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Welcome to the Quill Project home page. Here you can find more information about the project, what can be achieved on the platform and the team behind it.
We work to research the history and enhance understanding of some of the world's foundational legal texts.
A negotiated text is the product of a formal decision-making process where a text has been negotiated and drafted over a period of time.
Think of the process as made up of four elements — people, procedures, documents, and decisions.
If it is your first time here and you would like to know more about the project, please check out the introduction video below:
Following a recent referendum and the ongoing discussion about leaving the British Commonwealth, the content of the Australian Constitution has appeared frequently in public discussion in recent years.
As part of the project, some of the materials relating to the drafting of the Constitution have been digitised for the first time, as well as John Williams’ The Australian Constitution: A Documentary History, which will be made available on the Quill website.
The visualisation of these materials shows the complete record negotiations, and what issues were most important to the drafters at the time—the tension between states’ rights and majority rule, the control of railways and waterways, customs and excise. Meanwhile, it gives researchers a tool to access any topic relating to the Constitution that we are interested in the present day.
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