Brian Condon: Diary of James Alipius Goold, 1848-1886

Completing a full transcription of Bishop Goold's diary has proved to be an arduous task, necessarily extending over many years of part-time work. We are happy to acknowledge the great debt all readers owe Brian Condon's late mother, Frances Phyllis May Condon, who made the project possible by making the first transcription, working from photocopies of the original. They were mostly enlargements, since Goold's hand is tiny and his script owes little to the art of calligraphy. This first transcription was verified and corrected by Brian Condon, who then had a word-processed copy made, and checked and verified it again. The last element in our quality control programme was provided by Ian Waters, who checked and verified the manuscript against the original diary.

Our aim was to make a full and faithful copy of the best extant copy of the text, free of 'silent corrections' or other editing of that ilk, though occasionally some minor punctuation has been provided. Abbreviations have usually been expanded, an obvious example being the ubiquitous '&' symbol, whose sheer frequency is a dislocation to the contemporary eye. Where we remained doubtful about a reading, we enclosed it within asterisks {*}; where asterisks enclose an empty space, we were unable to essay a reading at all; square brackets in the text always signal an editorial interpolation. We made an effort, too, to standardize the presentation of the dates of entries, though we make no claim to have totally succeeded. For further remarks on these issues, please see the Introduction to the Web edition of Brian Condon's Letters and Documents Supporting Historical Studies of the Catholic Church in Australia.

We know better than to claim that text free from those marks is without blemish, especially in the tortured field of proper names (sometimes spelled differently by the writer in the course of a single entry!), and, of course, dates. We have a general confidence in our readings, but we welcome corrections and gap-filling. Please pass these on to Brian Condon on E-mail at: brian.condon@unisa.edu.au, and any warranted corrections will be made.

Our lodgement of the Diary on the Web is a recognition of the difficulty of arranging conventional publication. Ease of correction and of dissemination are compensations, however.

Readers are invited to copy this material for study and research. We do remind readers, however, of their obligation to give full citation in any written work which has made use of it. From our point of view, the purpose of this reminder is to make more people aware of this, and of other related publications listed, and thereby help new researchers and students.

Brian Condon

Ian Waters