Off the Shelf: Your Stories NLA 1901-2001 Celebrating 100 Years
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NLA Testimonials from Valued Readers for the Anniversary Year...'

'Professor John Ritchie and all the staff of the Australian Dictionary of Biography are constantly grateful for daily use of the wonderful resources of the National Library of Australia. Without the NLA, the ADB could not exist.'
Dr Di Langmore, RSSS, Australian National University

‘an indispensable resource for all my research into different aspects of Australian history … the National Library is a living record of the country’s intellectual, cultural and civic life’
Professor Stuart Macintyre, Historian, University of Melbourne
Former Chair of the National Library Council

‘one of the great strengths of the National Library of Australia has been its frontline people ... The quality of service given, and the degree of interest taken by staff to ensure satisfaction, consistently has been of the highest order … It is a privilege to live in Canberra and be able to use such a wonderful facility’
Mr T.W. (Tom) Campbell, Independent Historian (Biographer of George Dibbs)

‘The National Library is my heart’
Ann Moyal, Independent Historian

‘[The National Library] is home to one of the two greatest collections of Australiana in existence and … on the rare occasions when something is not in the Collection, the custodians move heaven and earth to borrow or obtain a copy for me. You may think that I am privileged, and so I am, but so is everyone who has discovered and used this great free public institution’
G.A. Mawer, Writer

‘It has been a great pleasure working in the Manuscript Room with its excellent facilities, its superb surroundings and its dedicated staff’
Clive Probyn, Literary Historian
Professor of English, Monash University

‘The material held by the National Library is a precious resource for all Australians. That staff care for it so passionately ensures that our heritage is in good hands’
Liz Tier, Public Relations and Marketing Manager
St Philip’s College, Alice Springs

‘My visits over 40 years … were always enjoyable and profitable … For the spasmodic reader from afar, with hopes of accomplishing much in a relatively little time, the service offered by Library staff was superb … The very atmosphere of the Library inspired maximum effort’
Dr Lionel Gilbert, Independent Historian (Biographer of J.H. Maiden, the Director of the Sydney Botanic Gardens, 1896–1924)

‘In my research I have worked in other libraries in Australia and overseas. I have not found anywhere anything to equal the level of services provided in the Petherick Room … and [such] an atmosphere of friendship and helpfulness’
Patricia Clarke, Independent Historian

‘I am too secular a person to have a “sacred site”. However, after repeated visits to the Manuscript Room, I now feel it to be one of the special places in my life, a site which brings out the best in me … On a rather more prosaic level, I know that if I am having trouble finding any book or serial, I am more likely to find it in the National Library than anywhere else’
Dr Tim Rowse, Cultural Historian (Biographer of H.C. Coombs),
University of Sydney

‘As a bibliographer I am a demanding user of the Library. The librarians, chiefly those in the Petherick Room, cope calmly and cheerfully with all these demands. A decade ago I was working on the first volume of my bibliography and made this acknowledgement: “Many weeks spent at the National Library of Australia were made a pleasure due to the staff of the Petherick Room, who were unfailingly helpful.” Now in a new century, engaged with another large project, the Petherick Room has moved and the staff changed, but I can certainly say the thanks remain unchanged’
Dr Kerry White

‘In every way … the National Library is a key centre of scholarship in this country, not only for the range and accessibility of its holdings but also for the expertise and enthusiasm of its staff’
Veronica Brady, Poet, Critic (Biographer of Judith Wright)

‘For scholars working on Australian material, the National Library is the best in the world. The combinations of staff and graciousness, architecture and accessibility, and location and facilities make it a wonderful place for study’
Dr Deborah Jordan, Independent Scholar

‘The National Library of Australia is of course one of the central institutions of Australian public culture and as such it plays a key role in the generation of debates in the public sphere … The Library’s central role in providing the information from which Australia’s public intellectuals continue to reassess the nation is likely to become more and more important’
Professor Robert Dixon, Literary Historian,
University of Southern Queensland

Your Stories

'I owe a successful career as a school librarian to the National Library. In the 40s I had completed the Preliminary Certificate of the Library Association of Australia, then marriage and family inrtervened and 15 years passed. One day in May 1965 I was in the Old Library in Kings Ave. A friend working there told me that the National Library was holding classes for the LAA for the Registration Certificate and that very afternoon I was at my first class at St Mark's Library. At the end of 1967 I sat for my last exam in the new Library and succesfully qualified as a member of the Library Association of Australia. Twenty years of very satisfying work followed and all thanks to those excellent free classes conducted by the National Library.'
Marjorie Gilby

'I think it was in 1985 that I went to Canberra for an afternoon meeting of magazine editors organised by the Australia Council’s Literature Board. Travelling from Western Australia meant arriving the evening before, leaving the next morning free.

What will I do? I thought, and, looking at the map decided to go to the National Library of Australia. What will I do? I thought when I got to the Library, and then I saw that there was a manuscript section. What will I look at? I wondered, and then thought I’d look up ‘Slessor’, since I had always enjoyed reading Kenneth Slessor’s poems. Lo and behold, there in the catalogue was his name! Up in the lift to the Manuscripts and Special Collections I went.

Idiotic, blundering tourist I might have been, but it wasn’t long before I was looking at the pencilled drafts of ‘Five Bells’, the greatest poem in Australian literature. There the pages were in front of me, the actual pages in which Slessor neatly and then fumblingly pencilled his way to ‘Time that is moved by little fidget wheels / Is not my Time’ It was like magic, a transportation in time. Perhaps only a poet and a scholar could fully understand the thrill this recollection still provokes, like Jack climbing the beanstalk and finding no giant around to frighten him back to earth. I’ve been studying Slessor’s writing on and off ever since.

In 1990, I was lucky enough to receive a Harold White Fellowship, and spent three months poring over Slessor’s pages. The Library staff were unfailingly friendly and helpful, and the Fellowship conferred numerous benefits from direct access to the Library’s compactus, where I risked being squashed as flat as an A4 page, to discounts in the Brindabella Bistro. I shared camaraderie with Roger Millis, another Harold White Fellow, as well as with Joy Hooton and other scholars who regularly used the Library. Hazel Rowley and I sat side by side in the Manuscripts Room as I puzzled over Slessor’s shorthand and she read the manuscripts of Christina Stead’s novels en route to writing her Stead biography. My own work led to the publication of Kenneth Slessor: Poetry, essays, war despatches, war diaries, journalism, autobiographical material and letters (University of Queensland Press, 1991) and the Collected Poems (Angus & Robertson, 1994) which Geoffrey Dutton and I edited together. It was one of the happiest periods of my scholarly life and I have returned regularly to the Library for reading and meetings about research ever since. Some of my own poetry, letters and other manuscripts are now housed there.

I have an undying love of manuscripts; they show the reality of writing and counter the sense of books and authors as monuments, which they tend to become once they enter the canons of the great and famous. I love books too, but manuscripts are books humanised. They are also a reminder that libraries are more than collections of books especially libraries such as the National Library of Australia. The Library, it seems to me, is one of the few things in Australia about which it’s hard to say anything bad. For me, it is probably the country’s most sacred site. It is more important than any of us, and deserves our devotion. Now, if I could only put a rope behind it and tow it over to Perth.'
Dr Dennis Haskell, Poet, Editor
Department of English, University of Western Australia


NLA 1901-2001 Celebrating 100 Years