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Speech by Professor Geoffrey Bolton, Historian given at the Launch of the National Library’s 100th Anniversary Program

30 November 2000

My experience of the National Library of Australia dates back more than forty years to that literally antediluvian era before the flooding of the Molonglo Valley created Lake Burley Griffin. At that time, when the population of Canberra was about one-tenth of its present size, there was a good deal of mixing at every level of social activity, and I remember that I first encountered the redoubtable director of the National Library, Harold White, in his role as stalwart of the Canberra Repertory Society. They told me that in this role he had only once been nonplusssed, and that was during the 50th anniversary celebrations of Federation, when there was a parade representing the major political figures of the early Commonwealth. Harold White, because of a certain fancied similarity of physique, had been cast as Billy Hughes on horseback, I believe and the sight was enough to send the real Billy Hughes, then aged eighty-nine and still very firm in his judgments, groaning to his bed.

Be that as it may, Harold White was a masterful and far-sighted administrator and diplomat in those distant days when we had a prime minister, Sir Robert Menzies, who took an active and benevolent interest in developing Canberra as a national capital worthy of admiration. It was under their aegis that the initiative was commenced which resulted in the construction of the present National Library of Australia. However in 1959, when as a young research fellow in Sir Keith Hancock’s department at the Australian National University I first used the facilities, the National Library was still housed in a couple of overgrown Quonsett huts. To one who had been recently exposed to such temples of the written word as the British Museum Library and the Bodleian at Oxford, such conditions seemed dismayingly Spartan. But I soon learned that the staff were warmly helpful and co-operative in a way which put to shame the starchy and pedantic style of many of the custodians of those Old World libraries. I remember with particular appreciation the admirable Pauline Fanning, but she was by no means unique. And it strikes me, speaking from forty years of subsequent experience, that one of the most enduring and valuable traditions of the National Library of Australia is its user-friendliness. From the attendants and guards at the reception desk to the top levels of administration, these has been a helpfulness, an enthusiasm, what one might call a knowledgeability about their specific files of responsibility which has always made it a pleasure to visit the National Library of Australia on an errand of research.

When Australian taxpayers have been called upon to subsidise the construction of national public institutions in Canberra such as the National Library, the National Gallery, the Australian National University and the High Court I shan’t venture to say anything about Parliament House one of the main justifications argued on their behalf is their ability to serve not only the Canberra community but the whole Commonwealth of Australia. Speaking as an academic whose career has been pursued mainly in Western Australia and Queensland perhaps that’s why you asked me I am here to affirm that the National Library carries out its national role convincingly and well.

My contact with the National Library in recent years has been in the course of research and writing for a biography of Australia’s first prime minister, Sir Edmund Barton, whose papers as you have heard tonight will shortly be available on Internet. The main body of Barton manuscripts were lodged in the National Library as early ass 1929. Their pioneering status may be seen by their code number, MS 51, among a manuscript collection reaching their tenth thousand. When, thanks to a Harold White fellowship another imaginative and constructive National Library initiative for which many scholars may be grateful I spent several months here in 1998 researching Barton, I lost count of the number of times when a member of staff Graeme Powell or one of his colleagues would murmur: ‘You might be interested in the So-and-so papers, there’s something about Barton there’ and so it would prove. In like manner the staff of the photographic section were endlessly helpful in the search for illustrative material, and down in the catacombs of the periodicals and newspapers section, I found a generous tolerance for a technological incompetence excusable only in a person of my vintage.

Good though the staff are, they are not the only asset which come of working at the National Library. Though it may not have been the intention of those who planned the Library, its reading rooms constitute one of the best informal clubs in Australia. Here you come across your fellow-researchers whose paths you may not often cross in the normal course of events. You chat for a moment, and if longer conversation seems warranted you may go aloft to the Brindabella room, and in the process it is wonderful how many ideas are sharpened or cross-fertilised. It may be someone working on a neighbouring field Tom Campbell, for instance, with a letter from George Dibbs to Lord Jersey gently satirising Barton’s fondness for food and drink or it may be Humphrey McQueen (‘Don’t you know that professors aren’t supposed to do their own research?’) with an astringently good-humoured critique of bourgeois historiography. This club doesn’t merely include those who are able to live and work in Canberra.

A surprising number of those researching in the National Library are carrying out commissions for friends elsewhere in Australia. While I was here working on Barton a friend in Perth, writing on the life of a Western Australian painter who had been a friend of Henrietta Drake-Brockman, asked me to check the Drake-Brockman correspondence in the National Library for any letters that might have survived. Sure enough, there were about half-a-dozen delightful gossipy letters from the period of the Second World War, giving vivid accounts of a Perth which believed itself under the threat of Japanese invasion, but where artists were still painting landscapes, and young wives in the professional classes were flirting with senior army officers and bemoaning the cost of living and the lack of domestic servants and at the same time working hard for patriotic funds and helping refugees from Malaya. Within the holdings of the National Library there are thousands, probably millions, of similar vignettes from which we can build up the mosaic of the Australian people, past and present.

Of course this is not the only way in which those who don’t live in Canberra can consult the resources of the National Library. The National Library has been enterprising and responsive to the great advances in information technology over the last twenty years. Computerisation has brought many of its catalogues within access of any part of Australia, although there is never a limit to what needs to be done, whereas there is always a limit to the available funding. It strikes me nevertheless that the National Library has done and is doing an excellent job of balancing its need to reach out to the whole of Australia with its mission to maintain in Canberra one of the world’s great specialist libraries if a devotion to everything Australian can be fairly defined as specialisation.

It is the measure of a civilised society that it produces such institutions, and it is the measure of both the public and the private sectors that they give such institutions practical and moral support. I am honoured to have been asked to testify the appreciation and goodwill felt towards the National Library of Australia by all those who have used and benefited from it.

NLA 1901-2001 Celebrating 100 Years

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