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Peter Cochrane

The Research Adventure

The relationship between researchers and research libraries is a rather neglected topic, but we are trying to address that in the centennial volume that I am editing for the National Library.

I want this volume to be more than a "Treasures of …" volume, and it is this ‘more’ that I want to talk about today.

How does a library become a great research library? How are collections built? What mix of policy and serendipity is in this? What part have historians and other scholars, the ‘users’, played, in building the collections their descendants now use; in laying the foundations of the research adventure?

With these sorts of questions I’ve encouraged authors contributing to the volume, to say something about the ‘inside story’ of the Library; to research and write its ‘collecting history’. If the most important thing to us is the collections ­ and that is still very much the case, despite the onward march of digitisation—then the Library’s history is the sum total of its acquisition narratives, i.e. the stories of how things were got and why? That is the history we have embarked on.

For some of us the Library’s own registry files have become the key to this research adventure. To craft these acquisition narratives, we research the research institution. The registry files are a resource of immense richness. They reveal a web of conversations linking benefactors, historians and other scholars, novelists, poets, politicians, bureaucrats and the acquisitors—the Librarians.

The correspondence files are the skeletal remains of the collections’ beginnings. And our work is a kind of ‘archaeology’ of the origins of the research adventure in this institution.

The NLA, in this sense, has been conversing with the nation, and the wider world, about the ‘research adventure’, for about fifty years, ‘fifty’ because it was around the middle of the century, let’s say post-war, that both the History discipline and the collecting business became truly professionalised, adequately funded for rapid expansion, and comprehensive in ambition and scope.

Harold White became National Librarian in 1947. He was entrepreneurial, visionary and relentless in his ascquisition policy and he had a very talented team of co-acquisitors who achieved research depth across many fields in a very short space of time. They laid a foundation for researchers which the Library continues to build upon. Post-war Australia was not exactly flush with funds but White and his team recognised this urgency and convinced government. These days, the NLA has to work in different and more straitened circumstances to convince higher powers of research and collection priorities.

In the 1950s an order from the National Library at Grahame Book Co. in Sydney was dubbed a ‘cream cake day’. When the Prime Minister, Robert Menzies, was asked to authorise the purchase of the Nichol Smith literature collection (purchased,1961) he wrote in the margin: ‘Eighteenth century. How could I refuse!’ This was one of many purchases in excess of the budget in that period.

The shape of the Library’s collections in the formative, post-war years was determined by a mix of purposeful collecting policy and the elements of fortune by political decisions and tax law, by peaceful and cooperative compromise between institutions as well as bitter demarkation disputes, and by familiar human elements like ambition, persistence, intuition, sheer luck, and of course great commitment by the acquisition librarians, the front­line of the collecting business.

I do mean ‘front-line’ because the registry files make you very much aware of how the Library does not end at its outer walls. The ethereal conversations in the acquisition records are merely the remnants of the explorations, the ventures, travels, and the peaceful, negotiated appropriations that have made our work as historians and writers possible. ‘Front-line’ reminds us that librarians had to go over-the-top to build the research adventure.

There are many stories. Here is one: when Graeme Powell sought the papers of the Building Worker’s leader, Bob Pringle, he was taken on a pub crawl in inner Sydney with the promise of the papers always at the next pub. Bob would down pints, then bang the bar with his fist and shout ‘When y’er ready’ to the barman. I like to think of Graeme, standing beside Pringle in strange surroundings, thinking ‘Now what is best from a collection-building point of view, should I go with him or stick to lemonade?’ The acquisition librarians have not, so far as I know, sacrificed their bodies to the cause, but they have gone the extra mile on many an occasion, and possibly the extra pint. The Pringle Papers can now be read in the Manuscripts Reading Room. There is another story about a budgie, but Graeme won’t allow me to tell you that one.

The wooing or stalking of potential donors and collectors great and small was sometimes a simple matter. Conscious of the tyranny of distance, Nichol Smith wanted this National Library, on the other side of the world, to have his collection. Leon Kashnor, also in England, wanted his collection to come here in preference to the Biblioteca Sentrinelli in Milan which offered more money. He wanted his books to have a British home and he also liked Cliff Burmester, the Library’s Liaison Officer in London. All kinds of weird and wonderful affinities are part of the story. Kashnor thought Burmester looked like Bradman. They talked as much about cricket as books.

But acquisition was frequently more intricate and perplexing. Librarians in the field soon learnt that relinquishing private papers or manuscripts or books was an emotional business. They were dealing with passionate obsessions—the records of a life, rare books, rare things, accumulations of love and dedication. They encountered financial worries, sizeable egos and furtive plans for posterity. Success depended on collecting acumen based on extensive knowledge but also on persuasive skills that lay somewhere between diplomacy and courtship, and on being supportive in surprising ways. Harold White organised a Commonwealth annuity for Daisy Bates to continue her work; Pauline Fanning, whose contribution to the Library was, in so many ways, great, bought office furniture, notably filing cabinets, for the very old Nettie Palmer.

The purchase of the formed collections, like Nichol Smith, enabled the Library to acquire what was often a lifetime’s collecting work in one fell swoop. Well-read librarians, bibliographic wonders, then set about deepening or extending that field of research with the acquisition of books and pamphlets, serials, newspapers, vast quantities of microcopy and so on. ‘Creative gap filling’ it was called. As we know this was the fast-tracking of the collection building process, of producing a world class research institution in a very short space of time.

Acquiring the formed collections gave depth in numerous areas. But the Library was also responsive to changing patterns of scholarship and the collecting net was notably broadened and less elitist from the mid-1960s onwards, with a progressive shift to include extra-parliamentary politics of Left and Right, labour history, feminist history, popular culture, multiculturalism, environmental history, land rights etc.

Whether an acquisition is someone’s library or a mass of private papers, the process is still the same—the transformation of the energies of the individual collector into an enduring public resource. Research libraries make public and accessible a host of private or previously inaccessible pasts. They turn family matters into national heritage…etc. They are a hedge against forgetting; they are guarantors defying oblivion. Which is why libraries are so precious and powerful. Some people may take this belief too far—there was a character in Melbourne who donated his papers to the State Library of Victoria so they would be safe when the end of the world came. Other people have made that preciousness their one concession to humanity: there was a colonel in Sherman’s army during the American Civil War who burnt everything in his path on the march to Atlanta, except the libraries.

The conversations that I’ve called the ‘acquisition narratives’ reveal the bibliographical wisdom and the scholarship of acquisition librarians. The records of research inquiries reveal how they routinely point our projects and ideas in new and lateral directions, and we know that of course from personal experience. That wonderful half sentence: ‘Have you looked at…’.

Equally, historians have played a part in building the research adventure, not merely as ‘users’ of the collections, but as advisers, collectors in their own right, and often as mediators between the institution and ‘uncaptured’ papers or private libraries.

When the Library was pursuing Leon Kashnor’s magnificent collection of books, pamphlets and manuscripts in British political economy (13 000 items covering the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries), John La Nauze, professor of History at Melbourne University, was asked to formally report on the quality of the collection. He said it was a collection that all of Australia’s libraries together could not duplicate. He also said the following: ‘Australia has a history before 1788. It is the history of Great Britain.’ Not untrue but not quite the full story either.

What La Nauze wanted to tell the Library, in 1951, was that the Kashnor collection would allow historians in this country to shrug off their obsession with the act of colonisation and look at the background which led to it. Historians did just that. But since then the Kashnor collection has been used by many scholars for many other purposes. It has been used for studies in the history of health and population, radicalism, chartism in particular, religion and free thought. It has been the principle source for a biography of the radical engraver, William Linton, and for a major study of the early Victorians. The continuing contemporary power of these collections is one of the mysteries and blessings of a great research library.

I am addressing this point because our brief asks us to discuss particular books that have relied heavily on the collections. That is easy. There is a bigger point here: the regenerative, chameleon-like powers of particular collections, to be many things to many people, to serve books and scholars not just of one time, nor just one field, but of many times and many fields.

Nowhere is that more clear than in the case of the Nan Kivell collection: that collection was formed more than half a century ago. It was distinguished by Nan Kivell’s curiosity and inclusiveness.

Nan Kivell was unsystematic, eclectic and non-elitist in his collecting. Bernard Smith recognised this collection as vital to his study of European visual culture in the Pacific. Smith established a field but by no means exhausted it. Yet today, decades later, the Nan Kivell collection is ‘fortuitously congruent’ (Nic Thomas’s phrase) with the concerns of cross-cultural history—the process of rethinking and revising European visions over time, the engagement with ‘popular and ephemeral materials’ as well as the canonical, the concern with literary culture but also with things ‘visual, material and spatial’.

A similar argument could be made for the Williams collection in the Asian Section of the Library, about its relevance to ‘Orientalist’ concerns of students today.

None of this means that the Library’s collecting is any less urgent than it was fifty years ago. New problems now confront the collection builders, not least of which is funding. ‘Fortuitous congruence’ is good news, but it may not always apply. We don’t know, I don’t know, how many visiting scholars ’users’ are absolutely stymied by the lack of sources here. The sources sought by social and cultural historians now are far broader than that which political historians wanted 30 or 40 years ago? Does Manuscripts meet their need for material on the built environment or popular songs or gardens?

The Librarians, too, the heroes of the story, are under new pressures. I wonder if acquisition librarians have anything like the freedom they used to have to act on their initiative in ‘filling out’ or ‘deepening’ the collections. The future of their vocation depends on the future of the humanities, of a reading culture and of the love of history, on decision-making processes from which we are perhaps more disenfranchised than ever.

It also depends on just how the virtual library and the training required to run it will mesh with the continuing demands for collection and bibliographic expertise, on whether the necessary effort going into software and its management can mesh with a humanities education and a true reading culture, on whether librarians can continue to be great bibliographers, our confidants and advisers in the digital age.

For libraries digitistion is a scintillating response to an otherwise impossible problem. Already we can see how it will extend the research adventure for us all, how it will provide us with undreamt of mobility while sitting in the same place, visiting digitised collections anywhere in the world, or offering up our own collections to people far away. But as with any technological revolution, the costs and benefits are reshuffled and redistributed and we have to be watchful and ready to save valuable affinities that might, unnecessarily, be lost.

One of these is the affinity which has been the subject of my talk. The affinity between historians and writers and the keepers of the collections in great public institutions such as the National Library, and in turn, their affinity with those collections. It’s an affinity which is expressed in the anticipation we feel every time we, the historians, the writers, walk up the Library’s front steps.

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