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Cover of National Library of Australia News, Volume XI Number 6, March 2001

enlarge imageNational Library of Australia News, Volume XI Number 6, March 2001
Cover image: Charles Blackman (b.1928)
Portrait of Jack McKinney 1955 (detail)
oil on canvas
Courtesy of Meredith McKinney

 

The Library has sustained its interest in collecting material related to Australia’s social, cultural, and political history. In 1995 the Library acquired the papers of Edward Koiki Mabo. Restricted until at least 2005, the papers document both the private and public life of the Indigenous-rights worker. 

Two magazines established in the 1990s extended the role of the Library as a forum for contemporary Australian cultural life. Through National Library of Australia News, the Library has continued its task of exploring and promoting the Library’s Collections. Voices (1991–1997) articulated the role of the Library in promoting and fostering contemporary Australia’s creative and intellectual community, through the publication of prose and poetry by contemporary writers, many of whose oral histories and manuscripts were either already housed within the Library or would shortly be so.

Cover of Voices, Volume V Number 3, Spring 1995

enlarge imageVoices, Volume V Number 3, Spring 1995
Cover image: Gottfried Lindauer, 1839–1926
Ana Rupene and Child
oil on canvas; 76 x 63.3 cm
Rex Nan Kivell Collection
Pictorial Collection

Contributing to the broader cultural discourse has, of course, been part of the Library’s program for many years. So too has forming bridges between the past and the present. The series of seminars on eighteenth-century literature that followed the acquisition of the David Nichol Smith collection illustrate the Library’s commitment to Australia’s intellectual life. Over the last 10 years the Library has played an increasing role in intellectual dialogue through its seminars and conferences, including Kenneth Slessor Remembered (1991), Alfred Deakin: Public Man, Private Spirit (1997), Voices and Memory (1997), Malthus and his Legacy: 200 Years of the Population Debate (1998), Challenging Australian History: Discovering New Narratives (2000) and An Inventive Magic Donald Friend and his Diaries (2001).

 
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