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National
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
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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.
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Voices,
Volume V Number 3, Spring 1995
Cover image: Gottfried Lindauer, 18391926
Ana Rupene and Child
oil on canvas; 76 x 63.3 cm
Rex Nan Kivell Collection
Pictorial Collection
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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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