Scholars and Readers

Over the years the National Library has facilitated the work of many thousands of scholars and readers. The National Library of Australia has a long tradition as a research Library committed to serious scholarship.

In 1938 the renowned New Zealand historian, Dr John Cawte Beaglehole, came to Canberra to examine Captain Cook's Endeavour journal at the Commonwealth Parliamentary Library. Beaglehole became interested in James Cook while working on his book The Exploration of the Pacific (1934). At that stage he intended to write a biography of Cook. The powerful experience of reading the handwritten manuscript reminded Beaglehole that a facsimile of the journal had never been published. In 1947 the Hakluyt Society in London employed Beaglehole to edit the Endeavour journal of Cook’s Endeavour voyage. Later, he was asked to edit Cook’s journals of his second and third voyages of the Pacific, held in the British Library, and the journal of Joseph Banks held in the Mitchell Library. It was a task that was to take over 20 years. In 1974, the Hakluyt Society also published Beaglehole’s biography of Captain Cook.

In the 1950s the art historian, Bernard Smith, was given a postgraduate fellowship at the Australian National University and began researching the Nan Kivell Collection, housed at that point in the Nissen Huts, the site on which the National Gallery of Australia now stands. His research resulted in European Visions and the South Pacific, published by Oxford University Press in 1960.

Previously, Australian historians looked to visual material to illustrate their publications after they had completed writing them. I made this point as strongly as I could when I was asked to give an address on the occasion of the opening of the Nan Kivell Room at the National Library in April 1974. Humphrey McQueen was probably the first Australian historian to grasp what I was talking about. Some years later, Professor Joan Kerr took up the matter passionately, and of course, in more recent times, many scholars such as Greg Dening, Nicholas Thomas, Sasha Grishin, Tim Bonyhady, Ann Moyal and Stephen Foster have made extensive use of the Nan Kivell Collection in their own historical research.

Bernard Smith, Paradise Possessed: The Rex Nan Kivell Collection
Canberra: National Library of Australia, 1998

The Harold White Fellowship was established in 1990. Each year a number of Fellowships are awarded to writers and scholars interested in engaging in original research based on the Library’s Collection.  

There have been many distinguished national and international scholars awarded Fellowships over the past 11 years. The research of the Fellows reflects the diverse nature of the Library’s Collection. In 2000 Professor Carole Carpenter, Associate Professor at York University, Toronto, Canada, was awarded a fellowship to study folklore in Australian children’s books at the Library. In 1999 David Branagan, formerly Associate Professor of Geology and Geophysics at Sydney, researched his biography of the geologist Sir Edgeworth David (1858–1934) on a Fellowship. In 1996 Professor Patricia Veronica Brady from the University of Western Australia was awarded a Fellowship to research her biography of the Australian poet Judith Wright. In 1992 a Harold White Fellowship enabled Dr Andrew Leonard Hassam, Lecturer in English at Trinity College Carmarthen in the United Kingdom, to work on the Library’s holdings of immigrants journals.

Through the work of these scholars, among many others, the national and international significance of the Library’s Collection is displayed. The Harold White Fellowship is one way in which the National Library of Australia contributes to fostering and promoting Australia’s place within the international community of scholars.

Professor Manning Clark and poet Rosemary Dobson standing in front of a portrait of poet David Campbell by Graeme Inson at the memorial service for David Campbell 1980
photograph
Pictorial Collection

European Vision and the South Pacific (Oxford University Press, 1989) by Bernard Smith
Cover Image: Sir Oswald Brierly
First Arrival of White Men amongst the Islands of the Louisiade Archipelago (detail)
watercolour and gouache on vellum; 24 x 42 in. (c.1860)
Pictorial Collection

Professor Geoffrey Bolton, Historian and Harold White Research Fellow speaking at the Launch of the National Library’s 100th Anniversary Program
photograph
National Library of Australia

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