Edgar Pemberton Waters

Born 26 October 1925; died 1 May 2008

Edgar Pemberton Waters was a generous supporter of the National Library of Australia’s collections, but was particularly influential in the shaping of the Oral History and Folklore collection. He was a scholar in history and folklore with a rigorous attention to fact and severely critical of assertion and assumption, while remaining a truly gentle man. His knowledge of the writings and collections of the world of folklore studies was unequalled, and his involvement in such studies in Australia made him one of the critical academic figures in the development of that area of study and a major contributor to Australia’s understanding and appreciation of its own culture. A fact known to few was that early in his career he was also a librarian, which only increased his appreciation of the collections.

Edgar Waters was born in born in Sydney in 1925, but grew up in Casino, northern NSW. His father Eric was a bush worker, a tick inspector at the time he died in a tent away from home when his son was 11 years of age; his mother Thelma Lancaster, subsequently worked as a cleaner to raise the family. Unusually for such a beginning, Waters’ scholastic achievements saw him accepted into Sydney University at 16 years of age in possession of a scholarship for the children of veterans of World War I. The only other of the students of Casino High to go to university that year was the much older son of the doctor.

Sydney University, during and after World War II, was a tumult of ideas clashing with the constraints of pre-war thought. Thinkers like John Anderson and Ian Maxwell held sway and the young Waters’ head was turned. Amongst this tumult he met Ann Barnard, with whom he shared much of his ideals and who he later married, and though his brother, Darcy, became a pivotal figure in the influential Sydney Push, which grew out of the Andersonian Libertarians, Waters rejected Anderson’s philosophy, opting instead for a commitment to the left which eventually led to membership of the Australian Communist Party in the early 1950s. He resigned in 1957, his initial discontent fuelled by a sponsored tour that included Soviet Russia and confirmed by the invasion of Hungary. He remained, nonetheless, in the circle of university academics and in 1947 edited Rebel Songs with Stephen Murray-Smith.

To raise enough money to live on, and with the added aim of being closer to the workers, Waters found employment at the Feltex factory while studying librarianship at the Public Library of NSW (later the State Library; it was nearly a decade before the first library course was established in a university in Australia). He completed his study and acquired a qualification accredited by the Library Association of Australia. Waters worked as a reference librarian in a number of areas, and was the film librarian in the early 1950s. The NSW Public Library was a fertile environment for the specialist librarian to increase his knowledge of folklore and Australian history. In the reading rooms he met Russel Ward, who was embarking on the research that led to The Australian Legend. Ward encouraged Waters to record the songs of bushman and musician Joe Cashmere with the still-novel tape recorder and in 1953, with friend Jeff Way, he visited the old man who had retired to a small bush block in Sylvania, south of Sydney. Typically he shared the recordings with others, including John Meredith, who was similarly commencing to record.

Though he continued to record for the rest of his life, Waters felt that he did not possess the engaging personality necessary to a folk collector and instead found his metier in research and analysis. He and Ann travelled to London where he immersed himself in the British and Irish folklore collections of the British Library and Cecil Sharp House.  He met and worked with such luminaries as Peter Kennedy, A. L. (Bert) Lloyd, Seamus Ennis, and Ewan McColl and eventually took a job as Alan Lomax’s research assistant. His recently augmented knowledge of the British Collections informed Lomax’s Folk Songs of North America, for which Waters is credited in the introduction. He also talked and gave lectures in London on Australian folklore, and met some of the performers who grace the English collections.

After some time in the UK Waters was beginning to feel the pull of home. A welcome letter came from friend Peter Hamilton inviting him to help establish a new record and production company, Wattle Films and Records. Waters agreed, pausing only long enough to raise the funds to purchase a professional tape machine, he left for Australia via a communist youth meeting in Warsaw and a sponsored tour of communist China.

Wattle Records altered the cultural landscape, publishing Australian performers for the Australian market. The Drover’s Dream sung by pioneering revivalist band, the Bushwhackers, was a commercial success, charting at a time when such material was relatively unknown. Wattle went on to release more than 20 records, many of which are still referred to today. Closest to Waters’ heart were the albums of field recordings including Australian Traditional Musicians and Singers which was compiled by John Meredith, and Australian Traditional Musicians and Singers in Victoria which contained Waters’ copious notes, and which are still referred to today. Waters wrote on folklore for the next decade, preparing many reviews and articles for journals and magazines, and writing a regular column for The Australian on the folk scene.

Though a critical success, Wattle Records was not enough to support Waters’ continued interest or make him a living. Looking to return to some more regularly paid employment, Waters claimed the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation provided the second of two unwitting favours. The first was some years’ earlier when boarding the Italian liner that was taking Edgar and Ann to Europe:  ASIO operatives informed the ship’s crew to be careful as they had two dangerous communists about to board. The consequence of this was that the sympathetic crew looked after the young comrades much better than they could have expected. The second was when he was seeking to return to employment at the Public Library of NSW and an adverse security report meant that he was declined employment. Unable to find a job that suited his interests, Waters responded to the urgings of his wife Ann, Bob Gollan and Ian Turner, and undertook what is arguably the first PhD in Australia to consider folklore as a subject. He lived in University House in the Australian National University and the difficult new subject was supervised first by Laurie Fitzharding and then Manning Clarke.

At the completion of his research, Waters was approached by the National Library of Australia to prepare a report which eventually formed the basis of the Oral History and Folklore collection, as it is now known.  However, though the Library eventually implemented virtually all of the recommendations of the Waters report, it was some time before it did, and Waters, after impressing Ken Inglis with his ideas for a history course in the University of Papua New Guinea, was offered a job teaching there.  Waters developed courses which explained to the emerging independent nation how an affluent Western society came into being, and described the value of oral traditions and local culture. He undertook detailed research to support his teaching. Michael Somare and John Kaputin were well known to him in the university environment, and Vincent Auali  and John Waiko, the latter the first PNG national to earn his doctorate, were among his students at the university.

In the mid-1980s, Waters moved back to Canberra and was again approached by the NLA, which by that time had implemented most of his recommendations, and a bemused Director-General, Warren Horton, met the librarian who years earlier had been his supervisor when Warren was a “stackie” at the Public Library of NSW. A stackie is a colloquial term for the person who retrieves the books from the shelves in the stacks of a closed stack library.

Though Waters continued to protest that he was not a collector, he recorded hundreds of hours of interviews and recordings for the collection, and helped in the negotiation and acquisition of many important collections. Just as importantly, and typical of his approach, he encouraged many younger researchers, collectors and performers in their quest to understand Australian culture and history. He shaped the nation’s folklore collection and influenced the way it has been studied.

In April Edgar Waters underwent heart surgery, and while it was technically a success he never really recovered from the operation, and passed away in Nowra Hospital, with his wife Ann, and the daughter of another relationship, Kate, by his side, and Ella Moon, his much loved granddaughter not far away. He died on May Day at the age of 82. His funeral featured some of the folksongs he loved and studied.

Edgar Waters was an extraordinary folklorist and oral historian. He was a social historian ahead of his time, working in what is now an established field, driven by the need to understand the broad social context in which culture lived. His primary motivation was, and remained his whole life, the joy of learning and knowing.

Kevin Bradley
Curator of Oral History and Folklore
National Library of Australia

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ttEdgar Waters at the Folk Festival 2005.

ttEdgar Waters recording Duke Tritton. Photo: Jeff Carter