Arrivals and departures
John Thompson returns to academe
John Thompson with a favourite manuscript, the original draft of Rodney Hall's novel Just Relations
John Thompson, who was a senior member of the staff for 20 years, left the National Library in June to study for a doctorate at the Australian National University.
John joined the staff in 1979 as the Manuscript Librarian, having previously held the equivalent position in the State Library of Victoria. He subsequently was promoted to the positions of Principal Librarian, Australian Reference, and then Director, Australian Collections and Services. He was trained as an historian and his passionate interest was always in collection building. He travelled widely in pursuit of original or rare Australiana and carried out single-handedly the negotiations that led to the acquisition of outstanding collections. A few examples are the books and manuscripts of Frederick Watson, the diaries of Donald Friend, the papers of Geoffrey Dutton and the Geoffrey Ingram Archive of Australian ballet materials.
After 1992 John eschewed administration to concentrate on making the Australian collections more widely known and accessible through publications. He wrote regularly for NLA News and Voices and presented papers at a number of seminars. In particular, he devoted a great deal of time and energy to a guide to holdings of manuscripts, pictorial material and oral histories relating to Australias indigenous peoples. The guide is almost complete and will be published next year.
John is widely known as an able spokesman for the National Library in Australian library, academic and literary circles, with his appointment as co-editor (beside Brenda Niall) of the Oxford Book of Australian Letters bearing witness to his standing in these communities. This handsome volume was published in 1998 and has been very well received, with some of the reviewers commenting favourably on the wisdom of engaging an editor who has such a great knowledge of the collections of Australias major libraries.
John Thompsons departure means an enormous loss of knowledge and expertise for the Library. He will, however, remain associated with the Library, as he is likely to make continued use of its collections in his research into the life of the historian Geoffrey Serle.
Please address any comments and enquiries to The Editor, Gateways: lkirwan@nla.gov.au