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38th Annual Report, 1997-98
Services to the Community

Exhibitions
Education Services
Volunteers
Publishing Program


Objectives

  • · To collect, organise, promote and utilise documentary materials which are of national significance in providing an understanding of Australia and Australians.
  • · To promote community understanding of the Library—its collections and services—as a national cultural information services institution.

The Library pursues a number of activities which are primarily intended to promote itself throughout Australia as a national cultural and information services institution, and lead to a greater understanding of its collections and national services. They include a program of exhibitions and publications, as well as a range of public programs, and educational services complementing these activities. The Library also has a Friends organisation and an active volunteer program.

Exhibitions

The Library continued to provide public exhibitions throughout the year. Exhibitions give the Library an opportunity to display significant themes and materials from its own collections to Library visitors and readers as well as to a wider audience beyond the Library building.

Dance People Dance, which presents a selection from the Library’s substantial performing arts holdings, began its national tour in October with a showing of the central portion of the exhibition at Orange, followed by another theatre appearance in Parramatta. The full exhibition was then displayed at Launceston, and will remain on the road, in some version, until the end of 1999.

The Governor-General, Sir William Deane, opened Captive Lives: Looking for Tambo and His Companions at the National Library Gallery in November 1997. The exhibition tells the story of Tambo and his companions, members of two groups of Aborigines removed from North Queensland in the late nineteenth century and taken to America and Europe, where one by one they died. Captive Lives assembles material from more than 30 libraries, archives and museums worldwide. It has been booked by a range of libraries, museums and art galleries, apart from the community hall on Palm Island, Queensland, where its story begins and ends. The exhibition will tour well into the year 2000.

Both Dance People Dance and Captive Lives were substantially funded by Visions of Australia, a Federal Government touring program.

The final exhibition for the year, An Exquisite Eye: The Australian Drawings of Ferdinand Bauer, 1801–20, displayed a selection of Bauer’s watercolours of Australian plants and animals prepared during the voyage of the Investigator around Australia from 1801 to 1803. This exhibition was curated by Peter Watts, Director of the Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales, in collaboration with the Natural History Museum, London. It was shown at the Museum of Sydney but the Library was the only other Australian venue for this important collection of works, never before exhibited in Australia, which attracted a record attendance of over 39 000 visitors. The exhibition was complemented by a display of the Library’s collection of field drawings by William Westall from the same voyage.

Displays in the Kenneth Baillieu Myer Visitor Centre, curated by Education Services staff, promoted interesting and little-known material from the Library’s collections. Topics included Australian opera singers in the United Kingdom, papers from the Manuscript Collection and political material relating to the anniversary of the 1967 Constitutional referendum, miniature books, photographs from the Mandurama Collection, cookery books and pulp fiction. The centenary of the first Philippines Republic was marked by the display of a selection of the Library’s important Philippines holdings and was opened by the Ambassador of the Philippines.

Education Services

Education Services continued its program of activities to introduce the general public and tour groups from schools and the wider community to the key collections and services of the Library. This year, public programs have used various aspects of the Library’s collections to coincide with community events. ‘Opera Sundays’ were held in conjunction with the 1997 National Opera Festival; and displays, talks and tours focused on popular culture in various collection areas. A range of publications was produced, including brochures and flyers, and two education kits provided background material for teachers on both the Dance People Dance and Captive Lives exhibitions. The quarterly publication, Link-up, was converted to an online discussion list.

[Image of Michael Leunig? & of the Friends event?]

The Library’s 1997 TDK Audio Book Awards were presented by Elizabeth Jolley at Old Parliament House in November 1997. The following awards were made:

  • · Best Unabridged Fiction: Christian Blind Mission International, Brown Ears at Sea, by Steve Lawhead; narrated by Robert Grubb
  • · Abridged Fiction Award: ABC Enterprises, Eating out and Other Stories, by Natalie Scott; narrated by Ruth Cracknell
  • · Abridged Non-Fiction Award: ABC Enterprises, Fifty Years of Silence, written and narrated by Jan Ruff-O’Hernes
  • · Unabridged Non-Fiction Award: Bolinda Audio Books, Kings in Grass Castles, by Mary Durack; narrated by Jenny Seedsman
  • · Trish Trinick Prize (best narrator): Louis Braille Books, The Fiftieth Gate, narrated by James Wright.

Volunteers

Participants in the National Library’s volunteer program continued their valued contribution to the Library in a number of different areas. These included Preservation Services, Photographic Services, the Manuscript Collection, the Ephemera Collection, the Pictorial Collection, Asian Collections and the Friends of the National Library. A list of 1997–98 volunteers appears in Appendix 8. An expansion of the volunteer program to incorporate volunteer guides for National Library Gallery exhibitions was initiated.

Publishing Program

The Library published a number of titles for the book trade in 1997–98 in keeping with its aims to make its documentary collections more accessible and to promote awareness of these collections to the Australian community.

Titles published during the year:

A Passion for Dance, by Michelle Potter, was published to complement the exhibition Dance People Dance. The book features oral history interviews with leading figures in Australian contemporary dance and is illustrated with photographs from the Pictorial Collection. It received an Honourable Mention in the 1997 Centre for Australian Cultural Studies National Awards, and was Highly Commended at the 15th National Print Awards.

Faces of Mandurama, edited and introduced by John Thompson, features the work of pioneer commercial photographer E.A.J. Lumme. It chronicles the life and times of a community of people living in the central-west of New South Wales during the 1890s and early 1900s. The images are from a collection of some 3500 glass-plate negatives held in the Library’s Pictorial Collection. The publication received a gold medal at the 15th National Print Awards.

Backroom Briefings: John Curtin’s War, edited by Richard Hall and Clem Lloyd, is based on the papers of F.T. Smith, a senior journalist in the Parliamentary Press Gallery during the Second World War. The papers are held in the Library’s Manuscript Collection.

Malaguna Road: The Papua and New Guinea Diaries of Sarah Chinnery, edited by Kate Fortune, documents the life of Sarah Chinnery, the wife of Australian anthropologist E.W.P. Chinnery. Transcripts of the diaries are held in the Library’s Manuscript Collection.

Diplomatic Despatches: From a Son to His Mother, by Sir John Mason, draws on letters held in the Library’s Manuscript Collection.

‘The Scythe Honed Fine’—A.D. Hope: A Celebration for his 90th Birthday, was compiled as a tribute to one of Australia’s greatest poets, and draws on materials relating to the poet from the Library’s monograph, pictorial and manuscript collections.

Australian Literary Manuscripts in North American Libraries, by Nan Bowman Albinski, was jointly published with the Australian Scholarly Editions Centre, Australian Defence Force Academy.

Australian Autobiographical Narratives: An Annotated Bibliography, Volume 2: 1850–1900, by Kay Walsh and Joy Hooton, was also jointly published with the Australian Scholarly Editions Centre, Australian Defence Force Academy.

A Celebration: Michael Leunig was published for the Friends of the National Library.

The Ellis Rowan Address Book features paintings of Australian flora and fauna from the Pictorial Collection.

The publishing program continued to support the Library’s role in building an effective national network of libraries with the publication, and subsequent reprinting, of the fourth edition of the Australian Interlibrary Resource Sharing Directory, and Guidelines for Preservation Microfilming in Australia and New Zealand, the latter a resource for libraries and organisations wishing to preserve collections of heritage materials. Six issues of National Library of Australia Gateways, aimed at the library and information science community in Australia and abroad, were published. Each issue of the title was also mounted on the Library’s server.

Twelve issues of the monthly magazine National Library of Australia News were published during the year, each one presenting information about the Library’s collections and services and its role as an information resource for the nation. The Publications Branch commissioned a readership survey which provided valuable feedback on the content and format of this title.

Editing and print production of brochures and other materials promoting the Library’s collections and services completed the work of the publishing program this year.

The National Library Shop’s revenue was higher than anticipated, in spite of a general downturn in visitors to Canberra and some reduced traffic following the introduction of machine-based photocopy card vending.

{The Friends of the Library organised a most successful tribute to Michael Leunig, October 1997}

{Australian cartoonist Michael Leunig}

Photo: Australian cartoonist Michael Leunig

 

The Friends of the Library organised
a most successful tribute to Michael Leunig, October 1997


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