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ISSN 1443-0568 | no. 38 | April 1999


The collections

Three itinerant Australians and their papers

Among recent manuscript acquisitions of the Library are the papers of three Australians, all great travellers, but each of whom achieved fame differently.

At a Christie's sale in London, the Library purchased an interesting and entertaining group of papers by Dame Nellie Melba. They comprise photographs, cuttings, programs, menus and about 30 letters written to her friend Lady Susan Fitzclarence between 1908 and 1917. The letters describe her travels around the world, including one of her visits to Melbourne where `I am treated as a sort of queen … I am mobbed'. In another letter she wrote, `I have had 2 proposals of marriage & am considering both; one of my wooers weighs 19 stone but has 10 000 a year—ha!' One of the menus is autographed not only by Melba but also by Charlie Chaplin, who drew a small caricature of himself.

The Library has several groups of Melba Papers and the papers kept by Lady Susan are an important new source on Australia's most famous singer.

The well-known foreign correspondent, Denis Warner, has donated his personal archives to the Library. For over 40 years Warner travelled around Asia, reporting wars, revolutions and political events for newspapers in Australia, the United States and Britain. He also wrote several books on Vietnam (such as The Last Confucian), Australian foreign relations and military history, as well as two volumes of memoirs. His 70 boxes of papers were accumulated over 50 years and include correspondence, a huge number of notebooks, research material, reviews and the drafts of several of his books. Among the correspondents are political leaders such as Lee Kuan Yew, fellow-journalists like Richard Hughes, academics and political commentators in several countries, and refugees who left Vietnam after the fall of Saigon in 1975.

The Warner Papers join a number of other collections of foreign and war correspondents held in the Library,
such as the papers of George Johnston and Chester Wilmot.

The third figure is the eminent philosopher John Passmore. Describing himself as a `semi-detached Australian', Professor Passmore has attended numerous international conferences, been a visiting lecturer and fellow at Oxford, Cambridge, Princeton and other overseas universities, held the Chair of Philosophy at Otago University, and was general editor of the Bertrand Russell Project at McMaster University in Canada. He was also Professor of Philosophy at the Australian National University from 1959 to 1979. The papers that he has presented to the Library document many of these activities and include his writings on a diverse range of philosophical, political and historical issues. They include letters from Russell, Karl Popper, Isaiah Berlin, Gilbert Ryle, Edward Shils, John Anderson and other world-famous and influential philosophers of the twentieth century.

Dame Nellie Melba
Left: Opera singer Dame Nellie Melba in her prime.
From the Pictorial Collection
Right: Author, academic and philosopher, Professor John Passmore
Professor John Passmore
| Contents list for this issue of Gateways |

Please address any comments and enquiries to The Editor, Gateways: lkirwan@nla.gov.au

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