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ISSN 1039-3498 | no. 46 | August 2000


Recent retrospective Australiana acquisitions

At ecent auction in Melbourne the National Library was successful in acquiring a number of items to enhance its collections including Songs of the Kelly Gang, (Hobart Town: T.W. Allen, n.d.) which contains several ballads lauding the achievements of ‘bold Ned Kelly’ and his gang. The sympathies of the composer are obvious from verses such as the following:

Tis sad to think such plucky hearts in crime should be employed,
But with great persecution
they’ve all been much annoyed,
Revenge is sweet, but in the bush they can defy the law,
Such stickings up and plunderings Colonials never saw.
The matter may be serious, Pat.,
but sure I can’t but laugh
To think the tales the Bobbys told should all amount to chaff
They said they had them all hemmed in— they could not get away,
But they did turn up in New South Wales, and made their journey pay.
Another item of note includes the

Life and Sufferings of Charles Adolphus King, the Escaped Convict of 1840 (Manchester: G. Jacques, 1845). This is a tale bemoaning the hardships faced by the author as a convict sentenced to transportation, his escape and return to Manchester, and eventual recapture and subsequent resentencing. Although the Library holds a later 1850 version of this tale, this earlier 1845 edition was previously unknown, and was recorded unseen by John Ferguson in his Bibliography of Australia.

The theatre and Australian actors and actresses overseas continue to have a prominent place in Australian collecting. Two albums of postcards and reviews of Oscar Asche, a prominent Australian actor in London in the early part of the twentieth century, and his English wife Lily Brayton, were recently added to the collection. These had obviously been compiled by a devoted fan, intent on collecting and preserving as wide a record of the activities of his or her theatre hero as possible.
Helen Wade

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