National Library of Australia - Gateways>

ISSN 1039-3498 | no. 48| December 2000


Harold White Fellows for 2001 announced

Jan Fullerton, the Director-General of the National Library, has announced the award of seven Harold White Fellowships for the year 2001. This is the largest number of Fellowships awarded in a year since the Fellowship Scheme was inaugurated in 1984. Each of the Fellows will spend from three to six months in the Library, carrying out research on the book, manuscript, map, music, newspaper and oral history collections.

Margaret Barbalet, the well-known Canberra writer, is working on a novel based mainly in northern Thailand. It has the provisional title Paradise Hotel and will be looking at the iconography of Buddhism and the place of Buddhism in modern South East Asia. As a Harold White Fellow, she will be studying the Library’s large collection of books in English on Buddhism, as well as many magnificent illustrated texts in the Asian Collections. Ms Barbalet’s previous novels include Steel Beach (1986) and Lady, baby, gypsy queen (1992).

Joanna Bourke is a Professor of History at Birkbeck College at the University of London and the author of four books, including Working class culture in Britain 1860–1960 (1994) and An intimate history of killing (1999). She is now writing a history of fear in Britain, America and Australia between 1850 and 1990. This will cover stage fright and shyness, phobias, illness and surgery, disasters and panic states, nuclear fear, death and God. In the Library she will be making use of an equally wide range of sources: oral history interviews, newspapers, novels, psychology literature, sermons, disaster advice and many more.

Rhian Davies is writing a life of a remarkable but little-known Anglo-Australian, Frederick Septimus Kelly. Born in Sydney in 1881, Kelly achieved early fame as a composer and pianist, playing with such figures as Ravel, Casals, Grainger, Bridge and Elgar. He was also a formidable sportsman, a gold medallist at the 1908 Olympic Games and one of the greatest scullers of all time. He served at Gallipoli and was killed in France in 1916. Dr Davies, a Welsh musician and musicologist, will mainly be looking at the eight volumes of Kelly’s diaries and the important collection of his manuscript and printed music held in the Library.

Satyanshu Mukherjee was for many years on the staff of the Australian Institute of Criminology. He is the author of Crime trends in twentieth-century Australia (1981) and has made extensive use of criminal justice data in his writings. He is now embarking on a history of criminal justice policy in Australia since 1788 and will look at issues like reforms in criminal policy, the convict system, the restriction of capital offences, the management of crime waves, crime prevention and policies towards special groups. In the Library Dr Mukherjee will be studying British and Australian government publications, archival records on microfilm, newspapers, public opinion surveys and manuscripts.

Benjamin Penny has for many years been studying popular religion and the Chinese State. He is currently focusing on the Falungong sect which has been challenging the authority of the Communist Party. The Library has the strongest Chinese collections in Australia and he will be using journals and monographs to analyse the doctrines of Falungong in the context of new religious movements and the history of religiously inspired uprisings against Chinese governments. Dr Penny is on the staff of the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University.

Jane Roberts, who has been a research scientist with the CSIRO for several years, has done a great deal of work on the environmental history of river systems in Australia. She is interested in assessing the value for environmental historians of such sources as the surveys, charts and logs of riverboat captains. The Library holds several charts of the lower Darling River, dating from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They are many metres long and difficult to decipher. Dr Roberts will describe each chart in detail and then match them against current mapping to document the environmental changes that have taken place in the last century.

Susan Woodburn has been identifying Australian printings and publications of works in Pacific Islands languages from 1814 to about 1950. When her work is completed it will make a substantial contribution to the history of cultural and commercial relations between Australia and the Pacific Islands and of the primacy and survival of languages in the Pacific. Partly due to the collecting efforts of Sir John Ferguson, the Library has one of the strongest collections in the world of Pacific language publications, as well as records of missionary societies and missionaries who translated and printed many of the texts. Ms Woodburn is the Special Collections Librarian at the University of Adelaide.
—Graeme Powell

For further information on the Harold White Fellowships, please contact:
Graeme Powell, Manuscript Librarian. Telephone: (02) 6262 1258

| Contents list for this issue of Gateways |

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

Gateways logo