National Library of Australia - Gateways

ISSN ISSN 1443-0568 | no. 66 | December 2003


2004 Harold White Fellows Announced

The Director-General, Jan Fullerton, has announced the award of five Harold White Fellowships for 2004. The Fellowships will enable the scholars to spend from three to four months at the Library, using a variety of collections and publicising their research through talks and lectures.

Rosemary Campbell is a Senior Lecturer in English at the Australian National University. She is writing a biography of Walter Head (1861–1939), who later adopted the name Walter Woods, and who was a poet, short story writer, journalist and Member of the Tasmanian Parliament. In 1892–93 Woods edited the journal New Australia and was closely associated with William Lane and others who established the New Australia settlement in Paraguay. Dr Campbell will be looking at records of the settlement and the correspondence of Mary Gilmore, as well as the Library’s holdings of the various newspapers that Woods edited.

Albrecht Dümling will be studying musicians and composers who fled from Germany and Austria between 1933 and 1945 and who settled in Australia. They included well-known composers such as George Dreyfus, Felix Werder, Henry Krips and Werner Baer. He will use the Library’s Music and Manuscript Collections in documenting both their experiences as refugees and their contribution to the musical life of Australia. Dr Dümling is attached to the Centre for Studies in anti-Semitism at the Technical University in Berlin.

Margot Harker, an independent scholar living in Canberra, will be undertaking research on Australians and their weddings from 1788 to the present. She is particularly interested in the period since 1970, including such topics as Australian responses to the royal weddings of 1981 and 1986, the emergence of aggressive wedding service providers, and the apparent failure of feminism to influence phenomena such as the princess bride and the marginalised groom. Dr Harker will draw on a range of sources from popular magazines to music and photographs.

Michael McClellan is an American musicologist who has taught at the Chinese University of Hong Kong for several years. He has a strong interest in the development of French opera. He will focus his research on the interaction of theatre and government during the French Revolution, especially a series of events between 1791 and 1799 relating to the freedom or regulation of theatres. Professor McClellan will be able to make use of the Library’s very large collection of pamphlets and newspapers of the period, as well as formed collections of 18th century French literature, drama and music. 

Penny Olsen will be examining the Mathews Collection and other ornithological collections in the Library for references to the paradise parrot, the only mainland bird species to have become extinct since the European colonisation of Australia. Described by John Gould as the ‘Beautiful Parrakeet’, the paradise parrot was once quite common in the woodlands of southern Queensland and northern New South Wales, but has not been sighted since the 1920s. Dr Olsen, who lives in Canberra, has written several books on Australian birds of prey, as well as numerous chapters and research papers on biological subjects.
—Graeme Powell, Manuscript Librarian

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