What’s Nick Cave Doing at the Library?
Photo Shoot for Nick Cave’s Book,
And the Ass Saw the Angel, 1988
Photograph by Polly Borland
Kindly lent by Polly Borland
Notebook Known as ‘Sacred and Profane’, 1985
Gift of Nick Cave, 2006
the Arts Centre, Performing Arts Collection
Object photography courtesy of Dan Magree © 2007
Handwritten Dictionary Contained in Notebook, 1984
Gift of Nick Cave, 2006
the Arts Centre, Performing Arts Collection
Object photography courtesy of Dan Magree © 2007
I don’t really reflect on what I’ve done and I tend to create something and discard it and move on to the next thing really quickly. So it (the exhibition) was a rare opportunity to look at what I’ve created over the years. I have a sense of pride about it.
Nick Cave, 2009
On Friday 14 August 2009, Nick Cave: The Exhibition was launched to a packed house at the National Library of Australia. The exhibition is a rich and intensely personal collection of diaries, song lyrics, artwork, photographs, manuscripts and personal mementoes that span Nick Cave’s 30-year career.
An indifferent student and failed chorister, Nicholas Edward Cave was born in Warracknabeal, Victoria, in 1957. He is the third of four children, born to Colin, an English literature and mathematics teacher, and Dawn Cave, a school librarian.
After dropping out of art school in his second year, Cave formed the band The Boys Next Door with a group of friends from high school. In 1979, the band released its first full-length LP, Door, Door. In 1980, the boys left for London, reforming as The Birthday Party. Two years later they relocated to Berlin and, by March 1983, after having releaed only two albums, The Birthday Party was over. After several variations of name and members, Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds emerged in late 1983 and has continued to revolve around Cave and his extraordinary song-writing ability. The Bad Seeds’ 14th studio album, Dig Lazarus Dig, was released in 2008.
Nick Cave: The Exhibition is arranged as a series of rooms that radiate from a central ‘office’; each of the rooms documents a particular creative period in Cave’s life and brings together the strands of his many creative projects. The content also follows Cave’s migration from Melbourne to London, to Berlin and Brazil and his eventual return to England, where he lives with his family. Multiple drafts of lyrics chart Cave’s journey from raw concept to finished product, allowing a rare insight into the song-writing process.
But Cave is much more than just a musician—he is a prolific and prodigious writer, a voracious reader and a logophile, or lover of words. The exhibition richly illustrates all of his creative pursuits, including the manuscripts and notes for his novels, his screenplays for the films Ghosts of the Civil Dead and The Proposition and his lecture at the Vienna Poetry Academy, ‘The Secret Life of the Love Song’.
The bookshelves in the exhibition offer just a taste of the literary passions that have informed Cave’s creative output—poetry, theology, philosophy, psychology and history. He is a fan of Auden, Beckett, Betjeman, Pound, Hardy, Nabokov, Dostoevsky, Dickinson, and Strindberg.
Cave is obsessed with diaries and notebooks. In his intensely personal volumes, lyrics sit alongside shopping lists. Pages are littered with scribbled concepts for album art, fragments of poems, collections of obscure words, observations on the weather and myriad ideas for projects, realised and unrealised:
Despite the way it might look, I never made any effort to collect my work. I did hang on to my notebooks because they’re a part of your work and you never know when you’ll need it again. But when I’ve left each place I’ve lived in, I usually scrape off the desk into a cardboard box and they’ve been put away somewhere.
While the exhibition toured the country, Cave added material from recent projects to augment the content. The opening of the exhibition in Canberra coincided with the publication of Nick’s second novel, The Death of Bunny Munro. This is the first time the original manuscript notebooks for the novel have been exhibited.
The Library has welcomed the opportunity to host the Nick Cave exhibition and is delighted to be the final, send-off venue. The exhibition not only presents Cave in a different light outside of the music scene but also reveals another side to the Library as an exponent of contemporary art and creative practice.
Justine van Mourik
Registrar, Exhibitions and Loans



