2006 Harold White Fellowships Announce
Director-General Jan Fullerton has announced the award of four Harold White Fellowships for 2006. The Fellowships enable each of the scholars to spend three or four months carrying out research on the Library’s Australian and Asian collections. There is, this time, a common theme linking the four Fellowships, as each Harold White Fellow will be studying the life and writings of a scholar-activist.
Pamela Gutman will be writing a biography of Gordon Hannington Luce. As a young man, Luce was on the fringe of the Bloomsbury Group and was a friend of E.M. Forster, John Maynard Keynes and others. In 1912 he went to Burma as the Professor of English and he remained there for most of his life. He became the leading authority on the history, culture and languages of old Burma. Luce died in 1979 and in the following year the Library acquired a large collection of his books, manuscripts and personal papers. Dr Gutman, who is an Honorary Associate in the Department of Art History and Theory at Sydney University, has written extensively on Burmese art and history, and especially on the ancient kingdom of Arakan.
Bernadette Hince recently completed her doctoral thesis at the Australian National University, the subject being the environmental and cultural history of the sub-Antarctic islands. She is now proposing to study and edit the 1953–54 Heard Island diaries of John Béchervaise. Béchervaise, who led three Australian expeditions to the Antarctic between 1953 and 1960, was a man of great versatility—poet, essayist, teacher, mountaineer. For most of his life he recorded his activities in detailed diaries, daybooks, letters and photographs. Unlike the somewhat bland official reports, the private writings document the beauty of the Antarctic, the extreme climatic changes, the geology and fauna, and the camaraderie and tensions of a small group of men living and working in utter isolation.
Jemma Purdey, who is a graduate of Melbourne University, is Writer-in-Residence at the Centre of Southeast Asian Studies at Monash University. She has started a biography of Herb Feith (1930–2001). As a young man at Melbourne University, Feith helped establish the Volunteer Graduate Scheme. He was the first volunteer graduate in Indonesia, where he worked for four years, and for the rest of his life he maintained close contact with intellectual and political leaders in Indonesia. He was on the staff of the Department of Politics at Monash University from 1963 until 1990, where he wrote and lectured extensively on Indonesian politics and history, and influenced huge numbers of students. He was also active in the peace movement. In her time as a Fellow, Dr Purdey will explore the very large personal archive which Feith assembled and which the Library acquired after his death.
Carolyn Strange is a Canadian scholar who has recently been based at the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research at the Australian National University. She will be studying the life and ideas of Thomas Griffith Taylor (1880–1963), the Australian geologist, meteorologist and geographer. Taylor, who was a member of Scott’s Antarctic expedition in 1910–13, founded the Department of Geography at Sydney University, and later taught at Chicago and Toronto. He was a prolific writer and he tackled big subjects—climate change, environment, race, nationalism, migration, and world conflict. In addition to all his publications, Taylor wrote an unpublished autobiography, kept diaries and scrapbooks, and wrote a huge number of letters. Most of these papers are held in the Library. Dr Strange will be using published, unpublished and pictorial sources to see how Taylor interpreted the world.
Graeme Powell
Manuscript Librarian
Manuscripts Branch
National Library of Australia



