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NLA News - home March 2005 Volume XV Number 6
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F. Monteath
Portrait of Kenneth Binns
gelatin silver photograph;
13.2 x 9.3 cm
Pictures Collection,
nla.pic-an23198963

 

Kenneth Binns Librarian on the move

Susan Marsden profiles Kenneth Binns, a man dedicated to the cultural life of Australia

Looking at the National Library today, well established and impressive, it is very easy to overlook how recently it was formed, and how recently Canberra’s other cultural institutions were established. However, those founding years lie well within living memory, as a recent oral history interview with Mrs Alison Sanchez illustrates. Mrs Sanchez, the younger daughter of Kenneth Binns, the Parliamentary and National Librarian from 1928 to 1947, was interviewed for the Library in 2004 by Susan Marsden. The National Library also holds recollections by Kenneth Binns himself (recorded by Hazel de Berg in 1967), his papers (MS 9822), and an interview with his elder daughter, Joan Binns, recorded by Shirley Tuff in 1982.

Kenneth Binns was one of Australia’s cultural pioneers. He was Parliamentary and National Librarian during the Library’s formative years, he helped to develop cultural and educational life in the new federal capital and he played a formal part in national and international activities, including the Commonwealth Literary Fund, the National Film Board and UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation).

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James Northfield (1888–1973)
Australia, Canberra, Australian Capital Territory1940s
Coloured poster; 101.0 x 63.0 cm
Pictures Collection,
nla.pic S10460

 

Kenneth Binns was born on 28 November 1882 at Dunfermline in Scotland. His father, the Reverend Fred Binns, was a Congregational minister who migrated with his family to Australia in 1890. Kenneth Binns was educated at Cleveland Street Public School in Redfern and at Sydney Grammar School. He joined the staff of the Fisher Library at the University of Sydney in 1900. The librarian was the poet John Le Gay Brereton, who gave the younger man an abiding love of books.

Binns married Amy Jane Higgins in 1909, and they had two daughters and a son. In 1911, they moved to Melbourne when Binns was appointed a cataloguer in the Commonwealth Parliamentary Library. He was the first professional historian appointed and used his skills to improve and extend the Library’s role, although he also found the work of assisting federal members interesting and important. In his words, he had ‘some small effect on the work of the Federal Government, the Parliament and Government, and in that way on the history of Australia’.

Federal Parliament and its Library were located in Melbourne. The Librarian, Arthur Wadsworth, was on loan from the Victorian Government and was in charge until 1927. During those years, in Peter Cochrane’s words in Remarkable Occurrences: The National Library of Australia’s First 100 Years, the Parliamentary Library ‘relied heavily on a borrowed book stock run by mostly borrowed staff in a borrowed building designed for colonial politicians in the 1860s’. Wadsworth laid the foundations for an extra-parliamentary library by acquiring important Australiana, including the large E.A. Petherick Collection, but did not pursue Australiana systematically. By contrast, Binns worked fast and effectively to establish a national collection, the foundations of the present National Library. He was helped by the passage of the Commonwealth Copyright Act, which made the Library a legal depository for Australian publications. Binns also worked well with donors, including Petherick, who had joined the Library to oversee his gift. Binns’ title was altered to Assistant Librarian in 1918, and in 1919 he took over the Australian section, in his own words, the ‘National section of the Commonwealth Library’.

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Mrs Alison Sanchez with her husband and a photograph of her father, Kenneth Binns Photograph by Susan Marsden

 

From then, Binns acted as both de facto librarian and, unofficially, as National Librarian. He introduced the term ‘National Library’, and actively fostered that national ideal by expanding the Parliamentary Library’s role and by acquiring significant records. The highlight was the purchase
of James Cook’s Endeavour journal in 1923. He was also successful in seeking gifts or gaining grants to purchase treasures such as the Ellis Rowan paintings, and he contributed to the publication of Historical Records of Australia (1914–25). He began to collect government records and embarked on a long campaign for the establishment of a national archives, finally succeeding in 1942.

The Parliamentary Library was the first Commonwealth department to be fully transferred from Melbourne to Canberra. Binns devoted more than a year to overseeing the move, as an essential part of the opening of a ‘Provisional Parliament House’ in 1927. Books were packed in Dewey order in cases holding 30–40, at a rate of 60–70 cases a week, reaching a total of 68 000. They were carried by truck from Melbourne’s Parliament House to Spencer Street Station, railed to Albury (there was no direct rail connection between Melbourne and Canberra), moved onto rail trucks on the narrower New South Wales railway gauge, and sent on to Queanbeyan and then Canberra.

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Portrait of James Cook and extract from the Endeavour journal broadside
Facsimile distributed to schools to celebrate the acquisition of the Endeavour journal (Canberra: Committee of the Commonwealth National Library, 1923)
Ferguson Collection

 

In January 1928, Binns succeeded Wadsworth as Commonwealth Parliamentary Librarian (‘Parliamentary and National Librarian’). As Librarian he was cautious but also decisive, intellectual but practical, taciturn but personable and, above all, persistent. These were all qualities well suited to the period of his tenure. Libraries were low on the list of priorities in the Commonwealth’s early years when government resources were directed to setting up in Canberra. These limitations increased during the Depression and the Second World War. The Library was also remote from booksellers and from professional contacts, and suffered makeshift accommodation. Binns succeeded in getting a building (West Block) to house the growing collection but the government took it over for office space. In 1935, a new National Library building was opened on King’s Avenue, but only the first section was completed.

Amy and Kenneth Binns were challenged and excited by the transfer to Canberra, and relished their roles as pioneers in the city’s cultural life. They lived in Melbourne Avenue and later in their own house designed by Hardy Wilson, in Mugga Way at Red Hill. The family home hosted church meetings, visiting librarians, writers, artists and historians. Binns was a broad-minded Christian with pacifist leanings and Labor sympathies, and was a founder and leader of the Canberra Congregational Church. He was also a founding member of the Canberra Society of Arts and Literature and the Canberra University Association, and served on the council when the university college was established. He edited the Handbook for Canberra for the Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science congress, held in the capital in 1939. He was also a foundation member of the Australian Institute of Librarians, and president from 1940 to 1944.

Kenneth Binns was no cultural elitist. His Scottish background underpinned a strong interest in Australian identity and, as a librarian, he supported both serious research and popular access to Australian history. In the belief that Cook’s Endeavour journal was a national treasure, he persuaded the Commonwealth to buy it, arranged to circulate it throughout Australia and produced a broadside with a journal extract which was distributed to schools. As a proponent of the Free Library movement, he opened the National Library to local borrowers in Canberra who lacked their own library, and introduced a mobile service. In 1934 he was the first Australian librarian awarded a Carnegie Travelling Fellowship. Two years later he gained a Carnegie grant to introduce free library services in the Commonwealth’s external territories (Papua New Guinea, Northern Territory, Norfolk Island and Nauru). He also surveyed library provision in Tasmania in 1943, and helped draft the state’s Libraries Bill.

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First box of books loaded in the removal of the Library
to Canberra, 1926
Pictures Collection

 

Binns’ ambitions for a National Library were realised when the government decided to develop it along the lines of the Library of Congress, as a national collection, and funded it as a separate division from 1935. By 1947 the Library had expanded to nearly a quarter of a million volumes and, largely due to Binns’ efforts to maintain contact with many significant Australians, had also amassed important personal papers, as well as major collections such as the Mathews ornithological collection, the Cumpston public health collection, and the first parts of the Ferguson and the Rex Nan Kivell collections. In 1945, Binns visited London to arrange for the British Public Record Office to microfilm its Australian documents, and the Australian Joint Copying Project began in 1948. His role in shaping the Library for future developments extended to his appointments of staff. He selected several with university degrees, including women, and supported his deputy, Harold White, who took over from him. He also established a national training school in librarianship.

Binns was dedicated to developing the cultural life of the nation as fully as he could, and acted to preserve a wide range of Australia’s cultural heritage, such as artworks, film, Indigenous artefacts, personal papers and government records. His work contributed to the development of other great public collections outside the Library, including the National Archives of Australia, the National Screen and Sound Archive, the National Gallery of Australia, and the National Museum of Australia.

Binns also helped to plan the Commonwealth Literary Fund and was a member of the advisory committee (1939–53). He established the documentary and historical film collection of the National Library and was a member of the National Film Board (1945–48). He aided the establishment of the Commonwealth Literature Censorship Board, and was a member from 1937, and chairman (1957–64). This was his most contentious role, when the board banned such books as Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955), but he also directed a revision of banned books, reducing them from 900 to fewer than 150. He was a branch member of the League of Nations and Australian representative for the International Institute for Intellectual Cooperation from 1930 to 1939 and, after the war, was a member of UNESCO, the body that succeeded it.

Kenneth Binns retired from the Library in 1947, and was awarded the CBE in 1964. He died in Canberra on 27 July 1969.

SUSAN MARSDEN is a professional historian who works in the Canberra-based partnership Marsden Russell Historians and conducts interviews for the National Library’s Oral History and Folklore Collection. Her most recent book is the bicentennial publication Newcastle: A Brief History

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