National Treasures from Australia’s Great Libraries
Opening on 3 December 2005, the touring exhibition National Treasures from Australia’s Great Libraries will be the culmination of a remarkable four-year collaboration between the national, state and territory libraries. Australians will be able to see many of the nation’s most valuable and historically significant manuscripts and objects displayed in their capital city for the first time. The exhibition will visit every state and territory capital over an 18-month period. ‘This exhibition is unprecedented,’ says Nat Williams, Director of Exhibitions at the National Library of Australia. ‘In every sense, it creates a new benchmark. It is the first major touring exhibition of works from Australian libraries and is the first to be indemnified by the Australian Government.’ National Treasures from Australia’s Great Libraries will reflect many facets of Australian life, from Ned Kelly’s bullet-scarred helmet and his Jerilderie Letter to the diary kept by 15-year-old Shane Gould during her record-breaking swims in the 1972 Munich Olympic Games. The scale of the exhibition is ambitious, with well over 170 items on show, drawn from some of Australia’s oldest and most significant library heritage collections. Many of the items symbolically represent moments in history that have helped to define our sense of the present and the past. Libraries have long been appreciated as places where books are kept, some valuable and protected, others borrowed by hundreds of individual readers. They are not quite so well known for the remarkable collections of pictures, maps, manuscripts, music, ephemera and historical and personal objects that they hold. In order to preserve and protect these valuable original items, visitors and researchers to Australian libraries are now encouraged to use microfilm, digital reproductions or other forms of electronic delivery. Yet visitors to libraries still express a strong desire to be able to see precious original manuscripts and objects for themselves. To most of us, there is still nothing quite like seeing an item of great historical or popular significance in all three splendid dimensions. Sometimes simply coming face to face with a faded scrap of paper recording someone’s dying notes, such as those by Harold Lasseter or Mary Watson, provides a powerful, poignant and memorable moment for the viewer. The genesis for this project was the successful blockbuster exhibition Treasures from the World’s Great Libraries which brought some of the world’s most revered and ancient manuscripts and other material held by libraries to Canberra in late 2001. That exhibition’s unprecedented success inspired members of the Council of Australian State Libraries (CASL) to propose a completely fresh experience, yet one of equal significance for all Australians and one that is available in their own city. It offers a unique way in which to view our history: a record of stories often told, such as that of Ned Kelly, and those stories now obscured by time, such as the tale of the infamous murderer, Frederick Deeming. Divided into eight sections (see below), the exhibition is a thematic reflection of the experiences of people in this country from the earliest European images of the flora and fauna of New South Wales, painted by Captain John Hunter who sailed in with the First Fleet, to the drawings of Eddie Mabo presented in the landmark High Court case that bears his name. The astonishing items in the exhibition’s first section, UNDER THE SOUTHERN CROSS, reveal how the people of the northern hemisphere first perceived Australia, beginning with rumours of a landmass in southern latitudes to the continent’s gradual emergence in the maps and journals of navigators and explorers. Represented here are a variety of complex early encounters with the continent, such as the violent story of the Dutch trader Batavia and its vicious crew bent on massacre, and early relationships between Europeans and Indigenous people. The first European depiction of the Southern Cross constellation was by Andrea Corsali in a letter dated 1515 and this has come to be seen as a powerful emblem of Australia. Among many individuals represented is Bungaree, an Aboriginal man who was one of early Sydney’s best known identities, and who sailed with Matthew Flinders on his circumnavigation of Australia. Captain James Cook’s Endeavour journal records the mapping of Australia’s eastern coast, and Eddie Mabo’s land ownership diagrams highlight the evidence for the High Court case that would one day enshrine his name in Australian law. SETTLEMENT, LAND AND NATURE deals with the experience of the first colonists in the harsh new land. Many of the first arrivals, including several convicts, took to their journals and sketchbooks to record their impressions and their colleagues’ attempts to adapt to an alien way of life. Natural history illustrations, an important part of the collections in Australian libraries, play a large role in this section. In his Sketchbook of Fishes in Macquarie Harbour, convict artist William Buelow Gould captured the natural aquatic wonders of early Tasmania. In 1808, John Lewin produced Australia’s first, and now incredibly rare, bird book, Birds of New Holland. The log of HMS Alligator reveals the unsuccessful attempt to establish a city in an ill-chosen part of remote northern Australia. A black-and-yellow convict uniform clearly demonstrates that punishment in the nation’s early years could also be psychological. After a long search and a hesitant beginning, the nation’s capital is eventually launched in style with banquets, Nellie Melba’s singing and an RAAF fly-past. In HOPE AND HARDSHIP, the first settlers come to terms with the harsh reality: Australia’s cruel climate and forbidding geography rarely showed mercy. The items in this section demonstrate the extent to which the newcomers were ill equipped to deal with either. Burke and Wills successfully crossed the country from south to north but died on the return journey. The writings of Welsh swagman Joseph Jenkins charted a nineteenth-century labourer’s life, and gold prospector Harold Lasseter penned a farewell to his wife as he lay dying alone in the desert. Containing countless but unspoken sorrows is the list of residents evacuated from Darwin in the wake of Cyclone Tracy. Amid the sadness, there was always hope. A nineteenth-century child’s jigsaw puzzle, intended for would-be migrants, painted an optimistic portrait of colonial life, from the clearing of the ground to the first wool clip. A severe environment and an innate aversion to authority bred not only bravery but also treachery. HEROES AND VILLAINS reveals Australia’s brave folk and its lawbreakers—sometimes, as in the case of Ned Kelly, they were the same person. This part of the exhibition also draws attention to some of Australia’s less well-known historic characters—people like Melbourne serial killer Frederick Deeming, who at one time was thought to be the infamous Jack the Ripper. Although a crowd of more than 12 000 people cheered wildly when Deeming was hanged at Melbourne Gaol in 1892, his story is now largely forgotten. Ned Kelly’s helmet and his Jerilderie Letter still loom large in Australian history and culture 125 years after Kelly was hanged. In her diaries, nurse Ellen Kettle described her remarkable efforts to bring medical care to the Indigenous people of northern Australia. And the papers of Lindy Chamberlain recall a time when a court case could transfix almost an entire nation. WAR AND LOSS examines the effect of conflict on Australia, from the horrors of World War I and the deaths of more than 60 000 Australian soldiers to the prisoner-of-war camps in the 1940s. On a page torn from a diary, Margaret Gordon Ingham recorded the names of the fellow passengers who died in her lifeboat during World War II. In 1942, the Japanese produced a map of Western Australia, suggesting they had identified several bombing targets in the state. Australian prisoner-of-war Ray Stewart was forbidden to keep a diary, so he risked punishment and wrote about life in Italian and German POW camps first on a roll of toilet paper and later in exercise books. And captured Allied soldiers in a Singapore prison produced a touching Christmas book for the children in Changi, calling it The Happiness Box. Loss—of life, of loved ones, of security—is sadly an inevitable part of war. Loss does not only occur during wartime; it can be as the result of natural disasters such as Cyclone Tracy or the Canberra bushfires, or of conflict between two groups of people. Australians have always been inventive, whether they are devising a new way of hanging out the washing or putting together the small beginnings of a now world-famous airline. INNOVATION AND INDUSTRY studies the extent to which the nation has prospered, thanks to a certain inbuilt ingenuity. Lance Hill’s order book reveals the first steps of the clothesline company that went on to populate countless Australian backyards with his eponymous creation, the Hills Hoist. When pilots Charles Ulm and Charles Kingsford Smith could not make themselves heard above the engine noise during the world’s first trans-Pacific flight, they penned a series of notes to each other (and discarded the more ribald ones on landing). David Unaipon’s improvement to the shearing handpiece was just one of many innovations for which this Indigenous polymath is known and for which he is now celebrated on the $50 note. W.A. Crowder’s diary details the struggle to build the 3200-kilometre Overland Telegraph Line, and the first Qantas logbook shows just how far both flight and the airline have come in little more than 80 years. The NATIONAL OBSESSIONS section highlights a certain Australian fondness for excess—in food, sport and drinking. The section delves deeply into the national psyche and touches a culinary nerve. Australia’s first cookbook, written in 1864 by a Tasmanian parliamentarian and self-confessed bon vivant, was aimed squarely at the gentry (it was subtitled ‘Cookery for the Many, as well as the ‘Upper Ten Thousand’ ). Mary Gilmore’s all-purpose The Mary Cookbook, on the other hand, was thoroughly democratic in its aim: to produce ‘every-day recipes of Australian housekeepers in working class homes’. The section also features Don Bradman’s favourite cricket bat (‘the best bat I ever had’), a Melbourne teenager’s letter that revolutionised the closing ceremony at the Olympic Games, and a collection of striking labels confirming the place of wine in our culture, and of the apple industry in our economy. As the new country grew, so did the opportunity to create afresh. CULTURE covers the artistic spectrum, from a quilt made by Aboriginal children in the mid-nineteenth century to the stunning iconic ‘sails’ of the Sydney Opera House. A telegram sent by a private detective adds yet another layer to the Ern Malley hoax, Australia’s most celebrated practical joke, and drawings by Billingee and Pitjantjatjara children reveal aspects of Indigenous culture. The original artwork of The Magic Pudding, the still-popular children’s book written and illustrated by Norman Lindsay nearly 90 years ago, shows the nature of the creative process. In the same vein, the original manuscripts of A.B. ‘Banjo’ Paterson’s Waltzing Matilda and Man from Snowy River establish a link with our embryonic culture. And a series of articles belonging to Henry Lawson, one of Australia’s best known and most popular literary figures, suggests a life where creation often took a back seat to the struggle to exist.
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