Redmond Barry and the University of Melbourne Library Carole Hinchcliff
Redmond Barry and the University of Melbourne Library Carole Hinchcliff Redmond Barry (1813–1880) was an Anglo-Irish lawyer in its governance and day-to-day administrative matters, who arrived in Melbourne in 1839 to establish his legal including those of the University Library. The role career. He served as standing counsel for Aboriginal of chancellor is an honorary one, and to date Barry is people from 1842 and became the first puisne judge of Melbourne’s longest-serving chancellor. the Supreme Court of Victoria in 1853.1 Though best The third of July 1854 was an important date in the known today for sentencing to death the legendary history of Melbourne: the foundation stones for the bushranger Ned Kelly in 1880, he was knighted for University of Melbourne and the Public Library were his efforts in establishing and developing the cultural, laid, with Barry presiding at both events. At the educational and intellectual life of Melbourne, rather university’s inauguration on 13 April the following year, than for his legal career. This is largely due to his roles as Barry delivered a long, ponderous speech, concluding inaugural chancellor of the University of Melbourne and with his aspiration for the colony’s first university: chair of trustees of the Melbourne Public Library, now known as State Library Victoria,2 as well as in founding And we hope that the University of Melbourne may or supporting numerous other cultural, scientific, stand forth amidst the institutions of the Southern educational and philanthropic endeavours. Barry not only Hemisphere with a steady and increasing refulgence, had fingers in every cultural pie, but baked many of them the nursing mother and generous instructress of a himself.3 He was instrumental in expanding the Public race of distinguished scholars, and that there is no Library to include the National Gallery, the National presumptuous anticipation of her late-born renown Museum and the Technological Museum.
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