1 We Can Imagine the Books We'd Like to Read, Even If They Have Not Yet

1 We can imagine the books we'd like to read, even if they have not yet been written, and we can imagine libraries full of books we would like to possess, even if they are well beyond our reach, because we enjoy dreaming up a library that reflects every one of our interests and every one of our foibles - a library that, in its variety and complexity, fully reflects the reader we are. It is therefore not unreasonable to suppose that, in a similar fashion, the identity of a society, or a national identity, can be mirrored by a library, by an assembly of titles that, practically and symbolically, serves as our collective definition.1 The collections and services of libraries and related agencies, such as museums and archives, are important components of social and institutional memory. They are both physical places of intellectual work and highly symbolic places. They represent national and cultural identity and aspirations.2 What a nation thinks, that it is. And what a nation thinks is for the most part what it reads. Investigations into social and political conditions are a mark of the time; they are many and elaborate but social and political conditions are largely determined by what is taking place in the imaginative life of the community.3 1 A Manguel, The library at night, Toronto, 2006, p. 294. 2 WB Rayward and C Jenkins, 'Libraries in times of war, revolution, and social change', Library Trends, vol. 55, no. 3, 2007, p. 361. 3 LS Jast, Libraries and living: essays and addresses of a public librarian, [s.l.], 1932, p. 142. Jast’s observations are remarkably pre-emptive of Benedict Anderson’s seminal thesis on the role of print dissemination in the creation of national identities. See BR Anderson, Imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism, London; New York, 1991. 2 INTRODUCTION This thesis aims to historicise the formation of local and national collections of material relating directly to the locality in the major ‘state’ public libraries in Australia, from the mid nineteenth century to the mid twentieth century. It documents and analyses changing attitudes to local and national literature and historical material, situating the institution’s growing desire to collect and promote its cultural and social history within changes in its coeval society, focusing on cultural shifts in nationalism and patriotism, historical consciousness and attitudes to the production of history, and the promotion of national literary culture. The thesis finds that, although the major public libraries were typically not active in acquiring an ‘archive’ of the locality when first formed, by the mid twentieth century they had all established and naturalised an active ‘archival’ function. Nevertheless, as this thesis argues, the evolution of this function was complex, influenced variously by factors such as the degree and type of cultural philanthropic activity in the wider community, historical ‘amnesia’ toward the colonial convict past, and residual ‘cultural cringe’ toward Australian literary production. This thesis emerges from the conviction that a close examination of the formation and stratification of library collections that symbolise and promote national identity contributes valuable information about emerging and changing ‘worldviews’ of communities, particularly the ways in which communities identify as members of a region and nation. Utilising the lens of public library philosophy and collections, the thesis offers a new way of reflecting on the formation of local and national identities in Australia. This thesis is primarily situated in the field of library history. Library history is a discipline that investigates the forces emerging from society that inhibit, promote or direct library development, and the ways in which libraries concurrently influence their communities. Library historian Michael Harris has described three principal areas of investigation into library provision commonly undertaken by library historians.4 These include control (libraries being ‘deployed by dominant 4 MH Harris, History of libraries in the western world, Metuchen, N.J., 1995, p. 4. 3 and powerful classes in society in an attempt to represent the world in ways that serve their interests’), commodity (libraries as ‘specialized markets for written and printed materials), and memory (libraries consolidating a ‘desired sense of national identity’, and providing a resource for the production and promotion of ‘cultural heritage’).5 This thesis engages primarily with Harris’ ‘memory’ function. In library history, this field of enquiry is one that is relatively underdeveloped, and one that has not been treated to any extent in Australian library historiography. Libraries are frequently conceived as places in which identity is located, as receptacles of collective memory and representatives of cultural ‘worldviews’.6 They are seen as repositories for safe-keeping the material remains of the past that, as Martin Stuart-Fox suggests, ‘possess an intrinsic value for our understanding not just of the world, but of ourselves as well’.7 In Australia, historical scholarship typically characterizes the principal public reference libraries established in the colonial period as popular ‘memory-banks’, and as institutionalized locations of history, contributing to the identificatory struggles of the new nation.8 Australian historian Bain Attwood writes that with the rising patriotic sentiment in the Australian colonies in the last decades of the nineteenth century, ‘[m]onuments and memorials, libraries and the like, were to be created as statements to posterity and would function as the new bearers of the past for the settler nation’.9 Marilyn Lake writes in the introduction to a key text exploring history and memory in Australia, Memory, monuments and museums: the past in the present, that Australian libraries and museums are ‘repositories of public 5 Harris, History of libraries in the western world, pp. 5-7. 6 Rayward and Jenkins, 'Libraries in times of war, revolution, and social change', p. 361. 7 M Stuart-Fox, 'Two views of the history of historiography and the nature of history', History Australia, vol. 4, no. 2, 2007, p. 44.13. 8 See for example, Australian historian Penny Russell, who writes that ‘through their efforts to ‘demarcate and order society, through their making of stories of “nation” and the egalitarian national character’, colonial Australians ‘enacted rituals of belonging’: ‘Making nation they made identity, in and through history. Making history they secured a sense of past and therefore a sense of continued presence and a grounded present’: PA Russell, 'Unsettling settler society', in Australia's history: themes and debates, Sydney, NSW, 2005, p. 38. 9 B Attwood and H Doyle, Possession: Batman's treaty and the matter of history, Carlton, Vic., 2009, p. 134. 4 memory’, institutions marking the transition ‘from the milieu de mémoire of pre- modern times to the lieu de mémoire instituted by nation states’.10 The generally agreed formulation that the major Australian reference libraries played a role in ‘making nation’ through their historical collections has not been critically examined.11 How did libraries perform this role in philosophical, professional and practical terms? How and when did this institutional ‘vocation’ (in Wallace Kirsop’s term12) become naturalised as a central element of the major reference libraries? What were the social stimuli for origination, retardation, and development of this function? Was it difficult, or contested? How did widely held social and cultural perceptions of local and national history, and of the relationship of the colonies with the metropolis, affect the acquisition of the local archive? These questions, from which this thesis emerges, reflect a gap in the historiography of public libraries. They offer directions for a critique of the accepted ‘national heritage’ function of the major public libraries in Australia, and for new insights into nation-making and the construction of identity. Eminent Australian book historian Wallace Kirsop has warned against parochial studies of Australian book and library history that present Europe and Australia as a ‘dichotomy’.13 He argues that nationalistic interest in local literature was a ‘broadly-based’ international trend, with parallels in Americana and the ‘long- standing bibliophilic traditions encompassing topography and voyages’. He 10 M Lake, 'Introduction: the past in the present', in M Lake (ed.), Memory, monuments and museums: the past in the present, Carlton, Vic., 2006, pp. 1-2. 11 Exceptions to this are two papers in Australian library history: J Sassoon, 'Phantoms of remembrance: libraries and archives as "the collective memory"', Public History Review, vol. 10, 2003, pp. 40-60, an outstanding theoretical analysis of the ways in which archive formation is dictated by local amnesia; B Tiffen, 'Recording the nation: nationalism and the history of the National Library of Australia', Australian Library Journal, vol. 56, nos. 3 & 4, 2007, pp. 342-59, in which the author seeks to explore how libraries can be utilised ‘to signify national characteristics and reflect “official” messages of nationhood’ (p. 344); and M Piggott, 'Archives and memory', in SM McKemmish (ed.), Archives: recordkeeping in society, Wagga Wagga, NSW, 2005, pp. 299-327, which deals only peripherally with libraries but makes important arguments. Wallace Kirsop summarised the problematics of the growth of bibliographic Australiana collecting (private and

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