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Introduction

The first chapter of this thesis considers how the free public library in mid- to late-nineteenth-century Australia diverged from its British prototype. Unlike British public libraries, in which the formation of a collection of locally significant material was central to their collection policies and to their role in their communities, colonial Australian public libraries collected local materials haphazardly, if at all, until the very end of the nineteenth century. As Margaret Wyatt has written, ‘[a]lthough rich deposits of locally originating materials were found in British local public libraries from 1850 onwards, and although Australian public libraries were modeled on the British library system, formal collection and preservation of local materials had no part in the Australian system as originally conceived’.1 This chapter seeks to explicate these divergences and adaptations by placing them in their historical, geographical, and cultural contexts.

The transfer of cultural institutions from the metropolis to the colonies was complex. Substantial differences existed in the nineteenth century between Australia and Britain, in terms of the stratification of society and the ways in which prevalent social and philosophical mores arising out of Enlightenment thinking could be applied by governments and community leaders to social problems or social advancement. John Gascoigne observes that while utilitarianism was ‘one of the most efficient routes to the more generalised goal of improvement … European Australians were to discover that the extent to which such progress could be achieved was limited’.2 Difficulties in effectively recreating institutions that had operated successfully at ‘Home’ were complex and manifest. They often resulted in outright failure, or substantial change from the received model. The ways in which Australian culture has emerged from multiple

1 _{M Wyatt, 'A local studies experience: applying British principles to Australian conditions', The}

Local Studies Librarian, vol. 8, no. 1, 1989, p. 3.

2 _{J Gascoigne, The enlightenment and the origins of European Australia, Port Melbourne, Vic.,}

sources and changed according to local conditions has been central to recent scholarship in the field of cultural history in Australia.3 David Goodman has identified a significant change in the way cultural historians have approached Australian history, moving from a desire to identify emerging colonial difference from the (British) metropolitan society, towards a deeper understanding of the translation of metropolitan cultural forms to the colonial situation, as appropriations with specific local cultural consequences.4 In the same vein, cultural historian Richard Waterhouse has suggested that:

Australian culture is neither the product of organic growth nor of imposed hegemony. Nor are our values and institutions the unwavering product of a 200-year old fragment. Rather, contemporary Australian society and culture are the results of a continuing series of cultural imports constantly reworked to meet local circumstances, and of a dynamic set of internal transcultural exchanges.5

These understandings of ‘cultural transplantation’ are a useful starting point for considering the development of the public library in the colonies of Australia, prior to the act of federation that instituted the nation-state of Australia in 1901.6

This chapter first examines archival aspects of the British public library model adopted in the Australian colonies, in order to more clearly articulate the divergence and subsequent reworking of the model. It considers the degree to which the public library in Australia diverged from the archival model of the British public library in the context of the absence of centralised ‘state’ archives and the close relationship between colonial public libraries and museums. The

3 _{See for example the compilation of essays in R White and H-M Teo, Cultural history in}

Australia, Sydney, 2003.

4 _{D Goodman, 'Desiring land in gold-rush Victoria', in D Merwick (ed.), Dangerous liaisons:}

essays in honour of Greg Dening, Parkville, Vic., 1994, p. 213.

5 _{R Waterhouse, 'Cultural transmissions', in White and Teo, Cultural history in Australia, p. 117.} 6 _{The value of addressing the ‘derivative’ nature of Australian culture (high and popular) is found}

in the work of many key Australian historians. John Rickard, for example, suggests that in seeking to write about Australian culture, he seeks to ‘avoid the well-trodden path of the quest for national identity ⎯ or at least to be able to place it in some broader cultural context, instead focusing on ‘the process of immigration and cultural transplantation’: J Rickard, 'Cultural history: the "high" and the "popular"', in SL Goldberg and FB Smith (eds.), Australian cultural history, Cambridge, UK; Melbourne, 1988, p. 187. John Hirst also addresses this as a central theme, finding that ‘[o]ur task as Australian historians is to understand a dependent culture’: J Hirst, Sense & nonsense in Australian history, Melbourne, 2005, p. 123.

chapter then introduces the Tasmanian Public Library as the key thesis example, examining the institution from its establishment up to the 1880s. Tasmanians found in print culture a way to retain a sense of intellectual connection to the northern hemisphere, its politics and ideas, and Britishness. They also found in print culture the means to begin to express something of the nature of their new identity as a community within the British dominions, and the beginning of recognition of the role that a cultural literary heritage could play in the formation of regional identity.

In the last two decades of the nineteenth century the various libraries in Hobart — and the Tasmanian Public Library in particular — were a central conduit of print culture, and the evolution of Tasmania’s own liberal archive. Yet there were to be challenges and complications to this evolution. Discussion in this chapter focuses on the degree to which the institution recreated the institutional values and practices of its British prototype, under the direction of ‘liberal’ librarian Alfred Joseph Taylor. The chapter concludes by demonstrating how this situation gradually changed in the last decades of the nineteenth century. The growth of local history married with liberal sentiment stimulated the public library to perform a more energetic custodial role in its community, as part of a wider practice of institutionalising the local past.

The development of the liberal archive in Britain

Mid-nineteenth-century liberalism, involving a combination of idealism and utilitarianism, has been recognised as a key ingredient in the formation of the state-funded free public library system in Britain.7 The public library was designed to encourage individuals to take responsibility for their own self- improvement by practising ‘self-culture’, guiding the acquisition of knowledge

7

Recent published work in library history has significantly expanded our understanding of ways in which the nineteenth-century public library enacted the liberal state’s philosophy of social organization. See A Black, A new history of the English public library: social and intellectual contexts, 1850-1914, London; New York, 1996; T Augst, 'Faith in libraries: public libraries, liberalism, and the civil religion', in T Augst and KE Carpenter (eds.), Institutions of reading: the social life of libraries in the United States, Amherst, 2007, pp. 148-183; M Hewitt, 'Confronting the modern city: the Manchester Free Public Library, 1850–80', Urban History, vol. 27, no. 1, 2000, pp. 62-88; and P Joyce, The rule of freedom: liberalism and the modern city, London; New York, 2003.

and taste in its role as moral guardian.8 The public library could ‘teach people to teach themselves’ and ‘help people to help themselves’. This was to be achieved through freedom of access to the building, direct access to the shelves, use of catalogues, and the organisation of physical space to facilitate publicly acceptable behaviour through observation and self-regulation. It opened the communication of liberal middle-class values and norms of character and propriety up to a wider section of society, deliberately embracing the working classes.9

Of most interest to this thesis is the way in which the British public library maintained a role of fostering a sense of community, both local and national in character. This was to be achieved (in general terms) through the communication of liberal values to its users,10 and specifically by presenting the community with information about itself in the form of its collections relating to the nation and the region. Alistair Black writes that ‘the emergence of the public library was part and parcel of the growing realisation that to reform and regulate a burgeoning population and its connected problems the first step was to accumulate, in an accessible repository, knowledge and data on the norms, habits and conduct of the new [middle-class] society’.11 Patrick Joyce has most explicitly conceptualised this ‘archival’ aspect of the nineteenth-century public library, as being central to its function as a political technology of liberal governmentality.12 Joyce suggests that, while library scholarship has acknowledged the importance of ‘cultivation of self’ to the mission of the nineteenth-century public library, the imperative that ‘knowing one’s society was a prerequisite to knowing one’s self’ is less recognised as a crucial part of the public library’s mission.13

8

Augst, 'Faith in libraries', p.173.

9

Patrick Joyce suggests that the public library helped to constitute new meanings of ‘public’, related not only to the production of a free institution available to all members of society, but also in the constitution of the working class as ‘demotic’, by giving this class access to the public realm: P Joyce, 'The politics of the liberal archive', History of the human sciences, vol. 12, no. 3, 1999, p. 39.

10 _{See Augst, 'Faith in libraries'.}

11 _{Black, A new history of the English public library, p. 70} 12 _{Joyce, 'The politics of the liberal archive', p. 35.} 13

The types of collections that the public library formed are central to Joyce’s argument. The clear local emphasis in the public library promoting strong regional associations always operated in relation to national identifications, ‘just as liberalism was itself about the balance of the local and the national state’, Joyce writes.14 He argues:

The inclusiveness made possible by the copyright privileges of the British Museum enshrined the universality of knowledge, an aspiration of course which was an age-old one, though one to which liberalism gave a new twist in the 19th century. The belief in a universal human nature was expressed nonetheless in the peculiarities of the local. Local libraries attempted to copy this universal coverage, though always with the characteristic sense of their mission to represent the local.15

Helen Meller similarly characterises the public library as a ‘means for the interaction of local, regional and national culture’.16

Joyce considers that the origins of the public library as liberal archive in Great Britain lie in the 1850 Public Libraries Act. While the Public Record Office (founded in 1838) and the library collections of the British Museum were theoretically ‘public’ archives, access by the public to both institutions was limited. Particularly in the case of the Public Record Office, documents consisted of ‘state records rather than material which was about and created by the population at large’.17 The public libraries established after 1850, particularly in the form of the major provincial libraries in cities such as Manchester and Liverpool, were the first to archive and promote materials which could relate more directly to the individual liberal citizen’s understanding of self within the national and local community. They also made these materials more generally accessible across class boundaries.

14

Joyce, 'The politics of the liberal archive', p. 40.

15 _{Joyce, 'The politics of the liberal archive', p. 41.}

16 _{HE Meller, 'The leisure revolution', in M Kinnell and RP Sturges (eds.), Continuity and}

innovation in the public library: the development of a social institution, London, 1996, p. 11.

17

The Select Committee on the Provision of Public Libraries (1849) recommended that every locality should have a ‘special library’, ‘illustrative of the peculiar trade, manufactures, and agriculture of the place, and greatly favourable to the practical development of the science of political economy’.18 Topographical collections in the principal provincial libraries were also recommended, ‘where history may find a faithful portraiture of local events, local literature, and local manners; and art and science a collection of all objects illustrative of the soil, climate and resources of the surrounding country’.19 These recommendations were put in place in the new free libraries that were established in Britain from the 1850s. Diana Dixon, in her study of local studies collections in Britain, has found that of the twenty-seven free public libraries founded by 1868, all ‘boasted fine local collections from the start’.20 Local history and an interest in the dialect and customs of the people were characteristic. These local collections did not just complement civic unity, they also ‘safeguarded the past cultural achievement of the locality’ and its citizens’ ancestors.21

The issue of the collection of a local archive in the public library remained important to the activities and concerns of public librarians through the last decades of the nineteenth century. As Nicola Smith has observed, librarians utilised the formation of local collections, particularly local history, as a way of legitimising their new (and often uncertain) professional status.22 William HK Wright presented a paper on special local collections to a national forum during the first meeting of the Library Association of the United Kingdom in October 1878. In his paper, ‘Special collections of local books in provincial libraries’, Wright urged fellow librarians to collect local material, defined as ‘having any connection with the district, whether descriptive of, or relating to, published in, or

18

Select Committee on the Provision of Public Libraries (1849), section 3393-3397, quoted in T Kelly, A history of public libraries in Great Britain, 1845-1975, London, 1977, p. 77.

19 _{Kelly, A history of public libraries in Great Britain, p. 77.}

20 _{D Dixon, 'Civic pride and posterity', The Local Studies Librarian, vol. 15, no. 1, 1996, p. 6.} 21

Black, A new history of the English public library, p. 177. Dixon notes that ‘Civic pride often manifested itself in judicious purchasing of material for the local studies collections’: Dixon, 'Civic pride and posterity', p. 7.

22 _{See N Smith, 'Finding a place: librarians, local history and the search for professional and social}

written by natives of, or sometime residents within, the limits of the district’.23 Wright saw that not only would a ‘large and valuable collection of books’ be formed, but also there would be tangible benefits for the community. These benefits were in the increased interest ‘awakened’ in ‘local as well as general literature’, and in the encouragement given to local authors, literary workers and publishers.24

Wright observed that while this was not a new idea (noting the fine local collections already formed in Manchester, Liverpool, Bristol, Leicester, and Birmingham) he considered there was still much to be done. This was not only in the ongoing acquisition of local materials, but also in the promotion of special collections to the public. Wright also urged improved documentation, noting that ‘instances of special cataloguing of local books’ were ‘few and incomplete’.25 He encouraged provincial libraries to emulate the ‘course adopted and advocated by the authorities of the national libraries — seeking to gather within one building all the literature relating to the district we each represent’. In such a way ‘in course of time collections of great value and immense importance would be formed’.26 The meta-narrative of the comprehensive national collection was to be underpinned by localised narratives within regional or local collections. In practical terms, all this meant that by 1897 John Ogle could claim in his history of the free library in Britain that ‘now there is hardly a free library of any importance where it is not recognised that the local collection is an important section’.27

Although the example of the public library in North America was not an influential one for Australian libraries in the nineteenth century, it is important to recognise that American librarians also demonstrated active interest in the formation of local and national collections in public libraries.28 As in Britain, this

23 _{WHK Wright, Special collections of local books in provincial libraries, London, 1879-1890, p.}

44.

24

Wright, Special collections of local books in provincial libraries, p. 44.

25 _{Wright, Special collections of local books in provincial libraries, p. 45.} 26 _{Wright, Special collections of local books in provincial libraries, p. 47.} 27 _{JJ Ogle, The free library: its history and present xondition, [s.l.], 1897, p. 98.} 28

activity was often closely connected with local historical societies.29 The issue of the formation of ‘local’ collections in public libraries was a topic that was frequently raised at American Library Association conventions after 1876. In 1889, the statement was made at the convention that ‘[e]very town library must collect exhaustively and preserve tenaciously any book, pamphlet, map, placard, poster, every scrap of written or printed matter relating to that town and less exhaustively to the neighbouring towns’.30 This directive was not contemplated in Australia for another decade, and not comprehensively acted upon for much longer.

The Australian public library as a derivative institution

In his An account of the chief libraries of Australia and Tasmania, published in 1886, British barrister CW Holgate wrote that ‘while the Colonies remain bound to us by the strong ties of kinship and sentiment, and while England is still “home” to them, their institutions, modelled in many cases on our own, look for encouragement and support from kindred institutions in the old country’.31 This was undoubtedly true. The establishment of the principal state-supported free public libraries in each of the colonies in colonial Australia was closely associated with the dissemination of the liberal model of the English public library, based on philosophies imported by those cultural advocates who had observed the benefits of this type of institution in England. The establishment of these libraries, and the closely related institutions of the public museum and art gallery, was a product of ‘intense moral seriousness’ emerging from the colonial bourgeoisie, who sought to promote liberal values of access and guidance of the democratic citizen of all classes.32

The major ‘state’ libraries were closely modeled on the ‘national library idea’, in Australian librarian John Metcalfe’s words, seeking to provide a universal

29 _{For an extensive discussion of an early example of this at the Louisiana State Library, see F}

Phillips, 'To "Build upon the foundation": Charles Gayarré's vision for the Louisiana State Library', Libraries & the Cultural Record, vol. 43, no. 1, 2008, pp. 56-76.

30 _{See G Pearson, 'The development and role of local history collections in Australian public}

libraries', Australasian Public Libraries and Information Services, vol. 1, no. 1, 1988, p. 29.