National Treasures from Australia's Great Libraries at National Library of Australia December 3 2005 - February 12 2006, 9am - 5pm (closed Christmas Day).
This is a Magic Pudding of an exhibition. You know what's in the recipe? - lots of amazing tastes, unexpected traditional threepenny pieces (genuine silver, of course), mixed for four years with tremendous enthusiasm and skill, bigger on the inside than it looks on the outside (more like a living yeast than a Tardis) and, finally, a texture, structure and shape better than anything Normal Lindsay imagined.
The only problem is time. It will run away with you, as a good Magic Pudding should. I would allow a couple of hours, lunch to chew 22 times per mouthful and digest, and then you could still go back for another hour or so for a second helping to discover nuts and raisins you missed the first time around. What's more, all this is free (except lunch since, as we know, there's no such thing) because "Australia's libraries have a responsibility to collect, preserve and make accessible Australia's documentary heritage in a wide variety of forms" including exhibitions of national treasures. Our first was in Hobart in 1858, then Melbourne in 1861, and then the first great Australian treasures exhibition organised by the Victorian Fine Arts Commission at the Melbourne Public Library in 1869.
As curator Margaret Dent says, a library collection is great for finding things you want, but "how do you find something you're not looking for?" Maybe you expect to see Don Bradman's favourite cricket bat and Ned Kelly's helmet made from ploughshares to armour (rather than swords to ploughshares), but the threepenny bits will set you thinking. Look at the first diagram describing the Southern Cross ("this crosse is so fayre and bewtiful"), not on Peter Lalor's flag but in a letter from Andrea Corsali in 1516 to Giuliano de Medici (translated from Italian into English by Richard Eden in 1555), and the yeasty possibilites begin to grow. Modern Australia might well have been Italian, or Dutch, or French. Or Aboriginal.
Did Indigenous people see a cross in this star formation? Or did it take European Christians to perceive that image? And should it have been such a cross to bear for Indigenous people? British Lord Morton, President of the Royal Society, hoped not in 1768 when he advised Captain James Cook "No European Nation has the right to occupy any part of their country (meaning newly discovered lands), or settle among them without their voluntary consent. Conquest over such people can give no just title; because they could never be the aggressors." Eddie Mabo's papers are set next to Lord Morton's advice, not far from the secret instructions Cook received from King George III to claim the new continent for England. The Royal Society organised Cook's trip, but the Government provided the funds - and it took more than 200 years until Mabo exposed the fraud. Eddie Mabo's papers were placed on UNESCO's Memory of the World Register in 2001, perhaps ironically along with Cook's Endeavour Journal.
This is just one thought bubble to grow from a page of a letter. On November 6, 1942, a German U-boat sank the City of Cairo in the South Atlantic. Of 17 people in Lifeboat No 4, only Margaret Gordon (whose husband drowned in a second torpedo attack) and Third Officer Whyte survived, sailing 3200 kms before rescue by a Brazilian minesweeper. Whyte was torpedoed and died returning from America to England. Gordon recorded the names and addresses on a page of her diary of her six European companions, and only that page survived. Margaret remarried, and as Margaret Ingham retired from the State Library of Victoria in 1980 as one of Australia's foremost experts on children's literature, establishing the 80,000 book Children's Research Collection. She never spoke of her ordeal, but wrote to inform the families of the dead. Mrs Solomon wrote that Gordon's letter "has gone on to [her son's] wife - who will keep it to read to little Nigel when old enough to understand".
These National Treasures touch the personal lives of people in our past, stirring up stories and thoughts which are real for us now. Even the suet in the Pudding - like the awful story of murderer Frederick Deeming - helps bind together our understanding. Take your time, because I've only touched on two of many, many fascinating stories of ordinary bits of paper, a helmet, a bat, Bourke and Wills' gun and whip, the model Holden I drove in 1964, a quilt made by Aboriginal children (anonymous) in 1845 and pictures drawn by Aboriginal children (with their traditional names) in 1940, the first order book for Hills Hoists and so much more. In fact the original Magic Pudding illustrations are about the last thing you'll see near the exit. Before you have lunch, and go back for a second helping. That's what I intend to do.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
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