Monthly Archives: October 2011 Back

The British Royals exhibition hits the airwaves

Posted on 24 Oct 2011| by JOL Admin |

It seems that all of Queensland is gearing up for today’s visit of Her Majesty the Queen and His Royal Highness the Duke of Edinburgh. The visit has thrown extra light on Queensland State Archives’ current exhibition The British Royals: a Queensland Story. An interview with Katherine Brennan, Manager Business Services and Planning about this striking exhibition was broadcast on Spencer Howson’s breakfast program on radio station 612 ABC Brisbane on Thursday 20 October. Katherine was also interviewed on Gold Coast radio station ABC Coast FM on Friday 21 October. Listen to Thursday’s interview on the ABC website.

The exhibition, which includes ephemera from the John Oxley Library collection, will be at Queensland State Archives, 435 Compton Road, Runcorn until March 2012 and is also available on our website.

Niles Elvery, Manager Public Access – Queensland State Archives

Out of the Port lecture "Cyclone Mahina"

Posted on 21 Oct 2011| by JOL Admin |

On Wednesday 19 October our monthly Out of the Port lecture by author and broadcaster Ian Townsend focused on Cyclone Mahina. On 4 March 1899 this category 5 cyclone caused one of Australia’s worst natural disasters killing over 400 people and destroying the pearling fleet berthed at Bathurst Bay. The ensuing storm surge swept inland for 5 kilmetres.

Thanks to Ian for a fascinating presentation delivered in a year in which Queensland, and indeed many other areas around Australia and the rest of the world, have again experienced the devastation of natural disasters in the form of floods, cyclones, earthquakes and tsunamis.

Ian’s book The Devil’s Eye: a novel was published on 2008. In 2005 he was our John Oxley Library Fellow with much of the research undertaken during his fellowship culminating in this publication.

Join us next month for our last Out of the Port lunchtime lecture for 2011. Brian Rough and Jack Ford will present Tripping over Concrete Slabs: documenting Queensland’s wartime heritage.

See you at the State Library on 6 November at 12.30, auditorium 2, level 2.

Simon Farley

Manager, Arts Portfolio – State Library of Queensland

"From Ship to Shore" travelling exhibition launched in Moranbah

Posted on 20 Oct 2011| by JOL Admin |

On Monday 17^th October the State Library’s From Ship to Shore travelling exhibition was launched at the Moranbah Library in the Isaac Region.

The exhibition includes panels featuring a selection of images and information relating to shipboard diaries from the 1860s to the 1940s held in the John Oxley Library collection. These diaries have all been digitised and can be read from via our online One Search catalogue.

I travelled to Moranbah with the original diaries to set up a white gloves talk and display at Monday’s opening ceremony. On the plane from Brisbane I was seated next to a miner from Sydney who was part of the fly in fly out workforce riding the resources boom sweeping Australia. While chatting he was interested to hear about the diaries and we both reflected on how rapidly we move around today in comparison with the age of shipboard travel. It takes us a matter of hours to fly thousands of kilometres through the air from one place to another. When we get to where we’re going, or stop off at various points along the route, we call, text, tweet, email, or send a Facebook message. And how many of us keep a diary while travelling with so many options open to us for spontaneous communication?

As a 15 year old assisted immigrant from Wales it took Maria Steley and her family from October 1863 to Februrary 1864 before they finally stepped off the Ariadne and onto the Australian mainland. The ship had been quarantined at Stradbroke Island on arrival in January due to an outbreak of measles.

Rereading a transcript of Maria’s diary, which is written as if she is addressing a long letter to her friend Elenor, I was struck by her excitement but also by the hard realities of life, and death, on board immigrant ships to Australia in the nineteenth century:

Monday 26 October we are sailing this morning 9 miles a hour if we go on at that rate we shall soone be ther I Don’t care how soon we get ther A child died to day it is a verry serrous thing they sowe the body up in a rug then they get a plank and let the body go down the Shool master reed the furnell service [sic].

Maria’s life would also be cut tragically short in a horse riding accident five years later as she was heading home after a visit to Agnesvale Homestead west of Maryborough where her father was involved with the Burrum Coal Mine.

Reading her diary from on board the Ariadne and holding it in my hand in another Queensland coal mining town 148 years later, knowing that she had held it in hers trying to write while the ship rocked to and fro, I was transported into Maria’s experience:

Saturday October 9 The ship is rolling very bad the tins and buckets and every thing that is lose is rolling from one end of the ship to the others…we could not stand nor sit without houlding something we Cant get our tables down to eat of we are Oblige to sit on the ground you would laught to seea us tumbling from one end of the place to the other [sic]

Thanks to Jo Coleman, Middlemount Branch Library Manager, for organising my stay and providing such great hospitality. Thanks also to Trudy and the staff at Moranbah Library and to Mayor Cedric Marshall and his staff. From Ship to Shore will be on display in the Moranbah Library until 25 Oct and then at the following places:

Clermont Library 27 Oct-9Nov
Middlemont Library 11-20 Nov
Dysart Library 22-29 Nov

To experience the power and aura of the original diaries visit us in the John Oxley Library Reading Room. Open daily from 10-5.

Simon Farley

Manager, Arts Portfolio – State Library of Queensland

Day of Digital Archives – Oct 6 – highlighting web archiving of our summer of disasters

Posted on 07 Oct 2011| by JOL Admin |

The Day of Digital Archives is an initiative from the USA to raise awareness of digital archives and an opportunity for those working with them to describe and collectively document what they do. The John Oxley Library participated by highlighting the work that has been keeping our web archivists Maxine Fisher and Gina Tom busy this year – selecting and archiving websites and online publications related to last summer’s natural disasters. These are organised into two collections: Queensland floods and Tropical Cyclone Yasi.

Braving the flood waters outside the Queensland Museum in Brisbane, 2011

Web archiving is just one area where John Oxley Library staff have been involved in disaster collecting. We endeavour to collect and make available information, images and resources that tell not only about our ‘summer of sorrow’ but also about the recovery and rebuilding process. For an insight into the web archiving aspect of our disaster collecting work, read the full post on the Day of Digital Archives website.

Dame Nellie Melba in Queensland

Posted on 06 Oct 2011| by JOL Admin |

I recently read of the passing of Dame Nellie Melba’s granddaughter Pamela, Lady Vestey 1918-2011 in Mark McGinness’ obituary published in the Sydney Morning Herald on 1 October.

McGinness writes that Lady Vestey was born Pamela Helen Fullerton on September 12, 1918, “the only surviving child of Melba’s only child George Armstrong. Her mother, Evelyn Doyle, a Brisbane-born singer, was George’s second wife, to whom Melba was devoted.”

Dame Nellie Melba herself was born Helen Porter Mitchell on 19 May 1861 in Richmond, Victoria. She lived with her parents, Isabella and David Mitchell, and seven younger brothers and sisters, and attended the Presbyterian Ladies College in Melbourne.

Melba moved to Mackay with her father, who had purchased a sugar mill there, after the death of her mother and one of her sisters in 1881. In 1882 she married Charles Armstrong in Brisbane, and they had a son, George, the following year. Jim Davidson in his Australian Dictionary of Biography entry on Melba writes of Armstrong that he was “tall, blue-eyed, and three years her senior, a man who agreeably combined skills as a rough-rider with the recommendation of gentle birth: his father was a baronet.” Davidson goes on to sum up Melba’s life in Queensland… “Sequested in a tin-roofed house, Melba became bored with the incessant rain and frustrated with a foundering marriage. The birth of her son George did little to allay her growing ambition to sing professionally, and on 19 January 1884 she left Mackay for Melbourne.”

An interesting collection from this time in the tropics is held in the State Library of Queensland’s John Oxley Library. TR1797: Dame Nellie Melba Correspondence 1882-1986 consists of correspondence sent by Nellie Melba to her singing master in Melbourne Signor Pietro Cecchi. There are eight letters and one telegram, all addressed to him. The collection also contains several newspaper clippings on Melba, as well as original photographs of Sr. Cecchi and one of Melba dated 1921; an unidentified house associated with Melba and 5 cartes-de-visite of famous men including William Gladstone, Giuseppe Garibaldi and Thomas Carlyle.

One of these letters to Sr. Cecchi from 1883 toured Australia as part of the National Treasures from Australia’s Great Libraries Exhibition in 2006. Melba wrote this letter from “The Hollow”, home of the Rawson Family whose lives in Mackay in the 1870s and 1880s are well documented in the Oxley Library’s Rawson Family Archive.

McGinness writes in his obit that Lady Vestey gave generously to institutions that honoured her grandmother’s memory. “In 1998 she gave hundreds of Melba costumes, documents, objects andphotos to the Lilydale Museum (now the Yarra Ranges Regional Museum). She also gave 80 stage costumes, accessories and photos to the Victorian Arts Centre’s performing arts collection and, in 2008, endowed the Melba Opera Trust with $150, 000 to sustain her grandmother’s bequest in 1931 to ‘find another Melba’.”

From these original collections held in institutions in Australia and abroad we are able to gain a deeper understanding of Dame Nellie Melba’s life and career. An Australian diva acclaimed by critics around the world as a ravishing voice of flawless purity and aflame with brilliance.

Simon Farley

Arts Librarian – Queensland Memory – State Library of Queensland

Text Queensland – Queensland's past online

Posted on 03 Oct 2011| by JOL Admin |

A wonderful new Queensland history resource has been launched by the Centre for the Government of Queensland.

Text Queensland features full text books, journals, theses, government publications and newspapers.

A range of University of Queensland Press publications have been digitised along with a selection of out of print books about Queensland. Full text journals include the Journal of the Royal Historical Society of Queensland (1914-1994) and of particular note are Pugh’s Almanac (1859-1927) and Queensland Government Gazette (1859-1900).

Text Queensland was launched by Professor Paul Greenfield AO Vice-Chancellor of the University of Queensland. Professor Peter Spearritt, Director of the Centre for the Government of Queensland also gave an entertaining speech. The launch was attended by a number of staff from State Library of Queensland.

It is a great website and I encourage you to take a look.

Sharon Nolan

Manager, Published Materials – Queensland Memory – State Library of Queensland