On Saturday the 6th July 1912, Brisbane had its first aeroplane flight. The pilot was Mr A. B. (Wizard) Stone the American daredevil who was barnstorming around Australia. According to the report in the Brisbane Courier on July 8 of that year, the event was one “of scientific and historic interest, a chapter in Queensland’s share of the romance of the conquest of the air”. To witness this historic event 8,000 spectators gathered at the main oval at the Brisbane Exhibition grounds.

Image number 65111

Visitors could pay an extra shilling to inspect the Metz Bleriot monoplane, a structure 28 feet from wingtip to wingtip and a length of 25 feet. It had a 50 h.p engine, 7 cylinders and its propellers were said to reach up to a speed of 1200 revs per minute. The plane weighed 156 pounds on the ground. Up in the air, with the passenger and fuel the aircraft reached a weight of up to 9cwt.

Crash of the bleriot. Image number 60453

Lady MacGregor, the Governor’s wife, and lieutenant Governor Sir Arthur Morgan were two of the eminent citizens there to witness the first flight. At 4 o’clock in the afternoon, with clear skies and a light breeze the bird-like machine was guided out of the tent on the oval. After warming up, the monoplane was sent soaring 200 ft into the air. Stone flew the plane 3 times around the exhibition grounds amid great cheers from the crowd, and with each turn increasing altitude until he reached 400 feet.

After successfully flying for ten minutes he began his landing in a very steep decent with alarming consequences. The machine hit the ground sharply and one of the four wheels fell off and in a flash the monoplane did a somersault and crashed into the ground, smashing in half.

To the amazement of the crowd, the pilot made a miraculous exit from the wreckage and except for a few cuts and bruises was uninjured. Stone declared the oval unsuitable for flying being “practically a well from which it was difficult to rise and into which it was still more hazardous to descend”. The crowd surged onto the oval to view the pilot and his broken plane.

Stone was daring and adventurous and lucky to survive some of his many flying “mishaps”. Despite this, the “Wizard” was well respected and admired by many including Bert Hinkler whom he met at a travelling show in Bundaberg in 1912. Hinkler became his apprentice and mechanic and whilst with Stone, grasped every available minute to study the principles of flight and technical information he would later put into practice.

To find information on the history of flight, search our collection using the terms aviation, aviators, aeronautics, air pilots and flight.

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John Oxley Library staff member Dianne Byrne visited Pialba last Saturday to meet a very special donor. He is Mr John Bingham 95, author and artist who for many years has been a popular resident of the Fraser Coast.

“Jack” Bingham served with the RAAF during World War Two and was captured by the Japanese in Batavia (Dutch East Indies). He was imprisoned in Changi and sent to work on the Burma Railway. The story of his time as a POW and his courageous escape is recounted in his book My Life (2008).

Now in retirement after a long career as an engineer John Bingham devotes his time to producing vivid and expressive landscape paintings. Two of these have been generously donated to the John Oxley Library by their creator and the Library is honoured to accept them. They are full of the great charm, good spirits and love of life of the extraordinary man who made them.

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The Professional Historians Association (Queensland) conference was held at the Marque Hotel in Brisbane on 3-4 September.  Several staff members from the John Oxley Library attended this event, which was held to mark the sesquicentenary of Queensland.

 Dr Leanne Day

Both days provided a wonderful forum for a range of papers on the history of Queensland.  Dr Leanne Day, from the John Oxley Library, presented an excellent paper on the Johnsonian Club, a gentlemen’s literary club founded in 1878 in colonial Brisbane.   The keynote address was given by the Queensland Governor, Ms Penelope Wensley, and was a highlight of the conference, discussing the importance of teaching Queensland  history in our schools and universities and preserving our heritage.

Other papers included A”fantastic adventure’: reading Christison of Lammermoor by Mark Cryle; Conspiracy of silence: the colouring of Australian history and the killing times on the nineteenth-century Queensland frontier by Timothy Bottoms; Rivers and resorts: how rivers and sheltered waters influenced the location of the Sunshine Coast’s resort towns by Peter Osborne; and Remembering the cane: conserving the sugar legacy of far north Queensland by Joanna Wills.

The conference was a huge success and clearly shows that interest and scholarship in Queensland history is booming.

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The Internet provides the world with a wonderous though inherently transient publishing environment with websites here today but often gone into the ether tomorrow.

PANDORA, Australia’s Web Archive is a growing collection of copies of Australian online publications, established initially by the National Library of Australia in 1996, and now built in collaboration with other cultural collecting organisations and nine other Australian libraries including the State Library of Queensland.

In a recent posting on the Aus-Archivists listserv Annabel Lloyd, coordinator of the Brisbane City Council Archive, shared the following story:

Just thought I would share a good news story on the value of PANDORA - the National Library’s web archive.
For close to 10 years we managed a small but popular local history website BRISbites which contain a short introductory history to each of the over 300 suburbs of Brisbane mainly aimed at school students but enjoyed by the wider community. It was hosted by a series of external providers - over the years the small providers were taken over by larger companies but the access to the site remained. Earlier this year the latest provider suddenly went bankrupt - our site disappeared overnight and we became creditors and were referred to the receivers, who were not helpful - In trying to recover the data we knew we still had much of the original text but what we faced losing was the numerous updates and corrections that had been made to site over the years. Fortunately, we were archived by Pandora who, in less than 24 hours were able to provide us with a complete version of the site less than 10 months old!
We are now working with our corporate website area to make the information contained on the site accessible through Council’s corporate website - the look and feel of the original site will still be preserved by PANDORA.

The BRISbites website was captured and preserved by the State Library of Queensland’s Gina Tom who works together in the John Oxley Library with colleague Maxine Fisher on the PANDORA Archive .

This was one of several hundred online Queensland publications added to PANDORA by The State Library over the course of the last year.

PANDORA contributor Gina Tom

For more information on the PANDORA Archive visit the National Library of Australia’s website at http://pandora.nla.gov.au/

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This week the State Library was pleased to welcome lawyer and curatorial art consultant Mr Tom Mosby. Tom’s face was of course instantly recognisable to many of us after his popular appearances on Channel 10’s MasterChef Australia

Tom will be involved in a number of projects and exhibitions at the State Library including those relating to the Margaret Lawrie Collection of Torres Strait Islander materials housed in the John Oxley Library on level 4.

Tom is a Torres Strait Islander descendent of Iama/Tudu, Masig, Meriem, Dauar and Erub Islanders. He holds a Bachelor of Applied Science in Art Conservation from the University of Canberra and a Bachelor of Laws from the University of Melbourne.

He is published in both national and international art journals and art catalogues with a focus on Art of the Torres Strait islands, Conservation, and Moral and Legal Rights.

In 1998 he was the curator of the landmark exhibition Ilan Pasin - Art of the Torres Strait Islands at the Cairns Regional Art Gallery.

Tom also advises the Queensland Art Gallery on Torres Strait Islander cultural protocols and sits on the Advisory Board of the Indigenous Arts Marketing and Export Agency.

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Did you know that the first published novel set in Brisbane was the futuristic tale, The Curse and Its Cure by Dr Thomas Pennington Lucas?

This two volume set was published in Brisbane in 1894. In the first volume, The Ruins of Brisbane in the Year 2000, the story begins with the narrator, an Australian, sailing up the Brisbane River in his motorised yacht, sometime after the year 2000. The Brisbane he sees is overgrown with rampant vines and foliage and is the home to many species of birds and wild animals – including tigers! On the way, he links up with an American couple, Mr and Mrs West, and shares with them his knowledge of Brisbane history and the circumstances that led to its ruin. The reader learns of local catastrophes that occurred prior to the Year 2000, including:

• a civil war between Queensland and the southern colonies. The place of battle was Fort Lytton. The southern colonies – ably led by the experienced General Churchill – crushed Queensland. Afterwards a Colonial Convention was held, resulting in the formation of the United States of Australia;
• the massacre of all but a few of Australia’s Aboriginal people.

 The ‘curse’ in the title of the book refers to selfishness and greed, and Brisbane’s downfall is attributed to this curse. Politicians, pastoralists and the citizens of Brisbane were all guilty of succumbing to greedy, self-centred lifestyles.

The cure to this curse is love, and in the second volume, Brisbane Rebuilt in the Year 2200, the reader learns how the city is rebuilt and transformed into a Christian utopia of peace, prosperity and good health.

Good health was an ongoing concern of this author, because as well as writing prose and poetry, Dr Lucas was also a medical practitioner and scientist. He published a range of medical articles and books, many of them held in the John Oxley Library’s collection.

Dr Lucas was particularly interested in the tropical fruit, the pawpaw or papaya. He owned a sixteen hectare farm at Acacia Ridge where he grew them and conducted experiments into their remedial properties. During the course of his experimentation, Dr Lucas developed a special ointment, which he called Lucas’ Papaw Ointment. It is still produced today by the family business at Acacia Ridge.

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Director of Client Services and Collections Vicki McDonald and Heritage Collections’ librarian Simon Farley show Mr Li Daolin, Ms Zhu Shufen and Mr Zhao Liang the first volume of John Gould’s Birds of Australia.

Heritage Collections’ librarian Irene Sourgnes opens the concertina-folded pages of artists’ book Plastic Surgery by Guan Wei.

Shanghai Library is the largest library in China and one of the ten largest libraries in the world. In October 2006, the State Library of Queensland signed the ’Windows of Shanghai’ Memorandum of Exchange and Co-operation with Shanghai Library.

This memorandum has seen co-operation and exchange activities in the fields of library materials and expertise, sharing of service resources and staff visits.

On Friday 5 December a delegation from Shanghai Library visited Brisbane and were taken on a tour of the State Library’s South Bank building after meeting with the State Librarian and members of SLQ’s Executive Group.

The visitors included Mr Li Daolin, Deputy Chairman of Shanghai Library Council, Mr Zhao Liang, Deputy Director of Shanghai Library’s Computer Systems and Network Centre and Ms Zhu Shufen, Director of Shanghai Library’s Finance Division.

During their tour the  delegates viewed a display of treasures from the Heritage Collections in the Fox Family White Gloves Room. A number of these collection items, including photographs, books and manuscripts from the John Oxley Library, as well as Artist’s Books from the Australian Library of Art, highlight the rich array of Chinese connections in Queensland’s history.

More exchanges of staff, information and books will be undertaken over the next two years, especially as 2009 marks the 20th anniversary of the Queensland Shanghai Sister-State relationship, and the Shanghai Expo will take place in 2010.

For more information on the ‘Windows of Shanghai’ Memorandum of Co-operation and Exchange go to: http://www.slq.qld.gov.au/about/ppp/partners/window_of_shanghai

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Erik Olaf Eriksen may be the State Library’s most enduring client.  For some twenty-five years he has carried out independent research at the library.  In fact, his personal use of the collections actually goes back a further twenty years to 1962 when he visited the former William Street building as a high school student.  According to Erik “The library has been not only a place of learning - it has also shaped my character”.

Erik Eriksen researching at the State Library.

Erik began his studies with work on Queensland colonial biography.  For over a decade he has carried out research on the life and works of the Reverend J.E. Tenison-Woods, the naturalist and geologist, who contributed so much to the science of colonial Queensland.

J.E. Tenison-Woods.  Sydney Mail, 19/10/1889, p.867.

Erik states that “It was Tenison-Woods who predicted, on the basis of characteristic fossils, that Queensland would become the great emporium of coal that it now is.  His outstanding skill in science is attested to by his reflection on the wider effects that burning coal might have”.

Another strong area of study for Erik was an examination of the forensic sciences, drawing on history, and exploring the definition and scope of the various forensic disciplines.  This research is recorded in his publication The Journal of Forensic Medicine, Theoretical and Applied, and in related journals and memoirs, all of which are held in the John Oxley Library.

Erik’s other areas of interest include: the Gatton murders, Benvenuti musicians, Aids, the Gatton Mounted Infantry, Henry Plantagenet Somerset, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and his relationship to the forensic sciences. His work on Conan Doyle includes a bibliography of his lecture tour in Queensland as well as an examination of the historical setting of Sir Arthur’s detective stories.

To his research Erik has brought university qualifications relating to the sciences, engineering, and mathematics, but the actual methods of historiography he has learned in the course of his research at the library.   Erik states ”I have seen the great changes in the availability of materials in the library, from the old card catalogues to the latest digitization of newspapers.  The new library systems are making citizens the direct proprietors of the history of their society. This brings a new dawn in opportunities for learning and its beneficial application to society is inspiring”.

Though Erik has travelled to many exotic places in the world, both tropical and polar, he has always returned to the State Library of Queensland.  According to Erik “State Library has been a goldmine to me - I couldn’t have produced my 36 works without it!”

Erik’s publications are all available in the John Oxley Library.  A full listing appears on the State Library’s catalogue.

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