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Ida
Leeson
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For my mother Rose Laurie Martin (1910–2001)
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Ida
Leeson A life S Y LV I A M A R T I N
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First published in 2006 Copyright © Sylvia Martin 2006 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act. This project has been assisted by the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.
Allen & Unwin 83 Alexander Street Crows Nest NSW 2065 Australia Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100 Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218 Email:
[email protected] Web: www.allenandunwin.com National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry: Martin, Sylvia. Ida Leeson : a life ; not a blue-stocking lady. ISBN 978 1 74114 850 3. ISBN 1 74114 850 2. 1. Leeson, I. (Ida). 2. Mitchell Library (N.S.W.) History. 3. Librarians - New South Wales - Sydney Biography. I. Title. 027.6092 Unless otherwise stated, family photographs of Ida Leeson and Florence Birch appear courtesy of Nancy Collins, June Leeson and Patricia Ryan. The photograph of J.J. Quinn, C.J. Brennan and others appears courtesy of the Parliamentary Library, Sydney. Other photographs are reproduced with permission of the Mitchell, Alexander Turnbull and Willoughby Libraries, Helen Fenbury and Nancy Phelan. Index by Russell Brooks Set in 11.5/14.5 pt Goudy by Bookhouse, Sydney Printed and bound in Australia by Griffin Press 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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Contents
Contents
Acknowledgments Introduction 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14
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Not a blue-stocking lady A born librarian The Mitchell bequest Librarians’ travels ‘Men prefer to deal with men’ Ida and Florence Castlecrag and the Griffins Secret manoeuvres Better friend than foe From depression to war ‘A highly peculiar mob of soldiers’ A researcher to the end The spinster’s bloomers Acknowledging Ida
Endnotes Bibliography Index
1 9 22 35 51 67 81 95 111 128 147 167 184 197 202 228 237
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Acknowledgments
Acknowledgments
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his book would have been impossible to write without the generous assistance of many people. My thanks to Bill Tully for initially suggesting to me that I should write about Ida Leeson and to Baiba Berzins for her timely commissioning of a series of taped interviews in 1985 with people who had known the former Mitchell Librarian. Without these interviews, I don’t think I would have had the courage to start. I am grateful to the Library Council of the State Library of New South Wales for awarding me the C.H. Currey Memorial Fellowship 2002/3 to undertake research for the book. My sincere thanks to Elizabeth Ellis, Mitchell Librarian, and to Paul Brunton, Senior Curator, for their generous support of this project and willingness to answer my queries. To Hilary McPhee, who believed in it, Richard Walsh, a consulting publisher to Allen & Unwin, who was prepared to take it on, Annette Barlow, publisher at Allen & Unwin and my editors, Alexandra Nahlous and Susin Chow, my thanks. The librarians from Mitchell Library have supported my research tirelessly. Especial thanks to Arthur Easton, who has retrieved obscure files from the depths of the stacks for me and searched every nook and cranny to ensure that Ida Leeson’s personnel file is really lost. It is. Thanks too to Margot Riley, vii
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Alan Davies, David J. Jones, Jennifer Broomhead, Mark Hildebrand and the staff of the Mitchell Library Reading Room. Caroline V. Jones, my fellow inhabitant of the Scholars’ Room, lightened my day with her pleasant conversation and knowledge of Australian publishing history. My research at times took me beyond the Mitchell to other libraries and I thank Bruce Carter of Leichhardt Library and the librarians of the National Library of Australia, Willoughby Library and the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. To Ewan Maidment of the Pacific Manuscripts Bureau, Australian National University, and Rachele Oriente, Librarian of the Secretariat of the Pacific Community Library, Noumea, my thanks also. Many relatives, friends and former associates of Ida Leeson and Florence Birch have offered their memories and memorabilia freely and generously. My grateful thanks to Sidney and Jenny Birch, Nancy Collins (nee Leeson), Telford Conlon, Paquita Crouch, Helen Fenbury (nee Sheils), Betty Goodyear, Noel Gray, June Greenhalgh, Kristin Kerr, June Leeson, John Legge, Suzanne Mourot, Dulcie Penfold, Nancy Phelan, Wilma Radford, Patricia Ryan (nee Leeson) and Peter Ryan. Special thanks to Helen Fenbury with whom I have conducted a fruitful email exchange during the course of the research and writing. Others who have helped with information about Ida and Florence and the contexts of their lives include Baiba Berzins, Ros Bowden, Jim Cleary, Greg Dening, Bess Flores, Cissy Godfrey, Shirley Hokin, Adrienne Kabos, Evelyn Latter, Marie Nicholls, Ronald Rivett, Jill Roe, Wanda Spathopoulos, Marie Tulip, Peter Tyler and James Weirick. Many thanks to Matthew Stephens, Sara Hardy, Baiba Berzins, Peter Ryan and John Legge for reading and making helpful comments on sections of the manuscript. Finally, thanks to my patient friends and family for living with Ida and Florence for the last three years. My special thanks to my partner, Lizzie Mulder, who supports me in all I do.
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Introduction
Introduction
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t is a humid evening in March 1935 on the island of Tahiti. In the Blue Lagoon Café in Papeete, to be precise, a remarkable encounter is about to take place. At a table in the corner, two men have just finished eating. They seem unaware of their surroundings, but they themselves are anything but inconspicuous, being American and large and recognisable to probably every diner in the café. One of the men is the Hollywood film director Frank Lloyd, who is here filming location shots for Mutiny on the Bounty, starring Charles Laughton as Captain Bligh and Clark Gable as Fletcher Christian. The filming on Catalina Island off the Californian coast and in the MGM studios has been completed, but the director wants this film to be a realistic representation of the mutiny and so has brought, at great expense, the reconstructed Bounty and Pandora across the ocean to Tahiti to film the exotic background scenes. A huge crew of technicians, camera outfits and equipment has accompanied him and he has hired 2500 extras to add authentic flavour, or at least colour and movement, to the island scenery. The film’s stars, however, have been left behind and the director is happy to be free of them: Laughton suffers from seasickness and Gable has been, well, a star, unwilling to shave off his moustache and agonising that he looks effeminate, and bandy, in knee breeches. James Norman ix
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Hall, one of the writers of the fictional trilogy on which the film is based, is Frank Lloyd’s dining companion tonight. As the two Americans lean back in their chairs and light cigarettes, the director is heard to reveal that, even with all his efforts to achieve realism, he feels he needs greater authentication. He complains to James Norman Hall that he has searched the world over for Bligh’s logs without success. To both men’s surprise, a little whitehaired lady at the next table, who has overheard their conversation, leans over and says ‘I know where they are’. Of course she knew where Captain Bligh’s logs were, and of course she had overheard their conversation; she would have been straining to catch it, perhaps even seating herself at the next table so that she could hear better. For the ‘lady’ in this story described in the MGM press clippings was Ida Leeson, Mitchell Librarian at the Public Library of New South Wales, Australia, who was in charge of the most significant collection of Australiana in the country and an expert on the documents of Australian and South Pacific history.1 By coincidence, Ida was on the island for a month, inspecting documents concerning the early European occupation of Tahiti that had been discovered in the archives of the British Consulate.2 But I am sure she was also following the Bounty filming closely. Sadly, the story recounted in the MGM press clippings is all that is now known about Ida Leeson’s involvement in Frank Lloyd’s film. It is unlikely that the director pursued his quest for the logs any further, particularly at this late stage in filming. Perhaps the certain knowledge provided by the Mitchell Librarian that the actual logs did still exist, safely stored in a library in Australia, was enough ‘authentication’ for Hollywood. It is possible, however, that Ida, whose knowledge of the content of the Library’s collection was legendary, gave advice to the director on particular queries he might have had. After returning to Australia on the April sailing of the Makura, Ida Leeson did pen an article inspired by her experiences, called ‘Bligh of the Bounty’. In it she writes: x
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Introduction The story of the Mutiny is one of the epics of the sea. It has a universal appeal—but nowhere should that appeal be stronger than here in Australia, and especially in Sydney. For Bligh is to us not only Bligh of the Bounty, but Bligh, the Governor of New South Wales, whose stormy life in Pacific seas was the forerunner of an equally stormy one on this Pacific coast.3
Conceding that ‘as the film shows him, there is little to admire’, Ida draws from documents in the Mitchell to paint a pen-picture of Bligh and the various sides to his personality. ‘Nowhere in the world,’ she concludes, ‘is there anything approaching the wealth of original material for the study of Bligh that is to be found here. This is another reason why the film should be of particular interest in Australia.’ Ida Leeson apparently saw nothing incongruous in the Librarian of the esteemed Mitchell Library publicising a Hollywood film, especially as she was, at the same time, drawing attention to the wonders that were contained in the institution that she was helping to build. The tradition continues; in recent times, research for Peter Weir’s film Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World was undertaken in the Mitchell Library. Just over two years before her research trip to Tahiti, Ida Leeson had won an epic struggle to become Mitchell Librarian. Her capacity for the position was never in contention; it was acknowledged that she was a brilliant librarian who had worked her way steadily up through the library’s ranks since starting in the Public Library as a young graduate in 1906. No, the problem that caused sleepless nights during the second half of 1932 for the Principal Librarian, his Board of Trustees and the Minister for Education was her gender. As the months after the retirement of Hugh Wright, the first Mitchell Librarian, dragged on without a replacement being announced, the newspapers started speculating on the outcome. ‘Headache for Minister’, ‘Mitchell Librarian may be Woman’, ‘Woman Likely to be Appointed’, screamed the headlines in November and early December. Finally, on 13 December 1932, the appointment of Miss Ida Leeson to the xi
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position of Mitchell Librarian was confirmed, though not without some compromises. Ida Leeson cut a most distinctive figure inside and outside the library world. Almost invariably, the first word used to describe her appearance is ‘mannish’ and this is confirmed by photographs. A small, slight woman with a prominent and determined jaw, short-cropped hair and steel-rimmed glasses, she walked quickly and spoke in a deep voice. She often had a cigarette between her fingers or in her mouth, which did not seem to affect her ability to conduct a conversation. She always dressed in variations of the same style: severely tailored suit with skirt, in shades of navy, brown or khaki; serge or tweed in winter, perhaps linen in summer. Under it she wore a light-coloured blouse, tied in a soft bow at the neck or with a knotted tie. Her hat also changed with the season—a plain man’s hat, felt in winter and straw in summer. She wore lisle stockings and sensible lace-up shoes. Her style of dress did not change over the years, nor did she alter it for special occasions such as family weddings or important library functions. Her manner was brusque and she could appear intimidating, but her smile, when she did smile, transformed her face. Today, librarians have been restyled as information scientists and knowledge managers, benefiting from all the dazzling wizardry technology can offer. Yet stereotypes are persistent and the image of the librarian as humourless spinster, hair dragged back into a bun, patrolling the bookshelves telling readers to be quiet, lives on in the cultural imagination. Ida Leeson’s beauty lay in her elegant handwriting, still preserved on old catalogue cards, and she kept her knowledge not on a website but in her mind, which has been described as being ‘like a card index’ itself.4 Her hair was cut short rather than scraped back, but in many ways she might have, at first glance, fitted the stereotype of ‘The Librarian’. But like all stereotypes, the woman herself far exceeds it. When people hear of my subject they often ask whether I am a librarian, as if that would explain my choice. It would, after all, xii
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Introduction fit into the tradition of recovering past luminaries in one’s own profession. I am not, but I have spent many hours in the Mitchell Library reading room researching the lives of unconventional women. Sometimes it feels like a second home. This vast and airy space, book-lined from floor almost to distant glass ceiling, used to be the Public Library’s reading room. When the new State Library of New South Wales was built adjoining it in the late 1980s, it was given over to the Mitchell section of the library. Earlier, as a student, I did work at the heavy oak tables in the long room at the end of the marble corridor that was the former Mitchell reading room. This was Ida Leeson territory in the 1930s and into the 1940s when, I am told, she would often dart out of the Mitchell Librarian’s office adjacent to the reading room to check a reference or to discuss a query from a reader who might have been Professor Julius Stone or Manning Clark, or a writer such as Mary Gilmore or Frank Dalby Davison.5 I had come across Ida Leeson’s name as I sat in the present Mitchell reading room poring over the letters of writer Miles Franklin to her poet friend Mary Fullerton in London. Miles recorded how she would pass on her friend’s poems for ‘Miss Leeson’ to give her opinion on and to make suggestions about who might appraise them for Australian publication. Miles also recorded the writers she would see and chat to in the Mitchell: Eleanor Dark, Jean Devanny and Marjorie Barnard, to name a few. They not only went there to mine the manuscripts as background research for their novels and non-fiction, but also to read the latest in Australian literature, since copies were placed in the library. As I became absorbed in Miles Franklin’s vivid descriptions of her encounters, I would sometimes find myself transported into her world and her experience of ‘the Mitchell’; at the very least, she made me aware that in my forays into her papers, I was taking part in a rich tradition. In a letter to a colleague, Miles Franklin once described ‘little Ida Leeson’ as ‘one of the treasures of the universe—wearing herself out in the service of others—always entering into things and never thinking of herself’.6 This librarian is so woven into xiii
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the fabric of the Mitchell Library she is to be found everywhere, if not by name, by influence. Teasing out the woman from the library fabric is one of the challenges of this book. Her lifetime from 1885 to 1964 spanned extraordinary events. In the big picture, she lived through two major depressions and two world wars. As far as her links to her home city are concerned, she was one of the early women graduates from the University of Sydney; she witnessed the building of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, and she played a major role in the development of another Sydney icon, the Mitchell Library. She contributed, not without personal hardship and cost, to radical changes in the position of working women in Australian society. On a personal level, she challenged norms of femininity in her own idiosyncratic way. One of the skills in Ida Leeson’s armoury was a talent for cataloguing, but the woman herself resists any easy classification. Exploring her life could be said to be an exercise in feminist history, to recover a woman whose achievements have been to a large extent forgotten and whose career path was influenced by her gender. Cultural positioning is also gendered. Librarians are custodians, ‘keepers of the flame’; like dutiful wives, they work behind the scenes enabling things to happen but rarely take centre stage themselves. Paradoxically, even though their position is in the public realm, its workings are those usually associated with the private sphere. In terms of gender positioning, they occupy what has been inscribed culturally as female space, regardless of the actual gender of particular librarians. And what a conundrum is Ida Leeson herself: a woman who looked like a man (was even mistaken for one on occasions) rising to a position in the Australian library world that had previously been held only by men, in a profession that is culturally inscribed as feminine.
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uring my research on Ida Leeson, I would often cross the road from the Mitchell Library to take my coffee break at the café in the Renzo Piano building on the diagonally opposite corner of Macquarie Street, where Bent Street starts and where the old Public Library used to stand. Macquarie Street is wide and straight, with a serious air that suits the city’s historic buildings lining it between Hyde Park and the harbour, today ending triumphantly at the gleaming sails of the Sydney Opera House. In contrast, the sharply angled Bent Street is one of a jumble of narrow streets toppling anyhow down to Circular Quay. Piano’s inspired architecture and modern technology has ensured that his asymmetrical sliver of sculptured glass built at the end of the twentieth century complements the awkward, triangular corner in a way that the stone building occupying the site a century earlier utterly failed to do. The Public Library of New South Wales started life as the Australian Subscription Library in 1845. In the decades after it was taken over by the government in 1869 as the Free Public Library, it was extended down Bent Street and had its Macquarie Street wing rebuilt after the walls were found to be unsafe. But 1
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these were makeshift compromises for the new building that was desperately needed. The busy Lending Branch, opened in 1877, was transferred in 1881 to the building known as the ‘Iron Church’, which stood next to Parliament House on the land now occupied by the present State Library. Even so, at the turn of the century the Bent Street building that housed the Reference Library was completely inadequate for its purposes: overcrowded, dingy, its books overflowing from inadequate shelves, open twelve hours a day six days a week, and four on Sunday.1 The library had only been employing women for seven years when Ida Leeson answered an advertisement for a female library attendant with a university degree in August 1906. She was twenty-one and had recently graduated from the University of Sydney—Bachelor of Arts, with History Honours Class II. Female graduates were still rare creatures at that time. For women who had studied Arts, teaching was the most obvious choice of profession, and Ida was no exception. When she applied for the position at the library, she had already had two brief stints teaching in private schools earlier that year. Her appointment to the newly opened branch of Sydney Church of England Grammar School for Girls in Bowral in the Southern Highlands required her to leave home for the first time. After only a short period, however, she transferred to Iolanthus College at Potts Point and returned to the family home in Sydney. Teaching does not seem to have suited her and in late August she joined the library as a junior attendant, at £75 a year. Ida Leeson started as an attendant in the reading room, which may seem rather a menial position for a 21-year-old graduate. Perhaps she sometimes wondered if she had made the right decision in giving up teaching in private girls’ schools. But even if she did, Ida probably knew the stoicism needed to work in the library conditions was worth it, for she entered the library world at an opportune time for single, educated young women. Henry Charles Lennox (H.C.L.) Anderson, who held the position of Principal Librarian from 1893 to 1906, was a liberal thinker who pioneered the employment of women in the Public Library, 2
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Not a blue-stocking lady although he was in a sense forced into it by an enterprising young woman. The first woman to join the staff in November 1899 was employed, as H.C.L. Anderson wrote two years later, ‘by an accident, which is worth recording, to show how the fair sex will find a way’.2 Among forty-two applications to fill an advertised position for a library attendant was one from an N.B. Kibble. Much to the Principal Librarian’s surprise, the person of that name who arrived to sit the special library examination turned out to be a Miss Nita Bernice Kibble. Nita Kibble topped the exam and ‘after a great deal of doubt and hesitancy’ on the part of the Librarian, she was appointed at £26 a year. Twenty-yearold Nita Kibble came to the library after a stint working in Wagga Wagga as a resident governess and remained in the library all her working life, eventually establishing its research department and becoming a rival of Ida Leeson’s in the promotion stakes.3 H.C.L. Anderson was also a pragmatist. As well as believing that ‘sober, steadfast and demure’ young women made good library assistants, he admitted that women were more likely to accept the mediocre salaries paid to library assistants than men. Mediocre for men, these salaries were quite attractive to women since, at that time, before the family wage principle was enshrined in arbitration in 1921 and women’s salaries were lowered relative to men’s, they received equal pay. There was a downside though— married women were ineligible for employment if their spouses worked for the public service, but that was unlikely to have troubled Ida Leeson.4 Once women like Ida had competed in the entrance examination for a place in the library as a reading room attendant, they were eligible, through the conditions of the Public Service Act of 1895, to be promoted on merit, moving into the clerical division and eventually into the professional. It would have been unbearably cold in August in the unheated and poorly ventilated building where it was standing-room only in the reading room on wet days when the regulars from the Domain joined the throng passing through the turnstile that counted more than 500 people a day. And even there it wasn’t necessarily dry since the roof leaked during storms. Imagine the 3
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malodorous atmosphere: the fumes from the gas lighting, the stench rising from the men’s lavatory in the lower depths that was accessed through a swinging door behind a screen in the reading room, the odour of unwashed bodies in cramped conditions. The smells were not all inside, either; you could tell the time by the stink that wafted in from the fish cart that passed by punctually at 11 a.m. every morning. In spring, the atmosphere was sweetened a little by the aroma from bunches of tuberoses on the front desk, brought in by thoughtful readers.5 Ida would have performed the back-breaking duties expected of the reading room attendants and library assistants in those years and, as the years went on, young women made up the large majority of reading room staff. These duties consisted primarily of collecting books and returning them to the shelves, climbing the iron stairs balancing piles of heavy tomes up to the narrow walkways that ran along the two levels of book-lined galleries, or descending into the dimly lit stacks to retrieve less frequently used items. Accidents such as a sprained ankle from a tumble off a ladder or a splinter of wood under a fingernail from the wooden shelves were expected to be treated at home. A cup of tea or an aspro was the only relief during period pain, which had to be endured. There was no respite from the fetching and carrying.6 At least when Ida worked in the reading room, the long skirts worn by women then would have spared her the indignities suffered by her counterparts in the 1920s and 1930s, who wore blue uniforms finishing just below the knee. One library assistant described how readers sitting below the steep iron staircase ‘could see everything everybody had on’ as the young women carried volumes stacked from thigh to chin up the stairs.7 Another related how ‘one we used to refer to as The Frenchman spent his time staring at the girls and sitting back in his chair if one of them had to walk up along the gallery’ which, like the stairs, had an open-grille floor.8 All attendants had to take their turn on night shift, usually three times a week. At ten o’clock they closed the library, clearing away the books and locking doors. Two would have to climb the 4
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Not a blue-stocking lady narrow stairway to the roof and let down the heavy glass skylights held open by iron chains, an unpleasant task made especially so on cold and rainy nights. Each young woman would then make her way home, walking through the dark Sydney streets to the tram, train or ferry. This process went on in a similar way for many years and one librarian, who did not start in the library until the 1930s, summed it up for me with the statement, ‘Janitors, we were’.9 In early 1907, Ida started on her upward journey through the library ranks. For several hours a day she learnt cataloguing from Christopher Brennan, who worked in the library for fourteen years from 1895, also working as a temporary lecturer at the University of Sydney for much of that time and eventually leaving for academia. Fifteen years older than Ida and a prolific poet, Christopher Brennan had started work at the Public Library when his father’s hotel business crashed, out of necessity rather than to pursue a career in libraries, where a position as a clerk was then considered ‘appropriate for an educated man of limited worldly ambition’.10 The association with Ida Leeson seems to have been a happy one, the poet naming the young woman among the lasting friendships he made at the library.11 His bohemian lifestyle among his artist and writer friends, his wellknown disregard for authority (as a student he had rolled stones down the floor when he disliked a lecturer) as well as his intellect may well have impressed her, but she was obviously not intimidated by him.12 He seems to have been an inspiring teacher, even if unofficial history has it that his cataloguing, though brilliant, was a bit uneven as the cards sometimes blew out of the window of the little triangular room where he sat at the end of the cataloguing room onto Bent Street, and nothing was done to retrieve them. It was also said that ‘he kept a cask on a shelf in that room and you can imagine what was in it’.13 By 1903, his ‘alcoholic waywardness’ had been noted by other library clerks, but this was apparently quite a common weakness among the ranks of male librarians then. In fact, Frank Murcott Bladen, 5
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who became Principal Librarian after H.C.L. Anderson retired in 1906, was suspended, and retired ‘medically unfit’ for that reason early in 1912.14 Manning Clark was later to say that Ida had ‘a long list of Australian literary drunks, whom she never could or would forgive’. Christopher Brennan was one of the exceptions, however, ‘forgiven because he always put a flower on her table after one of his many bibulous lunches’.15 As well as cataloguing, Ida learnt the rules of proofreading, a skill she was to exercise in later years for a number of Sydney’s writers who brought her their manuscripts to cast her expert eye over. Under Christopher Brennan’s tutelage too, she started ‘philology work’ on a project that was to result in a ten-volume handwritten work entitled ‘Vocabulary of New South Wales Aboriginal Dialects’.16 This was an era when evolutionary thinking meant that concern for recording Aboriginal history as an anthropological exercise for white posterity took precedence over addressing relations with living indigenous people; these records were of a people who were considered to be a dying race. The iniquitous Immigration Restriction Act of 1901, better known as the ‘White Australia Policy’, was testimony to how Australia felt about race issues generally. Ida’s work was compiled from ‘all lists in the Science of Man [the journal of the Royal Anthropological Society], plus Threlkeld’s vocabulary of the Awabakal Tribe, about the year 1908’. In a handwritten note in the front of the first volume and dated 17 May 1933 (many years later than the compilation itself), the concern of the mature librarian for historical accuracy is evident. Ida writes that the Science of Man lists are unreliable ‘as the words were gathered, in many cases, by police officers from black trackers, whose local habitat at the time was probably taken as the home of the words so gathered’.17 By the time she wrote that prefacing note to the work she had done when she was a new recruit, Ida Leeson had achieved the seemingly impossible in becoming Mitchell Librarian, in 6
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Not a blue-stocking lady 1932. That story will be told in detail later. For now, I just want to comment that she had been awarded the position when the 1930s Great Depression was reaching its most desperate period, as married women were being forced to leave the teaching profession as a result of the Married Women (Lecturers and Teachers) Act of 1932, and the situation for women in all professions was dire. When we learn how the earlier economic depression of the 1890s had affected Ida’s family and her own upbringing, this becomes an even more remarkable feat. John Metcalfe, a librarian who was to play an important part in the Mitchell controversy, later described the early women librarians as ‘blue-stocking ladies . . . sent to University because it looked as if they weren’t going to get married’.18 It appears that in his estimation they were not only ‘blue-stocking’ (that patronising term for intellectual women) but blue-blooded. He names Phyllis Mander Jones, who became Mitchell Librarian after Ida Leeson’s resignation in 1946, as the last of the ‘residue’ of these lady librarians. His definition of lady librarians could not have been further from the truth, however, in Ida Leeson’s case. Far from being sent to university because she was a failure in the marriage stakes, Ida Leeson only obtained her degree through the utmost tenacity and single-mindedness. No doubt these characteristics were to prove useful to her in later years when faced with the condescending attitudes towards women held by the men in her profession, even those like John Metcalfe who claimed to be perfectly at ease with his female colleagues. They probably also came in handy in the library culture where many of the women did come from families of the class who could easily afford to send their clever daughters to university, even if the daughters’ motivation for study was not disappointment in romance. These included Margaret Windeyer, who trained at the New York State Library School and was the daughter of Chief Justice of the New South Wales Supreme Court, Sir William Windeyer, and Maude Yeomans Fitzhardinge, who came from a distinguished legal family and held a Masters degree in Classics. 7
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Ida Leeson, on the other hand, came from the wrong side of the tracks—Leichhardt, not Woollahra or Pymble—and her father was ‘in trade’. It is apparent that her class as well as her gender were obstacles to overcome in her ambition to follow a professional career.
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A born librarian
A born librarian
t
homas Leeson, Ida’s father, arrived in Sydney from Toronto, Canada (then known as British North America) in the 1870s. His landlady at the boarding house he moved into was a widow, Mrs Mary Ann Walker, and in February 1878 he married her at St Paul’s Church of England in Redfern. Mrs Walker, born Mary Ann Emberson and still only twenty-two at the time of her second marriage, had spent her whole life in Sydney, although she and her new husband were both of Irish extraction. A significant difference between them was that Mary Ann’s background was Roman Catholic while Thomas, who was twentysix, came from a Protestant family. The children of this ‘mixed marriage’ were brought up Protestant, but Ida’s mother must have retained her faith as she was eventually buried with Catholic rites in the Roman Catholic section of Waverley cemetery. It was probably to Ida’s advantage that the children of Mary Ann’s second marriage were brought up in her husband’s religion, saving her in later years from the general prejudice in the community against those of Irish Catholic origin. In the same interview in which he made the ‘blue-stocking ladies’ remark, John Metcalfe defended the Public Library against such prejudice 9
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in the choice of its early female staff, commenting that, unlike the Protestant graduates who became library assistants, ‘most Catholic girls did not even go to High School’. According to some of those who worked with her, Ida Leeson herself displayed a prejudice against Catholics, which seems strange since she seems to have been the closest of her siblings to her mother and apparently her favourite. The first two daughters born to the Leesons lived tragically short lives: Ethel, born in late 1878, survived one year; Violet Annie, who was born in 1880, lived for two years. The three children who grew to adulthood were then born in evenly spaced succession: William Henry in 1882, Ida Emily in 1885 and Victor Sidney in 1888. The 1880s were good years for tradesmen like carpenter Thomas Leeson as the existing Leichhardt housing estates expanded and new subdivisions of the former farmlands were opened up.1 When Ida was born on 11 February 1885 the family lived on the Bellevue Estate, where their neighbours in Edith Street included another carpenter, an engineer, a blacksmith and three bricklayers. This was the height of the building boom. In 1890 the family moved across Leichhardt to Tebbutt Street on the Kegworth Estate. Formed in 1883 with 66-foot frontage blocks, this estate had been only half sold and the residue was subdivided into 25-foot frontages and sold off in 1889. On terms favourable to blue-collar workers, prospective purchasers could pay a £3 deposit and the balance by monthly instalments.2 Perhaps Thomas Leeson had a more substantial deposit saved, but, even so, this may have been a foolhardy move as times were changing and the economic depression of the 1890s was to profoundly affect the Leeson family. The intensive phase of development in Leichhardt slowed down by 1891 and Thomas Leeson was one of many who soon found themselves out of work. The family story describes how the unemployed carpenter travelled to Western Australia in the early 1890s to try his luck at the gold-diggings in Kalgoorlie or Coolgardie. When Thomas was not successful, he returned to his old trade until tragedy 10
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A born librarian struck in 1894 when he fell from the church steeple he was repairing and was killed.3 As is often the case with family stories, this one contains seeds of truth that blossom into conspicuously different plants when the earth around them is disturbed. Thomas Leeson did die from injuries sustained when he fell from a building he was working on in Perth, but in March 1906 rather than 1894, and more than a decade after he had moved to the west. Not surprisingly, the column on his death certificate relating to wife and offspring has a line crossed through it. The shifting of dates that conceals Thomas Leeson’s probable desertion of his family occurred long ago and has acquired a truth of its own that is now firmly believed by later generations. That is, until a biographer comes along and starts digging. With his connections in the trade, Thomas Leeson may have got a good deal as far as the building of the house at 53 Tebbutt Street was concerned, and he would have at least done the carpentry himself. At that time, much of the estate was still not built on, and paddocks surrounded the houses in the neighbourhood that became known as ‘Struggletown’. Ida would have started school at around six years of age, spending a year or so in the Infants Division. She didn’t have far to go as Kegworth Public School was across the road and a short walk from the house. It had only been built three years before and, unlike many schools that started out as makeshift weatherboard rooms and grew classroom by classroom, the initiative for Kegworth was taken by the Department of Public Instruction itself. The population was increasing rapidly and Leichhardt and Petersham schools were already overcrowded. A fine brick building was constructed, designed to accommodate girls’, boys’ and infants’ departments. It was opened in September 1887 and when Ida started there in 1891 or 1892 there were more than 400 enrolments, although the average attendance was a hundred or so less than that.4 The schoolroom in the girls’ department was designed to hold about 120 pupils and two or three teachers would work simultaneously in it. Most of Kegworth’s staff were pupil-teachers, 11
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boys and girls who started their apprenticeship at thirteen and learned on the job. Teachers worked under appalling conditions and when a new headmaster took over Kegworth Public in July 1894, he found it to be in a wretched condition. Replacing a predecessor with a drinking problem, Thomas Herlihy worked strenuously over the next eleven years to improve the conditions and the performance of the children in his charge. He instituted an annual prize-giving at Leichhardt Town Hall and, in a newspaper cutting describing the first ceremony at the end of 1894 attended by more than 900 people, nine-year-old Ida Leeson is one of three from the girls’ school who were awarded prizes for general proficiency. Three years later, she was dux of the school.5 In another newspaper cutting, from the Sunday News of 10 May 1925, headed ‘Kegworth Rises from Struggletown’, ‘Ida Leeson, B.A. of the Public Library’ is the only woman in a list of ‘Kegworth Old Scholars’ which included the Manager of the State Housing Department, a school inspector, a doctor, an accountant and two school teachers. Kegworth did not become a designated Superior Public School until 1899, that is, one offering post-primary schooling, so in Ida Leeson’s days Fourth Class would have been the final year. Even so, many of its pupils were about thirteen years old, having spent two or three years in that class. When Ida became dux in 1897, she was twelve. She may have had to stay more than one year in the highest class in order to be eligible to take the examination for a scholarship to Sydney Girls’ High School. More than a decade earlier, two years after Sydney Girls’ High School opened in 1883, writer Louise Mack had undertaken that stringent entrance exam, which she re-created in her semiautobiographical novel about her school experience, Teens, published in 1897, the year Ida Leeson sat for her examination.6 Louise Mack’s central character Lennie Leighton passed the exam and attended the school, but her scores were not high enough to win the scholarship she was trying for. She describes the four days of exams, sitting in the big schoolroom at the high school for two-hour sessions on each subject. These included not only 12
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A born librarian the basic subjects of Arithmetic, English and History, but also French.7 If Ida Leeson needed a working knowledge of French, which she presumably did, she must have taken special tuition at school or else studied by herself as it was not a subject taught at Kegworth Public. In any event, Ida was more successful than Lennie Leighton (and Louise Mack herself) and the scholarship she was awarded paid the school fees of three guineas a term and supplied her text books. Public schooling at that time was not yet free. When Ida enrolled at Sydney Girls’ High School in January 1898, a month before her thirteenth birthday, she was one of thirty-two new girls, whose ages ranged from twelve to sixteen, with one aged nineteen. Most listed ‘Church of England’ as their religion and their fathers’ occupations covered barristers, teachers, small businessmen and accountants, with a sprinkling of tradesmen whose daughters were probably among the scholarship winners. There were further intakes in March, July and September of 1898, making a total number of eighty-two for the year. Enrolments had slumped during the depression years of the 1890s to less than half the yearly enrolment figure for the 1880s as many parents found the twelve guineas a year in fees beyond them and there were few scholarships. For Ida, the depression that had left her mother supporting her family may have strengthened her resolve that she would be among those few. It was her only chance of a higher education. Having succeeded in gaining a place in the school that was set up to take the more promising students from public schools and prepare them for university, Ida Leeson was on her way to a professional career. Her elder brother William, however, was not. Because of the 1890s recession, the Department of Public Instruction introduced compulsory examinations at the end of Fourth Year for Certificates of Sufficient Education, which enabled those who passed them to leave school if they wished before the official leaving age of fourteen. Many, of course, languished in that class until they reached that age. William left school at around twelve; according to the family this was on the orders of 13
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his mother who was struggling to bring up her children and who was apparently determined that Ida should go to high school and university.8 Given her own circumstances, it was very likely that Mary Ann was anxious for her scholastically minded daughter to have the opportunity of an education that she had not been given, one which would give her the means to become economically independent. A photograph of Mary Ann Leeson in the family archive shows a straight-backed woman in her forties dressed in her Sunday best: long coat, high collar, gloves, dark hair upswept beneath a broad-brimmed, extravagantly decorated hat.9 Her somewhat incongruous background is a typical Australian backyard, probably at 53 Tebbutt Street, where an iron bed base propped against a rickety paling fence forms a trellis for the runner beans. The edge of the wood pile can be seen on the left of the photo. Mrs Leeson’s expression is severe and it is apparent that her daughter inherited her determined jaw. Her reputation among the family is that Mary Ann Leeson was a ‘hard woman to get on with’ and one of her daughters-in-law is said to have joked, ‘I only married Vic to annoy his mother’.10 Ida’s mother supported the family by working at home as a seamstress, sewing late into the night by candlelight. One of her jobs was making small boys’ trousers for women in the adjoining wealthier suburb of Annandale, and it was William’s job to deliver them before school as well as going to the butcher’s. After he left school he became apprenticed as a compositor and spent years of his working life with J. Fielding and Company, cardboard box manufacturers. Ida’s younger brother, Victor, became a machinist when he left school and then worked for the government printing office. After travelling by steam tram (electric after 1900) along Parramatta Road to the city, Ida would have walked up Market Street to Sydney Girls’ High School, which was at that time situated on the site that would later become the David Jones department store, between Elizabeth and Castlereagh streets. 14
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A born librarian Years later, when she was a librarian, she would often lunch or dine with friends in David Jones’s sixth-floor restaurant, looking out over the same view of Hyde Park that she had from her classroom, but from a higher vantage point. The school was housed in an old stone building that had been designed by Francis Greenaway and built by convict labour, its foundation stone laid by Governor Macquarie in 1820. Completed in 1825, it had been a Church of England Grammar School until 1883, when it became the first public high school in New South Wales.11 For the first few years there were also boys at the school although the two sexes were kept strictly apart—girls upstairs entering from Elizabeth Street, boys downstairs with their entrance in Castlereagh Street. Windows were kept shut even on the hottest days to prevent clandestine communication. It must have been a relief for everyone when the boys moved to new premises in Ultimo in 1892 and the girls could spread out over the two floors and air the rooms. Open windows over Castlereagh Street would have helped, too, in enabling the girls to catch glimpses of performers being dropped off at the theatre at no. 81. Harry Rickards had leased the old Garrick Theatre in 1893 and renamed it the Tivoli, where it became the base for his Australia-wide vaudeville circuit. Music hall stars like Marie Lloyd and comedians such as Little Tich might have been seen, or ballet dancers with glittering tutus over their arms, or black and white minstrels carrying their banjo cases. On the whole though, the atmosphere at Sydney Girls’ High was one of seriousness and diligence. The girls were there to make it to university, if possible. Not a great deal is known about Ida Leeson’s personal high school experience. Typical of my experience in researching her life, I found when I visited the school archives that her years there between 1898 and 1902 fell between school magazines, so there is no chance of finding poems or stories by her, or discovering if she was in a sporting team. The energetic and ambitious Louise Mack had started the Girls High School Gazette in 1885. Soon after, The Iris appeared, edited by Ethel Turner (later of Seven Little Australians fame), whose 15
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diaries state that she started her magazine after having a contribution rejected by The Gazette. The two rival papers ran for a few years but were discontinued after their editors left school. The Chronicle, which is still the school’s official paper, did not start life until May 1906. In the end, a search of the archives yielded only Ida Leeson’s enrolment details. We do know, however, that she distinguished herself academically during her high school years. In 1900 she topped the 251 entries in Angus & Robertson’s Annual Writing Competition, for which entries were sought from ‘every State in the Commonwealth and from the sister Colony, New Zealand’.12 I also discovered her name on the School Honour Board for the same year among the few who were awarded prizes in the statewide University Junior Examinations. 13 Given her later specialisation in History, the subject was an unlikely one— Arithmetic. The family possesses a photograph of Ida as a solemn-looking girl of around fourteen, fine dark hair pulled back from her high forehead and falling over her shoulder. Already short-sighted, the cord of her glasses disappears into the pocket of her double-breasted coat buttoned over her flat chest, and one hand rests over the back of an ornate chair. It is a studio portrait but it has been trimmed to fit an oval frame, so the studio name and date have been cut off. Perhaps it was taken to commemorate the Angus & Robertson prize or her achievement in the Junior Examination.14 This young woman was serious about getting to university. The original approach to the University of Sydney through Victoria Park from City (formerly Newtown) Road has been restored in recent times. It has re-created a vista that draws the eye along the pathway lined with gay flowerbeds up the newly built stairs and up again to the impressive spires of the main building at the top of the hill, the neo-Gothic façade of which has scarcely altered over the years. Although the surrounding contemporary buildings such as Fisher Library were not in existence then, the restored entrance makes it easier to understand the 16
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A born librarian breathless eulogy written by a new female student more than a century ago: ‘In 1900, on a March morning I crossed the little bridge as one enters from Newtown Road and saw the main building on the hill. I recall so clearly my awed joy: surely the gates of heaven had opened for me! Nor have they closed since.’15 Substitute 1903 and this might have been 18-year-old Ida Leeson’s reaction to her new life at university. At the end of her school years at Sydney Girls’ High, Ida had repeated her scholarship-winning performance, this time being awarded a bursary to attend the University of Sydney free, with a weekly allowance of seven shillings and sixpence.16 At the beginning of the 1903 academic year, she embarked on a Bachelor of Arts degree. The Arts Faculty was the most popular choice for women and the first two women to be enrolled at the University in 1882 were Arts students. By the time Ida started, there were more than sixty female students in the faculty, although they were still outnumbered many times by men. Other faculties were slower to admit women: Zoe Bertles, who became a senior librarian in the Public Library, was one of the first female Economics graduates in 1916; Architecture enrolled its first female students in 1918; and Veterinary Science not until 1930.17 What was life at the university like for a young woman in 1903? Although their numbers were growing, ‘ladies’ were still a bit of a novelty as far as the male students, and staff, were concerned. Professor Mungo MacCallum was one who referred only to ‘gentlemen’ in his opening remarks to a lecture.18 At this time the university magazine Hermes virtually ignored women’s affairs, or else wrote about them from the young men’s points of view. The year after Ida graduated, a contest in the magazine to define ‘the University girl’ in verse or prose judged this to be the winning entry, despite its complete lack of scansion: Her sartorial equipment is neat. She looks a ‘lidy’ But her hair is straight, rebellious and seldom very tidy Though she studies Maths or Latin, she’s neither slow nor stupid For her interests can range from Cicero to Cupid.19
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In 1899 women were provided with a Common Room—a wooden building at the southern end of the main building, which eventually had to be demolished in 1910 to make way for the original Fisher Library. Although inadequate, it was an essential refuge as women were not allowed to eat lunch outdoors and it provided tea-making facilities and a place to gather. Meetings and debates were also held there.20 It must have been a place where friendships were fostered, but who Ida Leeson’s friends were or how she was regarded by her peers in her university years remains a mystery. Ida had not yet had her long hair cropped in the style that was to become a distinguishing feature of her appearance, but if she had friends at Women’s College she might have met and been influenced by a living example of the ‘New Woman’. This breed of independent women who came to prominence in England and America in the 1890s was extensively satirised in cartoons and verses, like this one from the English magazine Woman in 1894: She flouts love’s caresses Reforms ladies’ dresses And scorns the Man-Monster’s tirade; She seems scarcely human This mannish New Woman This Queen of the Blushless Brigade.21
The University of Sydney’s New Woman, Evelyn Dickinson, had come out from London to join Louisa MacDonald, appointed the Women’s College’s first principal in 1891. Living at College with Louisa, her companion, and known to the students as ‘Dick’, Evelyn had ‘short hair, a gruff voice, wore strictly tailored suits and starched collars’.22 She completed Medicine at the university in 1908, wrote novels, rode a bicycle and was rumoured to smoke cigars. She returned to England to practise medicine in 1913, and when Louisa MacDonald retired in 1917 she rejoined Evelyn and spent the rest of her life with her. 18
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A born librarian Ida’s academic record shows that she took the four first-year subjects compulsory for all Arts students: English, Latin, mathematics and elementary science. The fifth subject was chosen from German, French or Greek, and Ida took French, which she had already studied at high school.23 In his memoirs, G.V. Portus, who began his studies as an Arts student in the same year as Ida Leeson, recalls that, for him at least, ‘the Science courses were a joke’.24 In the first term, the students studied Physics ‘in a huge class (from 100 to 150) consisting of all the undergraduates in the first years of Medicine, Arts, Science, Engineering and Pharmacy’. The professor was ‘a nervous old chap . . . utterly incapable of keeping order’. (Perhaps Christopher Brennan was not the only young man to roll stones down the floors of lecture theatres.) There were several prominent names on the Arts Faculty staff in Ida’s time: the aforementioned Professor Mungo MacCallum in English, Professor Francis Anderson in Philosophy and Professor George Arnold Wood in History. MacCallum, whose lectures Ida would have attended since she studied English for the three years of her degree, was an inspiring lecturer to whom ‘everybody had to listen’.25 She missed out on Francis Anderson since she didn’t take Philosophy, but this professor, whose influence on the University was profound, is remembered by G.V. Portus as being ‘a polished and effective orator, with just that touch of moral fervour which gets and holds a crowd’. Professor George Arnold Wood, however, was a lasting influence on Ida as she became one of his History honours students. As an honours student, Ida Leeson undertook the pass programme supplemented by extra reading and specialised essays over the long vacation. Pass students were required to write two essays of about twelve pages a year, while those doing honours produced three essays, each of about sixty pages. Many apparently exceeded this length. Some students’ essays with Professor Wood’s comments on them survive in private papers; these include a 98page study of Erasmus and 122 pages analysing how the British Empire developed into the British Commonwealth.26 I would 19
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imagine Ida probably kept her essays too, but unfortunately we will never know their content as they have not survived. In their second and third years, honours students took the pass examination in December and sat for the honours exam the following March. Some students undertook honours in two or even three subjects, but Ida confined her interests to History when she sat for her final examination in March 1906, by coincidence the same month her father fell to his death in Western Australia. Another student, Cecil Bede Newling, who was to become the first principal of Armidale Teachers’ College in 1928, described Professor Wood as having a ‘large rubicund face, clipped moustache, and full-breasted, starched and glistening dress shirt topped by a modest black tie’. Known as ‘Woody’, ‘his piping voice held his classes in thrall’.27 When we examine the professor’s approach to history, we can see how he must have influenced Ida Leeson’s later interests. An Oxford graduate, Professor Wood believed in the importance of basing the study of history on the critical interpretation of original documents. He also believed in its link with literature. As an historian he didn’t wish to simply reconstruct the past, but saw history as a means of illuminating the present and paving the way for a better future. He also saw it as an essentially subjective process. Moderate liberalism was his chosen approach and he was not afraid to speak out for what he believed.28 His open criticism of the justice and morality of the Boer War almost cost him his Chair of History.29 The main focus of his teaching was British history, as ‘a touchstone by which the history of other nations could be judged’.30 When Ida was a student, Professor Wood’s classes barely touched on Australian history. This was in keeping with the Anglocentric focus of education at the time, but it was also, of course, before David Scott Mitchell’s enormous bequest of Australiana to the State. The establishment of the Mitchell Library in 1910 helped foster an interest in Australian history and made the study of it from original documents an exciting possibility. The existence of the library would have facilitated Professor Wood’s major work, The Discovery of Australia, published 20
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A born librarian in 1922, which took the reader up to the death of Matthew Flinders in 1814. Ida Leeson was to amply repay her professor’s inspiration as a lecturer with her own further development of the collection. One of her most memorable feats of sleuthing occurred when she located the missing third log of Matthew Flinders’s expedition on a research trip to England in 1927, five years before she became Mitchell Librarian. The working-class girl from Leichhardt, student of George Arnold Wood, learnt her lessons well.
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3
The Mitchell bequest
The Mitchell bequest
w
hen Ida Leeson started work at the Public Library in 1906, she would have been familiar with the many newspaper articles and letters concerning the magnificent bequest of collector David Scott Mitchell. I wonder if that knowledge influenced her choice of a library career; if so, it turned out to be a propitious influence. The reclusive David Scott Mitchell was born in 1836 in the officers’ quarters of the Military Hospital in Macquarie Street, where his father Dr James Mitchell was the surgeon in charge. Educated in the Classics at the University of Sydney in the 1850s, he was called to the Bar at twenty-two, but never practised. Independently wealthy from the rich coal-bearing estates his father owned in the Hunter Valley, Mitchell had been a book collector from an early age. After his mother’s death in 1871 he ensconced himself in a large terrace house at 17 Darlinghurst Road where, looked after by his faithful housekeeper, he devoted the rest of his life to developing his library, spending his days among the manuscripts, books and pictures that gradually covered every surface and lined the walls from floor to ceiling. In later years he ventured out only once a week when, on Monday 22
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The Mitchell bequest mornings, a hansom cab would pick him up to visit all the booksellers in Sydney, new and secondhand.1 At first, he collected English literature and it is said that it was George Robertson, of Angus & Robertson, who steered Mitchell in the direction of Australiana, still a ‘tainted subject’ because of white Australia’s convict origins.2 The teaching of European history was favoured over Australian history in schools and universities and there remained a widespread belief in the community that convict records should be destroyed for the benefit of the nation’s history. This did not happen, but the suggestion demonstrates how archives are always socially constructed sites and not repositories of any kind of ‘pure history’. Realising he had a serious rival in his attempts to collect Australiana for the Public Library, H.C.L. Anderson secured, after careful manoeuvring, an introduction to David Scott Mitchell in 1895. This was achieved through Mitchell’s cousin, the pioneering feminist Rose Scott, who had a close relationship with her reclusive relative, perhaps, it has been suggested, even an unrequited romantic attachment.3 For more than a decade Anderson visited Mitchell at his home for a few hours every week, carefully cultivating his relationship with the collector: Each week I brought him all the catalogues of second hand books received from various European and American sellers, and definitely committed the Library, with the full consent of my President, to the new policy of giving him first choice of everything submitted to us for purchase from whatever source, of helping him in every way in our power, of saving him commission, freight and other expenses, of getting him discounts where available, and generally recognising him as a friendly ally in the same field of library work.4
He even offered the daily services of ‘Miss Margaret Windeyer’ to take down ‘invaluable bibliographic memoranda’, but the collector would not hear of such an intrusion into his ‘domestic ménage’.5 23
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Of course Anderson knew his strategy was risky. If his plan had gone astray, the cost to the Library, and to his own position, would have been enormous. With this in mind, he kept trying to make successive government ministers who were reluctant to commit themselves to securing the collection appreciate that it would be lost to the State if Mitchell were to die suddenly before making his will. He mused on the possible worst outcome with some horror, picturing the collection ‘dispersed at public auction, if not bought en bloc by some American Oil-King or Pork Millionaire to be presented in his name, and adorned with his book-plate, to some great American University’.6 Fortunately, the Principal Librarian’s gamble was to succeed. After declining her cousin’s offer to leave the collection to her, Rose Scott suggested to Mitchell that he bequeath it to the people of New South Wales. So, with Rose Scott’s persuasion, Anderson’s keen interest, and his own distrust of the fickleness of governments, in October 1898 David Scott Mitchell announced directly to the Trustees of the Public Library his intention of bequeathing his entire collection to the Library in trust for the people of New South Wales. His conditions were that the collection was to be accommodated in a separate wing of what was envisaged to be the new ‘National Library’, to be known as the Mitchell Library. He also required a readers’ ticket system be introduced, similar to that used in the reading room of the British Museum. To honour his pledge, he offered his non-Australian collection of 10 024 volumes, which, due to lack of space, had to be housed in the residence of the Principal Librarian, next door to the Library. Anderson moved out to make room for it. Mitchell first offered £30 000 to maintain and add to the collection, later increasing the amount to £70 000. The Principal Librarian’s careful nurturing of Mitchell and his collection had paid off to an extent beyond his imaginings. Anderson did not imagine, however, that it would be eight years before work on the building would commence. In 1899, the Trustees pleaded with the Minister about the ‘urgent necessity 24
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The Mitchell bequest of choosing a site for the new building’, the present building being in ‘every way unsuitable’. They said: Newspapers are stacked in piles wherever odd corners of space can be found. About two years hence all parts of the building— galleries and basement—will be absolutely packed full of presses of books, with only two feet passage between them, and it will be impossible to find a book in most parts of the building without some artificial light.7
The Trustees’ plea fell on deaf ears and in the following years a change of government occurred and uninterested ministers continued to prevaricate. Progress was not made until George Robertson of Angus & Robertson confronted the Public Works Committee in 1905 and explained the importance of the collection in the most visionary terms: ‘the time will arrive when from all parts of the world, men will come to consult it’.8 Mitchell, who was in poor health, also raised the alarm by intimating that if the building was not ready within a year of his death, the bequest would lapse.9 By October, the newspapers were full of debate about the suggested sites for the new library—seven in all—with maps provided. The Cook Park site opposite Hyde Park was a popular one, between the Australian Museum and St Mary’s Cathedral; another favoured because of its centrality was the site occupied by Ida Leeson’s old school, Sydney Girls’ High School, between Castlereagh and Elizabeth streets, bordering on Market Street. Arguments against the proposed site next to Parliament House in Macquarie Street ranged from worries that it would encroach on the Domain’s parkland to fears that it was too remote: ‘frequented by few people in the evening, and those often not of a desirable class’.10 Since this site diagonally opposite the Public Library was the one eventually chosen, is it any wonder that the young women library assistants there were slightly nervous about making their way home through the dark streets at ten o’clock at night after the library closed? 25
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As coincidence would have it, the Premier laid the foundation stone for the new library on 11 September 1906, just two weeks after Ida Leeson joined the staff of the Public Library. By then H.C.L. Anderson had resigned to become Director of the newly created Intelligence Department and David Scott Mitchell was too ill to attend the ceremony. The reclusive collector died less than a year later, never to see the finished Mitchell wing of the proposed National Library. David Scott Mitchell was said to have ‘a photographic memory’, knowing the contents of his books, ‘the finest differences of bibliographic detail between them’, and ‘their precise location in the room’.11 It was a quality shared by the young woman who was eventually to become the custodian of his collection, a talent for which Ida became legendary. It was to impress Manning Clark in the 1940s: You could say to her you had some idea that (I am making this up) James Macarthur had written to William Charles Wentworth at some time during 1842. And she would say, her eyes blinking with excitement, ‘Yes, Macarthur Papers, vol. 73, pp. 600–1’. Within five minutes she would bring the volume to you, open it at the page, and say triumphantly, ‘There it is’.12
Poet James McAuley included a reference to Ida Leeson in his long satirical poem, ‘The True Discovery of Australia’, published in the collection Under Aldebaran in 1946: Since it is usual in histories To make a contribution to research By adding some new evidence or other, I felt that Swift had left me in the lurch By writing everything that could be known About the great sea-captain; but I went To Ida Leeson at the Mitchell, saying:
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The Mitchell bequest ‘I don’t suppose you have a document . . .’ Of course she had one! Had it there for years.13
But such recognition was many years away. Ida’s first experience of handling books from David Scott Mitchell’s collection probably came when she was learning cataloguing from Christopher Brennan. He had begun work in about 1900 on the 10 000 volumes stacked in the Librarian’s residence, when H.C.L. Anderson was eventually granted his repeated request to the Committee for £150 to catalogue them. In 1909, the year Brennan left the Public Library to take up a full-time academic position at the University of Sydney, Ida Leeson was appointed a cataloguer in the Mitchell Library on a salary of £130 a year. On 8 March 1910 the new library was officially opened by the Governor of New South Wales, Lord Chelmsford. In the words of H.C.L. Anderson, ‘the Mitchell wing was opened and Mr Hugh Wright, who had been appointed Librarian of this important branch, with his capable lady assistants, had the treasures well arranged and displayed for public attention’.14 As Ida Leeson was later to write in her book on the Mitchell Library, the wing contained David Scott Mitchell’s collection of ‘61 000 volumes, a large collection of manuscript journals, diaries and letters, thousands of prints, maps and charts, portraits and pictures of historical interest, miniatures, book plates, coins and medals’.15 Even though the building was incomplete and would be accessed by a temporary entrance for the next ten years, conditions in the Mitchell were a vast improvement on those in the noxious and overcrowded library across the road. It had electricity for one thing, even an electrical ventilation system to filter fresh air through the building; the old library didn’t get electricity at all until 1916.16 The readers’ ticket system that David Scott Mitchell had insisted upon had its detractors, however, and letters to the newspapers complained of its elitism. The Worker of 24 March 27
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1910, perhaps predictably, carried the headline: ‘The Mitchell: a Library for the Few’, with the subheading: ‘Snob Rule and the Intellect’. The article detailed the lengths to which a reader had to go to obtain a ticket, concluding ‘It is not openly stated . . . that the intention is to keep the library for “nice people” i.e. those who are well-tailored and have friends with money.’ These allegations of elitism and snobbery that started with the library’s opening were to echo through the years and still hold some currency today. The first Mitchell Librarian, Hugh Wright, had been on the Public Library staff for twenty-six years, since he was sixteen. Longevity in the job was an important ground for promotion within the public service. Although he was well-respected in the community of historians for his knowledge of Australiana, he was later to be criticised for a lack of vigour and slowness in preparing the catalogue for the Mitchell.17 He did have an eye for a good cataloguer, though, and by the time Ida Leeson had been in her job for two years, Wright held her in high regard. ‘I would recommend first of all, Miss Leeson, perhaps to go to £180 grade,’ he told the Departmental Board of the Department of Public Instruction at a Services and Duties of Officers review on 2 June 1911. ‘She is the smartest cataloguer here. She has had a very good education. She is very obliging, and is exceedingly well read. She is a very good worker. There is no shirking about her.’18 To rank her as ‘the smartest cataloguer’ put her above Margaret Windeyer, under whose supervision Ida worked. Cataloguing a book was a highly specialised skill involving more than a modicum of ingenuity and it was believed in library circles that good cataloguers were born, not trained.19 ‘For the special work of meeting the people who come into the Reading Room, Miss Windeyer is facile princips,’ Wright told the Board, ‘but she has not got the knack of picking out the things most important in a book for indexing. She has not got that faculty, which Miss Leeson possesses.’ Working on the books relating to Australia and the South Seas in the Mitchell collection, Ida not only catalogued those written in English, but hundreds in Dutch, 28
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The Mitchell bequest French, German and Spanish.20 French she had studied at university, but for the rest, foreign language dictionaries must have been close to hand when she was cataloguing. As well as Hugh Wright, other members of staff were interviewed by the Departmental Board on 2 June 1911. Margaret Windeyer talks at some length about her experience in American libraries and the number of libraries she ‘rearranged’ after her training; Maude Yeomans Fitzhardinge, senior cataloguer in the Public Library, is asked many questions about her language expertise, replying at one point, ‘Greek, Latin, French and German I have a working knowledge of. Spanish I am working up to. For the eastern languages I have to burrow into a dictionary of the language.’ Ida Leeson’s interview is one of the shortest and is fairly monosyllabic except for the moment when, after saying she had acquired Honours in History in her B.A., she is asked, ‘Are you carrying on your historical work now?’ She replies enthusiastically: ‘For some time I have been studying industrial history, sociology is so fascinating I cannot find time for anything else. I am studying practical sociology.’ Unlike some of her colleagues, she does not make a pressing case for an increase in salary. At this stage of her career, Ida Leeson shows little of the lobbying skills she would display in her fight for the Mitchell Librarianship two decades later. Nita Kibble, who had secured the right for women to work in the Public Library in 1899 when she was twenty, was also interviewed on this occasion. She was by this time Accessions Clerk in the General Reference Library. Like Ida, she was from a working-class background and her mother had also been forced to provide for the family, taking over her husband’s country postoffice business after he died when Nita was six months old.21 Nita Kibble was not a graduate, but she had diligently studied throughout her eleven years’ service, passing all the examinations for which she was eligible—Junior University exams and Public Service clerical and grade exams. Clearly aware of her rights as a woman, Nita forgoes her usually quiet and retiring manner in her interview and complains that a male officer has been given 29
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an increment ‘which took him over my head’. When asked if he was a married man, she replies, ‘Yes. All the same it was not very pleasant to have him passing over me, especially as I think my duties are quite as important as those of Mr Sewell.’ There was another reason for Nita Kibble to bridle at the suggestion a married man should earn more than a single woman, with its implication that such women had only themselves to provide for. She had taken over the responsibility of bringing up her niece May Dobbie in 1904 after her sister died giving birth to her, for which, as a de facto single parent, Kibble had no support, combining work, study and child care at a time long before childcare centres were instituted. She managed May’s early years by living in a cottage in the grounds of a private school where she was assisted by the school’s housekeeper.22 Childrearing responsibilities by single women like Nita Kibble were not uncommon (Rose Scott, for instance, brought up her nephew, albeit with more financial support), but they failed to be recognised as legitimate in a society where the norm was marriage and the head of the household was the male breadwinner. Nita Kibble and Ida Leeson were both ambitious and able librarians and in 1916 they were promoted from the clerical to the professional division, each being appointed Chief Cataloguer— Nita in General Reference, Ida in the Mitchell. They were then the two most senior women in the library hierarchy. Vacancies had occurred because of the enlistment of several of the male staff after the outbreak of war; in fact, Nita Kibble’s predecessor, James Pierce, was killed in 1915. But although such unfortunate factors might have provided an unforeseen opportunity for women, these two were promoted on merit. They fared better than the two older women, Margaret Windeyer and Maude Yeomans Fitzhardinge, who, under H.C.L. Anderson, had been part of an intake of three female cataloguers into the professional division in 1901.23 On her return from her library training in the United States in 1899, Margaret Windeyer had applied unsuccessfully to libraries in Victoria, Adelaide, Tasmania and New Zealand before being taken on at the Public 30
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The Mitchell bequest Library of New South Wales. The Public Library of Victoria was completely open about her rejection, telling her there was ‘no provision for the appointment of ladies to the staff’.24 Although Windeyer and Fitzhardinge had the advantages of a privileged background and high social standing—from ‘the top layer of society’, as one librarian put it25—these very factors were also limiting to a certain extent. Whereas women such as Ida Leeson and Nita Kibble had no choice but to work, these two women chose to take up professions when there was no economic necessity to do so. And although they were both among the numbers of upper middle-class women who graced the salons of feminist Rose Scott, they had restricted independence. As unmarried women, they were expected to remain part of their families all their lives. They have been described by one commentator as ‘transitional figure[s] caught between the worlds of the late Victorian patriarchal family and the modern career woman’.26 Margaret Windeyer, second to Hugh Wright in the Mitchell Library, lost any chance of becoming Mitchell Librarian when Wright was unsuccessful in his bid to become Principal Librarian after Frank Murcott Bladen’s enforced retirement in 1912. Although she did not retire until 1926 at the age of sixty, she was soon overtaken in seniority by Ida Leeson. In the latter part of her career Margaret became the public face of the library— giving talks to the right sort of ‘public’, of course. One occasion described in the Australasian in August 1922 catches that whiff of snobbery and elitism that attached itself to the Mitchell and was exemplified in the figures of Maude Fitzhardinge and Margaret Windeyer: On Wednesday afternoon, August 16, at the Lyceum Club, Miss Margaret Windeyer gave an interesting address on ‘The Treasures of the Mitchell Library’. Miss Windeyer likes always to be under the Flag of England, so she carries with her a tiny Union Jack, and, hoisting this on a miniature pole whose point she stuck in the table, she began her address.
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Maude Fitzhardinge’s career in the General Reference Library had moved slowly in spite of her Masters degree in Classics and knowledge of languages. Through their shared passion for classical literature and modern languages, she became a friend of Christopher Brennan’s and an unacknowledged authority on his work. As a woman, however, she could not take part in his intellectual and social activities outside work, although librarians Frederick Jordan and John Quinn were members with Brennan of the Casuals Club, an association of professional men and artists who met to ‘eat, drink and converse’.27 The scanty papers left by Maude to the Mitchell all relate to the work of Brennan; there is nothing about her own life.28 In another time and place, she might have been a renowned scholar herself. When Brennan resigned in 1909 Maude left the tedious work of classification and became a senior cataloguer, responsible for serials and foreign and classical literature, albeit at a considerably lower salary than her predecessor.29 She eventually resigned in 1914 after it was made clear no management position would be available to her and returned to teaching in private schools. Later librarians remember her coming into the library, a rather eccentric and formidable figure, always dressed in violet and with hair dyed to match.30 The man who, whether by default or intention, negatively influenced the careers of both Margaret Windeyer and Maude Fitzhardinge was William Herbert (W.H.) Ifould, appointed Principal Librarian in 1912 at the age of thirty-four. Ifould had clearly seen the move from Principal Librarian at the smaller Public Library of South Australia as a promotion. Described by his biographer, David J. Jones, as ‘a cultured, energetic man with wide interests and accomplishments’, he was, in addition to being a librarian, an amateur steeplechase rider, keen golfer and trout fisherman. He was also a horticulturalist, in which capacity he founded the National Rose Society and maintained an orange grove in South Australia.31 Although the Sydney ‘establishment’ of social elites was small, he and his family became part of it, living in its upper north-shore heartland of Turramurra, a suburb 32
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The Mitchell bequest of large houses, sweeping green lawns and manicured gardens. He was a foundation member of the Rotary Club of Sydney, in the company of George Robertson of Angus & Robertson, Peter Board of the Department of Education and later Trustee of the library, and another Trustee, Sir Edgeworth David. Ifould would often ‘explore a deal’ with bookseller A.H. Spencer at a Rotary lunch in Melbourne on one of his trips to South Australia.32 In his capacity as Principal Librarian, he seems to have operated much like a clever businessman, precise and careful in his contacts and canny in his dealings with the book trade. In his later years as Librarian, his time was almost exclusively devoted to masterminding the building of the new Public Library of New South Wales, for which one promise of funds was secured on the Elanora golf course.33 Ifould maintained excellent relations with the press and the Sunday Times once described him as ‘the State’s most civil civil servant’.34 However he was apparently not always civil in his dealings with his staff; some almost worshipped him, while others found him to be a bully. One librarian described how she used to burst into tears whenever she had to see him, until she decided to stand up to him and found ‘he was like a lamb to me after’.35 The man known among his staff as ‘The Chief’ had a distinct influence on the careers of Nita Kibble and Ida Leeson, although the two women related to him in very different ways. Nita was one who ‘worshipped’ Mr Ifould and ‘always remained standing in his presence while he sat’.36 Although she missed out on the promotion she wanted most, that of Mitchell Librarian, she was well rewarded by him for her intelligence, diligence and loyalty. Ida showed no such deference towards her superior. It has been said that she was a thorn in Ifould’s side for nearly thirty years.37 They were both short—only about 5 foot 2 inches tall—but what they lacked in height they made up for in forcefulness. Ida and ‘Willy’ Ifould maintained a combative relationship, but also a certain level of mutual respect. Nita Kibble and Ida Leeson, distinguished from their older counterparts as ‘modern career women’ yet so different in 33
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IDA LEESON: A LIFE
personality and allegiances, continued their ascent through the library ranks. Three years after they had achieved chief cataloguer status in their respective sections, they were promoted again. A new research department was established in 1919 and Nita Kibble was appointed Principal Research Officer, a position she held until her retirement in 1943. Ida Leeson was obliged to pack up her office at the Mitchell and cross the road again when she was appointed Principal Accessions Officer for the Public Library in June 1919. Both were now on salaries of £455 a year, impressive salaries for women in the public service at that time; as a comparison, William Ifould as Principal Librarian received £830, Hugh White as Mitchell Librarian just under £500.38 The senior women of the Public Library of New South Wales were starting to make their mark, but they were to find the ceiling to their promotion prospects was made of shatter-proof glass. Women, after all, could not join Rotary.
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4
Librarians’ travels
Librarians’ travels
t
he antipodes were a hemisphere away from the great manuscript resources and developing libraries of the United States, Britain and the Continent. Over the years several senior librarians from the Public Library made extended trips, often on long-service leave. They went to study the latest in library design and procedures, to bid for crucial manuscripts of Australiana, and to delve into archives to recover more of our region’s history to be copied for the growing Mitchell collection. Ida Leeson’s chance would eventually come in 1927. In 1903, H.C.L. Anderson used his long-service leave of eight months to visit Europe and the United States, where he ‘closely inspected the greatest libraries of the world, both ancient and modern, and got many valuable hints of what to imitate and what to avoid in planning a Public Library with capacity for expansion for at least fifty years to come’.1 His mind was on the planned new ‘National Library’, of which the Mitchell wing would be the beginning. Maude Fitzhardinge took ten months’ leave without pay in 1913 to visit libraries in Europe and America.2 Her trip did little to further her career, however, and, although there is a bare 35
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mention of her leave in the Library’s 1913 Annual Report, none of her findings are recorded in the following year’s report.3 Hugh Wright, Mitchell Librarian, was granted six months long-service leave in late 1913 and sent on official business to Europe, his most important mission being the securing of the Macquarie manuscripts that were to be sold at Sotheby’s auction house. It was not a trip he enjoyed and his jaded attitude is a strong contrast to Ida Leeson’s enthusiasm for similar research tasks when she travelled thirteen years later. Arriving in London in December, Wright’s letters to William Ifould are full of complaints as he finds the people ‘as cold, unsympathetic and grey as the days’ and that ‘it is expensive to push business’.4 He found that cafés such as Simpson’s or the Trocadero offered a reasonable lunch, but he says that to take ‘a man’ out on business, with ‘a bottle of wine, coffee, liqueur and cigars, plus tips’ gives him little change out of a sovereign. On 14 January he writes, ‘Oh, this is a rotten place in winter. I wish you had taken the holiday instead of me . . . I feel tied to London all the time until the sale of the Macquarie documents, because you may wire authorising me to buy privately on best terms that I can make.’ In the event, Angus & Robertson’s London agent secured the documents for the Library in February with a private offer. To Wright’s annoyance, some newspapers reported that they would ‘probably’ go to the Mitchell, others not offering that much of a hint: ‘I thought, dash it, this is too much! The Library that pays for the whole lot gets practically no mention, but an agent gets a big puff.’ As he visits bookshops and libraries in Britain and Europe over the next few months,Wright continues to grumble: ‘I reckon it will be up to the Board to give me a run around the South Sea Islands and the Dutch Indies when I get back to balance this frigid experience.’ He finds the big libraries in England and Scotland ‘cold in construction and in methods’; in Leipzig it is ‘the wrong time of the year for everything’, and in Paris there are too many people and he has had to stay in an expensive 36
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Librarians’ travels hotel. The threat of impending war does not feature in these letters, but it must surely have added to his unease. A letter from William Ifould in December had granted a further £75 for Wright to go to the States as well as Europe, ‘to gain knowledge that may be useful to you in connection with library furniture, fittings, methods etc’. Wright complained, believing it was going to cost more than the allowance as the United States was expensive. He finally made it to the States in May 1914 after complaining about the length of time it took for the money to arrive. He found the modern library buildings of America much more to his liking than the British; on the back of a postcard of the New York Public Library he enthuses: ‘This is a library worth copying in very many ways. Rectangular reading rooms beat all the circular and octagonal ones.’ On arriving back in London, however, expecting to leave for Australia in June, Hugh Wright found instructions to go once more to Europe to inspect further the collections in France and Spain. The typed report of his visit, dated 21 September 1914, details his visits to government and municipal institutions at Caen, Le Havre, Paris, Madrid and Seville. One statement in it is of particular relevance to the later European trip taken by Ida Leeson in 1927: ‘All the documents at Caen relating to Australia were amongst the papers of General de Caen, and were taken from Flinders during his captivity at Mauritius. Those that are of any value have already been copied for the Mitchell Library.’ In 1923, it was William Ifould’s turn to travel to Europe and the United States. This was to be one occasion where the Principal Librarian’s shrewdness in bargaining for his library did not pay off. Leaving Hugh Wright to deputise for him, he sailed on 30 January on six months official leave, sent by the Trustees to endeavour to procure for the Mitchell Library some of the Cook documents in the collection of the late H.W.F. Bolckow of Yorkshire, which were to be offered for auction at Sotheby’s on 21 March.5 Ifould’s primary focus was Cook’s Endeavour journal, negotiations for which he had begun with Bolckow in 1920, but which had broken down when the collector refused his offer of 37
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IDA LEESON: A LIFE
£5000 and decided to put the documents up for auction. Displaying the Machiavellian streak for which he became well known, Ifould kept from his rivals (who included the Commonwealth Parliamentary Library) the fact that he had secured an agreement from the Trustees to bid twice that much at the Sotheby’s 1923 auction.6 Unfortunately, by the time Ifould reached London six weeks after embarkation, secure in the belief that he had misled his competitors, a telegram was waiting for him at the office of the Australian High Commissioner that must have seriously rankled. The new Australian Prime Minister, Stanley Bruce (who only took office on 9 February after Billy Hughes was ousted from government) had decided to acquire the collection for the Commonwealth Government and Ifould was instructed to bid secretly on its behalf—up to £15 000! If successful, the documents were to be ‘held by the Mitchell Library until such time as the Commonwealth Government has a suitable repository for them’.7 Writing to the Principal Librarian in England, Dowling, the president of the Library Trustees, though disappointed the journal would not be bought for the Mitchell, believed they were ‘saving a large monetary expenditure and would have the custody certainly for a long time, possibly forever’.8 Ifould’s bid for the precious journal was successful and he acquired the collection for just £5000, the amount of the offer he had made unsuccessfully nearly three years before. How he must have fumed, to be so near and yet so far from acquiring the journal for his own library. On its arrival in Australia, the Endeavour journal was the centrepiece of a display at Melbourne’s Parliament House, organised by Kenneth Binns, then head of the Australian Section of the National Parliamentary Library, to publicise the National Library’s collection. Only after the exhibition finished was it allowed to grace the display shelves of the Mitchell Library. The Trustees’ optimism proved to be misplaced and the journal was removed to Canberra in 1927 following the completion of Parliament House. The whole incident was a significant example of the tussle between the Public Library 38
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Librarians’ travels and its desire to secure the ‘National Library’ for New South Wales and those who wished to create the Commonwealth National Library in Canberra. The Cook Endeavour journal has since been described as ‘the foundation document of the National Library of Australia’.9 As a rider to this story, in 1935 William Ifould and Ida Leeson (by then Mitchell Librarian) managed to acquire a number of Cook relics after lengthy negotiations with the Australian Museum in Sydney. Most significantly, these included what is known as the ‘Corner copy’ of Cook’s Endeavour journal, regarded as second in importance to the original journal, now held in Canberra. Copied by Richard Orton, the ship’s clerk, in 1770 and later finding its way into the possession of John Corner, it was eventually purchased by F.H. Dangar who presented it to the Australian Museum in 1894.10 Some of the Trustees of the Museum felt, understandably, that ‘the Mitchell Library was getting more than a quid pro quo’ in the exchange of the Cook items for a number of medals and coins.11 On this occasion, the Mitchell Library was certainly the winner. By the time the transaction with the Australian Museum took place in 1935, Ida was a skilled and canny librarian; like William Ifould, she knew how to exploit to the full any opportunity to gain treasured items for the collection she devoted her life to. From the time she became Principal Accessions Officer in 1919, she honed the skills she would need to attain her goal of Mitchell Librarian. Ida Leeson was thirty-four years old when she took up her new position as Principal Accessions Officer and moved back to the Bent Street building, where a new generation of library assistants was staffing the overcrowded reading rooms. By this time, women comprised the overwhelming majority of junior staff and they fetched and carried and dealt with the diverse crowd of readers under much the same conditions Ida had experienced in 1906, except that space was even more limited. Many of the readers 39
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were regulars and well known to the library assistants, as one of them describes: There was the reader who always smelt of garlic, the poorly dressed elderly one who spent all his time with a book on Euclid. The nice young doctor who was a cocaine addict and who always came out in a sweat and fell asleep on the table. We used to have to shake him awake and always felt sorry. He was so apologetic. One woman spent months looking up law books to defend a case in court which she eventually won . . . There was a little thin man, always looking anxious and usually in cold weather with a drip on the end of his nose. He wore a bowler hat and read always Hakluyt’s Voyages.12
New recruits to the staff in the 1920s included Bertha Lawson (daughter of Henry) and Marjorie Barnard, both of whom were to become favoured by Ida Leeson in later years: Bertha when she worked for Ida in the Mitchell in the 1930s, and Marjorie as a writer and regular Mitchell reader. Another Marjorie, Marjorie Ross, became Ida’s much-valued assistant in Accessions soon after she joined the Public Library in 1922. Perhaps Ida saw something of a kindred spirit in her offsider, a quiet young woman who had begun work as a teacher at Sydney Girls’ High School, found she hated it and moved into library work. Marjorie Ross was also to go on to become one of the librarians in the Mitchell for whom Ida had great affection. Perhaps because of her reserve, Marjorie had an air of mystery about her. Daphne Gollan, who started as a junior in the Mitchell in 1936, remembers this ‘very private, very cultured’ woman receiving letters from English sexologist and writer, Havelock Ellis, for years: ‘one would see this sort of spidery handwriting (the letters were always addressed to Miss Marjorie Ross, Mitchell Library, Sydney) at least once or twice a week’.13 Another colleague, Heather Sherrie, who was a close friend of Marjorie’s, remembers she loved England and had many correspondents there, including years of correspondence with ‘a very good writer man’.14 Heather Sherrie herself, who 40
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Librarians’ travels joined the Public Library in 1923 as a Science graduate specialising in Botany, was a favourite of Ida Leeson’s. So was Phyllis Mander Jones, a brilliant woman with a formidable knowledge of languages, who was appointed in 1925 and who eventually succeeded Ida as Mitchell Librarian in October 1946. One new recruit in 1921, who was eventually to hold the position of Acting Mitchell Librarian for a period in the 1950s, had no favourable memories of Ida. Because Jean Arnot has been one of the principal sources of recorded information about Ida Leeson and the period, the few writings about the first female Mitchell Librarian that exist have tended to lean heavily on Jean’s assessment that Ida was prejudiced, difficult and an intellectual snob. Certainly, Ida was known to support graduates, or at least library assistants who were working towards degrees at night. Daphne Gollan remembers how anxious Ida was that she and her friend June Wells pass their exams when they were juniors in the 1930s, but she makes the astute comment: ‘Yes, she did have a preference for the ones who were either graduates or making their way through the university . . . I suspect she hadn’t come from a very rich background [so] she completely understood that you might have to struggle to get through.’15 Jean Arnot was not a graduate nor was she studying for a degree and, although she did not come from a wealthy family, her Pymble background was considerably more genteel than Ida’s, so perhaps there was a class element involved too. Jean’s first contact with Ida Leeson occurred when she moved from working in the reading room in the early 1920s to the periodicals accessions department: ‘That’s when I first came into contact with Miss Leeson because she used to come down every morning and read the Sydney Morning Herald in the Board Room . . . It was a joke that she wouldn’t buy the Sydney Morning Herald; she used to read it each morning—the library copy.’16 This critical tone pervades the interview conducted in 1985 about Jean’s memories of Ida; she then goes on to talk about Ida’s meanness, her favouritism and her prejudice. 41
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Did Ida ignore the young library assistant as she bustled through the accessions department to read the Herald, or worse, did she bark orders at her? Or did the young woman simply find this rather odd-looking little figure with her mannish suit, cropped hair and deep voice a bit confronting to her middle-class sensibilities? Jean herself appears in library photos in full-skirted, often floral dresses—a smiling woman with large, round glasses. Other librarians remember her as ‘fun’ to be with. Whatever the complexities of reasons for her dislike of Ida Leeson (and it does appear to have been mutual), it was a deeply felt response, exacerbated possibly by Jean’s later disappointment at being passed over for Mitchell Librarian after Ida’s resignation. The 1985 interview with Jean Arnot finishes when she comments, with a mirthless laugh: ‘Yes, she was always rude to me. I’m sorry, I’m the wrong person to ask.’ As Principal Accessions Officer in the early 1920s, Ida Leeson continued to develop her interests in Australiana as well as being responsible for studying the trade publications and newspapers such as The Times Literary Supplement, liaising with the Library’s agent in London, compiling lists of books to be ordered for the library and then submitting them to the Board of Trustees for approval. She had a reputation for being astute and comprehensive in her ordering; Heather Sherrie considered that the ‘marvellous collection’ in the library was in large part due to the years Ida Leeson was in charge of accessions.17 Ida had worked in the Public Library for twenty-one years when she was granted long-service leave in 1927. Mollie Barrington, a ‘tall, magnificent-looking woman’ who had joined the staff in 1916, acquiring her Master of Arts in 1925, took her place while she was away.18 Ida was on leave for much of 1927, travelling first to the United States. There is no record of where she went or what she did there, but it is evident that her librarian’s antennae were alert: William Ifould thanks her in a letter for letting him know that well-known American collector Dr Rosenbach 42
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Librarians’ travels had manuscripts of the Portuguese explorer de Quiros in his possession.19 In fact, like Hugh Wright before her, Ida Leeson had gone on long-service leave armed with a list of research questions to investigate in London and Paris on behalf of the Mitchell Library, for which she was granted three weeks’ ‘special leave’.20 She was also given research queries by her old professor, George Arnold Wood. Her letters to William Ifould once she reaches London at the end of June bubble over with enthusiasm for her work, unlike those of the jaded Hugh Wright in 1914. It is unlikely (and there is certainly no record of it) that she was expected to stretch her budget by wooing businessmen with wine, coffee, liqueur and cigars. Ida had other advantages over her predecessor too, who had arrived in wintry London in December 1913, cold and lonely, to an unwelcoming country on the brink of war. When Ida reached port towards the end of May 1927 after a ‘good voyage’ from New York (‘I wasn’t a bad sailor any more’), she found London ‘beautifully cool’, although raining constantly.21 She was also not alone, but accompanied by her long-time friend, Florence Birch, about whom we will learn more in due course. The two women based themselves at the Regent Palace Hotel, Piccadilly Circus, and prepared to enjoy the cultural offerings of London. They sallied forth to the Russian Ballet, the Irish Players and the Opera, where there were ‘no seats left—so we paid a man to sit in the Gallery queue for seven hours’. They saw ‘the King and Queen open the new Regent Street, and the wonderful spectacle when new standards were presented to the Guards, and the return home of the Duke and Duchess of York’. It is also said they became involved in Spiritualism and attended séances, but that was likely to be on Florence’s initiative rather than Ida’s.22 In her first week in London, Ida also checked catalogues for possible purchases at Maggs’s and Sotheby’s, visited print dealers and the Library’s London agent, Truslove & Hanson, and arranged a visit to the British Museum. 43
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Ida sent regular reports to the Principal Librarian all through July as she scoured catalogues, attended auctions and visited dealers procuring items for the Mitchell, as well as researching at the Linnean Society and the British Museum. In these letters she can hardly contain her delight at the world she has found herself in and her reports are punctuated by expressions of joy and frustration at the lack of time to immerse herself in it: ‘If only you could find me work to keep me here for a year or more! I would consider myself most happy if I had the chance to stay here for a time.’ Later, she says, ‘I’m very well, and rejoicing in every day’, and towards the end of the month, ‘Would there be any chance of getting more time? I haven’t been out of London yet. Its interest is so great that I don’t know how I’m going to tear myself away, even for the beauties of the countryside’. This was fortunate for the Mitchell as, early in August, Ida Leeson was to make a momentous and totally unexpected discovery at the Public Record Office as she searched among various ships’ logs. The Mitchell Library was already rich in manuscripts from Matthew Flinders’s voyages, acquired in 1922 when Sir William Flinders Petrie offered all the papers in his possession to whichever state would provide a suitable memorial to his grandfather. The Government of New South Wales responded positively and the Library Trustees purchased the manuscripts, thus defraying the cost to the Library of the bronze statue of Matthew Flinders that now stands outside, facing Macquarie Street. Included in the material were two of the three volumes of the log of the Investigator (1801–3), the sloop in which Flinders completed charting the east coast of Australia, the unknown south coast and Tasmania. These and other papers had been seized by Charles de Caen, Governor of Mauritius, where Flinders was detained on suspicion of being a spy at the end of 1803 on his return journey to England on the Cumberland. He had landed there unaware that hostilities between England and France had resumed earlier that year. Apparently his arrogance did not impress the Governor, and he was kept captive for more than six years, finally setting sail for Portsmouth in March 1810. 44
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Librarians’ travels Eventually, two of the volumes of the log were returned to him in England, but the third was retained ‘on the ground that it contained his reason for putting in at Mauritius’.23 Flinders died at the age of forty in 1814, one day after the publication of his book A Voyage to Terra Australis. Repeated requests by the British Government had failed to secure the log’s return and its whereabouts remained a mystery after the trail ended in France in 1825. Among the ‘Mitchell Library Queries’ that Ida took with her on her trip were two for the Service Hydrographique in Paris. One of these was to search for the Flinders log book No. 3. A précis of the log had been made by the French copyist employed by the Mitchell Library, Mme Hélouis, from among the de Caen papers at the archives of Caen. These stated that it contained, according to Flinders’s own statement, ‘the journal and transactions and observations on board the Investigator, Porpoise, the Hope cutter and Cumberland schooner, from some time in June to December 17, 1803’.24 Ida Leeson planned to travel to Paris in September, but that particular Mitchell query had already been answered by then. A letter to ‘Mr Ifould’ dated 9 August 1927 finds Ida Leeson in a great state of excitement: ‘Yesterday I sent you a cable through the Agent General’s office. I don’t suppose it was as interesting to you to hear about the Flinders’ log as it was for me to find it, but I wanted to tell someone quickly!’ In the letter she details her findings, building the story with a fine sense of drama. After recounting that she had spent two weeks at the British Museum and the Public Record Office and had completed the work ‘Mr Wright’ had asked her to do, she continues: But the possibilities there seemed so big that I was loth to give up, so I went one more day to look at logs of other voyages. That was a day of delays—I think the attendant had decided I was getting down too many volumes—and I had to go back on Saturday, cutting out an excursion we had promised ourselves into the country. But there was a reward. I suddenly found myself
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waiting excitedly for the last batch I had asked for—the dates of one log looked too good to be true.
The log Ida refers to is listed in a chart headed ‘Admiralty— Ships’ Logs (Supplementary)’ which records a series of entries with numbers, name of ship, dates, description (log or journal) and ‘By whom kept’. The dates of log No. 78 are 11 June to 17 December 1803, the very date Flinders was interviewed by the French Governor, General de Caen, after disembarking at Mauritius. The ‘By whom kept’ column contains only a dash; the log above it is ascribed to Robert Fowler. Ida queries this: I pointed out to the officer-in-charge that it was wrongly ascribed to Fowler. He said the—[dash] didn’t mean that it was Fowler’s, but that its authorship was unknown. He accepted my assurance that it was Flinders! If anyone had inspected it, there couldn’t ever have been any doubt, I think. It is a small quarto book, with the first page headed Log Book No. 3, H.M. Sloop Investigator. It contains 103 folios, and the last folio gives his reasons for putting in at Mauritius.
From a pencilled note on the log by ‘P.P. King’ dated 2 July 1825, Ida deduces that, as Australian hydrographer Phillip Parker King, son of Governor Philip Gidley King, was working on his surveys of the Australian coast at that time, he saw the log in England. Thus it appeared that it had been sent to England soon after the trail ran cold in France in March 1825. Meticulous researcher that she was, Ida wrote to William Ifould in a later letter that she had ‘completed the chain of evidence concerning the Flinders log book’. After telling ‘Miss Deane’, who had been employed at the Record Office for several years as a copyist for the Mitchell, about seeing the log, she notes that: the very next day she came to me to say she had seen a letter about a Flinders log book in a bundle of papers she had been using. She found it for me, and it was the letter of transmission
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Librarians’ travels with a note asking that P.P. King might see it (the book) and a further note by King himself.
This story of the finding of the Flinders log is a perfect example of how often archival research is a matter of fortuitous chance, backed by knowledge and an astute eye, of course, and helped along by connections with other researchers—a sophisticated game of connect-the-dots, or in this case, the dashes. Much later, in 1936, Ida Leeson completed the story in her book, The Mitchell Library, where she related how the log was sent to London in 1825, probably at a further request by the British Government on behalf of King, how it was then deposited in the Admiralty Library where it was mistakenly catalogued as an anonymous log, eventually finding its way to the Public Record Office in 1910 among the series of logs she inspected there. Ida mentions in her book that ‘in 1927 it was recognized as the missing third volume’, but modestly omits to say that she was the researcher whose expertise made that recognition possible. Would William Ifould have been as self-effacing, I wonder, or would he have managed to slip his name in as the discoverer, in the third person, of course, as convention demanded? Ida concludes her account by stating that ‘the authorities at the Public Record Office allowed the Library Trustees to have a photostat copy made so that their log might be complete’.25 Why only a photostat copy? That story was not told by Ida Leeson in her book. Australia did ask for the original to be given to the nation, to join the two earlier volumes that had been donated by Flinders’s grandson in 1922. The file held in the Public Record Office shows that the negotiations were carried out at the highest level—from Prime Minister to Prime Minister.26 All to no avail. The civil servants at the Public Record Office feared that such a gift would create a precedent and other Dominions would request records relating to their history. The British view was that the log was the property of the Government as Flinders was a naval officer on official business. However, like the other two volumes, this was Flinders’s private log. If he had had it in 47
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his possession when he returned to Britain in 1810, he undoubtedly would have copied selected parts of the log for presentation to the Admiralty, as he did with the other two volumes. But since the original had reached the Admiralty from Paris for use by Phillip Parker King in his researches and was subsequently transferred with other material to the Public Record Office as a log by an unknown sailor, it hardly seems to fit the simple argument that it was the property of the Government. And if it had not been for the eagle eyes of the Mitchell Library’s Ida Leeson, it probably would never have been rediscovered at all. Later in August Ida and Florence dashed up to Stratford for the end of the Shakespeare Festival, took in Oxford and returned to London ready to embark for Paris at the end of the month. In their two weeks in Paris, Mme Hélouis, the copyist employed by the Mitchell at the Service Hydrographique, did everything she could to make their stay a pleasant one as well as assisting Ida at the various libraries she visited. The research proved frustrating as the collections were still in disorder after their return to Paris at the end of the war and the libraries were short staffed. The travellers had to forgo the pleasures of Italy as time was pressing and returned to London to embark on, what was, for Ida at least, one of the most anticipated events of the trip—the British Library Association’s International Conference in Edinburgh. It was to be attended by about 2000 delegates. Florence Birch accompanied Ida Leeson to the conference as her companion. Most of the other delegates were men and some of the international visitors had brought their wives, but Ida’s situtation was unique. However, if Florence’s presence raised any eyebrows, it was certainly not the subject of public comment. I think the combination of Ida’s absolute confidence that her companion had a right to attend the conference and Florence’s ease in the company of professional people would have helped to make the situation appear unremarkable. William Ifould knew 48
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Librarians’ travels of the arrangement, but made no comment upon it in his letters to Ida. The conference started in London where the 100 international delegates were picked up in four charabancs for a five-day preconference library tour—to Oxford, Birmingham, Manchester and York—and then on to Edinburgh by train via Glasgow where they visited that city’s Mitchell Library. Ida listed for William Ifould some of the occupants of the charabanc she rode in, who included senior men of the library world (many bearing the title Doctor or Professor) from Yale, Chicago, Boston, Washington, Czechoslovakia, Sweden and Paris. She attended all the conference sessions and spent lunchtimes and evenings ‘networking’ assiduously with other librarians. The only female librarian she mentions is, somewhat predictably, the head of New York Public Library’s Children’s Department. The conference must have been an expensive exercise and, although Ida appears to have asked for funding, her request does not seem to have been successful. She noted to Ifould on her arrival in London in June: ‘I didn’t expect that the government would pay, so wasn’t disappointed by what you said.’ Her verdict on the conference was that it and the pre-conference tour ‘were memorable experiences’ and that ‘everything possible was done for the comfort and happiness of the overseas visitors’. She added that the ‘civic receptions at Birmingham, Manchester, and Edinburgh specially impressed the Americans!’. When Ida was researching in the Public Record Office in August she had found that there was an enormous quantity of material there. There was a wealth of material in the Admiralty records relating to confidential reports on the South Pacific islands by officers-in-charge of the Australian station.27 With her trademark tenacity, she implored Ifould to extend her leave: If I may be permitted to repeat the suggestion—I really think that I could do worthwhile work for the Mitchell here. And, as I am here, without any expense to the Government, it seems
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that it might be worthwhile prolonging the stay for that purpose. Special pleading! Partly, of course.
She succeeded in obtaining an extra two weeks and managed to secure berths for herself and Florence on the Moldavia (‘first class berths to Colombo, which will cost us an extra 10 pounds each!’), arriving in Sydney on 29 December 1927 at the end of a momentous year. It was one that must have shown William Ifould that Ida Leeson was well qualified to become a future Mitchell Librarian.
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5
‘Men prefer to deal with men’
‘Men prefer to deal with men’
i
n 1932, Sydney was in the grip of the Great Depression. That year the single word ‘Eternity’ started appearing on the city’s footpaths, chalked in elegant copperplate script. On the low window ledges that ran along the Bent Street wall of the Public Library, the young women library assistants placed sandwiches left over from their lunches for the homeless men who passed there in the late afternoon on their way to the Domain for the night.1 The caretaker’s wife, Mrs Newton, also hung parcels of sandwiches on the iron railings in the back lane, outside the entrance to the flat where she lived with her husband and children. Some of the Domain dwellers were regulars in the reading room. Even though unheated and poorly ventilated, near freezing in winter and sweltering in summer, the library provided some kind of shelter for these men. A few were memorable: ‘the well-dressed “specialty salesman”, filling in his day reading overseas technical journals and becoming more and more shabby as the year went on’; the ‘tall thin consumptive with his huge dark deep-set eyes who was obviously hungry’2; the poorly dressed man in a bowler hat who paced up and down the reading room, looking ‘just like a blowfly’.3 51
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There was celebration as well as deprivation that year. The structure that had dominated the skyline for nearly a decade, the wings of its great arch gradually stretching across the harbour to link the city and the north shore, was complete. Two years earlier, its promise as a symbol of progress had been encapsulated in Grace Cossington Smith’s painting The Bridge in Curve, in which the cranes poised to join the final section of the arch resemble winged angels against an apocalyptic sky. Black-and-white photographs of the opening ceremony on 19 March show a sea of people assembled to witness Premier J.T. Lang cut the ribbon and declare the Sydney Harbour Bridge open to the public. Ida Leeson was almost undoubtedly among them. Sydney was her domain and she knew its history intimately; she was also keenly aware of history in the making. Colleagues who worked with her in later life after she had left the Mitchell Library comment on how she kept them enthralled at lunchtime with her ‘total recall of the events of her life’. One of them remarked how they enjoyed her talk ‘for its sense of Sydney life—its continuity, stretching back—and the close-up saltiness of everyday Sydney and its characters’.4 One of Ida’s anecdotes may have concerned the spectacle of a man in captain’s uniform riding a horse through the assembled crowd on the bridge to slash the ribbon with a borrowed sword before the premier could perform the deed, shouting as he did so, ‘I declare this Bridge open in the name of the people of New South Wales, in the name of common decency, and decent politics.’5 Ida’s opinions on the event would have been illuminating if we had them, as the action of Francis de Groot, a member of the anti-Communist New Guard, was a protest against the Labor premier and symbolic of the political factions that had caused serious civil unrest in those desperate economic times. Jack Lang was dismissed by the governor less than two months later and his party was swept from power at the June elections by the United Australia and Country Party coalition headed by B.S.B. Stevens. William Ifould, whose politics leant towards the right, was openly critical of Lang’s government after the dismissal. Ida 52
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‘Men prefer to deal with men’ Leeson’s politics appear to have been based on personalities rather than a consistent left or right position, but whatever her opinions on the matter were, the incoming government was to have a significant bearing on her future.
Ida had continued as Principal Accessions Officer after she returned from her overseas trip at the end of 1927. Like the other senior public servants, her salary had been reduced progressively from the beginning of 1930 because of the depression, in her case from £510 to just under £420 a year. By 1932, like several of her colleagues on the Library staff, she was silently awaiting an announcement from Mitchell Librarian Hugh Wright, who was approaching retirement age. At fortyseven, Ida Leeson was in her prime; with her distinctive dress and gruff manner, she was a well-known library figure, loved and respected by some, disliked, even feared by others. When Hugh Wright submitted his letter of resignation to the Board of Trustees in August, the cue was given for his potential successors to step forward. The process of finding the successor to Hugh Wright and, ultimately, the Principal Librarian had actually begun many years before as William Ifould watched the rise in numbers in female library staff with growing anxiety. When he was appointed Principal Librarian in 1912, eleven of the twenty-six clerical and professional members of staff were women. By 1920 the proportion had risen exponentially as social mores changed, particularly after World War I, and more women, many with university degrees, entered the professions open to them, such as teaching and librarianship. As we have seen, two women were among the most senior staff in the library hierarchy. There were others not far below them and male librarians were starting to look like a threatened species. Young men would join the library as they studied for their law, medicine or engineering degrees and then move on to more lucrative and prestigious careers. Getting men 53
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to regard librarianship to be a career in its own right seemed increasingly difficult. William Ifould had begun to express his anxieties about accepting women into the library profession at the start of the new century. Long before he joined the Public Library of New South Wales, he was concerned about H.C.L. Anderson’s employment of women as library assistants and his public endorsement of the practice. Anderson had made his position public in his article, ‘Women as Library Assistants’ in the Library Record of Australasia of October 1901, and in his subsequent address to the Library Association in April 1902. Ifould responded to the address with a letter published in the Library Record of June 1902. In it he warns that if women were to occupy the intermediate positions in the profession, it would not be possible ‘to procure properly trained officers in the higher positions that can only be filled by males’. His concern was not entirely academic. Ifould, then twenty-four years old, was in that intermediate position himself. Having started at the Public Library of South Australia as a cadet ten years earlier, he was now embarking on a part-time Bachelor of Arts degree. ‘It is difficult even now to keep well-educated and well-trained men in the profession,’ he adds in his letter. He appears to have perceived that times were changing and that the days when boys left school and entered professions such as librarianship as cadets were numbered. As it happens, when he was appointed Principal Librarian in South Australia in 1905 he had not quite completed his degree. He never did complete it, but the time had not yet come when it would be impossible for a librarian to reach the top of the profession without a degree. ‘Will not the status of the librarian also suffer from this incursion of women?’ Ifould asks at the end of his letter, concluding, ‘At one time any learned “old woman” who was a hopeless failure in any other profession, was suitable for librarianship, but “the old order changeth, yielding place to new”.’ Replacing his emasculated ‘old woman’ with living, breathing women was not an option as it would only threaten a new order 54
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‘Men prefer to deal with men’ that was attempting to establish librarianship as a prestigious, ‘masculine’ career. Ifould was to become a perfect example of what he saw as the new order: not a bookish intellectual but, as we have seen already, a librarian who operated like a clever businessman. Even though he himself had not completed his degree, he wanted librarianship to be taken seriously as a profession alongside law, which meant it required a higher academic status than it had hitherto achieved. The paradoxes here are quite complex to tease out. If working with books was seen as a female occupation in Australia because it was associated with ‘culture’,6 why didn’t booksellers, like the empire-building George Robertson, suffer from anxieties about the manliness of their profession? Perhaps the business/trade element secured their position in the gender hierarchy. Another part of the conundrum lay in the old understanding, which still held some currency, that great librarians were inspired men, philosophers who were born rather than trained.7 But librarians in the fairly recent domain of public libraries were also public servants involved in a helping profession, traditionally a female domain. Many years later, Manning Clark was to praise ‘the handmaidens’ of the Mitchell Library in an address there.8 A similar set of paradoxes applied to the public teaching service in the early part of the twentieth century. Although the revered great teacher/philosophers of the past were men, teaching was also regarded as woman’s ‘natural mission’, as an extension of motherhood. In practice, women, who greatly outnumbered men in the service, were restricted to the lower levels of teaching, the school principals and inspectors being men. There was also a conscious effort to recruit more men into that profession in order to maintain the hierarchy.9 It is perhaps pertinent to note that librarians such as H.C.L. Anderson, Hugh Wright and William Ifould were all vitally interested in the bricks and mortar of their profession: architecture, library design, library fittings and electrical systems. Of course, such issues were crucial during the years of their incumbencies for the development of the New South Wales institution, but 55
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the zeal with which Ifould, in particular, pursued his goal of the new public library building towards the end of his career can perhaps be understood to have at least some basis in the gender anxieties that surrounded the profession. Anything to do with building is definitely a masculine domain. Although he retired in early 1942, just months before the new library was completed, the building represents the culmination of William Ifould’s library career and is a tangible memorial to it. A bronze bust of his determined head by Arthur Fleischman still stands on a marble plinth in the vestibule of what is now the extended Mitchell Library and there is a story that he commissioned it himself and asked the library staff to contribute to its cost.10 Whether truth or library myth, it is a story that somehow fits the figure once described by a junior staff member (female) as a ‘good-looking small man with the confidence which sometimes goes with men of small stature’.11 Ironically, in the early 1970s Sydney sociologist Michael Cass was to cause a furore when he blamed Anderson and Ifould for the ‘feminisation’ of the library profession, arguing that they had destroyed its image and status with the increased employment of women, resulting in low prestige and low pay.12 A case of swings and roundabouts?
In September 1919, after Ifould had asked the Board of Trustees to consider what limitations it would propose on the promotion of women to the higher positions, the Board passed a resolution that no woman would be appointed Principal Librarian or Deputy Principal Librarian.13 Ifould, in conjunction with the Public Service Board, had already set in place ways to actively recruit new male staff to groom for the highest positions. He had some failures in his attempts to head-hunt suitable candidates from around Australia, but two who were employed in the early 1920s stayed: Samuel Thomas Otho Pentelow, from Ifould’s old library in South Australia, appointed in 1921, and John Wallace Metcalfe, from Fisher Library at the University of Sydney, who started in 1923. 14 Both young men worked for a decade after their 56
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‘Men prefer to deal with men’ appointments as the only male library assistants while the Principal Librarian prepared them for seniority, aware of the rumblings amongst the women, especially those with library qualifications. John Metcalfe remembers that, at first, they used to sit alternately at the front desk and take people’s bags (‘attendants’ work’) and he also remembers being abused at the reference desk by readers ‘for doing women’s work’.15 At thirty, ‘Otto’ Pentelow (as he was known) was regarded as a capable officer by Ifould, but one who ‘needed a bit of prodding’.16 He had almost finished a degree at the University of Adelaide and his new boss sent him to Christopher Brennan, then Professor of German, for tutoring. Long-faced and lugubriouslooking, Pentelow eventually ran the reading room of the General Reference Library, but never achieved greater heights. Later library staff found him a mysterious character: Wilma Radford said he was ‘elusive’, with ‘a habit of appearing and disappearing suddenly’; Jean Arnot thought he might have been a secret drinker. Daphne Gollan believed that, as head of the reading room, he had a lot of influence on the selection of books, remarking, ‘Otto was very fond of organ music and fishing so they’ve got quite a good collection.’17 John Metcalfe fell into librarianship by accident after his mother saw an advertisement in the newspapers for a position at Fisher Library in 1917. He had passed the Public Service entrance examination in 1916 at the age of fifteen and was working in the State Taxation Department at the time. During his six years as a library assistant at Fisher he studied part time for his Arts degree, which he completed in 1923. Although highly intelligent and well read, John Metcalfe was not as committed to the Public Library during the 1920s as William Ifould would have liked: continuing his studies, applying unsuccessfully for several other jobs, and contemplating a degree in law. ‘I went to Billy one day,’ he recalled years later, ‘and said could I do law, take lectures and he said no. I wasn’t upset. I think if I’d done law lectures, I could have finished up a District Court Judge, possibly as a Supreme Court Judge, I don’t know.’18 57
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Ifould and Metcalfe were dissimilar in every way: the urbane, articulate librarian and rose-grower from an impeccable South Australian family versus an awkward, dishevelled young man whose father had been a factory foreman in England, who had bohemian tastes and held left-wing political views, and who was a hopeless public speaker. His nickname when he was an Arts student was ‘Onions’.19 In the words of Wilma Radford, who was to become a close colleague, John Metcalfe was ‘deliberately a rough diamond’.20 The Principal Librarian did his best over the years to polish his unlikely choice and allay the discord among the women on the staff, sending him to elocution lessons and insisting both he and Otto Pentelow sit for the library examinations he had devised for Public Library staff. Otto passed those without trouble but never managed to finish his degree, while John passed Library Economy but obtained only 40 per cent in Cataloguing. After six months cataloguing practice, he was recommended for promotion to Senior Library Assistant in 1929.21 When the position of Mitchell Librarian was advertised within the public service in August 1932, John Metcalfe and Otto Pentelow were the two male applicants alongside three women: Nita Kibble, Zoe Bertles (head of the country circulation department) and Ida Leeson. All three women outstripped the male candidates in experience, some in qualifications as well. The small, bird-like Nita Kibble, who always wore her hair in a little knot on top of her head, was well placed as the longest serving and most senior applicant. By 1912, she had passed every examination for which she was eligible as a non-graduate. After William Ifould introduced the higher grade library examination as a measure of further professionalising librarianship, she equipped herself to sit for it by doing a two-year evening course at the University of Sydney and a year’s specialised study at the Library. She followed this with a further course at university in Technological Chemistry which equipped her to head the new research service in the General Reference Library, started by 58
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‘Men prefer to deal with men’ Ifould in 1919 in response to the demand for technical information on manufacturing products.22 Achieving all this while holding down a full-time job and bringing up her niece must have required Nita’s utmost dedication. In fact, she worked more than full-time hours because Ifould had traded on her devotion to him, allowing her to carry her immediate superior, George Gifford, the incompetent Assistant Librarian who had worked in the library for more than forty years. George Gifford finally retired in 1924 but, based on evidence from an eighteen-month period between 1917 and 1919, Nita Kibble did 672 hours of unpaid overtime on his duties.23 Zoe Bertles, another small, slight woman, originally from country New South Wales, had joined the Public Library as a library assistant in January 1916. She was one of the first female Bachelor of Economics graduates at the University of Sydney, taking out a combined arts/economics degree in 1916. In 1919 she topped the higher grade library examination and in 1920 she was promoted to Officer-in-Charge of the new country circulation department, initiated to provide services in the form of ‘travelling libraries’ to regional areas.24 From their cramped quarters in the basement of the Mitchell Library the staff sent out boxes of books around the State. The department moved to a new ‘basement’ in 1928. Commonly known as ‘The Bunker’ by the staff, this squat stone edifice constructed on the north-eastern side of the Mitchell wing was to be the base of the next stage of the proposed ‘National Library’ building. Inside her fort, Zoe Bertles developed country services to schools throughout New South Wales to an unprecedented level in Australia. The third small, slight woman in the trio of female applicants for the Mitchell Library position was, of course, Ida Leeson. Unlike her colleagues, Ida never did take the library examinations, finishing her formal education with her History Honours degree. ‘I don’t know what training she had in library work, whether she ever sat for library exams,’ Jean Arnot sniffs in her 1985 interview. ‘I don’t think those women had to go for examinations in those early days, so I shouldn’t imagine that she was trained fully as a 59
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librarian.’25 Jean did have some grounds for resentment. Ida had slipped through the cracks, employed before the compulsory higher grade examination was initiated for graduates and nongraduates alike. Nita Kibble, who had been the first woman employed in the Public Library, seven years before Ida’s appointment, had been obliged to undertake the examination because, as a non-graduate, she was ineligible for promotion without it. Zoe Bertles, as a much later appointment, was required to take it in spite of the fact she had tertiary qualifications. Ida Leeson had learnt her formidable library skills on the job from the likes of Christopher Brennan and Margaret Windeyer. She had then honed them over the next twenty or so years. Her training working on cataloguing the Mitchell bequest, her years as Principal Accessions Officer building the General Reference collection and dealing with London agents and the book trade, her proven abilities as a researcher of the highest order during her long-service trip in 1927 and, above all, her passion for and knowledge of Australiana combined to make her the pre-eminent applicant for the Mitchell Library position. She had the determined focus that William Ifould had looked for in vain in his search for a male successor; what a shame Ida was a woman! In August 1932, William Ifould had reminded the Board of Trustees that ‘every endeavour should be made to appoint a man to this second position on the staff because of the necessity for having a successor to myself as Principal Librarian’.26 In spite of that, after the applications were in, he acknowledged that Ida Leeson was the best candidate. His only reservation was the curious one that she was too friendly with her juniors.27 Did he feel she lacked a suitable distance and authority to be a good manager, or was he perhaps worried that she was inspiring a following of women who would also stand up to him? Among the Trustees, T.D. Mutch, a former Labor Minister for Education, strongly favoured Ida for the position. A majority of Trustees agreed with him and in September they nominated Ida Leeson for Mitchell Librarian. 60
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‘Men prefer to deal with men’ You could be forgiven for thinking that Ida would get the position with these recommendations, but no, there were further obstacles to deal with, principally in the form of the Minister for Education, D.H. Drummond, who had regained the position he had held from 1927 to 1930 when the Lang government was overthrown in June 1932. David Henry Drummond and Ida Leeson shared some unlikely connections: both were born on 11 February (Drummond five years later than Ida), both were born in Leichhardt and both were brought up in straitened circumstances after their fathers who worked in the building trade suffered losses in the 1890s depression.28 Drummond’s childhood was even more troubled than Ida’s as his mother died when he was two and his stepmother abandoned him; as a result he became a ward of the state at twelve years of age. In adulthood he became a farmer in Inverell in northern New South Wales where he was involved in the setting up of the Progressive Party (later the Country Party) and then embarked on a political career. He achieved much in his career, including being instrumental in the establishment of the Armidale Teachers’ College in 1928. William Ifould found a congenial spirit in David Drummond when the minister mooted a complete redesign of the besieged new library building in the 1930s, using cheaper methods of construction.29 And Hugh Wright belatedly had his preference for a rectangular reading room granted when the original plans for a circular room and dome were abandoned in the redesign. However, and without making any necessary connections to David Henry Drummond’s motherless childhood, it must be said that this conservative politician was no supporter of women’s rights. Just before the Trustees had nominated their choice for Mitchell Librarian, this new Minister for Education had been responsible for the passing of the Married Women (Teachers and Lecturers) Act 1932, which abolished the existing right of married women to permanent employment and required that women resign from the service upon marriage. Stating that it was an emergency measure, the Minister resisted arguments of discrimination by the Opposition and the New South Wales 61
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Teachers’ Federation. A 1970s feminist reappraisal found that the ‘1932 Act can be seen both as a step backwards for women and an illustration of social conditions and attitudes during the great depression’.30 In such a climate, it is no wonder people who knew Ida Leeson at the time say that she was worried about her chances of being chosen to become the new Mitchell Librarian because of her gender. On 13 October G.R. Thomas, the Undersecretary for the Department of Education, wrote to William Ifould stating that: The Minister has given consideration to this matter and he is of the opinion that in filling the vacancy to be declared by Mr Wright’s retirement, consideration should be given to the need for appointing an officer who, with training, would be a likely successor to the Principal Librarian when the time for that officer’s retirement falls due.
The proposed solution to the predicament was a startling one: ‘To this end the Minister considers that the office of Mitchell Librarian should be abolished and a new position, viz, that of Deputy Principal Librarian should be created, and that such office should be filled by a man.’31 Thomas had obviously aided the Minister’s decision, having offered him a series of objections as to why a woman should not deputise for the Principal Librarian (as Hugh Wright had done), or succeed him. Could a woman administer funds, manage investments, control staff, or represent the Library? His problems really boiled down to the fact that most negotiations would be carried on with men and ‘men prefer to deal with men’.32 Five days later, Ifould responded to Drummond that ‘the Trustees had very carefully considered his communication but that they still adhered to their nomination of Miss Ida Leeson for the position of Mitchell Librarian, as they regarded her as specially suitable for that position’.33 However, they were prepared to discuss the matter. Of the Trustees, Tom Mutch and Labor journalist H.E. Boote wanted the most able person, irrespective 62
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‘Men prefer to deal with men’ of gender. Sir Daniel Levy, Speaker of the Legislative Assembly, also thought it was possible for a woman to become Principal Librarian. The other three on the committee—W.F. Gale, W.F. Leighton Bailey and E.C. Sommerlad—agreed with David Drummond that the Principal Librarian must be a man.34 In November they reached a compromise, that Ida Leeson would be offered the Mitchell Librarian’s position, but that a new position of Deputy Principal Librarian would be created, to be offered to John Metcalfe. In effect, the Mitchell Librarian had been downgraded to third in the Library hierarchy with a concomitant reduction in salary. Ida Leeson was in Melbourne with Florence Birch when the offer was made in early December, having retreated to the comfort of Florence’s brother’s home, where she was regarded as one of the family, to sit out the seemingly endless, nail-biting process. We can only imagine her mixed feelings: she had won the position she coveted and deserved, but had to suffer the humiliation of a candidate who was not qualified for that job being offered a position above her. To add insult to injury, John Metcalfe was given Ida’s old job as Principal Accessions Officer as well as ‘taking charge if the Principal Librarian was away’. As Metcalfe noted after his retirement, ‘It wasn’t a question of being his assistant day by day. Ifould didn’t want any assistance.’35 There was furore among the feminists, outrage and gossip among the staff. The newspapers had already leaked the possibility of a rearrangement of the top positions and on 1 December leading women’s rights activist Jessie Street wrote a strongly worded letter to the Board of Trustees commending them on their nomination of Ida Leeson, but stating: We have been informed that among those in whose hands the appointment rests, the opinion has been expressed that it would lower the dignity of the position were it filled by a woman. Needless to say, we regard this opinion as one which is offensive to women as a whole. We consider that it is the position which clothes the individual with its dignity.36
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Prominent activists, Mildred Muscio and Linda Littlejohn, wrote letters to the newspapers asking questions and making complaints about the decision. Jean Arnot, on the other hand, blamed Ida Leeson herself for the situation that was such ‘a bitter blow’ to women. She felt very strongly that Mr Ifould, ‘who was very keen on women librarians . . . was so fed up with the bickering of Miss Leeson in particular . . . that that was why Mr Metcalfe was made Deputy Librarian’.37 Various protests from library staff were made to the Public Service Board as resentments simmered. Five librarians—Ida Parsons, Monica Flower, Zoe Bertles, Mollie Barrington and Otto Pentelow—protested against John Metcalfe’s appointment on the grounds that he was junior to them. Nita Kibble protested against Ida Leeson’s appointment on the grounds of her seniority on the staff, taking her appeal directly to the Premier. Ida herself prepared an appeal of several pages and, aided by Tom Mutch, took it to the Public Service Board in May 1933. ‘The grounds of my appeal are two,’ she wrote, ‘a) the inadequacy of the salary fixed, and the method of arriving at the amount; b) the seniority granted to Mr Metcalfe, in spite of his lower salary and shorter period of service.’ In elaborating on the second ground, she states her case bluntly: As the Public Service Board knows, that appointment was made, not because of any unfitness on my part to act in the Principal Librarian’s absence, but because of official opposition to a woman occupying, even for a few days, such an administrative position. The Trustees of the Library were forced to make the nomination of a Deputy Principal Librarian because the authorities would not accept my nomination as Mitchell Librarian unless accompanied by such nomination. Mr Metcalfe was actually placed fourth among the officers considered for the Mitchell Librarianship, in the Principal Librarian’s report on suitability of the officers available, and in the Committee’s consideration of those officers.38
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‘Men prefer to deal with men’ All the appeals were unsuccessful and the decisions concerning the Mitchell Librarian and Deputy Principal Librarian were upheld. Rumour has it that Ida Leeson and John Metcalfe communicated only via memo for some considerable period of time. John Metcalfe himself, recalling the situation in 1974 from the comfort of retirement, felt that ‘statements made that women were denied promotion to the higher echelons of the State Library’ were ‘utter nonsense’.39 He considered that ‘part of this involved the rights for women issue’ and contended that ‘Miss Leeson was a leading feminist . . . regarded by everyone beyond her real abilities as a genius’. He conceded that she was ‘able’, but also pointed out that ‘she was the one woman who really did not allow herself to be dominated by the Principal Librarian, Ifould’. In fact, the three women who applied for the Mitchell Librarian’s position were all ranked higher than Metcalfe. Ida Leeson certainly seems to have believed it was her right to achieve the highest echelons of her profession. But does that make her ‘a leading feminist’? Although she did campaign quite extensively for equal pay for women in the public service and higher pay for graduates, she was not aligned with the middleclass, liberal feminist movement of her time in the way that other women in the library, such as Jean Arnot, were. Jean states emphatically that Ida ‘didn’t take an active part in women’s affairs’. Jean adds, ‘She wasn’t working for women, like she wasn’t a feminist in that way.’40 Unlike Margaret Windeyer and Maude Fitzhardinge, Ida was not a habitué of Rose Scott’s feminist salon. She had no personal association with Jessie Street and her ilk. Ida Leeson from ‘Struggletown’ was simply in competition with the male librarians at the Public Library. Yet it would be disingenuous to ignore the fact that meanings assigned to words can differ according to the position of the speaker, that language can be encoded in quite specific ways. The term ‘feminist’ has been (at least since the 1970s when John Metcalfe made his comment) sometimes used to imply ‘lesbian’ and ‘man-hater’ by those who wish to denigrate independent, forthright women. Such usage, of course, has infuriated both 65
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heterosexual feminists and lesbians, if for different reasons, as it shows no understanding of either feminism or sexual preference. John Metcalfe was aware of Ida Leeson’s efforts to establish women as equals in the library profession, but his description of Ida as ‘a leading feminist’ may also be a swipe at her ‘mannish’ appearance (code lesbian) and the fact that she was not intimidated by men (code man-hater). Was Ida Leeson a lesbian and just what does that mean? Was she a man-hater as John Metcalfe implies? Let us look at her life outside the Mitchell Library in order to address these quite complex questions. What can be said at the outset is that, apart from her beloved Florence Birch, Ida’s idols tended to be men, though none to my knowledge were librarians.
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6
Ida and Florence Ida and Florence
r
esearching a life can at times seem an unrewarding, even tedious process, especially when every avenue turns out to be a cul-de-sac. You read in the archives that a brother destroyed his sister’s personal letters and effects after she died; you track down relatives who are generous with their time and memories, but who apologise for how little they know; occasionally you are refused an interview. Old friends and colleagues of your subject say ‘I wish I’d kept those letters she sent me’ or ‘I wish I’d paid more attention when she told us those vivid anecdotes of her life at morning tea’. Then, just when it seems as though there is no more to discover, a wonderful, unexpected breakthrough makes the whole journey worthwhile. In my experience there have been only two such memorable moments, and both have involved photographs. The first occurred during research for a biography on poet, Mary Fullerton, when I was shown a photograph of Mabel Singleton, the young woman to whom Mary had written many passionate love poems—it was a milestone in that story. The second breakthrough happened during my research on Ida Leeson, and again it was a photograph that cast a whole new light on her personal life. 67
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When broadcaster Ros Bowden was commissioned by the Mitchell Library to conduct a series of interviews in the 1980s with people who had known Ida Leeson, she asked each interviewee if they knew how and when Ida came to meet Florence Birch.1 No one knew. My experience was the same. Everyone I spoke to knew about Florence’s existence; some had met her. They said Ida talked about her constantly, they knew the two women had lived together for years, but nobody knew the origin of their relationship. At a time when I thought I had exhausted all avenues in my research, I travelled three hours from Sydney to visit a great-niece of Ida Leeson’s. To my surprise, I was shown a sepia photograph that placed Ida and Florence Birch together as young women. No one outside the family had ever seen this photo before. It was a studio portrait of Ida and Florence dressed in the long skirts of pre-World War I fashion. The address of the studio was in Melbourne, not Sydney. Although the photograph is undated, I was able to give it a time range by finding out that the Yeoman’s Crown Studio, which took the portrait, operated between 1908 and 1916. This means that when the photograph was taken, Ida could have been as young as twenty-three. In the painted backdrop behind the two women, a path winds away towards a stone staircase in what appears to represent an English park. Ida is perched on the edge of a wicker chair, thin hands nervously clutching an open magazine, feet in shiny lace-up boots crossed awkwardly under the ankle-length skirt of her suit. Her dark hair is long, scraped back from her face and gathered unceremoniously into a knot just visible at the back of her neck. She stares seriously into the camera, perhaps myopically as she does not seem to be wearing her glasses. Florence, by contrast, is a vision of studied elegance. In long dark skirt and frothy blouse, she is draped over a cushion on a footstool, leaning on one elbow against the seat of a dining chair. A black velvet band encircles her neck, her fair hair swept into an elaborate chignon above a straight-nosed profile. Every description I had heard about the pair, such as ‘the odd couple’ and ‘like chalk and cheese’, was apparent in this 68
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Ida and Florence portrait, even though Ida had not yet adopted the cropped hair style that she favoured for the rest of her life. Inspired by the portrait, I redoubled my efforts to find out more about Florence Maud Birch. I already knew she was born in November 1873 in the remote West Coast goldmining town of Stafford, on New Zealand’s South Island, where her father was Clerk of the Court. The third of seven children of Paul Adolphus Frederick and Annie Maud Birch, as a young girl Florence moved with her family to the North Island in 1879 when her father was appointed Sheriff in Napier. In 1891 the family migrated to Melbourne, arriving on the SS Wairarapa on 23 October, just weeks before Florence’s eighteenth birthday, and her father opened a law practice. At this point in time, the trail of Florence’s life stopped and wasn’t picked up again until much later when Ida and Florence were already in a long-established relationship. Then the portrait appeared. Now a fortuitous lead directed me to the Young Women’s Gazette, the magazine of the Sydney branch of the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA).2 In it, I discovered that Florence Birch had been appointed Assistant Secretary of the YWCA in 1908, a paid position which meant she was in charge of the Industrial and Social Department of the organisation housed in Castlereagh Street. The four departments of the YWCA were the Theological, Industrial and Social, Educational, and Business departments. As the Sydney branch was the first to initiate a training scheme for branch secretaries in 1910, it is likely Florence was involved, taking courses in subjects such as the Modern Factory System, Practical Sanitation, and Physical Training and Hygiene.3 One of her duties involved visiting workplaces at lunch breaks and speaking to the women workers. Florence also organised social activities such as evening programmes of ‘music, recitations and games’ for around 130 members of the Central Girl’s Club. The woman described by those who knew her as effusive and outgoing enjoyed thespian activities too, acting in entertainments (in one she played ‘a lady of wealth and fashion’) and speaking in debates on subjects like 69
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‘Does home or business life better prepare a girl for womanhood?’. One social and educational activity she did not organise but may well have taken part in was the Literary Circle, established in 1908 under the leadership of some University of Sydney graduates. At its meetings papers were read ‘on various authors and individual books’, with the group’s ‘object being to follow regular study with intelligent criticism and appreciation, free discussion holding a regular part in the programme’.4 One of the ‘ladies’ listed as a speaker in the Circle was Miss Ida Leeson. Was it at this early twentieth-century version of the modern book club that Ida Leeson met Florence Birch? Ida’s name crops up in the YWCA’s activities frequently over the next few years: as a full member of the Association, as responsible for the Student’s Library and as the contact person for subscribing to the Y’s National Quarterly. These positions would have been voluntary and, although Ida always remained a religious sceptic, the YWCA was a progressive organisation that would have offered her both a social life and the opportunity to use her skills outside work. It is very likely that Ida and Florence began their friendship at the YWCA. The Young Women’s Gazette reports that over the Christmas period each year Florence Birch spent her holidays with her family in Melbourne and we know now that Ida Leeson accompanied her.5 Without doubt, it was on one of these holiday occasions that the photograph of Ida and Florence was taken by the Yeoman’s Crown Studio in Bourke Street. It is not mentioned in the Gazette, but Florence would almost certainly have returned to Melbourne on the occasion of her father’s death in 1911. On their trips to Melbourne, the two women usually stayed at the Victoria Coffee Palace, a large temperance hotel in Little Collins Street. From their base at the hotel they would visit Florence’s favourite brother Harry, manager of the South Melbourne branch of the English, Scottish and Australian Bank. He and his wife Honora lived on the bank premises and their three sons, Hugh, born in 1916, and twins Sidney and Louis (Charles), born in 1918, grew up there. Ida and Florence were to remain close to 70
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Ida and Florence Harry’s family over the years and, after Harry’s retirement in 1935, stayed with them on holidays at their property ‘The Hills’, in Montrose, on the lower slopes of the Dandenong Ranges. With the discovery of Florence’s position at the YWCA and Ida’s involvement in its social activities, I had located the beginning of the relationship that lasted almost fifty years, until Florence’s death in 1957. At that point I thought I only needed to discover when and where they began living together, to complete their story. Imagine my surprise when I read in the Young Women’s Gazette for March 1912 that Miss Birch had accepted an appointment as General Secretary to the YWCA in Wellington, New Zealand! The position of General Secretary was the highest office in a YWCA branch and the Gazette’s report was rapturous: We offer her our hearty congratulations, and wish her every blessing in her new sphere. She will be greatly missed by fellowworkers, and by a large circle of girls, who have grown to love her and to appreciate her valuable work amongst them.
The workers and girls would not have been the only ones to miss Florence Birch. What about Ida? Did she accept that this was a great promotion for her friend and rejoice in it? Given her determination to succeed in her own career, perhaps she did. But their friendship seems to have operated on a very special level even then and there is no evidence of any other close relationships in Ida’s life, male or female. And picture this: there is a Leeson family story that is told, with some amusement, about the time one of Ida’s brothers walked into the living room at the house in Leichhardt (where Ida lived with her mother until 1915) and was stopped in his tracks by an unusual sight—Florence, so the story goes, was seated in an armchair while Ida knelt at her feet holding her hands.6 Could she have been imploring Florence to stay? Perhaps the studio photograph in Melbourne was taken at the beginning of 1912, when Florence was waiting to hear if she was to be offered the position. Can we read into Ida’s serious 71
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demeanour an indication of her feelings, or was it simply her usual lack of ease in front of a camera? These tantalising glimpses inviting speculation must remain just that but, if the two women were attracted to each other, social constraints would have made any open declaration of affection difficult, certainly in the friendship’s early stages. Situations that may be comparable to that of Ida Leeson and Florence Birch can be found in the work of Australian women poets of the period. In Melbourne, Lesbia Harford, who was six years younger than Ida, wrote many poems to Katie Lush, the philosophy tutor she was in love with. One untitled poem written in 1915 finishes: Would that I were Sappho, Greece my land, not this! There the noblest women, When they loved, would kiss.7
Mary Fullerton, also in Melbourne, met the woman she was eventually to live with for the rest of her life in 1909, around the time Ida met Florence in Sydney. Over the next few years Mary wrote many love poems imploring her friend to recognise her ‘destiny’. One called ‘Touch’ begins: Take me by the hand love Take me by the hand Touch is more than word love To make me understand.8
Ida Leeson did not leave any personal poems, letters or diaries that might give us clues to her feelings towards her friend at this time, but we can say with a degree of certainty that at the very least Ida missed Florence when she departed for distant shores in March 1912. From the YWCA Gazette we learn that Florence returned to Australia from Wellington each year, usually in early January, 72
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Ida and Florence spending a night in Sydney before leaving for her annual holiday in Melbourne. And we know that Ida went with her. On Florence’s first return trip, the February 1913 Gazette reports on an ‘at home’ that had been arranged by the YWCA for her stopover in Sydney, ‘to which a large number of Miss Birch’s friends came’. It also reported, ‘As one girl friend said: “She looked six years younger” and all listened with pleasure to her account of life in Wellington.’ On that trip Florence also gave a talk to the Melbourne YWCA, in which she ‘breezily introduced us to the Wellington Association’.9 The following November, Ida Leeson was one of the Sydney Association’s delegates at the National Triennial Convention in Melbourne, where Florence was also a delegate. In 1916, Florence came to Sydney in October to give an address at the next Triennial Convention. In this way, the two women spent some time together each year, even though Florence had to cross the Tasman by steamship, a voyage that was not without danger during wartime. The SS Wimmera, for instance, was sunk by a mine between Auckland and Sydney with the loss of twenty-six passengers and crew. One tangible reminder of Florence’s voyages was the row of deck chairs that her nephew remembers lining the verandah of their home. Apparently, she had to buy one on each voyage.10 By 1916, 31-year-old Ida was living in the inner city at 87 Phillip Street with her mother, her brothers William and Victor having married and set up their own homes. The Mitchell Library was just a short walk around the corner and up the hill. Mary Ann Leeson had returned to the occupation she had followed before she met Ida’s father in the 1870s—as landlady of a boarding house. In the days when there was little social welfare, managing boarding houses was a way for women to earn a living; the majority of proprietors were indeed female, often widows or deserted wives who rented the premises they operated from.11 Boarding houses were a dominant feature of Sydney life before blocks of self-contained flats started to be built in the 1920s and 1930s. The Census of 1911 gives a total of 3574 such establishments in Sydney and its suburbs. While boarding houses 73
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in Darlinghurst and Woolloomooloo tended to be home to society’s ‘drifters’, inhabitants of those in the inner city were more likely to be working people—clerks, mechanics, teachers and the like— many of whom had come to the growing city from the country to improve their lot. The Leesons’ 87 Phillip Street was a typical boarding establishment: a double-storey terrace that had once been grand, built for families of the professional classes, but then converted to house six or seven lodgers. Mary Ann Leeson died from a cerebral haemorrhage at age sixty-four in April 1920, but at least she lived long enough to see the clever daughter she had encouraged achieve her early promise. Ida, by then thirty-five, was Principal Accessions Officer at the Public Library, and was soon to embark on a new period of her life outside the library. Across the Tasman, Florence proved to be an energetic and inspired leader in her new role. The Wellington branch of the YWCA had started in 1906. After its first General Secretary resigned in 1908, honorary secretaries had managed it until the arrival of a ‘trained secretary from Sydney’ in April 1912, that is, Florence Birch.12 In her first year there the membership almost doubled, with 135 new recruits joining the branch. She invited prominent women to give talks to the ‘girls’. Among these was Dr Agnes Bennett, a University of Sydney graduate who had gone to Edinburgh to do her medical training. She visited the branch to give ‘health talks’ in 1912–13 and I wonder if that included some sex education.13 Dr Bennett was then prominent in medical circles in Wellington, where she was an expert at St Helens Hospital in the areas of women’s and children’s health; she was also a compassionate supporter of unmarried mothers.14 As well as administering the branch, Florence was a keen fundraiser for the purchase of the building the YWCA rented in Boulcott Street. During the war, that building was let to the YMCA as a soldiers’ hostel and the women’s organisation operated from a cramped, rented space elsewhere. Yet the fundraising continued and Florence ‘quietly canvassed’ contributors during her country tours. She also continued to take part in the branch’s 74
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Ida and Florence social and educational activities, among them leading a Business Girls’ Camp at Island Bay in 1916. The membership continued to rise, and by 1917 there were 920 members of the Wellington YWCA.15 Florence’s hard work was rewarded when in 1920 she was appointed the first National Field Secretary for the YWCA.16 Sent to the United States for six months’ study, she was granted £300 towards expenses. On her return in October, she was immediately dispatched on a hectic schedule around the country to establish branches in Whangarei, Gisborne and New Plymouth, organise hostels, launch financial appeals and attend conferences. For a time in 1922, she was also Acting General Secretary for the Wellington branch until the replacement arrived. By late 1922 Florence was exhausted. Even though her salary was raised to £225 per annum, she applied for a year’s leave and left for Australia on the Tahiti on 30 September. Seven months into her leave she tendered her resignation. Although she was asked to reconsider, she held to her decision and remained living in Sydney. The Wellington Gazette reported that ‘Miss Birch has done splendid pioneering work in New Zealand, and we feel that her resignation is a great loss to the Dominion. Our best wishes go with her’.17 While Florence represented New Zealand on the National Board of the YWCA in Sydney and later also became Senior Vice-President of the Kirribilli branch of the Red Cross, she effectively retired from paid employment in 1923. She was forty-nine years old. She could have returned to Melbourne where she had an ongoing offer of a home with her brother and his family, but she chose Sydney and this was the beginning of her shared life with Ida.
A head and shoulders portrait of Ida Leeson, taken at the Swiss Studios in Sydney, shows her on the cusp of the androgynous look that was to characterise her appearance for the rest of her life.18 Gone is the pulled-back hair, gone the awkward demeanour. She sports a stark Eton crop that seems to be greying at the sides, 75
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prefiguring the completely white hair she had when she became Mitchell Librarian at forty-seven. She wears a white blouse with a collar, ornamented by a simple brooch at its V neck and, although she stares solemnly at the camera through rimless pincenez highly arched over the bridge of her rather large nose, her mouth suggests the beginnings of a wry smile. The look is boyish rather than her later much commented-upon ‘mannish’ air. In this portrait, the young woman who thought she was ugly is starting to grow into her strong-jawed face. Undated, it is definitely post 1916, as that was when the studio moved to the address given. It is probably post 1918, when many women started cutting their hair in short crops that would have been unthinkable before the war. Ida Leeson would have looked like this when her friend returned to Sydney in 1922. Florence herself still had long hair, but the style was less elaborate and her face was more rounded, softening the slightly arch look of a decade earlier. The two women joined a new breed of Sydney inhabitants— those who lived in the self-contained flats that were starting to become part of the city and suburban landscape. For a time they lived in the Bencove Flats in Stanley Street, behind the Sydney Grammar School and a brisk walk for Ida along College and Macquarie streets to the Library. Ida’s brother Victor is said to have joked that the women did not realise they were living in the red light district, but if they were alerted to the fact it does not seem to have worried them unduly as they remained there for more than two years.19 By the early 1920s, Ida’s brothers both had families. She was closer to Victor’s three sons than she was to William’s daughter Nancy, who remembers her as being quite terrifying when she visited her in the Library as a child with her father.20 She feels her boy cousins were Ida’s favourites. Victor junior remembered his father dropping him off for the weekend when the women lived in Stanley Street and he also remembered them taking the boys out on picnics. Ida and Florence always visited the family at their home in Mosman for birthdays and Christmas when the boys’ aunt would present them with gifts.21 She usually gave them 76
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Ida and Florence books, something she also did for Florence’s nephews and for children of colleagues, hoping to instil in these young people the love of reading and the appreciation of knowledge that was so much part of her own life. Occasionally she ventured into toys. Victor junior received his first meccano set from his aunt and I can imagine she enjoyed helping him set it up. Ida also used to enjoy playing cricket with her nephews, while Florence sat in the lounge room talking to their mother, May. Ida’s sister-in-law said she often wondered what the neighbours thought when they saw this grown woman batting the cricket ball to the boys in the middle of the street.22 Most of 1927 was taken up with the two women’s extensive trip to the United States, Britain and Europe when Ida found the missing Matthew Flinders log in London. On their return, the couple took up residence in a flat in Milson Road, Cremorne. In December of the following year, Florence was called upon by the National Association of the YWCA to organise the fundraising for the purchase of premises to house the newly established Canberra branch. Her experience in the area from her time in New Zealand was, of course, well known and she had already been recruited to organise a special appeal for a new building for the Sydney branch in 1924.23 Now the Sydney Association offered her headquarters for the Canberra project. Her salary and expenses were to be the ‘first claim on money raised’.24 Although Florence had to undergo an operation in early 1929 (the reason for which is unknown), followed by several weeks of enforced rest, the committee she had set up continued the campaign until she was well enough to resume her work. By September 1930 the sum of £1700 was raised as the Sydney quota.25 During the 1920s, Florence’s spiritual inclinations took a new direction when the ideas of a spiritual movement known as ‘anthroposophy’ were introduced to Sydney by two New Zealanders, Edith and Robert Williams.26 A breakaway movement from theosophy, which also had a following in Australia, anthroposophy was founded by Rudolf Steiner in 1913 and had its headquarters in Switzerland. Encouraged by opera coach, Lute 77
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Drummond, who had just returned from several years in Europe and who had visited Steiner’s Goethenaeum at Dornach, Edith Williams rented a studio over the Kodak shop in George Street in 1920. There she started offering lessons on Rudolf Steiner’s teachings, which were not otherwise available in Australia. They began with a study of ‘Occult Science’. A group of seven people initiated the St John Group of the Anthroposophical Society in 1923. Florence joined a breakaway group run by Thomas Crawford McDowell five years later, in October 1928. McDowell’s property eventually provided substantial funds towards the creation of Glenaeon, the Rudolf Steiner school in Middle Cove, established in the 1950s under the motto ‘Education for Life’.27 Glenaeon is still the leader among a number of what are known as ‘Waldorf Schools’ which, with the curative homes for the disabled, are the most tangible legacies of Steiner’s philosophical teachings. Anthroposophy is a very difficult word to pronounce. Its theoretical principles are also difficult to articulate briefly, but in essence it ‘refers to the development of a spiritual science of and by humanity’, a science that incorporates body, soul and spirit and follows the stages of cosmic evolution.28 Working to counter materialism, anthroposophy is a non-utopian movement that is not based on ‘blind faith’ but on a ‘spiritual perception that is fully conscious’.29 Consequently, all aspects of life affect the development of the individual: food, colour, movement, to name a few. Bio-dynamic agriculture is an outcome of the philosophy, as is the gymnastic dance form known as ‘eurythmy’, a way of harmonising mind and body. To some, anthroposophy represents ‘benign dottiness’.30 For others, particularly in its heyday in Australia in the 1920s and 1930s, it became a driving force in their lives. This was certainly so with Florence Birch, and friends remember that her conversation was replete with anthroposophical language; water, for instance was always referred to as ‘cosmic fluid’. 31 Florence’s passionate interest in anthroposophy was to change the lives of herself and Ida Leeson. Although Ida never joined the movement, she thoroughly 78
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Ida and Florence supported her companion’s involvement and would quote her at length on the subject to colleagues at work. Through Florence’s new circle of friends, the women were brought into contact with two people who were embarking on an exciting project and who offered interested people a different way of living. American architects, Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin, first came to Australia from Chicago in 1912 as the winners of an international competition to design the Federal capital. That experience was in many ways devastating for the Griffins. Partly to compensate for his clashes with bureaucracy over Canberra, Walter Burley Griffin formed the Greater Sydney Development Association in 1921 in order to acquire land on three rocky peninsulas jutting into Middle Harbour. The Griffins’ vision was to build residential estates that would be completely different in philosophy and design from the proliferating red-brick suburbs of Sydney. Castlecrag, the only part to be fully developed, was built on the southern side of one of the Middle Harbour promontories. In Walter’s own words, Castlecrag was to be about ‘the things we stand for: preservation of natural beauty, unostentatious homes, healthy active life and the expression of it in the various forms of art’.32 Among the alternative and artistic people Castlecrag attracted were theosophists and anthroposophists, and Florence Birch was one of them. She and Ida may also have had their interest raised by another plan, though on a smaller scale than Walter Burley Griffin’s, to build a suburban village designed to exist in harmony with the landscape, begun in the late 1920s by garden designer Edna Walling in Mooroolbark, at the foot of the Dandenong Ranges outside Melbourne. Edna Walling was a well-known figure in Melbourne and Florence’s brother retired to Montrose, near Mooroolbark, a few years after ‘Bickleigh Vale’ was started.33 Some of the houses on the Middle Harbour promontory were rented out and vacancies were circulated by word of mouth to those in the know. In late 1929 or early 1930, Florence and Ida moved into 46 The Parapet, one of two identical, squat stone houses known, predictably, as the twin houses.34 Although they 79
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were only to live there for about three years, the women became an integral part of the unique Castlecrag community. They maintained their association with the community throughout the 1930s and the friendships they developed were part of their lives forever.
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7
Castlecrag and the Griffins
Castlecrag and the Griffins
i
n 1930, a decision to move to Castlecrag was not made lightly. It required a commitment to the Griffins and to a set of ideals. The rocky promontory in Middle Harbour was an outpost, without any of the conveniences most people took for granted. Four miles from Circular Quay, the nearest permanent transport was the tram at the Willoughby terminus with a change to the ferry at Milson’s Point. On occasions, a private bus ran from Castlecrag to the ferry, but for a long time the only way to travel the two miles to the tram stop in Mowbray Road was on foot. Ida Leeson was a keen walker, but this must have tested even her capacities, and patience. There was no sewerage or gas at Castlecrag, and electricity and even water were not easy to get.1 A few small shops on Edinburgh Road at the entrance to the estate serviced the area, with bread and milk being delivered to the residents by horse-drawn cart. The young Ronald Rivett, son of the doctor who opened Cabarisha Hospital there in the late 1920s, remembers ‘the eerie and mysterious aura of the bleak Castlecrag peninsula, which at night, with the distant baying of sundry hounds, often struck chill to my child soul’.2 However, beyond the night fears of a sensitive boy, Castlecrag was a haven 81
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for children. And for the daring adult, Walter and Marion Griffin’s vision of a new way of living in harmony with nature and with other people was compelling. The Griffins had a horror of conventional suburbia with its red-roofed, red-brick houses side by side in regular rows on streets that took no account of neighbours or of the natural attributes of the land. In Castlecrag, Edinburgh Road follows the spine of the ridge, while the roads of the Griffins’ Haven Estate on its southern side curve and wind, following the peninsula’s natural contours. Walter named them after the parts of a medieval castle— The Parapet, The Bastion, Sortie Port and so on—and the houses he designed in the local sandstone, or in his cheaper knitlock block invention, have the solidity of a castle if not the size, being mostly single-storeyed and flat-roofed.3 Although no trees or bushes were to be disturbed except for the space required for the building itself, photographs taken of the first houses in the mid1920s show how much of the land had had to be cleared for building and telegraph poles. They give some credence to Rivett’s description of the peninsula as ‘bleak’. The views over the wooded gullies and bays to the harbour’s glistening water, however, were spectacular and the contouring of the roads and the flat roofs ensured that these would not be built out. An abundance of walkways and reserves provided common ground for the residents as well as access to the foreshore. Today, Castlecrag is the province of the wealthy and Walter’s covenants are no longer observed in the large and often ostentatious houses that jostle for the best position, but the weathered stone walls of the dozen or so remaining Griffin houses blend into their native bush gardens in just the way he intended. As Castlecrag was a social as well as architectural experiment, it proposed to restore ‘creative individuality’ to the suburban experience.4 An article in the theosophical magazine Advance! Australia! by a visitor to Castlecrag in 1927 describes ‘the special type of people’ who would be attracted to the area: ‘It seems Castlecrag will have a distinctive social atmosphere. It will certainly not be a conventional one. Among the names of 82
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Castlecrag and the Griffins prospective householders [are] artists, musicians, men of distinction in the literary world.’ The author of the article adds: ‘“Cranks in a crank suburb” says, perhaps, the satisfied dweller in orthodox suburbia.’5 It is easy to see how attractive such a place would be to an unusual couple like Ida Leeson and Florence Birch, who were totally accepted and who integrated without difficulty into the community. Their names are prominent in attendances at Castlecrag Progress Association meetings and gatherings to discuss ventures such as the Community Club House. I imagine Florence’s fundraising skills were much in demand. Even so, they were a striking couple and several people who were children during the 1930s remember the impact of their appearance. Wanda Spathopoulos (nee Herbert) first saw them going for a walk along Edinburgh Road. It was a sunny day and she thought Miss Leeson must have been hot in her suit and sensible lace-up shoes, ‘unlike Miss Birch, who wore a short-sleeved floral dress with a flounce’. Wanda recalls that ‘her wavy brown hair curled around her neck, while Miss Leeson’s was really short, shorter even than Mrs Griffin’s.’6 Marie Nicholls, daughter of Walter’s partner Eric Nicholls, recalls the women walking up the path at an anthroposophical festival in the late 1930s: Ida ‘vertical and severe’, Florence ‘feminine and chatty in a full skirt’. Marie, who was a young girl at the time, discovered that Ida was not as formidable as she looked, but had a dry sense of humour—her mouth would go up on one side when she smiled.7 The two women may have planned to settle in a Griffin house of their own as they purchased a block of land on Edinburgh Road in December 1929, high on the ridge with views over Middle Harbour and The Spit to North Head.8 This was probably when they moved into their rented house on The Parapet. Why they did not build on their land is not known. Perhaps the depression was a factor, when building practically ceased and values slumped. Or perhaps they found the area just too inaccessible, especially after Ida was appointed Mitchell Librarian in 1932, even though the journey to the city had been made 83
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easier by then with the opening of the Harbour Bridge. Perhaps Walter’s departure for India in 1935 and his unexpected death there in 1937 affected their decision, although Eric Nicholls continued to design houses. In any event, even though they did not sell the land until March 1941, no plans were drawn up for that particular lot. Walter Burley and Marion Mahony Griffin were a dynamic couple, as different and complementary to each other as were Ida and Florence; once met the Griffins were not easily forgotten. Marion was the extrovert of the two—a flamboyant woman with a love of the theatrical. She was an artist as well as architect and draughtswoman and her exquisite house and garden designs, in ink and watercolour on silk panels, are as unique as the houses themselves, and rather more beautiful. Bim Hilder, a sculptor whose family became long-time residents of Castlecrag, recalls an early memorable occasion in 1929 that captures Marion’s inventiveness and sense of drama: The first time I saw the Griffins was . . . at ‘Pakies’, a club for artists, writers and actors, in Sydney. Pakie decided to hold a Mexican night, and one was expected to wear something suitable, and the Griffins turned up with their whole staff dressed as Aztec Gods, dressed in brilliant colours with many gold ornaments. It must have been a big effort to create this dramatic effect, but this was typical of Marion Griffin.9
It was also typical of the Griffins to support their friends, and Pakie was a resident on the peninsula whose marriage to Duncan McDougall, director of the Playbox Theatre, had broken down. After it opened in June 1929, her club at 219 Elizabeth Street was to become an institution among artists in Sydney for decades, inspiring the headline ‘Semi Bohemians Night Out in New Club’ in the Daily Guardian. The ‘bare old room’, reached after climbing a narrow stairway behind a doorway announced only by a little parchment lampshade with PAKIE’S printed on it, had been transformed by the planning of Walter Burley Griffin and the 84
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Castlecrag and the Griffins colour scheme of artist, Roi de Maistre. The signatures in the club’s scrapbook read like a who’s who of Australia’s artistic community. The writers include Mary Gilmore, Dymphna Cusack, Katharine Susannah Prichard, Xavier Herbert, Miles Franklin, and Jean Devanny. Bertha Lawson from the Mitchell Library is there, and T.D. Mutch from the Library Trustees; J.S. MacDonald from the National Art Gallery, who was a friend of Ida’s, gave a lecture there in 1933.10 Ida and Florence were almost certainly to have been found there on occasions. Louise Lightfoot, Marion Mahony Griffin’s young assistant who had qualified as an architect but whose passion was ballet dancing, says that Marion’s ‘appearance was as peculiar as her manner’. Louise describes her as having a ‘rather thin triangular nose, eyes a little too close together, thin shanks on loose ankles, strong Chicago accent, “mirthless” laugh, and unusual clothes’.11 Marion was dark and lean and wiry and sported an Eton crop after 1925; among her unusual outfits were Chinese gowns and loose trousers. She had a strong spiritual bent and believed her ability to see fairies was of great significance, complementary to the ability ‘to do original work in all human realms’.12 Her ability to paint the most exquisite fairies is certainly memorable. Marion’s husband, whom she called ‘Waltie’ or ‘Mr Griffin’, was tall and broad, with fair hair, worn rather long, and the round-faced good looks of a Nordic god. There was, indeed, a golden aura around the man and he was revered by the Castlecrag residents almost as though he was a god. His manner was quiet and gentlemanly, but he could be autocratic and determined when crossed, as he was by Dr Edward Rivett who wanted to contravene the flat-roof covenant on the Griffin-designed house he was building. His builders went ahead with a low-pitched roof of red Marseilles tiles and Walter took out an injunction to have the tiles removed. The court case that ensued in 1929 dragged on for twelve months, ‘during which time’, Dr Rivett’s son Ronald recalls, ‘the tiles were off, the roof was covered with malthoid sheeting, and we lived inside, fighting a constant battle to repel rain and wind’. Walter was eventually defeated and the tiles were 85
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replaced. Dr Rivett’s counsel was none other than the honourable Dr H.V. Evatt, who was for a long time President of the Trustees of the Public Library and a man for whom Ida Leeson held one of her strongest animosities. His defeat of Walter Burley Griffin in the Rivett case may have been one reason for her dislike, for Ida was one who revered the architect. A photograph of Ida in the Sydney Morning Herald in 1932 when she was appointed Mitchell Librarian shows her wearing a neck-bow identical to the trademark black silk bows Walter wore, stitched for him by Marion. Was this a coincidence or was she emulating the man she held in such high regard? Ida was to enlist Walter’s aid in the campaign to save the Hyde Park Barracks in 1935. A letter by her in the Herald on 18 June supports the idea of adapting the building for use as a museum, but she also echoes Walter’s ideas when she states that it ‘belongs to the day of simple dignity in architecture, before the blight of midVictorianism settled upon architecture as on the other arts’. Walter Burley Griffin followed this with a letter published on 21 June, which also talks of the building’s ‘dignity and simplicity’. In an address to the Town and Country Planning Institute given around the same time, he specifically refers to Hyde Park Barracks, reiterating its importance as a memorable example of the simplicity of early Australian architecture and noting that he was impressed that ‘hundreds of earnest leaders of thought in Sydney should be exerting themselves to prevent the Government from demolishing such a primitive, even “barracks” structure as that of Governor Macquarie’s on the east side of Queen’s Square’.13 The barracks was saved, but faced further struggles in later decades until it did eventually become a museum in the 1980s. In a manner characteristic of her allegiances, Ida seems to have been closer to Walter than to Marion Griffin. As I have indicated, most of her idols were men. The reverse could be said about Florence, who became closely involved in Marion’s anthroposophical festivals throughout the 1930s. However, for most of the time Florence and Ida actually lived in Castlecrag, Marion was away in Chicago. It appears that the Griffins’ marriage 86
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Castlecrag and the Griffins was under some strain during this period and there are rumours that Walter had an affair with a community resident. Marion alludes to this in her unpublished autobiographical work, ‘The Magic of America’, written in the last years of her life: In 1930 at the end of that character testing decade of one’s forties . . . I threw up my hands and ran away, this time to America. My parting words to Walt were—‘Well now you are a free man’. His to me—‘I’m a perfect damn fool’.14
Marion Griffin was in fact nearly sixty when she sailed for the United States in November 1930. She returned to Castlecrag in 1932 and resumed her life with Walter at their house at No. 8 The Parapet. She threw herself with her usual fervour into a new venture: organising anthroposophical festivals that were held in residents’ homes and augmented by productions of classical plays in the magical open-air amphitheatre that Walter and the community built into a steep-sided valley overlooking Sailors Bay. Marion describes what came to be known as ‘The Haven Scenic Theatre’ in an evocative passage in her autobiography in the section entitled ‘Unsophisticated Drama’: Then came the momentous decision to have the Anthroposophic Festivals at Castlecrag . . . The Segnor had set aside the Haven Valley for an open-air theatre and Mrs Griffin was aflame to produce a play in the valley! . . . So the valley was astir for weeks with Castlecrag ‘Boss’, Griffin, working like a navvy along with the others . . . A stretch of the west side of the valley was terraced and faced with great stones to form seats for the audience; the other side, and the head of the valley, 100 feet above and down 100 feet and more to the harbour, was the stage, the loveliest ever seen.15
Marion recalls the flora—angophoras, Christmas bush, wattles, blue hardenbergia, waratah—and describes how the natural features of the area were used in the settings for the dramas: ‘And the 87
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rock! The Iphigenia rock! That top promontory where Iphigenia gave her invocation to the sea—with its precipitous drop; and the cave below where in a later play Everyman was laid in burial.’ The spiritual dimension was important too: ‘On the evening of the play you could hear the softest sound. The valley was a perfect megaphone and our Anthroposophic knowledge—that sound is a function of the darkness as colour is of light—was proved.’ The anthroposophical festivals started in 1934 and although Florence and Ida had by that time moved to Kirribilli, they both played their parts in them: Florence delivering lectures on such subjects as ‘The Four Temperaments’ and ‘The Miracle of Transformation’; Ida working behind the scenes. Each festival was held over one or two weekends, with lectures and readings in one of the houses during the day and performances of the chosen play in the amphitheatre at night. Marion wrote to Walter, after he had left for work assignments in India in late 1935, that: the Anthroposophical Festival went very sweetly. The lawn border very gay. Miss Leeson makes it her Sunday task to behead the calliopsis, and the poker plant is out, and the gladioli . . . Sunday Miss Birch showed great capacity for lecturing in a talk on Christ and the Ego.16
For the evening drama performances, Ida was one of the stalwart community members whose assistance helped the plays to run as smoothly as possible. Sometimes she was the prompter, concealed behind an angophora, even dodging from tree to tree to be close to the actors; at other times she sat in the audience shining an electric headlamp onto the stage; often she, or Florence, were to be seen standing at the top of the tiers of stone seats collecting the shilling entrance fee. On occasions, Ida’s status as ‘the august librarian of Australia’s History Library’ was needed. At one of the performances of Iphigenia in Tauris in 1935, she was called from her fee-gathering duties to soothe the nerves of the newly appointed Greek ConsulGeneral who, on seeing a notice in his hotel of a production of 88
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Castlecrag and the Griffins Euripides, had rung the number given for directions. Taking a taxi, he told the driver to wait at the door of the theatre—but there was no door, the theatre being the valley, and the driver heard him exclaim ‘My God, my God’, perhaps, as Marion Griffin recalled, ‘fearing for his life on this lonely way with precipice on either side’. After Miss Leeson’s diplomatic intervention, however, Mr Kakatakus was appeased and ‘his enthusiasm knew no bounds, thrilled to have found such appreciation of his own people and enraptured by the production’.17 The productions were usually jointly directed by the opera coach Lute Drummond and Marion, the actors rehearsing for weeks on the flat roof of Lute’s studio in the city and then moving into the amphitheatre for Marion to finalise the staging. Sometimes Louise Lightfoot’s eurythmic dance group would provide the chorus in Greek tragedies, while Marion devised costumes out of the most ingenious materials: house curtains for togas, old dresses of hers cut and slashed, even strips of linoleum to create sentinels’ tunics. Residents acted in the plays, but some productions were graced by professionals like Jean Robertson-Brose, whose roles included the title role in Sophocles’s Antigone and Carmalis in Merlin. The results were, not unexpectedly, often gloriously chaotic with amateur theatre’s high spirits and inevitable mishaps. In one production the shepherds came on in the second scene instead of the third. When Walter played the head of a dragon (the dragon being seven people carrying painted designs on the nearside to the audience), he went to the right side of a banksia bush while the remaining six kept to the left and, as Louise Lightfoot recalls, ‘Thus the dragon was untimely decapitated’. For illumination, car lights were directed onto the stage from the road above and pungent-smelling acetylene flares were set off for dramatic effect. Among photographs from the production of Antigone that appeared in the magazine, Pix, in October 1938, one of Ida dressed in a long coat and old hat is captioned: ‘An electric headlamp—one of those played on the actors from the auditorium. It is in the hands of Miss Ida Leeson, librarian of 89
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the Mitchell Library, Sydney, and an authority on Australiana.’ Earlier Ida, who was not a thespian, had gamely offered her services to the 1936 Easter Festival production of the medieval play Everyman which, as Marion wrote to Walter, was in difficulties: Sunday afternoon—storm settled in by 5—able to tell everyone who rang that the play was off. It was just as well for one of our Five Wits was ill, and Miss Ruth Pierce Jones had rung to say she was down and out with dysentery, and, unknown to me, Miss Leeson was busy learning the lines of Knowledge; and Helen Morton arrived with such a croak in her voice that she, who was Strength, could hardly speak.
But all was well in the end. A week later Marion wrote: Our whole news this week is the production of the play— Everyman. A clear still night Sunday and a good audience sitting on their stone and backless seats in breathless stillness, gripped by the magic of that matchless valley, your gift.18
The festivals used to attract around 150 people and many stayed on for the night performances, when the stone tiers were usually full. Ida’s niece, Nancy, remembers being taken there by her father. Writer Miles Franklin, who had known the Griffins in Chicago, was often in the audience, with friends or, in the early 1930s, with her elderly mother who would walk from the tram stop. One resident who moved to the ‘Crag’ in 1938 was the playwright Betty Roland and her memories of an open-air performance are less effusive than others: Everyone enjoyed themselves especially the cast, and there would be a party afterwards in someone’s house, with claret cup and homemade cakes and sandwiches and congratulations to the cast for having remembered their lines and for not falling down
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Castlecrag and the Griffins the cliff and to the audience for having endured the swarms of mosquitoes and the discomfort of the seats.19
Betty’s disaffected mood may have been influenced by the fact that her partner Guido Baracchi was very much involved in the production of Iphigenia in Aulis, lured by ‘the woman on The Parapet’, Ula Maddocks, who was to supplant her in Guido’s affections. After the Easter Festival in 1936, Marion Griffin answered Walter’s call and set off to join her husband in India. In ‘The Magic of America’, under the heading ‘LIKE AN INDIAN MRS GRIFFIN FOLLOWS HER MAN’, she reports that she sailed on the SS Cormorin for Calcutta on 29 April with ‘a jolly bunch at the boat to see me off’. She was presented with flowers and other ‘thoughtful gifts’, also letters of introduction for India: ‘one from Miss Leeson saying we were two of the greatest people in the world’.20 Marion’s ‘Magic’ is a wonderful collage of a text that includes drawings, plans and letters from friends. In July 1936 there is a letter from Florence describing the activities of the Pentecostal Festival, with news of the community, as well as telling Marion in her effusive way, ‘But you are missed, Beloved, very badly’. She finishes the letter with a comment that distinguishes her style from her companion’s: ‘When I stopped to ask Ida for a message for you she grumpily said “Tell her it’s time they came home again”.’21 In February 1937, after Walter’s unexpected death in Lucknow at the age of sixty from peritonitis following a gall bladder operation, letters of condolence poured in from the shocked Castlecrag community. One is from Florence, addressed to ‘Dearest Marion, greatly beloved and longed for’, in which she speaks for the community: ‘We went from one friend to another in our dismay to find that the same distress prevailed and anxiety for you.’22 Marion returned to Australia grief-stricken, but supported in her loss by her anthroposophical beliefs. She produced her last plays at Castlecrag—‘truly a bit of Paradise on Earth’—before leaving to return to Chicago at the end of 1938. By 1940, the 91
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amphitheatre was dark; without Marion’s energy to sustain the productions and with wartime vetoes on the car lights and flares that had lit the stage, the residents had no heart to continue. After decades of neglect, today it has been restored and the theatre is once more the venue for occasional theatre productions and concerts. Before Marion left, Ida Leeson collected articles and documents by Walter Burley Griffin to be preserved in the Mitchell Library.23 Nearly a decade later, after Ida had retired from the Library, she wrote a letter to former federal Labor politician, King O’Malley, who had had a long association with the Griffins. One of the early Griffin houses at Castlecrag was built for him, although he never lived there, and it was bought by the Doctors Rivett and extended to become Cabarisha Hospital. Ida’s letter was written in response to one sent to Florence by Marion from Chicago, and in it she tries to get King O’Malley’s financial support for the publication of that labour of love—‘The Magic of America’. It is a wonderful letter, warm and diplomatic, written by someone greatly skilled in the art of persuasion. It begins: Dear Mr O’Malley, You will remember me, I hope, as the Mitchell Librarian, then in the Army, who visited you in 1944, and was most hospitably entertained by you and your wife. I felt then that much of the warmth of my welcome was due to the fact that Marion and Walter Griffin were my friends as they were yours. Hence, when Florence Birch, with whom I have long shared a home, received the letter, a copy of which is enclosed, and we considered it together, my thoughts turned to you.24
Ida gradually introduces the reason for writing—to ask him for perhaps £10 000 to guarantee the publication—saying, ‘You are the only one of Marion and Walter’s friends here who is, so far as I know, possessed of worldly wealth.’ She is aware of the enormity of asking such a favour: 92
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Castlecrag and the Griffins In my desire to help Marion I have risked what you may regard as an impertinence. She will, of course, know nothing of this letter, unless you are moved to enquire of her what her need is. The enclosure bears her address, so that you may write direct if you wish. I should be glad to know how you feel, especially if you do not take my letter ill.
This letter is preserved in the National Library of Australia (without the enclosure of Marion’s letter), but there is no reply. Marion Mahony Griffin’s work still remains unpublished, so it seems that Ida’s persuasive skills were not successful on this occasion. Although Ida and Florence maintained close links with the Castlecrag community throughout the 1930s, towards the end of 1932 they moved from the house on The Parapet to a rented flat on the waterfront at Kirribilli, in a newly built block called The Mayfair in Holbrook Avenue. It must have been so much more convenient for Ida. She could watch the ferry leaving the Neutral Bay jetty from their kitchen window and be ready to step onto it by the time it reached the Kirribilli wharf. The Art Deco block, with its timber-panelled entrance hall and elegant staircase illuminated by leadlight windows on the landings, is prized real estate today. However, relatives and friends remember the women’s flat as being rather stark, sparsely furnished and with stained wooden floors at a time when carpets were what most people aspired to. Only when Florence became very ill towards the end of her life did Ida buy a sofa, specifically so that her beloved friend could lie in the loungeroom during the day. In 1923, Walter Burley Griffin had written: Among the longer civilised races domestic ornament is generally restricted to single or significant objects of significance; it is not, as with us, an objectless accumulation with few, if any, outstanding features. It is gradually becoming recognised now that the less furniture a house contains, consistent with its needs, the better.25
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The Griffins’ simple and functional interiors emphasised colour and light rather than luxurious furnishings and it appears that Ida Leeson and Florence Birch carried on the Griffin tradition long after they left the unique community at Castlecrag.
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8
Secret manoeuvres
Secret manoeuvres
b
y the end of 1932, Ida and Florence were settled in the Kirribilli flat they were to live in for the rest of their lives. Now, instead of the trek from Castlecrag, Ida only had to catch the ferry to Circular Quay and walk up the hill past Government House and the Royal Botanic Gardens to work. The beginning of 1933 brought another move for her after her promotion to Mitchell Librarian in December, a long-awaited and welcome one. Leaving the Principal Accessions Officer’s room in the Public Library (now, ironically, to be occupied by John Metcalfe), she made the journey once more across the road to the Mitchell, this time to take up residence in the office of the Mitchell Librarian. She would have walked, with some pride and satisfaction, I imagine, down the marble corridor and through the arched entrance with its cedar doors, bevelled panes and stained glass into the spacious book-lined office dominated by a large and impressive desk. Except for the addition of modern technology and the replacement of the heavy wooden chair by a more ergonomically sound variety, the Mitchell Librarian’s office remains little changed today. This was the room where Ida Leeson entertained visitors, such as writer Miles Franklin, who would bring irises from her garden 95
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to decorate what she referred to as the Librarian’s ‘lovely sanctum’. It was where prospective researchers were interviewed for their readers’ tickets. It was also where deals were done, where valuable donated manuscripts and papers, as well as loaned objects, were passed over the desk to be locked in the office’s fireproof safe.1 This was the room in which Ida would dictate her correspondence to a library assistant to type up. One such young woman was William Ifould’s assistant, Dulcie Penfold, who had had secretarial training. He allowed her to go across the road to the Mitchell for a limited time each morning—an hour or an hour and a half, no more—to sort and file correspondence in the Manuscript Room next to the office and then to sit on the other side of Miss Leeson’s desk and take dictation. The trouble was that Ida had a habit of disappearing for lengthy periods of time to check a reference or answer a query and the girl taking shorthand would be on the receiving end of Mr Ifould’s wrath for being late back. Dulcie recalls: I’d say, ‘I have to go, Miss Leeson’ and she’d say, ‘You’re not going’. One historic day she locked me in and I burst into tears and that was the end of it. But we were very friendly about it afterwards. We were never allowed to waste time—according to Mr Ifould.2
The tussle over the services of the unfortunate library assistant is one small example of the rivalry between the Principal and Mitchell librarians. Ida Leeson was not a person to defer to her immediate superior, in matters trivial or important. In fact, she had barely settled into her new office before she was preparing to embark on a secret mission behind William Ifould’s back to secure a set of documents so important that she was moved to write: ‘I even feel that there is Providence in my becoming Mitchell Librarian at this time. If success comes, I shall believe that I have justified myself in that position.’3 96
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Secret manoeuvres Researchers in Australian literary history would find it hard to imagine the Mitchell Library without the extensive Angus & Robertson Papers that are a key resource, containing as they do the original manuscripts of many Australian writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: Henry Lawson, Christopher Brennan, Andrew Barton (‘Banjo’) Paterson, Mary Gilmore, Norman Lindsay and Zora Cross, to name just a few. They also contain sketches and final artwork for illustrated volumes. But arguably their most important contribution to Australia’s literary and cultural history is the extensive correspondence with writers—established, developing, emerging and merely hopeful—that was filed away for posterity. These letters make fascinating reading. All but the most fortunate of writers have first-hand knowledge of rejection letters, but encountering the uncompromising tone of some of those sent to aspiring writers from Angus & Robertson makes today’s knockbacks seem almost kindly. There was a time when it seemed that the Angus & Robertson collection was going to be sold elsewhere, even perhaps split up and dispersed, out of the reach of future scholars. The major players in the drama played out in the early months of 1933 were George Robertson of Angus & Robertson, his ex-pupil and now prominent Melbourne bookseller, A.H. (‘Bert’) Spencer, William Ifould and Ida Leeson, with a ‘Greek chorus’ of seven Library Trustees who made up the Mitchell Committee in the background, doing rather more than commenting on the action.4 The plot unfolds in a set of correspondence that survives in the papers of A.H. Spencer. This correspondence also gives us a rare insight into the characters of both librarians. In particular, it shows the emotional investment Ida Leeson had in the library she had worked in for almost the whole of her career since her graduation in 1906. It is fortunate for us that these letters did survive because Ida Leeson, no doubt aware of her impending appeal against the downgrading of the position she had just achieved, urged Spencer to ‘please destroy all my letters on this subject’.5 This he apparently intended to do, or at least that is 97
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what he told George Robertson. ‘I intend to destroy immediately the whole of Miss L’s letters to me,’ he wrote at the conclusion of the sale of the collection.6 Perhaps he then realised that, decades later, the letters might themselves become part of Australia’s cultural history, or maybe he simply got caught up in other pressing matters and filed them away and forgot about them. Such is the serendipitous nature of the material which historians and biographers have to work with. At the beginning of 1933, the ‘genial and autocratic’ George Robertson was in his early seventies and ailing.7 For years, the man responsible for the most important collection of literary Australiana had been pondering the future of the extensive Angus & Robertson papers and now he was determined to sell them. In 1886, George Robertson had formed a partnership to open a bookshop with another Scot, David Mackenzie Angus, who retired because of ill-health in 1900 and died a year later. Since its foundation, Angus & Robertson had played a hugely significant role in Australian bookselling; we have already seen the influence of George Robertson and his staff on collectors such as David Scott Mitchell. In the 1890s the name also became synonymous with Australian publishing, particularly after the runaway success of The Man from Snowy River and Other Verses, by young Sydney solicitor, ‘Banjo’ Paterson, in 1895. William Ifould had assumed for years that these papers would eventually be sold to the Mitchell. George Robertson had on several occasions since Henry Lawson’s death in 1922 indicated his desire for this. At the end of October 1930, Robertson informed the Principal Librarian that the collection should be sold to William Dixson, with the idea that it would eventually go to the Mitchell. Dixson, another wealthy bachelor and book collector, had succeeded David Scott Mitchell as the Public Library’s major benefactor.8 He had paid particular attention to collecting paintings after he learned that the terms of Mitchell’s will did not allow the Trustees to spend endowment money on pictures. William Ifould, of course, drew his attention to suitable purchases and in 98
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Secret manoeuvres 1919 Dixson had offered part of his collection, including portraits of Cook, Governor Phillip, Mrs Phillip and Governor Macquarie, to be hung in the gallery of the new National Library building. In a familiar re-run of the Mitchell bequest scenario, this offer was hampered by the government’s procrastination about the building and it was not until ten years later, in October 1929, after years of deputations to the Minister, that the William Dixson Wing was officially opened and the portraits were displayed. As they had with Mitchell, the senior staff of Angus & Robertson encouraged Dixson to collect Australiana, so it was a reasonable assumption that the Angus & Robertson Papers would go to the Mitchell Library if their benefactor bought them. However, like everyone else, the depression had affected Dixson’s buying capacity and both Robertson and Ifould understood that this would create problems for a smooth transaction. The Principal Librarian noted in a memo to the Mitchell Committee in October 1930 that senior Angus & Robertson staff member, Fred Wymark, was only worth his salary because of his capacity to sell to William Dixson and he was not now able to sell him anything.9 And there the matter rested for some time. In January 1933, William Ifould learned to his surprise that George Robertson intended to sell the collection elsewhere, even though he had arranged for William to see it about two years before when the Principal Librarian had spent three hours going through it and estimating in his mind its value. Now he discovered that Robertson had been submitting the material to private collectors ‘and even’, he expostulated in a memorandum to the Committee, ‘to the National Library at Canberra for which he has always expressed a contempt’.10 By the time of the writing of this memo, Melbourne bookseller A.H. Spencer had accepted Robertson’s invitation to act as his agent in the sale of the Papers. Why the turn around on George Robertson’s part? One reason may have been economic, for not only had the depression affected Dixson’s buying power, it had also substantially reduced the income of the Mitchell Library Endowment. On becoming Robertson’s agent, Spencer had immediately contacted Ifould 99
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and given him the asking price for the Australian authors’ manuscript material, comprising about 103 volumes. The Librarian had replied that at that price he would prefer it to go to Mr Dixson (even though Dixson was not buying at that time). In a follow-up letter to Ifould, Spencer gives the Principal Librarian some cryptic advice as he urges him to recognise that this ‘grand page’ of Australian history written by the firm of Angus & Robertson should remain in Sydney. ‘My feeling,’ he tells him, ‘is that in this matter quarrels and grudges and misunderstandings, if any there be between men and groups of men, should be thrust into the background.’11 As Spencer’s letter hints, there may also have been more personal reasons for George Robertson’s defection. Ifould himself recorded in his January memorandum that Angus & Robertson’s Fred Wymark, when ‘not quite sober’, had confided in him that Robertson had suddenly started offering the material elsewhere because ‘G.R., as he calls him, has for some strange reason taken a dislike to myself’. In a footnote to his memo, the Librarian says he suspects Fred Wymark’s motives for the remark, suggesting the man might have been ‘getting back on Robertson for having him displaced on the Board’. William Ifould’s biographer, David J. Jones, believes that he ‘perhaps should have looked closer to home for an explanation of Robertson’s disfavour’.12 He is referring to the furore caused by the downgrading of the Mitchell Librarian’s position that had occurred in the previous month, when John Metcalfe was elevated to Deputy Principal Librarian so that the experienced and capable woman who was appointed would not succeed Ifould as Principal Librarian. The controversial decision had caused people to take sides and Ida Leeson had worked for years in close conjunction with George Robertson, who would have seen Ifould’s hand in it. Alarmed at the prospect of the Mitchell Library losing the valuable Angus & Robertson collection, Ida Leeson had already mobilised her own campaign to secure it, working behind the scenes and embarking on a secret correspondence with A.H. Spencer at his 100
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Secret manoeuvres Hill of Content bookshop in Melbourne. The first letter that survives from her exchange with Spencer sets the tone.13 Dated 15 February, it is highly emotional and quite wildly written for the librarian with the beautiful hand, even trailing up the side of the page at the end. (One can imagine that this correspondence was not suitable to be dictated to Ifould’s assistant for typing up.) Ida informs the bookseller of ‘developments since I last saw you’. These cover the few weeks since Spencer visited Sydney to inspect the collection and put his value on it. Ida herself has now examined the manuscripts (on a ‘personal, not official’ basis) and visited Mr Dixson to make sure he was not a prospective purchaser. In addition to the 103 volumes of manuscripts, Robertson had also offered the separate Henry Lawson collection and had shown her the Lawson correspondence, saying no one else had ever seen it. When she asked him if that was included in the Lawson lot of manuscripts, his reply was ‘No—I regard it as part of the general correspondence which covers the whole of our publishing history. That will be offered later, but only to the purchaser of the collections now offered.’ Ida was surprised and concerned, declaring to Spencer, ‘This was rather a facer’. She had not known there was a large quantity of correspondence and feared that it would prove a difficulty for a Committee short of funds. An additional fear was that ‘WHI was likely to prefer letters to manuscripts or, at any rate, consider them very important’, whereas she was concerned that the Mitchell should buy all parts of the collection. Worried, Ida had ‘prayed for an opportunity to see G.R.’ and was lucky enough to get a lift to the Blue Mountains on a Saturday to visit him at his home in Blackheath. ‘It wasn’t a helpful interview,’ she writes. The sick man had insisted he couldn’t put a price on the correspondence without going through it again, and although he suggested getting some of it sent to Blackheath, Ida wouldn’t agree as she knew he ‘wasn’t fit’. She did get him to add the Lawson correspondence to his manuscripts for another £500. The Committee, however, would not make a decision on 101
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the purchase of the entire manuscript collection until it knew the price of the correspondence. At this point in the letter, Ida shows the steely determination she was so capable of, prefacing her demands with an appeal to Spencer’s feelings: To these others, WHI included, this is a business matter, to you and me it is more. We see not just a collection of volumes of varying interest and importance, but a great man’s life-work, and we cannot separate these volumes from the man we love and honour.
She asks the bookseller for his ‘entire frankness’, firstly demanding that he tell her if he has a buyer and who it is, assuring him, ‘The information will be safe with me’. Secondly, she asks him to ‘pencil in market values’ beside at least some of the items on the typed list she encloses. This will help her as she goes through the items herself. ‘I have bent all my energy to the end that this material shall come here,’ she finishes, adding that ‘WHI didn’t show me your letter—I didn’t expect he would—but GR showed me his copy. Relying on you, Yours, Ida Leeson.’14 Thus the lines of the conspiracy were set up, with Ida letting Spencer know that she had her ears to the ground and that George Robertson was keeping her informed. Two days after Ida wrote this letter, Ifould penned one to Angus & Robertson, asking them if, in such difficult economic times, the firm would consider payment of £1000 per annum should they agree on a price for the collection. His main concern, however, was to ask for a definite offer of the correspondence and for permission for himself and Ida Leeson to examine it. Robertson, in return, offered to sell the whole collection for £7000. To Spencer, Robertson confided his weariness over the whole negotiation: 102
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Secret manoeuvres When I look back on the forty years I have given to doing something for Australia it ‘listens to me’ (as the Cowboys say) that I ought to have been attending to the much easier and more profitable business of selling imported books.15
Ida knew the single figure for the whole collection would not please William Ifould, who wanted to pick and choose, and who would certainly not wish to be tied up for seven years paying for it. Writing to Spencer, she says, ‘At any rate, my immediate job was clear—bog into the correspondence, for which there was just a fortnight before the meeting.’16 Day after day she ‘sat in G.R.’s chair in G.R.’s office’ above the bookshop that spread across a city block opposite David Jones in Castlereagh Street. She read under the watchful eye of Miss Rebecca Wiley, George Robertson’s secretary and confidante and the company’s most influential woman at that time, who later stated in her memoir that ‘Miss Leason [sic] . . . read every single epistle’.17 To get through the vast amount of material (‘340 from Zora Cross alone [and replies]’), Ida also took some home at night. It seems very trusting of the firm to have allowed this. Or did she simply pick up a bundle at the end of the day, put it in her bag and set off for the ferry? It may never have occurred to her that anyone might question her honesty. Ida was aware it would be up to her to make a thorough perusal of the collection. William Ifould later estimated that he had been able to spend ten hours on the general collection of manuscripts and illustrated material, a small amount of time on the Lawson collection and none on the collection of unbound correspondence.18 The Committee had also been asked to visit the Angus & Robertson office if possible to inspect the collection, but Ida was sure no one else would go through it, although she told Spencer that ‘Tom Mutch will do most’. The former Minister for Education, who had supported her through the Mitchell Librarianship affair and who was to be the longest-serving Trustee on the Board (1916–58), was a close ally. Tall and always impeccably dressed in a tailor-made suit, Mutch was a familiar 103
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figure in the Mitchell after his political defeat in 1930, working as a freelance journalist writing historical articles. He was also a professional genealogist and his comprehensive index of the early settlers of New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land—the ‘Mutch Index’—was to be a frequently used document in the Mitchell Library.19 Spencer echoed Ida’s trust in her colleague, saying he and Mutch were ‘old and good friends’, but added that it would be ‘infradig and in any case the sort of backstairs business which has never appealed to me’ for him to approach the Trustee with his opinion on the Angus & Robertson collection.20 His secret correspondence with Ida obviously did not come into that category as far as the bookseller was concerned. He was at the same time, of course, corresponding with George Robertson over the matter of the collection, but what Ida did not know was that he was enclosing her letters as well. While Ida Leeson and A.H. Spencer’s common concern was to ensure the Mitchell Library secured the whole Angus & Robertson collection, Spencer also wanted to get the best possible price for it on behalf of the man who had taught him the book trade. In a letter addressed to Robertson’s home in Blackheath and marked ‘Confidential’, he lets his former employer into the secret of his private correspondence with the Mitchell Librarian, saying that ‘she, good soul, would give her last shirt to see the entire lot in the Mitchell’, but warning him against revealing her involvement to anyone.21 He encloses her letter of 15 February, suggesting that ‘in this instance it will be wise if you do not let her know that you have read her letter; it may make her chary of writing to me in the future’. He tells G.R. he has declined (‘gracefully’) to name any buyers or to comply with Ida’s request for figures against individual items, claiming, ‘I see the hand of Ifould in it; just the sort of pernickety business one would expect, instead of taking the wide view.’ The first of Spencer’s replies to Ida skirted her direct requests by pushing the case, in somewhat purple prose, for the Mitchell Library as the rightful repository for the Angus & Robertson 104
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Secret manoeuvres collection. ‘If words mean anything,’ he orates, ‘if life is life and not a dream; if the idea of the Mitchell Library is fact and not myth; then to me it would appear that the Mitchell must acquire this goldmine of the real beginnings of literature in Australia.’22 He asks her to imagine the consequences if G.R. were to ‘make a bonfire of the entire lot’, saying the story of Australian literature for decades ‘would be a blank’. The bookseller was obviously preaching to the converted in expressing such sentiments to Ida Leeson, but he urges her to ‘make any extracts from it you care to, and use them’. Ida was not so persuaded by Spencer’s rhetoric that she forgot the questions she had asked him and reiterated the difficulties she faced in trying to value the Angus & Robertson material without any guide as to their ‘market value’. Spencer had argued that the ‘worth’ of individual items overrode any attempt at ascertaining ‘market value’, using the original manuscript of The Man from Snowy River as an example: ‘If I were a wealthy collector, I’d kiss the man that offered it to me for a thousand pounds.’ Ida replied dryly that she didn’t think ‘a single member of the Committee would approve your estimate—in fact, I’m sure of it’.23 Ifould’s view, as expressed to her, was that ‘It’s not what a wealthy collector will give, but what is the market value at the present time, that we are concerned with.’ So she asks again for hard facts, this time for Spencer’s assurance that he could sell Lot 1 (the volumes of manuscripts and illustrations) ‘now’, and at the quoted figure, in order to convince the others that he was ‘not a “man of straw” in this matter’. Tough words! And the bookseller responded with the assurance Ida was implicitly seeking—that he would not be prepared to sell the collections piecemeal to a Melbourne buyer. ‘It appears to me that it boils down to taking all the lots, or none, because each lot hinges upon the other,’ Spencer writes. ‘For instance, when at a future date the general publishing correspondence comes up for consideration, some of it will refer to the very items that make up Lot 1.’24 He also assures her, without naming names, 105
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that there are men in Melbourne ‘big enough in money and imagination’ to take the lot. Ida’s reply the next day is grateful, telling him that ‘This is the most helpful one of all’.25 Using imagery that befitted a woman who took a keen interest in the race track, she assures the bookseller that ‘I’ve only worried you in this way because I want to make every post a winning post.’ A week before the Mitchell Committee meeting scheduled for 14 March, William Ifould sent the Trustees a lengthy memorandum in which he suggests that ‘a very liberal estimate of the value of the total collection to the Mitchell Library would not exceed £5000’.26 He is also of the opinion that even if the firm succeeds in selling it ‘en bloc or piecemeal, the greater part of it will eventually return to New South Wales and eventually to the Mitchell Library’. Demonstrating how little impact Ida Leeson’s arguments about the importance of obtaining the entire collection had on him, he predicts that the Trustees ‘will be able to choose the best of the material, and pay a price, I am confident, far lower than the price Angus & Robertson are now endeavouring to get’. George Robertson’s health was deteriorating quickly; in fact we know now that he had less than six months to live. This may have prompted the Principal Librarian to visit him before the meeting to tell him the collection was only worth £5000 in his estimation, no more. Probably to everyone’s surprise, Robertson accepted and, furthermore, offered to put it away if the Mitchell couldn’t face the expenditure at that time. But even at the reduced price, the Committee decided at the meeting on 14 March to defer purchase, by a narrow margin of four to three. Ida confided to Spencer that she blamed Robertson’s offer of an alternative deal for the decision: I really think if he hadn’t offered that alternative, the things would now be ours . . . If it had been take it now or lose it— they wouldn’t have lost it—but one or two have a great idea
106
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Secret manoeuvres that the depression will make treasures tumble into the market abroad, and that, tied down to £1000 a year for five years, we mightn’t be able to secure these supposititious [sic] ‘grandeurs’.
While obviously exasperated—‘Yes, say a few b’s and d’s if it helps! I could have thrown the inkwells at ’em and blasted ’em myself’—Ida still feels that Ifould might be persuaded to push for the sale, especially if the contentious illustrations (which were not supposed to be bought under the terms of the Mitchell Endowment) could be sold elsewhere by Spencer, reducing the price of the rest of the collection to £4500. Up to that point, the bookseller had refused her requests to try to sell the illustrations elsewhere, saying they belonged intrinsically to the collection. ‘I feel like hawking the pictures myself from door to door,’ she concludes, imploring the bookseller to ‘Tell me what we must do—tell me quickly, please!’. What the irritated and, in his words, ‘dazed’, bookseller did was to shoot off two short letters to George Robertson, saying that the ‘shilly-shalling of the Mitchell’ was beyond his understanding and suggesting he offer the lot to the Felton Bequest Committee in Melbourne.27 Alfred Felton, a wealthy bachelor like David Scott Mitchell and William Dixson, had died in 1904, leaving his fortune for the public benefit. Although not a philanthropist during his lifetime, he had filled his rooms at the Esplanade Hotel in St Kilda with works of art, and his bequest was principally for the purchase of artworks as well as the funding of charitable institutions. That Spencer would have been successful in interesting the bequest’s administrators in the Angus & Robertson collection seems unlikely, but, in any case, Robertson did not authorise the suggestion. Instead, he wrote an uncompromising letter to Ifould, stating that he was ‘heartily sick of the whole business, and if the committee does not accept it at its next meeting, we will consider the proposal “off”, and put the stuff back in our strongroom’.28 107
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Ida was in despair: ‘My heart is heavy, for I can see no daylight ahead of any further effort I can make. Is there anything we can do?’29 Spencer’s flash of inspiration was to get the Mitchell to ask G.R. ‘to retain the volumes of original drawings, and offer the whole of the remainder for £4500’.30 His plan succeeded, and on 12 April Ifould informed Angus & Robertson that the Mitchell Committee had agreed to the arrangement.31 No final letter to ‘Bert’ Spencer from Ida Leeson survives, although no doubt she wrote one. As far as the bookseller was concerned, however, she had certainly justified herself in the position of Mitchell Librarian. His praise to George Robertson was unstinting, if a trifle condescending: Miss Leeson is happy today that her battle has been won; it is nothing to the happiness she will feel as the years go on, knowing that the Mitchell has that lot. Ida Leeson is a brick; a damned clever woman, a mind as clear as any lawyer’s—a fortune was hers at the Bar—I like her, and if I don’t hug her on my next Sydney visit, well—I’m not Casanova’s double after all. Seriously though, Ida had the intuition to be right in this matter; it is inconceivable that all the other officials and trustees did not think with her from the beginning. Time will support Ida’s judgement.32
Time has supported Ida Leeson’s judgment. One of the crucial differences between the Leeson/Spencer position and that of William Ifould (and by extension the majority of the Board of Trustees) was the formers’ understanding of the importance to Australia’s literary and cultural history of such a collection of manuscripts and correspondence. Spencer’s argument about the ‘worth’ of certain items such as The Man from Snowy River hinged on its popularity and its cultural value to a nation of immigrants searching for an ‘identity’, rather than on its value as great poetry. The Angus & Robertson collection also contained one unique item that took the continent’s history back beyond white invasion: 108
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Secret manoeuvres the hand-written manuscript of David Unaipon’s Native Legends (1929), the first work by an indigenous author to be published. It would not have survived if William Ifould had been able to pick and choose from the collection; beside this item on the typed list of manuscripts, he pencilled ‘unreliable aborigine’. The portrait of this Ngarrindjeri man who was a scientist, inventor, lecturer and author now graces the Australian fifty dollar note, accompanied by an excerpt from the manuscript held in the Mitchell Library. Ida Leeson knew that the Principal Librarian’s priority (and that of the Trustees) was collecting the ‘treasures’ of Australia’s past for the Mitchell—explorers’ maps and diaries and ships’ logs—and she knew that ‘the cautious men’ would not want their funds tied up for years in case such items should come up for sale in London. The crux of the matter was, as she tells Spencer, ‘they have to be convinced that this is history comparable in importance to the history of discovery and exploration’.33 She adds, ‘I have no doubts myself on this point.’ Like Ifould and the Trustees, Ida was also committed to securing the documents relating to Australia’s white settlement, but her understanding of history as ongoing—and contained as much in the writings of popular poets as in the grand narratives of a nation’s ‘discovery’—makes her in many ways ahead of her time. While many of her male colleagues would rather have been lawyers or academics than librarians, there is no suggestion that Ida Leeson ever considered another career after her two early stints as a teacher. Spencer might have considered that she would have made a fine barrister, but women, of course, did not have the luxury of selecting from a range of careers. Even in those professions open to them, they had to struggle to achieve seniority. Ida Leeson, being working class as well as female, shows the sometimes bloody-minded tenacity that was necessary to infiltrate an entrenched ‘Rotarian’ culture. But the passionate commitment she displays in these letters is perhaps also indicative of her gender, or at least of her acculturation as a woman. It is there in the loyalty she felt towards the people she loved, such as 109
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George Robertson; it is there too in her passionate devotion to her work of developing the Mitchell Library collection. At one climactic point during the tortuous Angus & Robertson saga, she told William Ifould ‘to touch his heart-strings’, not a plea commonly heard among those involved in business dealings.
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9
Better friend than foe
Better friend than foe
i
da’s nephew Victor remembered being impressed as a young man by the way his aunt knew ‘practically everyone of importance in Sydney’ and that many of them used to ask for her assistance.1 Sydney was still a relatively small city in the 1930s and I have been constantly aware during my research of how close-knit its intellectual networks were. The hub of much of its intellectual activity was the Mitchell Library, so it is little wonder that Ida Leeson was influential in a variety of areas. As we have seen, she was passionate about the building of the Public Library’s whole collection, from her years as Principal Accessions Officer to her years as Mitchell Librarian. Through rigorous and persistent requesting of material from government institutions, she also built up the state archives section, which was then contained at the Mitchell. Her indexes and bibliographies were widely consulted, her initial essay into the field being an index for the first Australian newspaper, The Sydney Gazette, when she was working in the Mitchell in the 1910s. We have seen how she was regarded by academics who asked for her assistance with their research. Sometimes this work behind the scenes took place over extended periods, even years, as Ida’s 111
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correspondence with Professor E. Morris Miller indicates, during the time Professor Miller was compiling a comprehensive bibliography of Australian literature.2 The Mitchell Librarian’s correspondence files are extensive and wide ranging, from police checks on whether someone was an Australian citizen to requests from people inquiring about their family histories. Ida also assisted university students with their honours and postgraduate research and there are grateful responses from successful candidates. Although not a keen public speaker, she was not averse to publicising the Library and its collections—in writing and on the new popular medium of radio. Her friend and research colleague on the Board of Trustees, Tom Mutch, was a keen broadcaster who, over 1936 and 1937, did a series on ABC radio’s 2FC entitled ‘Treasures of the Mitchell Library’. Ida assisted him with the research and presented a program on ‘Bligh of the Bounty’ in one of six episodes on the mutiny.3 Ida also used her skills and professional networks in activities that might not have been considered part of her work as a librarian, but which made her sought after by the intelligentsia of Sydney. ‘She is a giver and slaves herself to death,’ wrote Miles Franklin.4 The writer visited the Mitchell library often several times a week, sometimes with a bunch of zinnias or irises from her garden to decorate the office desk. Her diaries of the 1930s and 1940s record the visits; day after day the phrase ‘read in Mitchell’ is recorded, Miles Franklin often sharing a table with other writers who were doing the same. Miles went to the Mitchell to research her own writing too, such as her article on Rose Scott in Flora Eldershaw’s tribute to prominent women, The Peaceful Army, published for the sesquicentenary in 1938.5 She also went there to check proofs with Ida Leeson, of her own work or that of friends like Mary Fullerton, whose poems Ida proofed as well as taking an active part in securing their publication. The librarian’s endeavours on behalf of the Sydney literary world were well known. Ida’s loyalty to the people she loved and respected knew no bounds; those who crossed her could expect a long-standing 112
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Better friend than foe animosity that was just as vehement. From the multitude of stories that could be told about Ida Leeson’s time as Mitchell Librarian, let us concentrate here on two extended interactions that illustrate the effects of her contrasting feelings towards patrons of the Library. The first comes to light through the writings of Miles Franklin and it culminates in Ida being given her own scene in one of Miles’s novels. The second concerns Ida’s frosty relationship with the outspoken, self-made historian and avid anti-Communist, Malcolm Henry Ellis, who was a journalist on The Bulletin. Miles Franklin made her final return to Australia towards the end of 1932 at the age of fifty-three, after many years of expatriate life in the United States and England. She soon began her habit of visiting the Mitchell, which provided her with a space to read novels, undertake research and meet friends, as well as affording her welcome respite from the demands of looking after her elderly mother. As a staunch feminist, Miles had been appalled at the circumstances of Ida’s appointment as Mitchell Librarian and maintained her rage about it for years. She was fond of telling an anecdote from her Chicago days about a librarian friend, Editha Phelps, who remarked of a colleague that, though he was less competent than she was, he got paid more. When Miles asked why, Editha replied: ‘He has the genital organs of the male; they’re not used in library work, but men are paid more for having them.’ Miles was to call John Metcalfe ‘a perfect illustration of Editha’s quip’.6 The writer’s friendship with Ida Leeson grew gradually and it was not until the beginning of 1935 that the librarian is first mentioned by name in Miles’s daily diary. It occurs when Miles goes with Katharine Susannah Prichard to see her friend’s portrait in the Archibald Prize Competition, noting: ‘Egon Kisch and Ida Leeson also there’ (although, as we shall see, clearly not together).7 Miles relates the occasion in more detail in a letter to Mary Fullerton in London, and the exchange she describes is illuminating about Ida in several ways: her fastidiousness, her 113
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politics and the way she took part in literary gossip with the writers of the time. On her visit to the Art Gallery, Miles was not at all taken with Katharine’s portrait, describing her as looking anaemic and like a ‘very very cold English professor who has a high sense of honor [sic] . . . and no vestige of human charm’. She comments that ‘Miss Leeson (Mitchell Librarian) was also there, and agreed with me’.8 Egon Kisch, the Czech-born Communist who, in November 1934, had jumped onto the wharf in Sydney and broken his leg after immigration officials tried to prevent his entry, thought the portrait and the whole show was dull. Miles writes: Kish [sic] was still wearing his crutches and was accompanied by a youth, who as Miss Leeson pointed out, was wearing dirty sand shoes. I said perhaps he had no others. Miss Leeson then said, ‘Are you a pal of Kisch too?’ I said I wanted to proclaim right there that I did not know him, but was for anyone who was anti-war, and that I wanted to know why he was a prohibited immigrant. Miss L. is of course conservative.
She continues: ‘I did not want to quarrel with Miss Leeson, a good librarian and courteous to me in that capacity, so I exclaimed about the atrocity that some painter had worked on Mary Gilmore.’ The talk among the women then turned to Australian literature and Katharine Susannah Prichard said she was very disappointed in Vance Palmer’s new novel, The Swayne Family.9 Miles recalls: Miss Leeson asked me had I read it. I said no. She said it was so dull that she could not finish reading it. I feared this. I said what I objected to was the clack about his perfect craftsmanship. Miss Leeson promptly interposed that he had no craftsmanship.
Although the friendship between the writer and librarian never became a close one, they were alike in more than their similar age, small stature and deep, rich voices. They were both forthright 114
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Better friend than foe in their opinions about everything and they shared a passionate nationalism. They both valued honesty, and friendship. Miles once described Ida Leeson as ‘one of our rare souls’.10 Outside meetings in the library, Ida and Miles quite often had lunch or tea at city restaurants like David Jones, sometimes with colleagues like Tom Mutch or Beatrice Davis, literary editor at Angus & Robertson. At one luncheon, when visiting American Carnegie Fellow, C. Hartley Grattan, was casting aspersions on the Australian literary scene, Ida asked him acerbically if he had not found ‘one good Australian’ and he replied ‘Yes, Miles Franklin’.11 Miles also occasionally went to dinner with both Ida and Florence, at David Jones’s or the Metropole or the buffet at the Australia Hotel. Their mutual connection with the Griffins added a personal dimension to the friendship and Miles attended the festivals at Castlecrag throughout the 1930s. On 12 February 1937 Miles learned on going to the Mitchell that Walter Burley Griffin was dead. ‘Desolation,’ she wrote in her diary. The three women dined together on this solemn occasion and then sent a cable to Mrs Griffin in India. Florence was not one of Miles’s favourites, however. After being invited to dinner at the Kirribilli flat to meet a visiting academic from Columbia University, she confided to her diary that she had not been able to get the visitor’s ‘point of view’ because ‘Florence Birch twittered all the time to me personally with small-talk gentility playing the ladylike hostess’.12 In 1935, Miles Franklin and Ida Leeson were two of more than two thousand New South Wales recipients of the King’s Jubilee Medal, awarded to citizens throughout Australia for ‘public service’. The following year they both enjoyed success with the publication of books of their own, albeit in different fields. Ida’s was her major work, the detailed monograph on the history and collections of the Mitchell Library, while Miles Franklin produced the first major novel published under her own name since My Brilliant Career, which had burst onto the literary scene in 1901. Perhaps the unforgettable story of Sybylla Melvyn, the young 115
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woman who turned her back on marriage to pursue her career, had been inspirational for the 16-year-old Ida Leeson when it was first published, as it was to countless young women. The major event at the Mitchell Library that year was the exhibition prepared to commemorate the centenary of the birth of David Scott Mitchell. It was opened on 19 March 1936 by Ida Leeson’s nemesis, the Hon. D.H. Drummond, Minister for Education, the man who had tried to abolish the position of Mitchell Librarian in 1932. Ida, of course, was the principal force behind the exhibition that was open to the public from March to April. She also prepared a brochure on David Scott Mitchell that was sent to high schools by the Education Department. During this time, she was working intensively on the text of the book to be published by the Trustees of the Public Library to commemorate the centenary, in a special edition of 1000 copies. The Mitchell Library: Historical and Descriptive Notes is a handsome volume, featuring coloured plates of D.S. Mitchell and Governor Macquarie and many illustrations of the handwritten journals and explorers’ maps that are among the collection’s ‘treasures’. It was published in December, without the author’s name on the title page (a later librarian has pencilled it in on Mitchell copies), but with an acknowledgment in W.H. Ifould’s Introduction: This book is the work of Miss Ida Leeson, B.A., the Mitchell Librarian. To cover the subject satisfactorily Miss Leeson has been forced to devote long hours of work during a period when her office of Mitchell Librarian was particularly exacting.
After its publication, new applicants for readers’ tickets were required to familiarise themselves with the book before using the library.13 Miles Franklin was away on a nostalgic visit to her childhood home near Goulburn when the centenary exhibition opened in March and only got to see it on 15 April just before it closed, when she and Marion Mahony Griffin were given a guided tour 116
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Better friend than foe by Ida. Later that year Miles was on hand at the Mitchell when, as she noted in her diary of 17 December, ‘I.L. got first two copies of her handbook’. Miles Franklin trod what was for her a familiar path of anonymity, or rather, disguise, when she submitted the manuscript of her pioneering saga, All That Swagger, to be considered for the 1936 Prior Memorial Prize. She entered it under a pseudonym, in this case Captain Bligh, and even changed the manuscript’s clever title that might give her identity away to the hackneyed ‘Advance Australia’. Tom Mutch was one of the judges of the prize, instituted by The Bulletin the year before in memory of its former editor S.H. Prior, and he was enthusiastic about it. He told Ida Leeson ‘there was one manuscript that towered over everything else’ among the entries. Ida suggested that, judging by the physical setting of the tale (and perhaps also by the oddness of the pseudonym), that it was possibly Miles Franklin’s work.14 Miles was awarded the prize for All That Swagger in July 1936. She received £100 prize money and an additional £50 for the serialisation of the novel in four parts in The Bulletin before its publication as a book. Ida began using her networks to aid in the publicity for her friend’s book and in September summoned Miles to the Mitchell to tea to meet W.S. Smart from the British publishing firm, Hodder & Stoughton. 15 Through Leeson’s recommendation and Smart’s influence, Anthony Hordern’s organised a series of book signings of All That Swagger in December and January. It was probably the first of what has today become a standard marketing event for new books. At the initial signing on 4 December, Miles said that when she arrived at the department store there was a queue of sixty to eighty people and she signed books for two hours. She netted the store £30 profit which, at six shillings and sixpence a copy, meant that Hordern’s sold a quantity that would rival any book signings today. Miles Franklin was pleased with Ida Leeson’s initiative: ‘The only time I have ever been pushed by a stunt & it was wonderful how the book sold.’16 Tom Mutch and Ida had also helped with galley proofs over the months leading up to the December publication but, by the 117
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time the third edition of All That Swagger was ready to come out in April 1937, Miles was tiring of the exercise and Ida’s library duties proved an irritant on one occasion: ‘Did chores and went to Mitchell to have I.L. look over my proofs, but she was so interrupted that she was not much help vitally.’17 A few days later, the unstoppable Miles Franklin was back in Mitchell with a package of 140 poems by ‘E’ (Mary Fullerton) for Ida, who had previously suggested a Dr Allen at the National University as someone who could be trusted to appraise them and advise on the groupings of the poems for publication. ‘As I knew [Ida] was off to Canberra on a holiday,’ wrote Miles to Mary, ‘I have asked her to meet with Mr Farmer Whyte and Dr Allen and read and discuss the poems.’18 No doubt whatever was in flower in Miles Franklin’s garden found its way onto the Mitchell Librarian’s office desk with the package of poems. Nineteen thirty-eight began with a flourish as Sydney was invaded by English dignitaries and the residents of the city poured onto the streets in the summer heat to witness the celebrations for the sesquicenterary of the founding of the colony of New South Wales. The festivities began on 26 January and continued throughout February with pageants, exhibitions, vice-regal garden parties and receptions. On the morning of what was then known as Anniversary Day, people lined the shores of Farm Cove and the harbour was crowded with flag-bedecked small boats alongside sleek launches bearing the Governor-General, the Governor of New South Wales and the visiting vice-regals to witness the re-enactment of Captain Arthur Phillip’s annexation of the continent. The thousands who had gathered in the Domain for the early morning landing then dashed to Macquarie Street to witness the procession of floats in the ‘March to Nationhood’. The floats represented each period along that ‘march’: there were Captain Cook and Governor Phillip floats, and floats representing the finding of coal (‘turning the wheels of industry’) and the opening-up of the Blue Mountains. There was, of course, no float representing the convict origins of white settlement; this was history to be wiped from the cultural 118
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Better friend than foe memory, not celebrated. Some of the floats that were present spoke more of 1930s cultural attitudes than of the so-called historical period being represented. The ‘Womanhood’ float, for instance, dedicated to the women of Australia, portrayed ‘the Madonna and child, on a dais, surrounded by white classic columns’.19 The ‘aboriginal float’, on which ‘beside their wurlie, the aborigines and their gins cooked a possum’, served to keep Aboriginal people safely in the place of ‘primitive’ carved out for them by official white history. The background to the ‘aboriginal float’ was, however, even more of a deliberate whitewash than was apparent from the stereotypical scene. A ‘Day of Mourning Conference and Protest’ had been organised by members of the Aborigines’ Progressive Association for 26 January 1938. It was held at the Australian Hall after permission was refused for the use of Sydney Town Hall and made such an impact that the Prime Minister agreed to receive a deputation of delegates. While this seemed a step forward in black/white relations, Aboriginal organisations had understandably refused to take part in the ‘Anniversary Day’ parade, so the Government had transported groups of Aboriginal people in from western communities. They were locked up at the Redfern Police Barracks stables and members of the APA were denied access to them. These were the Aboriginal people who participated in the ‘aboriginal float’.20 The Mitchell Library’s contribution to the sesquicentenary was an exhibition in the Dixson Galleries, described by The Bulletin as ‘practically an encyclopaedia of Australian history’ with ‘thousands of documents—diaries, notebooks, letters and official papers’ on view, as well as ‘very old maps’ and ‘hundreds of pictures’.21 On 2 February, a sultry Sydney day recovering from an early morning storm and heavy rain, the president of the Board of Trustees, Mr Justice Evatt, officially opened the exhibition. In his address, he pronounced that the Mitchell Library was our equivalent of the Public Records Office in London and was recognised by scholars throughout the world. According to the report in The Bulletin, he also took the opportunity to do 119
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a spot of politicking for the ever-delayed building of the new Public Library, saying that the library’s activities ‘were severely hampered by lack of space, and the trustees and officers were at their wit’s end’. Evatt added that ‘It was hoped that the Government would take action to remedy this.’22 Many of Ida Leeson’s familiars were present in the crowded gallery for the opening, among them Marion Mahony Griffin, Tom Mutch and George Mackaness from Sydney Teachers’ College. The visiting American C. Hartley Grattan was present, conspicuous in a white suit; so was Miles Franklin, who noted in her diary that William Ifould spoke to the visitors, ‘crowing while Ida Leeson did work in the way of androcentric society’.23 At least the ‘Women’s Page’ in The Bulletin gave the Mitchell Librarian some recognition: ‘Ida Leeson and her cultured staff are to be complimented on the splendid and cleverly-arranged show.’24 Miles Franklin writes that after the opening she met up with Ida Leeson and Tom Mutch, who complained that they thought that the exhibition was being ‘boycotted’, that it ‘would have collected more people if the Governor instead of the Chief Justice had opened it’. Miles recalled that Mutch said, ‘Australians won’t come to anything unless they can see the vice-regals or other lords.’25 The sesquicentennial celebrations provided Miles Franklin with fuel for her work, in particular what she dubbed ‘the Australian lick-spitting colonialism’ as guests queued and ‘dipped their knees’ to the vice-regals. At a garden party for prominent women, held on 1 February at Government House, Miles and the younger writer, Dymphna Cusack, who knew each other only slightly, had fallen into animated discussion. As they sat on the edge of the lily pond eating soggy sandwiches and sipping lukewarm lemonade, they railed against the superior attitudes of the overseas visitors.26 Two days later they met again at Lady Gowrie’s ‘at home’ at Admiralty House on the harbour foreshore at Kirribilli. On this occasion Dymphna was announced as ‘Miss Cossack’, after which, in a gesture of defiance, she refused to curtsey to her hostess. As the two women ‘explored the heavenly-contoured 120
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Better friend than foe grounds’ of the Governor-General’s residence, Miles suggested they should ‘join forces in showing up things as they are—with a light touch if possible’.27 And so the idea for their satirical novel, Pioneers on Parade, was born. Over the course of the next year, the irreverent tale of vapid English lords and ladies, local social climbers, stalwart older pioneer countrywomen, fine, robust young Australian women and their not-so-clever but well-meaning male counterparts took shape, all set against the backdrop of the sesquicentennial celebrations. The manuscript evolved by telephone, letter and the occasional meeting. Dymphna Cusack fitted it in between her teaching job at Sydney Girls’ High School and a sojourn in hospital for an appendectomy, while Miles Franklin endured the death of her mother in June, which plunged her into deep depression and guilt. In spite of everything, in July 1939 Pioneers on Parade was published by Angus & Robertson, the first Miles Franklin book to be edited by Beatrice Davis.28 Reviews were mixed. The Catholic Weekly said, ‘We need more forthright books like this’; Woman described it as a ‘witty, pungent novel’; the Sunday Sun thought it was unworthy of the writers and of Australia. The distinguished English critic, St John Ervine, wrote a letter to Miles Franklin deriding the book for its ‘flippant smartness’, unable to believe it came from the same pen as the author of All That Swagger.29 While the rather heavy-handed comedic tone of Pioneers is very much Miles Franklin’s, the book also features ‘real’ people in cameos, and one of these is Ida Leeson. When one of the central characters, Lord Cravenburn, decides to go in ‘urgent pursuit of Australia’, he arranges to be driven to the Mitchell. What follows is a witty paragraph that shows Ida’s negotiation skills and energy and shows up the English lord’s rather superficial interest in history: He asked for the highest cockalorum, and Ida Leeson had him into her lair. She was cheered by an oversea [sic] visitor showing such interest, and was eager to help him. He didn’t want any
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of the mouldy history, not even the Prado MS, nor anything about Captain Cook or the mutiny of the Bounty, nor aborigines, nor yarns of old-time squatters and wide open spaces, and sheep and kangaroos, and droughts and bush-rangers, and buck-jumping and gold-digging. He wanted something here and now. Miss Leeson extracted that he was interested in applied art and interior decoration. Australian motives. Ah, the cupboard was not bulging. Thank heaven for Baker’s book. His Lordship sat with it till closing-time, when Miss Leeson sent a messenger scouring the town for a copy, which she presented to him so that he would go home. He went, when Lucy called, with the volume under his arm, he and Miss Leeson equally delighted with each other as grist in a lean harvest.30
The book that so delighted Lord Cravenburn was Richard T. Baker’s The Australian Flora in Applied Art, published in 1915 to advance the author’s advocacy of the waratah as the national flower.31 Richard Baker, seemingly unaware of the satirical point of the inclusion of his book, was flattered by the ‘high compliment’ paid to him by the authors of Pioneers on Parade and, after a meeting over a cup of tea at the Metropole Hotel, a genial correspondence and friendship ensued between himself and Miles until just before his death in 1941.32 While Ida’s appearance in Pioneers was a compliment, the writer paid her a more profound compliment, if indirectly, when she laid down the terms of the Miles Franklin Literary Award in her will, drawn up in 1948. Of the five judges nominated to administer the award, one was specified as ‘The Librarian for the time being of the Mitchell Library’. Although Ida Leeson had by that time resigned from the Mitchell, the regard with which she was held by Miles Franklin and other writers during the 1930s and early 1940s was surely an influence. It is also a compliment to the position itself, one which continued to be occupied by librarians of learning as well as professional competence. 122
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Better friend than foe In January 1939, while still finishing the manuscript of Pioneers, Miles Franklin had started work on a biography of Joseph Furphy who, under the pseudonym of Tom Collins, had written the pioneering novel Such Is Life. Joseph Furphy had become Miles’s mentor and inspiration after the publication of My Brilliant Career. With his friend and promoter Kate Baker advising her, Miles completed the manuscript in time to submit it for the 1939 Prior Memorial Prize, which had not been awarded since she won it in 1936 for All That Swagger. Another entrant in the competition was The Bulletin journalist, Malcolm Henry Ellis, who had been working on a vast historical biography of Lachlan Macquarie, Governor of New South Wales, for a decade. In early August it was rumoured that a book on Macquarie had won, but no official announcement was forthcoming. In fact, the judges—writer Frank Dalby Davison, Sydney University Librarian H.M. Green, and playwright Louis Esson— favoured Ellis’s manuscript for the prize, but Kenneth Prior from The Bulletin, who knew Ellis’s work, insisted that it be further checked by an authority on the subject matter. So the manuscript was sent to Ida Leeson for her approval. Ida worked on it for a fortnight and then pronounced that it was undocumented and full of inaccuracies; in other words, it was too unfinished to recommend for the prize. The judges were in a dilemma, needing to find a winner since the prize had been accumulating for three years. They felt the slim Furphy biography, which was ranked second, contained too many letters and extracts and not enough original writing to be considered for the prize, but when Kenneth Prior consulted Ida, her opinion was that ‘any book by Miles Franklin would be a hundred percent better than Macquarie, that literary merit did not go by size’.33 The final decision was that the Furphy biography would get the prize of £100, without accumulations, which would be carried forward to 1940. The intention was that M.H. Ellis would then submit his revised manuscript and thus be eligible for £300. Miles Franklin wrote to Malcolm Ellis in late August, perhaps to appease him for her win and his loss, congratulating him on 123
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his ‘winning the Prior Memorial Prize (deferred)’ and asking him to lunch with her.34 Later, she wrote to Mary Fullerton that she and Malcolm Ellis had ‘long been chums’.35 Her regard stemmed from his poor background in country Queensland where, she said, he had had to support his family from the age of seventeen. Miles described him as ‘a nervous shy man’, very hard-working and hampered in his research by the fact that he had lost the sight in one eye through an accident with scissors when he was eleven. Ida Leeson, on the other hand, does not seem to have enjoyed friendly relations with Malcolm Ellis. Why this was we do not know, but it seems from his own complaints that the journalist might have been a somewhat difficult and demanding library patron. In an interview recorded decades later, he talks about how he had been constantly delayed in his research by rules and regulations at the Mitchell, such as allowing him to have only one volume of documents at a time (a rule that is still in force). Perhaps his blustering manner was a result of shyness, but if, as he indicates, he argued with the librarians and went above their heads to the Premier for access to documents, he is unlikely to have been regarded favourably by the Mitchell Librarian.36 That said, it does not mean that Ida did not give an honest appraisal of his manuscript (it obviously was unfinished), but neither would she have loyally supported it as she might have for a more favoured colleague. As it happens, the matter of Malcolm Ellis’s Macquarie manuscript was to continue to haunt her for years to come. Malcolm Ellis did win the Prior Prize in 1940, but since he shared it that year with Kylie Tennant and Eve Langley, he only received £100, not the expected £300.37 In November, he applied to the Commonwealth Literary Fund for a grant to aid the publication of his Macquarie manuscript. Dr George Mackaness of Sydney Teachers’ College was asked to nominate a suitable person to read it, and he suggested Ida Leeson. How unfortunate for Malcolm Ellis! Ida’s report submitted in February 1941 was no more favourable than her previous report for the Prior Prize. While acknowledging that ‘the writer has made an exhaustive examination of the 124
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Better friend than foe available material, and has laboured to produce a true picture of Macquarie’s life and times’, she considers, ‘regretfully’, that the publication should not be subsidised by the Commonwealth Literary Fund (CLF).38 She feels that the author ‘has been overwhelmed by his material’, that he ‘lacks the historical training necessary for a work of this kind, and his literary style is not good’. Her damning conclusion is that the ‘manuscript is rather an extensive selection of source material, with notes and annotations, than a historical biography’. Ida clearly took seriously the fact that the Prior Memorial Prize was a literary prize and placed due emphasis on the manuscript’s literary quality as well as the competence of its author’s historical research. She also noted that it was still unfinished and that Malcolm Ellis had already received £100 toward the cost of publication in the form of the Prior Prize. Malcolm Ellis, quite understandably, was infuriated by this report and complained vigorously. Dr Mackaness, on the strength of these complaints, decided that, as the author ‘is apparently not very happy about his relations with the Mitchell’, they should get a second opinion on the manuscript.39 Historian Dr C.H. Currey was approached, but he declined to read such a big manuscript for the paltry fee of two guineas. Ida Leeson, meanwhile, had returned her fee after a telephone conversation with Dr Mackaness, presumably in high dudgeon after hearing that a second opinion was being sought. Finally, after Dr Mackaness decided to examine it himself, the Advisory Board of the CLF wrote to Ellis suggesting that he revise the manuscript and cut it by one third, partly ‘by removing a deal of the antiquarianisms’.40 Malcolm Ellis declined the offer and embarked on a campaign against the CLF. This continued even after the publication of Lachlan Macquarie in 1947 and contributed eventually to what has been described as ‘an iconic event in Australia’s Cold War’, the 1952 dispute over left-wing writers receiving grants from the Commonwealth Literary Fund.41 One of the writers accused by this staunch anti-Communist of ideological leanings to the left was Marjorie Barnard, friend and former colleague of Ida Leeson’s. 125
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The origin of Malcolm Ellis’s stoush with Marjorie Barnard went back to 1941 when he learned that she was engaged in producing a life of Macquarie to be published that year by the Limited Editions Society. He complained to the CLF that Flora Eldershaw, who worked collaboratively with Marjorie, was a member of the committee that was examining his Macquarie proposal. As it happens, Marjorie Barnard had applied successfully to the CLF for a fellowship in 1940, not for the book on Macquarie as Ellis later claimed, but to write an historical novel based on research in the Mitchell. In May 1941 she advised the Board that she had decided instead to write a novel of the present from a vantage point in the future, eventually published as Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by M. Barnard Eldershaw in 1947.42 Her change of mind was to be used later in the 1952 literary witch-hunt by rightwing politician W.C. Wentworth (acting on information from Malcolm Ellis). Wentworth asked in Parliament: ‘How is it that, when a fellowship is granted for an historical research work, a trashy, tripey novel, with a Marxist slant, appears in its place?’43 The publication of Barnard’s Macquarie’s World took Ellis’s fury to new levels, as he believed he saw evidence of plagiarism in it and declared that a female conspiracy was at work concerning Marjorie Barnard, Flora Eldershaw and Ida Leeson. Curiously, he did not make the complaint until 1946, five years after the book’s publication. In a 43-page letter to Prime Minister Ben Chifley he laid out his charges, described in a confidential report in the CLF files entitled ‘The Ellis Manuscript’, dated 10 December 1946. In the letter and in a subsequent interview, Ellis describes a scene that he alleges took place on 15 January 1941 when he arrived at the Mitchell Library. On his entrance to the reading room, he claims, he saw Ida Leeson holding a draft of his manuscript in her hand and reading from it to Marjorie Barnard, who was taking notes. As he was within five feet of Miss Leeson, he was certain he recognised the manuscript as his own original draft from the handwriting, a draft he had previously given to the library. He supports this story by complaining that Dr Mackaness chose Ida Leeson as a reader when he knew that she 126
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Better friend than foe and Ellis were ‘on the worst of personal terms’. Furthermore, he alleges that Dr Mackaness knew that ‘Miss Leeson and the Misses Barnard and Eldershaw were intimate friends and that Miss Barnard was at the time in constant contact with Miss Leeson in connection with her book on Macquarie’. There is no response to these charges from Ida (who certainly wouldn’t have considered either woman to be an ‘intimate friend’), but Marjorie Barnard is recorded as denying them: Mr Ellis’s accusations of conspiracy . . . depend on a mistaken belief that I saw his manuscript in the Mitchell Library, a suspicion which so far as I know he took no steps to verify or dispel at the time when it would have been easy for him to do so.
Marjorie Barnard admits, however, that she did see the manuscript in 1939 when it was submitted for the Prior Memorial Prize and ‘a representative of the judges’ had approached her for an opinion. The request would have been made by Frank Dalby Davidson, a writer colleague with whom Marjorie had a secret affair for several years. So Ellis may possibly have had a point about passages of her book resembling material from his own, but the female conspiracy he concocts appears to have been a product of his imagination. Acknowledgments pages in books can be quite revealing of their authors’ support networks; sometimes they even carry an encoded story, as in the case of the two books on Macquarie. Marjorie Barnard, the author of Macquarie’s World, thanks the Board of Trustees and ‘Miss Ida Leeson, Mitchell Librarian, and her staff for unfailing kindness and help’.44 In his ‘Author’s Note’ to Lachlan Macquarie, M.H. Ellis thanks the Board of Trustees as well as ‘Mr W.H. Ifould, Mr J.P. Metcalfe, Mr Hugh Wright, the Hon. T.D. Mutch, Miss Phyllis Mander Jones, Miss Nita Kibble, the late Miss Willis, Miss Barrington and Miss Joyce Cocks’45— everyone of note (and some of lesser note) associated with the Library except Miss Ida Leeson, Mitchell Librarian. Malcolm Ellis exacted his revenge after all. 127
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10
From depression to war
From depression to war
w
illiam Ifould had changed his mind about Ida Leeson’s capacity to run the Mitchell Library by the time she had been in the job for two years. I am sure his entrenched belief that no woman should hold the position of Principal Librarian remained unshaken, but since there was no danger of that now that John Metcalfe occupied the Deputy Librarian’s position, he could afford to be generous to the woman who ‘worked like a demon’ for the good of the Mitchell.1 At the end of 1934, Ida had applied to the Salaries Commission for an increase, based on the fact that the former Mitchell Librarian’s salary had been £598 on retirement whereas she had started on £525 with a range to £550. She claimed William Ifould had said the position was worth £700, but that ‘for reasons personal to the officer concerned [Hugh Wright], he did not recommend that he should receive this amount’.2 She supported her application with the claim that ‘during the past two years the Mitchell Library has been acquiring material at a faster rate than ever before’. She stressed the need for initiative: 128
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From depression to war There is competition for historical material in the hands of private owners or of dealers, and constant vigilance and effort are required to secure what we need to maintain the pre-eminence of the Mitchell Library. I have been active in seeking accessions from private sources, and in examination, for the same purpose, of the archives of the State Departments.
Ifould sent a support letter for her claim, recommending that her salary should be increased to £590 and comparing her performance favourably with that of Hugh Wright. ‘Miss Leeson,’ he said, ‘has quickly got into the work of the Mitchell Librarian and has performed it with energy and ability. She already has a better knowledge of values of material than the last Mitchell Librarian.’ Ifould wrote ‘She has far more initiative than he had.’ He also compared her with Hugh Wright when he said ‘she has a better method of handling her staff’, taking back his earlier reservation that she was too friendly with her junior staff, a comment that had implied she lacked authority: I expressed doubts as to whether she might be satisfactory in this latter direction. I was wrong. Although Miss Leeson is a female officer I consider that the disparity between her salary and that of a male officer in the position should be a diminishing quantity. She is very definitely more valuable than the last holder of the office even allowing for his twenty-five years experience in Australiana.
This was a striking endorsement of Ida’s abilities, even if the Principal Librarian’s salary recommendation fell rather short of her claim that he believed the office was worth £700, an amount he might have recommended had she not had the misfortune to be born a woman. Ida Leeson’s book The Mitchell Library records that in 1936 the staff of the Mitchell Library consisted of ‘the Mitchell Librarian, ten other professional and clerical officers and five officers of the general division’.3 All the professional staff were women. 129
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The atmosphere of the Mitchell reading room was much quieter than that of the crowded and chaotic General Reference Library across the road, but staff shortages and lack of money during the depression had meant that the shining new library of 1910 had become rather shabby and rundown. Records were often wrapped in brown paper and tied together with tape, while piles of newspaper cuttings were shoved into tatty manila folders. When Daphne Gollan was employed in 1936 at the age of seventeen, she was one of the first two juniors to be hired in many years. One of her tasks was to re-organise the huge newspaper collection—putting them in new manila folders, resorting, and fixing up the titles. With only two full-time cataloguers, a huge backlog of books awaited cataloguing. The catalogue itself contained many discrepancies; one of the problems was that the librarians attempted to undertake too much, indexing articles in periodicals and books that would be of interest. The bindery downstairs was so short-staffed that periodicals were years behind in the binding process, especially since those from the Public Library were given preference. The comfort of readers and staff was also an issue: on winter mornings the inadequately heated sandstone building was close to freezing.4 Ida worked from the Librarian’s office, but she was a dynamic presence in the reading room as she darted down to the stacks to look things up or ‘buzzed’ around conversing with readers and giving orders to staff. She spoke abruptly and quickly, but always courteously: ‘Would you mind doing this for me?’ she’d ask in her low voice. Many who worked for her say she could appear formidable, but that she was actually rather soft, and several stories indicate that she could be approachable and friendly. Unless she was entertaining a visitor in her office, she would usually go along to the ‘funny little room’ where the staff gathered for morning tea. Daphne Gollan remembers that ‘she was a great talker, loved to talk about anything’; politics, current affairs, ‘discreetly attacking the Public Librarian, Willy Ifould’—Ida’s conversation was wide-ranging. Dulcie Penfold, the library assistant who took dictation from Ida, recalls an occasion when the 130
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From depression to war Librarian had a new carpet laid in her office and all the staff went in to look at it. Ida overheard one young library assistant say that she’d change the carpet when she became Mitchell Librarian and was most amused: ‘Who said she’d change the carpet when she became Librarian?’ she asked. June Greenhalgh, who worked in the Mitchell in the early 1940s, remembers Ida, who never wasted an opportunity to read, recounting to the staff in the tea room the story of how she was crossing Queen’s Square reading a book when a driver pushed her aside and said ‘Out of my way, woman’. On the other hand, Ida could be what Daphne Gollan calls ‘bureaucratic and unimaginative’ when rules were broken, as the young assistant found after she had been persuaded by Professor Julius Stone to lend him a Mitchell Library book to use in the Public Library on a Sunday when the Mitchell was closed. Ida found out the book had been lent out and demanded the professor tell her who had lent it to him, which he, to his credit, refused to reveal. The reading room itself was headed by Ida Leeson’s secondin-charge, the truly formidable Monica Flower, who had started in the Public Library in 1912 and was appointed senior cataloguer in 1921. Miss Flower, daughter of a senior Anglican clergyman and the holder of a Masters degree in Classics, was universally feared by the staff under her control. Daphne remembers her as a ‘magnificent, very handsome woman with dark brown eyes, very tall, grey hair . . . an extremely cultured, very erudite woman, stiffly conservative’. Other library assistants remember her as remote, cold and formal, but also a librarian who was never on time: ‘She came when she was ready.’ Her formality did not extend to her desk, which was always ‘a terrible mess’. It was situated at the back of the reading room, while the staff sat in a row in front of her, up the room along the west side, with the youngest in front of her so she could keep an eye on them. The two cataloguers struggling to reduce the backlog, Helen McKay and Ellen Small (or ‘Smalley’ as she was known), had worked in the library for many years and they were often at loggerheads with Miss Flower. Two of Ida Leeson’s favourites on the staff were 131
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the quiet and industrious Marjorie Ross, who had been her offsider when she was Principal Accessions Officer, and Bertha Lawson, a witty and charming woman who kept the staff’s spirits up when they were being ‘persecuted’ by Monica Flower. Whether it was good management or not, Ida never interfered with the general running of the reading room, until one altercation with Miss Flower led Bertha and Marjorie to complain on behalf of the rest of the reading room staff. Ida was forced into action and called in the staff, one after the other, to hear their grievances. As a result, Monica Flower was ‘moved sideways’ into the manuscript room to deal with manuscripts—with which she was very adept—rather than people. Mollie Barrington, a senior cataloguer in the Public Library, was brought in to take her place in the reading room, a move that Daphne describes as ‘ten times worse’ because, unlike Miss Flower who was ‘pretty vile’ to everyone, Miss Barrington ‘played favourites’. Ida Leeson, says Daphne, ‘had favourites, but she didn’t play favourites’, implying that the way Ida treated her staff depended on their dedication to their work and their loyalty rather than an inefficient management strategy that promoted her own importance. When Bertha Lawson left the library to move to Melbourne, taking the very radical step to live ‘in sin’ with Walter Jago (whom she did later marry), Ida ‘gave this lovely and loving, gentle speech’ to the staff gathered in the manuscript room, with ‘no hint of judgement’. Bertha repaid her loyalty, keeping in touch and sending Ida a birthday present each year, as well as leaving the papers in her possession concerning her father, Henry Lawson, to the Mitchell. Daphne Gollan and her friend June Wells, the two juniors under Ida Leeson’s charge in the years leading up to the war, received encouragement from her to work towards finishing their degrees at the University of Sydney. She also supported them when they took part in a huge university procession in 1938 that wound its way from the university to the Domain. Daphne and June were both ardent anti-fascists and, with the help of New Theatre, they devised a quite radically political tableau for the 132
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From depression to war evening students’ float. It depicted Liberty being slaughtered by the fascist beasts in front of a row of slumbering academics. Daphne portrayed Liberty and June was the leading academic, resplendent in gown and long beard. The crowds lining the streets cheered and clapped the float as the procession moved through the working-class areas, but grew quieter as it reached the central business district. By the time the float was passing along College Street past St Mary’s Cathedral there was dead silence, until the students heard a single person clapping furiously. It was Ida Leeson in the front row, applauding ‘her girls’. By 1939, when the Soviet–German agreement occurred and the line of the Party changed, Ida became more and more hostile to the Communist cause. This did not prevent her librarian’s instinct from being on the alert, however, and she knew that the Communist Party was getting out illegal literature. ‘She wanted that literature,’ recalls Daphne, ‘and she’d say to me at the top of her shout in the tea room: “I must have copies of the illegal Tribune. Will you get them for me?”’ Daphne, aware of the dangers involved in being in an illegal underground organisation (as the Communist Party was at that time), denied knowledge of the paper but did manage to sneak some copies to Ida. ‘As far as she was concerned,’ says Daphne, ‘getting the records is the first aim of a good librarian.’ In 1935, the Australian library world had been shaken by what was known as the Munn-Pitt Report, an exhaustive survey of Australian library conditions carried out under the auspices of the Carnegie Corporation of New York by Ralph Munn, Director of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, and E.R. Pitt, Chief Librarian of the Public Library of Victoria.5 Their very frank report disclosed the backwardness of library services in Australia generally and contained suggestions for improvement. The Trustees were, however, pleased with the very favourable report on the Public Library of New South Wales.6 William Ifould, who was intensively training his recently appointed deputy so that he would be ready to succeed him when he retired, had a word in the ear of Ralph 133
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Munn when he was visiting Australian libraries in 1934 about how useful a visit to the United States would be to develop his understudy’s qualities of ‘initiative and driving force’.7 As a result, John Metcalfe was offered a £2000 Carnegie travelling fellowship to enable him to inspect American and European libraries and study the latest methods in library economy. He took six months leave without pay in 1934–35 and wrote an extensive report for the Library on his return. His selection did not go unnoticed by sections of the press and an article in the Australian Women’s Weekly entitled ‘Women Passed Over in Public Service’ recounted the Mitchell Librarianship controversy, noting: ‘At present this man is visiting America on a Carnegie grant in order to inquire into libraries—a privilege and an educational opportunity that ought to honestly have fallen to Miss Leason [sic].’8 In 1936 it was William Ifould’s turn to visit Great Britain and the United States on the invitation of the trustees of the Carnegie Corporation, to discuss library conditions in Australia in the aftermath the Munn-Pitt Report. He inspected more than one hundred libraries and purchased material for the Mitchell.9 During his absence, John Metcalfe was given his first stint as Acting Principal Librarian. Although Ida Leeson had travelled to Tahiti in 1935 to secure British consular records (and, incidentally, to advise the director and writer of the Bounty film), she had not been offered a grant to build on the very successful trip she had undertaken on her long-service leave in 1927, before she was appointed Mitchell Librarian, when she had discovered the missing Flinders logbook. That is, until 1939 when at the end of May she wrote to a colleague: My long-since suggested trip abroad looks like coming at last. It was announced in yesterday’s Herald that the Trustees had decided to send me to arrange for the copying of all the original records in England and on the Continent. Permission has been sought in London for the copying to be done, and if, and when, received, date of departure will be fixed. It may be August.10
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From depression to war Ida may have had John Metcalfe to thank indirectly for the inception of the copying project. When he travelled abroad in 1934–35 he showed a great interest in library technology and was particularly taken by the possibilities of microphotography for securing copies of historical records. He brought back from England what he claimed were the first examples of microfilmed records.11 Technical difficulties had prevented the Library from carrying out its long-held dream to copy at least 200 000 original documents held in overseas libraries relating to the history of Australia and the South Pacific. Although copyists had been employed by the Library for years (Miss Deane in London and Mme Hélouis in France were two of them), by 1939 it was possible through photography to reproduce documents accurately and inexpensively with the use of 35mm microfilm. William Ifould’s prediction that ‘it is hard to set a limit to the possibilities of the microfilm method’ could not have been more true for the ensuing decades, particularly before the current shift towards digital technology.12 Ida Leeson was to initiate this mammoth operation, firstly by visiting the Library of Congress in Washington to discuss the methods of obtaining the best results, then to Ottawa to receive advice from the Canadian Archives, and thence to London to begin the work at the Public Record Office. On the home front she suggested her nephew, Victor, who was a photographer, should travel with her (presumably at her expense), and Florence would almost certainly have accompanied her as she had done on the trip in 1927.13 Ida intended to visit friends and colleagues en route, such as Marion Mahony Griffin in Chicago.14 But all her plans were dashed when war intervened, making it necessary to postpone the copying project indefinitely. In mid-August a series of ‘Departmental Instructions’ marked ‘secret and urgent’ was issued from the Department of Education to the Principal Librarian.15 Extra watchmen were to be appointed. Any departmental heads or essential technical officers who were absent from Sydney on duty or on leave were to be recalled. Essential state records were to be prepared for removal ‘in event 135
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of a national emergency’: first priority to go to the basement of the Australian Museum or the National Gallery. William Ifould, John Metcalfe and Ida Leeson were given keys to the locked instructions and responsibility for taking action. They were to remain within easy reach of the telephone when off duty and to assist military authorities in any way possible. Departmental Instruction No. 20, dated 4 September 1939, announced ‘in the strictest confidence’ that ‘a state of war has been declared, the following being enemy nations’—Germany is handwritten in the space. The final instruction to W.H. Ifould in this memo was: ‘Appeal to your staff to use their influence to discourage the spread of alarmist rumours.’ Ida Leeson’s consolation prize for the deferment of her longawaited overseas trip to identify and arrange the copying of thousands of historical documents was to be given permission to examine, for copying, documents in the archives of Victoria and South Australia. 16 What eventually became known as the Australian Joint Copying Project was formally set up in 1945 as a collaborative project between the Commonwealth National Library and the Public Library of New South Wales. Over the next five decades, it produced and despatched to Australia more than 10 000 reels of microfilmed records from overseas sources, dating from 1560 to 1984.17 Ida Leeson was not part of the project, however; by 1945 she was on leave with the Armed Forces and she never returned to the Mitchell. The extension of the existing Mitchell Library to house the new Public Library was finally approved in 1939 and building continued throughout the war, taking up much of the Principal Librarian’s attention. He also had to ensure the safety of his staff and organise storage for precious library materials. An air raid shelter for staff was constructed in the women’s common room in the Library basement, and plans were drawn up to fill the light moat with sand to protect the building against bomb blasts.18 Ifould also started the search for a suitable repository in the country for the treasures of the library. 136
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From depression to war Suddenly, men in uniform began to appear in the reading rooms and the library’s resources and staff were called upon to provide information for the military. Near the beginning of the war, an order came through from Ifould to ‘Prepare information immediately!’ for the army’s Sixth Division, which was being sent to the Middle East. To her horror, the secret Communist, Daphne Gollan, was assigned to preparing information about the south end of the USSR and the Ukraine. Ida Leeson was to be increasingly called upon to undertake research for the military over the next few years, in addition to all her normal duties. She was also ordered to, in effect, ‘spy’ for the authorities. In 1940, a letter from the Australian Military Forces (AMF) Eastern Command, stamped ‘SECRET’, instructed her to withdraw from the library shelves ‘all books which may be regarded as being in the nature of propaganda for Germany and Italy, or for the Fascist or Nazi causes, together with books of a peace-at-any-price tendency’.19 She was to use her discretion about ‘Communist works’, distinguishing between standard works used by students of social philosophy and anti-British or antiwar propaganda. Most interestingly, she was instructed to acquire and report to the Intelligence section the names and addresses of any ‘persons’ enquiring about any of the withdrawn books. During 1941 Ida was also occupied with selecting valuable material and assigning staff to pack it up to be transferred to the secret locations secured by William Ifould for safe-keeping for the duration of the war. Jean Arnot remembers having to go over to the Mitchell at night for weeks, under Ida’s instruction, to sort and pack all the early newspapers: ‘an old man who lived down at The Rocks, an old age pensioner, came and helped me . . . other members of the staff were packing some of the Mitchell treasures—the documents—and they were sent to the country too’.20 Finally, in December, ‘255 cases of manuscripts, pictures and the First Folio of Shakespeare left on the Brisbane Mail for Armidale, accompanied by John Metcalfe, the Deputy Principal Librarian, the Library carpenter and a junior who was to stay with the collection as watchman’.21 The cases were locked 137
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in a storeroom at the Armidale Teachers’ College, joined a few weeks later by 220 more boxes. The stamp collections were sent, also under great secrecy, to a bank vault in Barmedman in the Central West. Library work was to be still more severely disrupted. The 1942 Annual Report recorded: With the coming of the war to the Pacific, precautions became necessary, and watches have been maintained on both buildings every night . . . Because of the high proportion of women on the staff, much more had to be done by them in the Public Library than by women in other institutions and buildings, and the burden on them increased with the enlistment and calling-up of male officers.22
Those who were then young women on the staff remember the time vividly, particularly fire-watching duties from the roofs of the two library buildings. Daphne Gollan recalls: the work of the library just went to pieces because we had to be on duty all night, in turns, and the mosquitoes came in, it was warm, it was summer—what we were supposed to do I don’t know. We had buckets of sand; we were supposed to stop the place going up in flames if a firebomb came.23
The staff was exhausted. Wilma Radford remembers they used to lie on the tops of the long sloping tables in the Public Library reading room until Mr Ifould put a stop to it. ‘Then the library employed boys to do the bomb-spotting at five bob a night,’ recalls Dulcie Penfold, ‘but when Pearl Harbour happened we all stayed on duty all night.’ There were compensations and lighter moments, however, and Dulcie says the war brought them all together and they became a close-knit bunch. It was hard to get holidays, so they would take holidays together. She remembers going with other staff to a cottage they rented in Dee Why and they’d go in to 138
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From depression to war work from there. Jean Arnot remembers a holiday house at Manly that some of the staff frequented. For Heather Sherrie, the time fire-spotting from the roof of the Public Library brought a romantic frisson: We sat up there (generally a man and a girl) just fitted into the doorway—I don’t think either of us knew much about what we were supposed to do if there was a bomb or anything. We used to get very continental and tell each other all our love life.
Ida Leeson continued to be asked to lend material to the armed forces, such as maps of New Guinea so that they could be copied, books on the geology of the Pacific, even books in Dutch for personnel from the Royal Netherlands Navy who were working on information about Dutch New Guinea for Military Intelligence. Obviously, the strict rules of no borrowing from the Mitchell Library did not apply in times of war, at least not to the Australian Military Forces. A letter she received in December 1942 was Ida’s first contact with the man she was later to refer to as a ‘life-changer’.24 It was not an auspicious beginning. Major A.A. Conlon wrote to Ida from the Research division of Land Headquarters, Victoria Barracks, in Melbourne. ‘Lieutenant Simmons,’ he begins, ‘has told me of your kind offer to assist my department in the preparation of a bibliography on the more important books on the South West Pacific to be found in Sydney libraries.’ He goes on to suggest how it should be done with the limited amount of labour and time available, asking for the title, author and date of publication only. ‘I hope,’ he continues, ‘that at some later date we shall be able to amplify the bibliography with comments on the various works by authorities competent to analyse their worth.’ Ida kept Alfred Conlon waiting for more than a week, a significantly long time for her, before she composed her reply to the young man nearly half her age who had sprung from nowhere to become Chairman of the Prime Minister’s Committee on 139
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National Morale.25 Reminiscing years later, she says she replied ‘rather stiffly’, which is rather an understatement. 26 ‘My recollection of my conversation with Lieutenant Simmons is that I did not make any promise to undertake the bibliography,’ Ida writes frostily. ‘I said I should like to hear more about your project after he had discussed it with you.’ She goes on to say that what he suggests ‘would not be worth the while spent on the task’. She asks him what use he wants to make of such lists, if he has ascertained what other bibliographies are already in existence to prevent overlapping, and if he intends to make the ‘compilation’ available to other departments. ‘Inquiries come from so many directions,’ she says, ‘that it is clear various sections are trying to cover the same or similar ground without each one having any knowledge of what the others are doing or trying to do.’ Then she comes to the perceived slur on her own capabilities: You say you hope at some later date to be able to amplify the bibliography with comments on the various works by authorities competent to analyse their worth. Perhaps you did not mean to indicate that I, as a librarian, would not be competent to assess the value of the books I have seen and used, but I might be justified in taking that view.
She left the matter open for more ‘definition of the plan’, but Alfred Conlon did not respond. At the time of the exchange with Alfred Conlon, it is probable Ida Leeson knew that a huge bibliographical project was being proposed, to be undertaken in conjunction with the AMF’s Allied Geographical Section of the South West Pacific Area. She was already engaged in an extensive campaign (including writing to bookshops in the United States) to acquire any titles about the South West Pacific area for the Mitchell Library. On 18 March 1943, three months after her reply to Alfred Conlon, Ida was invited to attend a one-day conference held at the Public Library to organise the bibliography for the Allied Geographical Section (AGS).27 At the conference, it was agreed that the annotated 140
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From depression to war bibliography of the area would include ‘all essential facts regarding books, journals, maps, charts etc for the use of the Allied Geographical Section’. Three cooperating libraries were to be involved: Canberra would cover the Solomon, Gilbert, Ellice, Marshall and Caroline island groups; Mitchell Library the New Guinea mandate and Papua; and the Public Library of Victoria would do Dutch New Guinea and the Netherlands East Indies. The subjects to be covered were ‘coastal information, topography, roads, cities (towns, important villages, both native and European), vegetation, population, resources (minerals, timber etc), climate and meteorological conditions, maps and photographs, references to additional material on the areas and persons with local knowledge’. When annotating books or articles in German or Dutch, translations of titles, chapter headings, maps and photographs were to be given. It was an enormous task and a stressful one as the librarians were expected to continue their normal duties as well as producing the material as quickly as possible. Tempers were easily stretched and there is a heated exchange in the correspondence between Ida Leeson and L. Fitzhardinge of the Commonwealth Parliamentary Library about duplication of material when Ida found they were both working on the same periodicals. In April, Ida writes to W. Baud, the officer from the State Library of Victoria assigned to the bibliography, asking for a copy of an item and sounding a note of warning: ‘You are the dark horse in the bibliographical race, and I expect you’ll come with a rush towards the end and beat the other starters by lengths.’28 Four days later, however, she is contacted by the Commanding Officer of the AGS to say that the Melbourne officer is not able to cover the work allocated to him. Ida immediately suggests the Mitchell take it over, saying that she had made it clear at the conference that she didn’t want Dutch New Guinea to be separated from the rest of the island (Papua and the New Guinea mandate), as a number of publications covered both. ‘With regard to our progress in our own area,’ she tells Lieutenant-Colonel Jardine Blake, ‘we have just finished a good week’s work, including the Easter holidays, and we feel we 141
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are well on the way.’ In the middle of May, Blake writes to Ida that ‘Mr McCarthy from the Australian Museum doesn’t feel competent to annotate material in “International Archives für Ethnographie”, “Globus” and “Baessler Archiv”’ and asks if the Mitchell could undertake to do these journals. Yes, of course. Ida would not have been able to cope with the enormous workload without the support of another librarian assigned to the task at the Mitchell. She readily admitted that she could not wish for anyone better than Phyllis Mander Jones, a brilliant graduate of the University of Sydney with Honours in German and French, who had started in the Public Library in 1925.29 Her facility with languages was well known and it extended not only to German and French but to Italian and Dutch as well, the latter making her ideally suited to working on the material relating to Dutch New Guinea and the Dutch East Indies. When she was working in the Public Library, Phyllis Mander Jones had discussed with William Ifould the possibility of a transfer to the Mitchell, a move he considered would be getting into ‘a backwater’.30 It was, however, to be her destiny and where she was to make her mark in library and archival history. Ida Leeson and Phyllis Mander Jones worked on the bibliography for eleven months. It was eventually printed by the War Office in England and published as An Annotated Bibliography of the Southwest Pacific and Adjacent Areas in three volumes (with a fourth volume typescript supplement), and a foreword by General Douglas Macarthur. Being what she called ‘a critical sort of person’, Ida Leeson admitted she had originally felt ‘rather hostile’ to Alfred Conlon and thought the National Morale Committee he had initiated ‘a bit phoney’.31 But her friend ‘Jules Stone’ (Professor Julius Stone, Challis Professor of International Law and Jurisprudence at the University of Sydney), who was Vice Chairman of the Morale Committee, used to say to her: ‘You’re entirely wrong, Ida. You must meet Alf, he’s wonderful.’ So, in spite of the fact she thought Conlon’s eyes were too close together and that you 142
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From depression to war could never be sure he was candid about things, she was impressed and called in to see him in Melbourne on her way through to Adelaide on a library job in 1943. On 6 October of that year, Lieutenant-Colonel Conlon’s research unit became the Directorate of Research, responsible specifically to General Thomas Blamey. It then started its greatest period of growth. After the massive bibliography was finished in March 1944, Ida wrote to Conlon, saying ‘You seem to have extended’, to which he responded that they definitely had and that he would probably be in touch again. Ida didn’t have long to consider this cryptic remark. Less than a month later, Conlon telephoned to ask if she could come at once—in a week—and to tell her that he had tried to get her a majority but could only manage the rank of captain. Giving notice to the Library immediately, she organised leave without pay, said goodbye to Florence and caught the train to Melbourne. On 5 April she was inducted into the army as Captain Leeson, Research Officer for the Directorate of Research and Civil Affairs. Ida always said it was a painful move for her financially and that she ‘lived at a distinct financial loss’ the whole time she was in the army, where women were paid little more than half the salary of their male counterparts. That is true: for the two years she was in the army, she received little more than one year of her equivalent Mitchell Librarian’s salary.32 It must have been a painful move for her personally as well, to leave Florence and her friends in Sydney, although she made frequent train trips home during the next two years. Florence also visited Melbourne on occasions during this period; Ida recalled a time when the two women visited the Conlons’ flat in South Yarra and went walking in the Botanic Gardens with Willna Conlon and a barely three-year-old Telford, who was born in 1942. Was it also painful for Ida Leeson to suddenly relinquish her position as Mitchell Librarian, even if she did safeguard herself by taking leave without pay rather than resigning? It is quite possible that she was ready to make the move, and perhaps the seeds were sown the previous year when she had decided to call 143
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on Conlon in Melbourne. She was fifty-nine years old in 1944 and nearing Public Service retirement age. Her former rival Nita Kibble, who in 1899 had been the first woman employed in the Public Library of New South Wales, had retired at the end of 1943, still heading the Research Office that she had established in 1919.33 More importantly, John Metcalfe had succeeded William Ifould as Principal Librarian upon his retirement from the Public Service in 1942. His office was also now housed in the same building as Ida since the Public Library had moved from the old Bent Street building into its new premises in June of that year. Could Ida Leeson’s decision to join Alf Conlon’s Directorate, leaving the unpopular Monica Flower to step into her place at one day’s notice, have been a final act of revenge upon the man who had been unjustly promoted over her head in 1932 and who seems to have shown little understanding of his delicate position? There was possibly an element of this, but it was more likely that Alf Conlon, a man who has been described as a Svengali and a spell-binder, ‘charmed’ her into his orbit as he did so many of his extraordinary collection of unlikely soldiers.34 One of them, the young lawyer John Kerr, was to say of Alf that ‘he had the capacity to occupy the minds of people and persuade them to do things that in their saner moments they wouldn’t do’.35 And what a vibrant team of scholars and intellectuals Alf Conlon was drawing into his web: anthropologists, historians, geographers, economists, philosophers, lawyers, poets, even a sculptor. It is not hard to imagine that Ida found the whole prospect most intriguing. A year after she left on leave for the army, John Metcalfe wrote to the Library’s Trustees to say that Ida Leeson had reached the age of sixty and had applied for an extension of her position of Mitchell Librarian for one year (she was eligible to apply each year for an extension until she reached sixty-five).36 He claims that during 1943 the Trustees had instituted an enquiry into the administration of the Mitchell Library and had come to the 144
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From depression to war conclusion that some serious weaknesses lay in its administration. According to John Metcalfe, those weaknesses had continued: . . . largely because in April 1944 Miss Leeson, without any prior discussion with the Committee, applied for and was granted leave to take up work with the Army Directorate of Research in Melbourne, which has meant the complete absence of a permanent officer in charge of the Mitchell Library for an indefinite period.
He recommends that if the Public Service Board decides ‘that Miss Leeson should continue in the Service, provision should be made as soon as possible for a Deputy Mitchell Librarian’. All this and more is contained in one of Metcalfe’s typically tortuous sentences, which continues for more than half a page. In May 1945, the Department of Education approved the new position of Deputy and asked Metcalfe for his recommendation on Ida Leeson’s future. In spite of his negative claims to the Trustees, he replied that the performance of her duties ‘was satisfactory at the time of her entry on military leave, and I recommend that she be continued in the Public Service for the time being’. Four women applied for the position of Deputy Mitchell Librarian: Miss J.F. Arnot, Miss P. Mander Jones, Mrs C.K. Thomson and Miss E. Sims. Phyllis Mander Jones was appointed. After Ida Leeson finally submitted her resignation in February 1946, the only applicants for the Mitchell Librarianship were Jean Arnot and Phyllis Mander Jones. Phyllis was appointed, with Heather Sherrie, who had worked closely with her for years, as her deputy. When Phyllis Mander Jones took up the position, the library was just coming out of its war-time dormancy and the collections that had been sent away for safe-keeping were being returned, to share floor space with crates of newly deposited material. Suzanne Mourot, who was on the Mitchell Library staff and who later became Mitchell Librarian herself, recalls that ‘Phyllis immediately embarked on an ambitious programme of training 145
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staff, organising the collections, augmenting them, and spreading the Mitchell’s name abroad.’37 When the pictures from the Dixson Galleries were replaced after their war-time removal, they were hung right up to the ceiling and Suzanne remembers Heather Sherrie announcing dryly in her very loud voice, ‘Look at that— a gallery for giraffes!’38 Phyllis Mander Jones went on to be an outstanding Mitchell Librarian who was, among many other achievements, responsible for the creation of a State Archives Department in the Public Library. She resigned as Mitchell Librarian at the end of 1957 and in 1962 she became the first Australian Joint Copying Project Officer, based in the Australian High Commission in London. In that capacity, she continued the task that Ida Leeson would have begun on her planned overseas trip in 1939 had the increasing hostilities of World War II not snatched that opportunity from her.
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11
‘A highly peculiar mob of soldiers’
‘A highly peculiar mob of soldiers’
a
s you travel south-east from the centre of Melbourne along St Kilda Road as it crosses the Yarra and passes by the Royal Botanic Gardens, the Shrine of Remembrance appears for a time to stand directly in its path. It is a clever optical illusion, of course, as the road curves to the right past the imposing edifice on its way to the bayside suburbs. On the opposite side of this broad and leafy boulevard, before you reach the shrine, stands another reminder of Australia’s military past, not a monument but a working building that was the nerve centre of the Australian Army during World War II. The lawns fronting the ivy-covered, bluestone façade of Victoria Barracks are decorated with ornamental cannon, just in case the building’s purpose is not immediately obvious. I used to pass this complex on the tram every morning on my way to high school, my eyes inevitably drawn to the huge recruitment billboard out the front with its larger-than-life figures in uniform pointing at me and following my gaze under the slogan (as I remember it) ‘The Australian Army Needs You!’ When Ida Leeson was ‘marched in’ to Alfred Conlon’s Directorate of Research and Civil Affairs in 1944, she actually caught a tram from the city before crossing St Kilda 147
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Road and walking past the row of stately palms lining the perimeter into another world.1 In the 1940s, the Victoria Barracks were Army Land Headquarters, where the army’s top brass and key intelligence units were housed. ‘L’ Block, to which Lieutenant-Colonel Conlon’s ‘highly peculiar mob of soldiers’ found their way as they were snapped up from their previous occupations or military postings, was not part of the main building but a weatherboard barn of a place with a tin roof in one corner of the grounds.2 There, in his spartan office, Alf Conlon received his new recruits, among them the young lawyer, John Kerr, who was to be his second-in-command, James Plimsoll, economist from the Bank of New South Wales, anthropologists Ian Hogbin and the Honourable Camilla Wedgwood, physiology professor Roy ‘Pansy’ Wright, economics professor Keith Isles, and Professor of Agriculture from Queensland, J.K. (Jack) Murray, who was to become the first post-war administrator of the territories of Papua and New Guinea.3 As Ida Leeson was to remark, ‘Alf’s unit was a different sort of organisation to any other in the army’ in that its director, a half-colonel, presided over several full colonels, including Colonels Wright and Murray. Furthermore, as she said, there were ‘almost no troops’.4 The nearest to ‘troops’ in the unit were several younger recruits, among them John Legge, later to become Professor of History at Monash University and Peter Ryan, later director of Melbourne University Press, who, although only twenty-one when he joined the Directorate, was one of the few who came with decorated overseas service.5 Two who were to distinguish themselves early in areas other than military were poets Harold Stewart and James McAuley, former Fort Street High boys like Conlon and Kerr. On a quiet Saturday afternoon in the spring of 1943, before Ida’s time there, L Block was the scene of the birth of ‘Ern Malley’, brainchild of Lieutenant McAuley and Corporal Stewart. It took an afternoon and evening for the two poets, working in tandem, to produce the sixteen hoax surrealist poems that became the deceased poet’s oeuvre. Parodying the avant-garde poems published 148
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‘A highly peculiar mob of soldiers’ by Adelaide poet Max Harris in his magazine, Angry Penguins, the Ern Malley creations were intended to puncture what the poets saw as the pretentiousness of the modernist experimental movement. They were taken seriously by Harris who, to the detriment of his career, published them in 1944. The Ern Malley affair became the most famous Australian literary hoax of the twentieth century.6 James McAuley was later to describe the Directorate as having ‘some of the elements of a Renaissance Court, with Alf as the Medici prince’ and himself and Harold Stewart as the ‘court poets’.7 The Directorate has always drawn exaggerated and colourful responses from commentators; recently, Robert Manne described it as ‘the grandiose, preposterous, self-mythologising intelligence unit of the army’ and its leader a ‘charismatic charlatan’.8 So just who was this so-called Medici prince and how did the man who was still a student at the beginning of the war come to be in such an exalted position a few years later? And what did this shadowy ‘think-tank’ do? Twenty-three years younger than Ida Leeson, Alfred Austin Joseph Conlon grew up in straitened circumstances not unlike those of Ida’s childhood. He lived with his widowed mother and two brothers in a flat in Newtown, a neighbouring suburb to Ida’s Leichhardt, above a shop in which Mrs Conlon conducted her dressmaking business. From an early age Alf immersed himself in books, showing no interest in boyish pursuits like football or bicycle riding. Bulky-figured, plain and pallid-complexioned, with heavy glasses and short-cropped hair, the boy closely resembled the man he would become, though presumably without the ubiquitous pipe that would become his trademark. If his extraordinary mind and his ability to use his book knowledge in original ways were apparent early, so was another quality on which his wartime influence would depend. Ida Leeson recalls talking to a woman whose brother was in Alf Conlon’s class at Fort Street High: ‘She said that she had known him when they 149
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were school children and she said that Alf was as plain as plain, but when he smiled, oh, he was charming!’9 Forced to leave Fort Street after fourth year for financial reasons, Alf later matriculated privately and embarked on a series of university courses during the 1930s; he graduated in Arts with Philosophy Honours, then did a couple of years of Law and later started a degree in Medicine. In 1939 he became involved in student politics and stood for the Senate of the University of Sydney as student representative. He was elected on a platform of opposing compulsory attendance at lectures and giving support for a Department of Music.10 His politics were left-wing but not Marxist. After the outbreak of war he was appointed to the job of University Manpower Officer, which gave him authority ‘to determine all enlistments and employment of University personnel’.11 He apparently saw it as his job to preserve the most intelligent students from becoming cannon fodder at the front so that they could contribute to post-war Australia. Alfred Conlon’s position as Manpower Officer introduced him to the ‘gentle and studious’ Brigadier Victor Stantke of the Eastern Command who, in 1940, became Adjutant-General at Army Headquarters in Melbourne.12 Alf had approached him to suggest the army should establish a research unit, but at the time Brigadier Stantke could only offer him a position on a committee looking at an army education scheme to help the morale of the troops. In early 1942, after Pearl Harbour and the fall of Singapore brought the threat of Japanese invasion, Alf took the notion of morale further when he convinced the prime minister, John Curtin, to set up a ‘Committee on National Morale’ to be made up of senior academics, judges and bureaucrats, with himself as chair. In April he was commissioned by General Stantke as a major in charge of a research unit at Victoria Barracks. In May the Morale Committee was established with the brief ‘to study matters of civilian morale and to advise the Government with a view to formulating a far-reaching policy in matters of morale’.13 Major Alfred Conlon’s star was on the rise. 150
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‘A highly peculiar mob of soldiers’ One of his earliest recruits to the new research unit was John Kerr, who was ‘marched in by Alf as a private from an army depot place in Parkes in New South Wales’ in mid-1942.14 These men were to become two of Ida Leeson’s favourite people and, quite characteristically, she also became strongly attached to their wives and children. As she did with Florence’s and her own nephews, Ida gave Telford Conlon and her god-daughter Kristin Kerr birthday presents of books as well as advice about their education. Telford remembers Ida reprimanding his mother for allowing him to study the clarinet as a teenager when he should have been concentrating on his science studies. 15 Kristin remembers that Ida was always telling her how clever Telford was.16 Perhaps part of Ida’s affinity for their fathers, Alf Conlon and John Kerr, was the fact that they both came from unprivileged backgrounds like her own and had had to make their way in the world through their own initiative. Kerr had grown up in the then working-class suburb of Balmain, the son of a boilermaker and Labor activist, and his father was regarded with great affection by Ida too. When Victor Stantke was replaced as Adjutant-General by the more conservative General Lloyd at the beginning of 1943, the research unit found itself on shaky ground. Legend has it that when Lloyd asked Alf Conlon what his unit did, he replied, ‘We just buggerise around’, or words to that effect.17 The general attempted to bring the unit into line by making it hold regular parades, but these were apparently so farcical they were stopped to prevent the barracks being held up to ridicule. The unit survived, however, as Alf Conlon succeeded in having it removed from Lloyd’s control and transferred to the Directorate of Military Intelligence. From there he worked to improve his standing with General Blamey, who had been made Commander-in-Chief after his return from the Middle East. As a result of these endeavours, it was announced on 6 October 1943 that a Directorate of Research and Civil Affairs had been established with Alfred Conlon as Director, responsible directly to General Blamey himself. 151
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For the duration of the Directorate, Alf Conlon became the buffer between the government and the army in matters relating to civil government, colonial administration and some aspects of foreign relations. General Blamey was known for his ‘ruthless, driving ability’ but he was also hated by many in John Curtin’s Labor Government as ‘a militarist conservative’ and ‘notorious loose-liver’. He was openly disliked by some of his senior officers too.18 The Commander-in-Chief’s office was being called upon to involve itself in matters previously not encountered by the armed forces, such as army education. With the Japanese threat receding, it also had the new and huge responsibility of deciding how the civilian populations of the islands such as the territories of Papua and New Guinea would be administered, both immediately and post war.19 In Alf Conlon’s unit, he had, or was about to acquire, the people needed to undertake research and create policy: ‘seasoned colonial administrators, anthropologists, tropical medicine experts’.20 On a personal level, Alf was wellsuited to his role as he had the ability to talk to people in their own language. Ida Leeson likened him to Christopher Brennan in his capacity ‘to talk with experts on their subjects as if he were an expert’.21 Others less kind than Ida might call this trait something less complimentary. James Plimsoll believed Alf ‘was a man who came up with ideas’, but that he was at his best as a ‘confidant to someone else who carried them out’.22 Under Alf Conlon, the Directorate was to play a principal role in establishing the comparatively radical post-war national policy for Papua New Guinea as a single entity. As Alf had told Ida in early 1944, the Directorate was ‘extending’, and this was its period of greatest expansion. According to John Kerr, ‘he liked to collect people who had had positions and obvious achievements in their field’, so it makes excellent sense that Alf would go to the top to acquire a librarian to set up a library that would resource the various academic specialists and also to undertake research herself.23 And what a coup he pulled off in persuading Ida Leeson to take up that position. The Mitchell Librarian might have resisted Alf’s rather peremptory request to 152
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‘A highly peculiar mob of soldiers’ write a bibliography for him in 1942, but how much better to then secure the services of the librarian herself, with her vast knowledge and reputation as a researcher—and who had the added value of having just undertaken almost twelve months’ work on a comprehensive bibliography of the South West Pacific area for the Allied Geographical Section. Murmurs of resentment from the more orthodox sections of the army were frequently heard as Alf Conlon brought in his new members of staff, not only for their lack of military training and active service, but because of their elevated rank on entry. The man known as ‘a hidden persuader’ may have had to bring more than his usual charm and influence to bear on the securing of Ida Leeson (even if he did initially only manage a captaincy rather than the majority he sought for her).24 Not only was this new recruit female and nearly sixty years old, there also seems to have been a rumour that she had once had tuberculosis.25 I have not been able to verify this and she probably would have gone to great lengths to hide any evidence if she had contracted the disease, as it carried great stigma. It is a possibility though, as tuberculosis was rife when Ida was a young girl, particularly in the poor inner-city suburbs.26 Ida’s defence record lends some credence to the speculation and reinforces Alf Conlon’s influence; the section headed ‘Medical Examination’, which determined whether a recruit was fit or unfit for military service, has a line crossed through it with the words ‘Not Applicable. Enlisted on direction of C-in-C’.27 Florence’s nephew Sid, however, remembers Ida talking about her induction into the army and how terribly embarrassed she had been to be told to stand in line with several other women, all stripped to the waist for a medical examination.28 Perhaps when she reached the head of the queue and showed her papers, she was told she was exempt and found she had endured the mortification of baring her twenty-nine-inch chest for nothing. Two years later, her demobilisation book states that she was X-rayed three times over a period of four days, ‘but declined further investigation on medical grounds’.29 153
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Once through the entry hurdles, Ida settled into developing the research library for the Directorate. She ordered books covering subjects such as sociology, international law, philosophy, anthropology and colonial administration as well as journals on Oceania, Asia and the Pacific. Most particularly, Alf wanted her to collect books on New Guinea and ‘all the things relevant to training army officers to work with intellectual backing in ANGAU—the Australian New Guinea Administration Unit’.30 The established scholars worked on their own areas of expertise: Camilla Wedgwood undertook a major project planning a school system to end the dominance of mission schools; J.K. Murray conducted a survey of agricultural potential.31 The younger staff members were set to work developing their knowledge of the region. Peter Ryan was told to read all the books he could about the history of Papua and New Guinea ‘in every aspect of their colonial manifestations’.32 John Legge wrote an article on race relations in South Africa and then started work on New Guinea.33 James McAuley read everything he could on how colonies were run and the impact of colonial rule on indigenous people, learning to read Dutch to do it.34 On Alf’s instigation, Harold Stewart became Ida’s library assistant and typed catalogue cards and did ‘odds and ends’.35 ‘When he did them he did them very well,’ she recalled, then added, ‘It wasn’t so often that he did them.’ Harold was the most unsuited of all to military life. Ida claimed affectionately that he was ‘always looking as if he’d slept in his uniform and his hat was the most extraordinary thing you ever saw. He wouldn’t wear puttees . . . he said he was allergic to khaki.’ In some ways he was not unlike his director, who usually looked crumpled and did sleep in his uniform on the nights he stayed working in his office. Both Alf and Ida were most protective towards the poet, who later became a Buddhist scholar and ultimately lived a reclusive life in Kyoto, Japan. As well as performing her library duties, Ida was also asked by Alf to go to his office daily and collect ‘top secret documents, double-treble-sealed and so on’, read them and make summaries 154
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‘A highly peculiar mob of soldiers’ of them for him, so that he could then report their contents to the Commander-in-Chief. She found the most fascinating to be the long regular dispatches from Lord Stanley Bruce, the Australian High Commissioner in London and former prime minister.36 Alf obviously had complete faith in his librarian’s ability to keep secrets, a faith that was not misplaced. Part of Alf Conlon’s grand plan was to establish a school for training ‘kiaps’ or patrol officers, during wartime and for postwar rebuilding of Papua and New Guinea. Many of his Directorate staff were chosen with the long view that they would form the basis of the teaching staff at this school. In January 1945 the Land Headquarters School of Civil Affairs was established in Canberra, housed in a corner of the grounds at the Royal Military College, Duntroon. Once again, the Directorate’s situation within the army was marginal; at Duntroon, which was ‘the permanent army’s holy of holies’, Alf Conlon’s unorthodox staff was regarded with some suspicion and largely ignored.37 Colonel J.K. Murray was appointed Chief Instructor, with lecturers including Ian Hogbin and Camilla Wedgwood on native affairs, John Legge on Pacific history, John Andrews on Pacific geography, and James McAuley on government. Julius Stone lectured on law and Ralph Piddington on anthropology. Lucy Mair was brought in as a civilian from the UK to lecture on colonial administration—Lord Lugard’s doctrine of indirect rule, and the like. Peter Ryan taught a course on pidgin English. Each course lasted three months. Some of the students who had served in Papua and New Guinea were initially resentful of the academic and reformist approach of the school and clashes occurred. At the end of the first course, the Pacific Islands Monthly, whose editor was for many years a spokesman for the white expatriate communities of the Pacific and who detested the military and ‘Eddie’ Ward, the Labor Government’s Minister for External Territories, reported: 155
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. . . there was too much anthropology in the School, and too much Conlon everywhere . . . The students expected that the School would give them a well-rounded-out picture of tropical administration. Instead, it was devoted to a very large extent to instruction on native affairs and native welfare . . . ‘It was definitely an Eddie Ward show, so far as atmosphere and politics were concerned,’ said one student.38
Ida Leeson received her majority in March 1945, a promotion that brought her honour but an increase in salary of only about one shilling and sixpence a week. She set up the library at the School of Civil Affairs, travelling frequently between the Directorate in Melbourne and Duntroon. As soon as she arrived in Canberra on her first trip, she rolled up her sleeves and got to work unpacking books and shelving them. As the courses got underway, she also offered her knowledge generously to the students, teaching them how to use books and how to do further research in journals. Peter Ryan recalls: More or less unconsciously, the men absorbed from her this essential skill of a thinking person, and for most of them it remained life long. They had marched in (many of them) straight from the battlefields, aware that they were to spend a few months in a very odd-ball military unit indeed, but they had never known anyone like Ida. Who had?39
When Ida was at Duntroon, she was housed with the other women on the staff—Lieutenant-Colonel Camilla Wedgwood, Lieutenant Barbara Hockey and Lucy Mair—in an army hut known informally as ‘haus meri’ (after the pidgin word for a Papuan women’s house), a long building with a central passage and small individual rooms running off it. The accommodation was adequate but austere and, as one might imagine, relations between the women, thrown together in such close proximity, were sometimes strained. Barbara Hockey apparently chafed under the conditions and when the rather puritanical Camilla 156
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‘A highly peculiar mob of soldiers’ complained about the number of gentlemen visitors Barbara received, she remonstrated that it was all very well for Camilla to call the hut ‘haus meri’ but it wasn’t ‘House Virgin Mary’.40 Relations between Camilla Wedgwood and Lucy Mair were also not always amicable. They had both trained in anthropology in the United Kingdom, but had moved into different areas—Lucy into colonial administration and Camilla into education. Lucy occasionally showed her irritation with Camilla when they argued at the breakfast table, over such academic matters as whether one could accurately assess the numbers in a large crowd.41 Ida’s relations with Camilla—a person of dominating personality but who was also gregarious and popular with the students—were correct and friendly but not close.42 She referred to Camilla as ‘remarkable’ and a ‘very noble character’, words that suggest respect but not intimacy.43 Camilla later worked with Ida at the Australian School of Pacific Administration, but even there they remained ‘slightly wary respecters of one another’s hard-work qualities’.44 It is possible that the mixture of assertive and retiring qualities that was characteristic of both women contributed to the distance they seemed to have maintained in their relationship. Perhaps their extremely different class backgrounds was a factor too; certainly Camilla Wedgwood’s Cambridge accent with its exaggerated vowels and habit of pronouncing ‘r’ as ‘w’ (she spoke of ‘mowal fibre’) would have been quite a contrast to Ida’s educated Australian speech, which still retained a trace of her origins and a fondness for colloquialisms. Ida was friendly with her mostly male colleagues and frequented the Mess in the evening to chat over her dry sherry before dinner, but would politely excuse herself and retire to her hut on the occasional nights when the alcohol flowed and the atmosphere became ribald. John Legge recalls that she ‘was never standing around the Mess bar in the evening listening to Piddington’s stories’.45 At breakfast she would brightly read out and comment on the headlines of the newspaper, a habit some of those who had not retired to bed early found mildly irritating. But they all sat up and listened the day she announced, ‘I see the Americans 157
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have dropped an atom bomb on Hiroshima’, and read the short paragraph from the Canberra Times verbatim.46 The news of the appalling event was greeted that morning by the officers with horror, but also with ‘an overwhelming sensation of joy and deliverance’ that the war was virtually over.47 Sometimes the men, bored away from home and family and their regular lives, played practical jokes on one another, such as the time John Legge, Peter Ryan and others dragged a huge boulder into the hut and onto the bed of geography lecturer, John Andrews. The note that accompanied it read, ‘I found this on Mt. Ainslie. I thought it might perhaps be a piece of bedrock.’ It was signed Sergeant Moloney, the name of an obsequious student who had been presenting his lecturer with bits of stone after lectures.48 Peter Ryan also spent many of the long evenings in his small, bare room working on the story of his time conducting intelligence patrols in the jungles of Japanese-occupied New Guinea. After the war, he approached several publishers unsuccessfully with the manuscript and then put it away in a cupboard where Ida Leeson discovered it more than a decade later when she was staying at the Ryans’ house in Melbourne. She had probably filed away in her card-index mind some mention Peter had made of his writing when at Duntroon and determined to find it and read it. Setting off back to Sydney with the manuscript, she promptly showed it to her editor friend, ‘Trix’ (Beatrice Davis of Angus & Robertson). Ten days later, Peter Ryan received a telegram: ‘Angus & Robertson will publish stop love Ida.’49 Fear Drive My Feet has become a classic World War II memoir. The power base of the Directorate always remained fragile and by mid-1945 it was in danger of fragmenting completely. The Royal Military College, Duntroon, wanted the School of Civil Affairs to vacate its premises, and Alf Conlon’s mentor, Prime Minister John Curtin, was very ill (in fact he died in early July). Ida recalls Alf’s distress at that time: 158
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‘A highly peculiar mob of soldiers’ He came in one day after lunch and I said to him ‘What’s the latest news? I hear that Curtin’s had an occlusion.’ He looked most pained and said, ‘Don’t say it, Ida, don’t say it, don’t say the word’.
Ida knew he thought that might mean the end of everything and all their planning. Ida Leeson was so close to Alf Conlon that she appears to have become almost motherly towards him during this difficult time when he was verging on a state of nervous collapse. On one occasion when they were travelling back from Canberra to Melbourne and Alf had had a few drinks before they left, he stood in the train corridor talking to her from Queanbeyan to Goulburn, telling her ‘all that history of his life and his marriage’ (which was also in trouble). When the train stopped at Goulburn he wanted to go back to Duntroon, unable to face the difficult meetings he had to undergo in Melbourne, fighting the authorities. Tom Fry from the Directorate was also on the train and hadn’t the slightest idea how to deal with Alf, but Ida walked the platform with him in the middle of the night, trying to persuade him to continue the journey. When the train got up steam again, much to her relief he boarded it with her.50 Towards the end of 1945, not long before he left the army, Alf Conlon was made a full colonel but resisted putting the scarlet cap-band and gorget patches of that rank on his uniform, saying it would make him feel like ‘a bloody alec’.51 Ida came to the rescue before he was to take part in an important conference in Canberra, whisking the relevant garments off to her room and returning them a short time later with the badges of rank sewn neatly onto them. She might not have been the most domesticated of women, but she had had a seamstress mother and could sew when the need arose. Although Alf Conlon’s powers were waning by the end of the war in August 1945, he did still wield considerable influence. Applications for the new position of peacetime administrator of the Territories of Papua and New Guinea attracted fifty-three 159
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applicants, among them five major-generals and the former administrator of Papua. Alf was determined to offset the conservative influences of J.R. Halligan, Secretary of the Department of External Territories, and backed Colonel J.K. Murray, a man who was committed to a New Guinea policy that put the interests of the indigenous people first. The Department’s public service committee marked his application as unsuitable on the grounds that he had no experience of colonial administration, but on 11 September Cabinet confirmed Colonel Murray’s appointment.52 To replace him as principal of the School of Civil Affairs Alf had John Kerr, who had spent much of the preceding year in London representing the Directorate, made a full colonel, and ‘marched’ him in again. John Kerr was to hold this against Alf as he had planned to return to the Bar.53 Ida Leeson gave Harold Stewart some tuition in Melbourne to take over the library for the School in Canberra, but John Kerr soon contacted her to say they had tried to make him come into the library from 9.30 to 3.30 every day without success. Meanwhile, Ida travelled to Port Moresby in mid-November to join Colonel Murray for a couple of months.54 He had arrived there in October to find that the Department of External Territories had not provided details of his employment conditions nor paperwork to identify him. Government House was not ready for him to occupy and no furniture had been authorised.55 Mrs Murray was horrified (‘the place was just like scorched earth’) and returned to Australia immediately where she organised for their belongings and furniture to be transported to Port Moresby.56 Conditions were perhaps a little better by the time Ida arrived, but while Colonel Murray continued with his very formal manners in the house, she spent most of her days there ‘working away sorting dusty documents in the sweltering confined spaces between the ceiling and the roof of Government House’ where she was trying to salvage records and archives.57 In those dirty conditions she would have needed the four safari jackets, three skirts and six pairs of stockings recorded on her clothing list for the journey, but they wouldn’t have helped her cope with the heat. At least 160
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‘A highly peculiar mob of soldiers’ there was a note that ties were not worn in New Guinea.58 When not working, she would have been able to renew her acquaintance with old PNG identities like John Black, now Assistant Director of Planning and Research, Jim Taylor and Ivan Champion. Ida had established warm friendships with these former district officers on their visits to Duntroon when Alf hand-picked them to be brought down to the School to offer the students some of their own experience of colonial administration in action. Alf Conlon’s reign at the Directorate came to an end when he went on the retired list in October 1945 and the Directorate of Research and Civil Affairs was disbanded. He was still frequently seen around Canberra in the post-war months in deep discussion with John Kerr as they organised the changeover of the Land Headquarters School of Civil Affairs to its civilian manifestation as the Australian School of Pacific Administration (ASOPA), with John Kerr as Principal. In 1946, Mr Alf Conlon resumed his medical studies at the University of Sydney. Ida was not demobilised from the army until June 1946, by which time she had resigned from the Mitchell Library. When she returned from New Guinea at the beginning of the year, she oversaw the shifting of the School’s library from Duntroon, firstly to Holsworthy army base outside Sydney and then in March to ASOPA’s temporary premises in two Quonset huts half hidden amongst scrub at Georges Heights, above Mosman. Although her library was still housed in an army hut, at least she was living at home again in the flat overlooking the harbour at Kirribilli, with Florence by her side. Ida was on familiar territory in her new job as many of her colleagues from the Directorate were on the teaching staff, including James McAuley and Camilla Wedgwood, along with some new faces. One of these was Helen Sheils, twenty-one and a recent graduate, who started the journal Monthly Notes (later retitled South Pacific) and performed certain library duties for Ida. On her first encounter with Major Leeson, Helen assumed that the small, white-haired figure who greeted her from behind the 161
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library desk was a man, although she thought John Kerr had called her ‘Ida’. Helen was impressed in her initial interview by ‘the directness of this person, as though the whole person was there communicating with you’. When they were gathered in the staff room at coffee time, the new recruit was able to solve the riddle of the major’s gender when she saw Ida ‘chiacking with Spencer Stead, the Sergeant Major, about tips for the races’ and noticed that the bottom half of the uniform was a tailored khaki skirt.59 ASOPA’s situation was a tenuous one, fraught by the differing expectations of Secretary J.R. (‘Reg’) Halligan of the Department of External Territories, who saw its purpose as being to train patrol officers, and the ex-Directorate contingent, who intended it to be a semi-tertiary institution bridging a gap between the military school and the establishment of the Research School of Pacific Affairs at the proposed National University.60 Even Ida Leeson’s library was a contentious issue, with the academics wanting wide discretionary powers in buying books and the public service wanting adherence to bureaucratic procedures with books ordered through the Department.61 Later, when the opportunity arose to create a School motto, Alf Conlon suggested a dogLatin Biblical text that translated as ‘Who is this man who darkeneth counsel by words without wisdom?’, referring to the detested Reg Halligan.62 In 1947, ASOPA moved to more permanent premises in brick buildings on Middle Head. It became a little less subject to Departmental bureaucracy, buffered by a governing Council with Professor R.C. Mills as chairman and members including Professor R.D. Wright, Alfred Conlon and John Kerr. There were still problems, however, regarding the permanent appointment of staff and, in a letter to Minister ‘Eddie’ Ward in July, John Kerr specified Ida Leeson’s situation as an example, stating that ‘the distinguished former librarian of the Mitchell Library’ had stayed on because of his ‘continued assurances that an adjustment would be made in her position’. He continued, ‘I feel that I cannot keep her any longer’, and assured the minister that ‘her loss would 162
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‘A highly peculiar mob of soldiers’ be irreparable’.63 Ida was to weather that storm, but her situation was eventually to become untenable, not because of Departmental intervention but through a catastrophic dispute with the man she loved and admired, Alfred Conlon. By late 1947 John Kerr had lost the will to fight the bureaucracy and decided to resume his interrupted plans to return to the Bar. He resigned as Principal of ASOPA in December, but was persuaded to stay on in a part-time capacity for six months while a successor was sought. For Colonel J.K. Murray in New Guinea, who was a great supporter of Alf Conlon, Alf was the only possible candidate. In September 1948, ‘Pansy’ Wright reported back to Jack Murray that, despite opposition from ‘the usual drongos’, Alf Conlon had been appointed Acting Principal of ASOPA for one year.64 Even Alf Conlon’s staunchest supporters later agreed that this appointment was disastrous. The man who was at his best as a creator of big ideas and a ‘hidden persuader’ in getting them acted upon was hopeless as an administrator. Although John Kerr’s relations with his former mentor had soured before this time, his assessment of Alf’s unsuitability for the post of principal is probably apt: He’d had absolute power, really, in the army. If he said anything it happened, so far as the people on the staff were concerned, but everybody, including Ida, thought they were at the beginnings of the development of a minor academic institution of semitertiary level, and they valued their freedom and their right to think what they liked within the academic discipline of life. But Alf had no idea of that, he didn’t believe in that.65
While the staff grew more and more worried about Alf ’s inefficiency and increasingly eccentric behaviour, he did manage to pull off a deal worthy of his wartime days, but it was to prove the catalyst for his demise. He managed to persuade Sir Edward Hallstrom, the man who had made a fortune from his ‘Silent Knight’ refrigerators, to donate money for a library. Hallstrom 163
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also had interests in New Guinea where he had established a research station for sheep breeding and a sanctuary for birds of paradise. Contacting Colonel Murray, Alf asked him to come down and finalise the arrangements, which he did. However, Edward Hallstrom’s initial offer of about £50 000 was reduced to £10 000 when he found it would not be free of income tax.66 But it was still a considerable amount of money and Alf Conlon was convinced that this amount was just a beginning. For Ida, Sir Edward Hallstrom’s money was the chance to build a first-rate research and teaching library but, to her dismay, the principal of ASOPA started ordering expensive books that were to her mind totally inappropriate. Alf bought books relating to the Far East, saying to Ida, ‘These fellows mustn’t go back to New Guinea without knowing about the Far East.’ He bought a handsomely bound edition of the complete works of Freud in German, although he didn’t read German. He ordered Bligh’s voyages in an expensive French edition. Ida remonstrated that Bligh’s voyages were in the Mitchell, in their original language, but to no avail. It was then that Ida saw the ruthless side of Alf Conlon. ‘Instead of the charming smile,’ she recalled, ‘I got black looks and he said to me one day “You resist me, Ida”. And you see, you mustn’t resist him.’67 The master of devious methods then started bypassing the librarian in order to continue spending the Hallstrom money, even instructing the registrar to intercept her correspondence. Ida tried to intervene by telling J.K. Murray about the situation but, to her surprise, he just assured her there would be more money. The Commonwealth Library people, meanwhile, were ‘furious’ because their agent in London told them that Alf Conlon was paying fantastic prices for books for ASOPA. This all proved too much for Ida and she handed in her resignation, which Alf initially refused to accept, and then insisted upon. In May, lecturer David Fienberg wrote to his colleague Gus O’Donnell, who was in New Guinea: 164
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‘A highly peculiar mob of soldiers’ Alf in the process of buggering up this place and himself with it. I think he has megalomania which, as the walls shut in on him, is causing him to race around in ever decreasing circles. Staff not happy, students in near rebellion . . . He and Kerr have busted . . . Ida left some time ago (Alf more or less sacked her) . . . librarian (new) in nervous collapse and on sick leave.68
It was another old friend of Alf’s, James McAuley, who made the first move to end the dire situation and in June 1949 issued an ultimatum to Alf that he quit or the staff would strike. In negotiations with John Kerr, Alf, who had barricaded himself in his office, agreed to six weeks’ leave until his contract ran out. It was an ignominious departure. Colonel Murray, Alf’s supporter to the end, wrote sadly to Ida: ‘Someone said to me, not so long back, that he has more streaks of genius in him than any other person he knew, but that occasionally the machine could not keep up with the fast pace.’69 Alf Conlon finished Medicine, became a GP for a short time and then set up his own practice as a psychiatrist in North Sydney where, as Ida said, his ability to (literally) hypnotise people would have been useful. She believed he had treated her ‘disgracefully’ and had no more contact with him until nearly a decade later when, at the end of 1957, she contacted him to say that Florence was terminally ill and Alf and Willna visited her in Cabarisha Hospital.70 Ida was touched that they also attended Florence’s funeral and later, when Alf was in hospital suffering from a broken neck, she visited him where she recalled, ‘he hung onto my hand and he wouldn’t let me go’. When Alf Conlon died of a heart attack in 1961 at the age of fifty-three, Ida said: ‘I couldn’t go to sleep for two nights, and for weeks afterwards it was all going through my mind.’ She remembered how the man who impressed her with his life-long passion for books would come past her room in the barracks after lunch, sometimes with a pile of books under his arm, and how 165
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‘he’d look over with a wicked grin and say “There’s next week’s rent gone”’. In characteristic fashion, Ida, ever the librarian, promptly offered to assist Alf’s widow in cataloguing the thousands of books that he left behind and spent days just listing the psychology and psychiatry books intended for his proposed Memorial Library.
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12
A researcher to the end
A researcher to the end
a
t the funeral in May 1949 of Lute Drummond, one of the most loved members of the Castlecrag community, Miles Franklin saw Ida Leeson for the first time in several years. Lute, the opera coach who had been involved with Marion Mahony Griffin in the production of most of the plays at the amphitheatre, was farewelled by many of the old Castlecrag crowd at the flower-filled Christ Church St Laurence in George Street. Miles, in her report to Dymphna Cusack on the event, said that Ida was ‘looking thinner and frailer than ever’.1 No wonder, since this was only a matter of weeks after Ida had undergone the painful experience of resigning from the Australian School of Pacific Administration in protest at Alf Conlon’s behaviour over the Hallstrom money. Ida was sixty-four by this time and it would be reasonable to expect that she might have decided to retire and take life a little easier after the Alf Conlon experience. She would surely have been able to afford to do so; she had been working full time since her graduation from University of Sydney forty-three years earlier. Florence, who was eleven years Ida’s senior, had retired from the YWCA before she turned fifty, although she had 167
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continued to use the skills she learned there in the honorary position of Vice-President of the Kirribilli branch of the Red Cross. In the last three decades of her life, however, Florence devoted herself primarily to anthroposophy and was still active in the movement in the 1950s when she was nearing eighty. At the society’s meeting room in Hoskins Place, she had an armchair reserved for her and anyone else who sat in it was firmly asked to move, by ‘the very definite little old lady’ herself.2 That Florence was not sitting at home waiting for Ida to retire from full-time work and join her in gentler pursuits befitting their age was perhaps just as well, since the whole concept of retirement seems to have been entirely foreign to Ida Leeson. Ida gave herself little time to brood over her split with Alf Conlon and decided to take up an earlier offer from John Kerr and former Directorate of Research and Civil Affairs colleague John Ryan to set up the library for the recently formed South Pacific Commission (SPC). This was a consultative and advisory body set up by the six governments responsible for the administration of island territories in the South Pacific region. Established in February 1947, the signatories to the ‘Canberra Agreement’ were Australia, France, the Netherlands, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. The Commission’s purpose was to promote the medical, economic and social development of the territories under their administration. When the Secretariat and the Research Council were set up in 1948, Noumea was selected as the Commission’s headquarters. The move to New Caledonia was made in February 1949 and the South Pacific Commission headquarters was established in a building donated by France for the purpose. A former American military headquarters nicknamed ‘The Pentagon’, it was situated on a picturesque bay at Anse Vata. By mid-1949 Ida was on her way to Noumea where the Pentagon was to be her base for the six months she planned to be there, a period that stretched into almost nine. In typical fashion, she had barely disembarked before she applied herself to the task in hand. Ida worked like a demon ordering books 168
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A researcher to the end and organising the new library; it was a procedure with which she had become very familiar over the years since she left the Mitchell. Even though she acknowledged that she found the heat hard to take, she usually finished at 5.30 instead of the designated 3.30.3 She often returned to work again at night, when perhaps the conditions were a little more bearable. She did, however, find time to enjoy the company of the other staff associated with the Commission in those early stages, among them the Secretary General, Australian W.D. Forsyth, his deputy John Ryan, with whom Ida had worked at the Directorate, and the Deputy Chairman of the Research Council, a Dutch biology professor who luxuriated in the name of Laurens Gerhard Marinus Baas Becking. Dr Baas Becking had been appointed Director of the Botanic Gardens at Bogor, Java, in 1940, but while winding up his affairs in Holland was caught by the German invasion and imprisoned for the duration of the war. On liberation, he moved to Java and started work reorganising the Botanic Gardens, but when Indonesia became independent, he took up the South Pacifc Commission’s offer and moved to Noumea. As she always did, Ida became attached to her colleagues’ families too; in fact The Bulletin in Sydney reported that she ‘gave the groom away’ at the wedding of John Ryan and Ailsa Dickson, standing in for the groom’s mother according to local custom.4 Like all the people Ida loved and respected, ‘for the rest of her life’ these colleagues at the Commission ‘were in the pantheon’.5 After she left Noumea in early 1950, Ida received a letter from Anthony Murray-Oliver, who hailed from the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington and who became the Commission’s first full-time librarian. In it, he thanks her ‘for the kindness to me in the few days that I was so glad we had here together. And for all that you have done to ensure the smooth running of the Library in your handing over to me’. She left, he says, ‘a perfectly adjusted machine’. The letter finishes with the surprising comment that, ‘every time the samba is played it will for long revive once again affectionate memories of your time at the Pentagon’.6 Did 169
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Ida have a secret passion for Latin American dancing? We can only conjecture. As it happens, Ida’s efforts on behalf of the South Pacific Commission headquarters library did not end there. Almost as soon as she had found her land legs in Sydney again, she was invited to become librarian of the Commission’s Social Development Section, which, unlike the rest of the organisation, was to be based in Sydney. In 1951, she received word from John Ryan in Noumea that the librarian from New Zealand was leaving and could she suggest a replacement. Perhaps the attractions of life in a tropical paradise were outweighed by New Caledonia’s isolation from Australia (and New Zealand); in any case, Ida found it very difficult to find a suitable librarian who was prepared to move to Noumea. Thinking laterally, she proposed that she train the Dutch lawyer who had been Dr Baas Becking’s private secretary and who had been relegated to a less interesting job after he left Noumea for Australia. Ida believed Elisabeth de Dragffy would make a fine librarian; she was highly intelligent and, according to Ida, ‘she knew about five or six languages, she could talk to all the scientific people who came there—and they were mainly foreigners—in their own lingo’. ‘Lily’ de Dragffy came to Sydney at the end of 1951 so that Ida could give her a few weeks’ intensive training in classification which, her teacher said, ‘she simply lapped up’. After being appointed librarian in Noumea in February 1952, Lily used initially to send her quarterly lists to Ida for checking before she issued them. She accepted a permanent post as librarian in 1955 and worked in that capacity for the next fourteen years, after which she moved to France. Ida Leeson’s five years with the Social Development section of the South Pacific Commission seem to have been some of the happiest of her long working life. Housed in two adjoining flats in Cremorne overlooking the harbour, the section had a small, congenial staff working under the direction of H.E. (Harry) Maude, a Cambridge anthropology graduate and former Resident 170
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A researcher to the end Commissioner of the Gilbert and Ellice islands. ‘Maudie’ or ‘The Master’, as he was affectionately known behind his back by his staff, was a shy and self-effacing man who directed by suggestion and discussion rather than by giving orders. Through this, he was unconsciously responsible for the warm, family-like atmosphere that pervaded the unit. Ida Leeson, by far the oldest member of the group, was twenty-six years older than her boss and doted on him. He, in his turn, valued and respected Ida, referring to her as ‘the leading authority on the documentation of Oceania’ and his ‘untiring researcher and collaborator’.7 In his book, Of Islands and Men: Studies in Pacific History, a collection of essays written over a period of years, H.E. Maude acknowledges Ida’s contribution in the preparation of several essays and lists her as joint author on one: ‘The Coconut Oil Trade of the Gilbert Islands’.8 During her time in the Social Development section, the bibliographer extraordinaire also compiled two major bibliographies: the first was on cargo cults and the second, A Bibliography of Bibliographies of the South Pacific, became a key reference work for scholars working on the region.9 She was an indefatigable researcher and a ‘marvellous ferreter’ and Harry Maude would say to any Commission staff with research queries: ‘Get Ida on to it.’10 Ida was doing what she loved best—researching in her area of expertise and managing her own, albeit in this case, tiny library—and she also seems to have relished the friendly atmosphere at the section, where she clearly felt able to give free rein to her slightly odd sense of humour. When she was away from her small library cum office, she would leave a printed notice on her desk that read ‘GONE TO GOWINGS’ (a reference to a long-running advertising campaign by the Sydney store of that name). In a more self-deprecating vein, she used to refer to herself as ‘the office gargoyle’.11 As well as throwing herself into her research and library duties with her usual vigour, Ida was also learning to relax. In summer, the cricket commentary could be heard issuing from her room as she worked. When she did not have a great deal to do, she had a tendency to wander out and 171
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stand in front of a colleague’s desk, cigarette between fingers or lips, and regale them with the details of family genealogies, of which she was very fond. Her much younger colleagues loved and respected her, in spite of occasionally wishing she would go away and let them work. The youngest, Paquita Wilkes, was only nineteen when she started as secretary of the Literature Bureau and she remembers Ida was always generous and patient, showing her how to look up things in the dictionary and how to cite references.12 Alexander Dix, a young historian in his twenties, worked closely with Ida as the Commission’s research assistant and enjoyed her company and her great knowledge, although he said she could be infuriating at times: ‘the eccentricities that we all have in old age, I suppose, of keeping certain things to yourself that really perhaps other people have a legitimate need for’.13 He felt he was ‘fortunate to be with a group of people in the Commission who had played a significant and unusual role in Australia during the war’. ‘Ida,’ he said, ‘used to be a bit like honey to a bee that people came to see her from time to time and they inevitably would stay to lunch and talk.’ The young man sat fascinated, listening to the conversations. Alex clearly found Ida a most unusual-looking woman, with her tiny physique and deep voice. Her odd clothes, which he records in detail, made a lasting impression on him: She almost without exception every day would wear the same sort of outfit: a khaki shirt with a knotted string sort of tie, usually a brown, masculine jacket and a very no-nonsense sort of skirt, very sensible, masculine, brown or black shoes (brown, I think, usually, lace-ups) and a porkpie hat.
When Paquita became Mrs Crouch, she invited her colleagues to her wedding and Ida turned up in her usual outfit. A photograph of the event shows her, wine glass in hand, talking animatedly with one of the elegantly turned-out guests. She is in her much172
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A researcher to the end loved felt hat, but wears a sparkling white shirt and Walter Burley Griffin-type black silk neckbow under her suit jacket. At the Commission, Ida renewed her friendship with Helen Sheils, with whom she had worked at the Australian School of Pacific Administration, who was now Harry Maude’s assistant. She also met Nancy Phelan, who started in the Literature Bureau in 1951 and was appointed full-time Visual Aids Officer two years later, designing simple visual material for village education on health, agriculture and social problems for each different island territory. Nancy ‘commuted’ between Sydney and Noumea in her position.14 Helen Walsh was also an assistant in the section; she was Roman Catholic and remembers Ida’s interest in talking to her about the religion she had always been sceptical about.15 Nancy Phelan and Helen Sheils remained friends of Ida’s for the rest of her life and even today, long after Ida has departed, they are still in contact with each other and visit ‘French Helen’, Helen Walsh (now Godard), at her home in France. A familiar upper-class English voice was often heard around the office too as Camilla Wedgwood, who was still lecturing at the School of Pacific Administration, would visit Harry (which she pronounced ‘Harreh’) to talk about her work, such as the survey she was doing on female education in the South Pacific territories. Sometimes she would go to Nancy Phelan’s room to watch documentaries made by missionaries or anthropologists on one of the islands, and Nancy recalls her booming voice issuing forth one day as she peered at a scene of ‘capering tribesmen’: ‘What can it be? Can it be a PUBETEH RITE?’16 All sorts of people came to visit the unit—French, Dutch, American, Melanesians, Micronesians, Polynesians, anthropologists, educators, linguists and academics. Some stayed to lunch, cooked in the apartment’s kitchen by members of staff (though not by Ida, whose lunch usually consisted of a couple of sausage rolls and a bright yellow rock cake). Even when there were no visitors, about five or six staff members usually gathered in the office, or in the garden when the weather was particularly fine, to share their lunch. 173
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Here, in the tradition of the tea breaks in the common room at Mitchell, Ida was a keen participant in the conversations. The younger staff found her a fascinating anecdotalist (‘if you drew her out on a subject of interest to her’) with accurate recall of people and events from her long and interesting life. Helen Fenbury (nee Sheils) remembers: those peopling her talk of past times were Henry Lawson in the days when his pay was garnished for debts connected with his drinking; his daughter Bertha; Ion Idriess sitting in a little room upstairs in Angus & Robertson, writing a ration of pages a day; Christopher Brennan, courteous and gloomy; and more recently, George Ferguson of A&R, for whom she had a high regard.17
On one occasion, after Ida had been reminiscing about Castlecrag, Alex recalls that the next day she brought in a letter she had received from Marion Mahony Griffin just after Walter’s unexpected death in India, in which Marion expressed her spiritual interpretation of the tragic event.18 Of course, Florence’s name was heard frequently during these stories, sometimes too often for Nancy, who says that she was quoted on ‘everything’. Nancy recalls, ‘It was all seen through the eyes of an anthroposophist.’19 One thing that all the staff agreed on was that Ida never boasted about her past achievements. Alex remembers her as ‘extraordinarily self-effacing’; Nancy says she was ‘rather humble about herself . . . about her attainments and what she’d done in life’; Paquita did not even realise she had had such an important career—and none of the staff at the Commission knew anything about the controversy over her appointment as Mitchell Librarian. Outside the office, Ida was generous to her colleagues, sometimes taking them out to dinner and, on one occasion, to the opera to see one of the first performances of Menotti’s The Consul with Marie Collier in the lead, the young Australian soprano who went on to an international career until her death at the age of forty-four. Ida’s tastes, if not her beliefs, were very catholic and she was a regular attender of the Randwick races 174
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A researcher to the end too, where her advisor was the journalist who wrote the racing guide for the Herald—‘a bit seedy, hat angled over one eye, and always a burberry-type raincoat’. Ida offered to consult him on ‘the form’ when Nancy went to Ladies Day with a friend, but, to the veteran racegoer’s disgust, the women backed a horse called Tea Towel because of its name. They had the last laugh, though, when it won.20 For a few years, life was very pleasurable at the Cremorne establishment. But clouds gathered when in April 1955, the South Pacific Commission acquired its third Secretary General, an American who, as everyone in Social Development agreed, was more interested in business and paperwork than the Islands. The crunch came when it was announced that the Social Development section, which Harry Maude had worked so hard to keep in Sydney, was to be moved to Noumea. Gradually the close-knit staff left and dispersed. Harry Maude resigned at the end of 1955 and, after leave which he spent mainly in the Mitchell Library reading up on Pacific history, he joined the Australian National University as a Research Fellow in the Department of Pacific History, where he did most valuable work for more than twenty years.21 Ida Leeson, at the age of seventy, retired from full-time employment, though not from freelance research work and the general ‘networking’ for friends that she did so assiduously all her life. Nancy Phelan’s first travel book, Atoll Holiday, arose out of her time at the Social Development section and commemorates some of the friendships she made there. It is a lively account, illustrated with her own photographs, of a prolonged visit to the Gilbert Islands with Helen Sheils. In Harry Maude’s foreword, he confesses to having at first felt ‘an unreasonable hostility’ to the women’s proposal to spend their next holiday in the Gilbert Islands. As the former Resident Commissioner there, the beautiful islands and their ‘gentle and lovable’ people held a special place in his heart, but he knew that ‘their subtle appeal was not for everyone’. He was concerned that his two staff members, for whom he felt great affection, might return with ‘polite 175
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commonplaces’ about the islands he loved, but, as he says, he need not have worried. Nancy was in England in 1958 when Atoll Holiday was in the process of being published by Angus & Robertson, but Ida Leeson was busy at home organising last minute details and publicity, as she had done over the years for so many writers who were in her personal gallery of friends. In a letter to Nancy, she says: ‘I’ve been so engrossed in your affairs, that, to answer your question on what I am doing, I can but say, straining to get your book published.’22 She had been organising for Nancy to be sent a copy by airmail as soon as the book was out, as well as sorting out the dates for her of the Australian, English and American editions with George Ferguson and ‘Trix’ Davis of Angus & Robertson. Ida had been promised the first six copies, which she planned to give to friends, ‘urging them to boost it’. She was also up-to-date with the latest technology and tells Nancy that she has heard television publicity would be good when she returns to Australia. As far as her own news was concerned, Ida indicates that she was continuing her research work: I had a most enthusiastic letter from [Harry Maude] from Fiji. He’d found so much material he could scarcely wait to get back to tell me about it. He’ll be back about mid-September, and I’m trying to get some work done for him. Three and a half months seemed a long time when he left, and I’ve been doing a newspaper search for A&R part of the time.
It is clear from Ida’s letter to Nancy Phelan in September 1958 that she had not slowed down, even though, in the three years since she left the South Pacific Commission, her world had to a large extent fallen to pieces. When Ida returned to Sydney permanently in 1950, she and Florence had resumed their life together, visiting friends and relatives and enjoying each others’ company in their flat on the harbour. After Ida’s nephew Jack married in 1952, the two women 176
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A researcher to the end would visit the young couple every few weeks for Sunday lunch; they would also visit other members of the Leeson clan. June, Jack’s wife, refers to the two elderly women affectionately as ‘the odd couple’—Ida always in her suit and collar, and Florence like ‘a little bird’, with her cape around her shoulders and her hair wound in plaits around her head and threaded with ribbon. Florence, who was nearing eighty, would always have a ‘lie down’ after lunch while Ida went outside and pulled out weeds from the lawn or chatted to her nephew while he polished the car. (She doesn’t seemed to have helped with the washing up.) The two women were very fond of Florence’s nephews too. The twins, Charles and Sidney, had first visited the ‘aunts’ at Kirribilli on their way to a school excursion on the Great Barrier Reef in 1933. Sid remembers ‘Aunt Fonnie’ would have a big bowl of fruit on the table for them and they would take the ferry to Circular Quay for a milkshake. Their brother Hugh spent his adult life in Sydney, as a wing-commander in the air force during the war, and later as Chief Executive Officer of Qantas. But it was Charles who was the apple of his aunt’s eye, especially when he returned from Oxford to become a senior lecturer in zoology at the University of Sydney in 1948.23 Sid, an executive with Shell, was posted to Sydney in the early 1950s, after which he and his brother visited the aunts quite often and occasionally took them out to dinner at the Tattersalls Hotel. Florence became ill in 1957. She was suffering from cancer and it became evident towards the end of the year that she was terminally ill. That was when Ida bought a couch so that she could lie in the living room during the day. She was lying there one evening in December when June and Jack came to see her and Florence said to June: ‘No, you sit here with me and I’ll talk to you now and Jack can go over there and talk to Ida.’ She wanted to see them separately to say her goodbyes, holding June’s hand and thanking her for her kindness. Then Jack had to take June’s place on the couch. That was the last time they saw her.24 Nancy Phelan had a similar experience of what may have been an anthroposophical ritual of farewell. Just before Florence died 177
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in Cabarisha Hospital, Ida told Nancy that her friend wanted to see her. Nancy recalls: I was led up to the bed. Florence was lying there. It was frightfully hot weather, it was the most terrible heatwave . . . and she seized me by the arms and pulled me down to look at me very close, and said ‘Let me really look at you’ . . . She died soon afterwards, almost the next day or that night.25
Florence Birch died on 21 December 1957. The mourners at her funeral included friends from her anthroposophy circle as well as the Leeson relatives and the Conlons and Hugh Birch. Noticeably absent were Charles and Sid Birch, who had been forced to make a difficult decision whether to go on their planned trip to Melbourne to spend Christmas with their widowed mother or to attend their aunt’s funeral. They chose to be with their mother and Ida never forgave them for it. Her refusal to have anything more to do with the twins, with whom she had enjoyed such a long association, is probably the most extreme example of her utter inability to forgive perceived disloyalty to herself or to the person she loved most. Ida was devastated by the death of the woman who had been part of her life since she was a young library assistant at the Public Library, but she did not waste away in the fashion Manning Clark describes in his autobiography: Ida was so overwhelmed with grief when Florence died that she lost her appetite for life. She even lost her appetite for food. Friends—she had many, for she was greatly loved—and doctors tried to persuade her to take just enough to remain alive. But that was what she did not want. She was found one night lying dead in the street in North Sydney.26
It is perhaps a pity to spoil Manning Clark’s romantic fantasy with dull facts, but Ida actually had another six years to live and was to die in a hospitable bed. 178
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A researcher to the end Rather than pining away, Ida threw herself into work to assuage her grief. She continued to undertake research for Harry Maude until 1963; she worked on the Australian Encyclopaedia for Angus & Robertson; and she took on numerous private research and bibliographic jobs for friends or for people who contacted her because they had heard of her knowledge and research skills. Among her scanty papers are a few letters written to her in the early 1960s. A Mr Mansfield of Darlinghurst asks her to help him with a proposed list [of famous Australians] for the coat of arms for the Wesley College building. She does so and then makes her own suggestions: ‘My list would be 1) Cook, 2) Banks, 3) Phillips’, then ‘2 (or 3) explorers, 3 scientific benefactors, 2 governors, 1 wool industry pioneer, 1 statesman, 1 architect, 2 professors’.27 In another letter, from Bernard Amtmann Inc., Montreal, Rare Books and Manuscripts, she is asked a series of questions as ‘the greatest authority on the South Seas’. 28 Apparently, among the papers burned after her death were letters from people thanking her for research she had undertaken for them; the banknotes pinned to them were saved.29 Ida stayed up late at night, sometimes till 3 a.m., drinking black coffee to keep herself awake as she worked.30 During the day and into the evening, her small, severe figure was often to be seen in the reading room of the Mitchell Library. Because of her formidable reputation, the librarians on duty used to be a little nervous when Miss Leeson approached the desk. One junior librarian was amused that the officer in charge would go quite pale and whisper ‘You look after her’ as she made herself busy elsewhere. Ida would tell the librarian exactly where to go to find items in the stacks.31 Suzanne Mourot remembers Ida asking her personally to look for books, but at times the frustration of explaining and waiting must have become too much for the former Mitchell Librarian. Jean Arnot claims Ida Leeson ‘used to drive us mad’ when new staff who didn’t know her would report seeing a small white-haired person down in the stacks. Jean rather pompously adds that she was determined that when she retired she wouldn’t do that.32 But put yourself in Miss Leeson’s 179
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sensible shoes and imagine how annoying, and demeaning, it must have been for her to have to queue at the desk to request books and manuscripts to be fetched for her. She not only knew the contents of the library stacks intimately from years spent trawling their shelves on a daily basis, but had acquired and catalogued many of the books and manuscripts herself. Jean Arnot was Acting Mitchell Librarian for much of this time, as Phyllis Mander Jones was away working on behalf of the Library in London for more than a year from the end of 1956. Her deputy, Heather Sherrie, retired the same year. Ida’s writer friend, Miles Franklin, had died in October 1954 and it was Jean who took the Mitchell Librarian’s position (as laid down in the writer’s will) on the judging panel for the first Miles Franklin Award, decided in 1957.33 I wonder what Ida thought of that. Relations between the two old adversaries had not mellowed with time and absence, and Jean tells a story of delivering a message of condolence about Florence’s death one day in the reading room from a former librarian, to which Ida replied dismissively, ‘I have no time for maudlin sentimentality’.34 Colleagues recall how Ida could clam up if she thought someone was being presumptuous and she clearly did not wish to share her personal grief with Jean Arnot. When friends were in town, they would lunch with Ida; Peter Ryan remembers going to some rather fashionable restaurants in the city, such as La Salle, where, he says, ‘she used to point out the great and interesting of Sydney . . . Figures that were quite new or unknown to me’.35 Ida also spent more time with June Leeson, meeting her for lunch at DJs (‘always soup and sweets’) and accompanying her shopping. On one such shopping trip, June remembers Ida going with her into a dress shop. June picked a few things and went into the little dressing room. Ida looked in, with everyone watching her, and said ‘Oh, neither shape nor make, that’.36 When June was pregnant with her third child in 1959, Ida took a greater interest than she had with the other children, even going with June on visits to the doctor and insisting 180
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A researcher to the end on carrying her bag as they walked up to Macquarie Street. June recalls: And I used to laugh because when we’d go into the waiting room to wait for the obstetrician I’d see people looking. I suppose they’d think ‘Well, I don’t think she’s her mother. I wonder what the connection is’. And then she’d walk all the way to Wynyard with me to catch the bus.
Ida also continued to travel interstate, for work and to visit friends. It was on a trip to Melbourne that she found Peter Ryan’s wartime manuscript in a cupboard and carried it off to Beatrice Davis. Decades of heavy smoking were starting to catch up with Ida, however, and a trip to Canberra to see a friend in midwinter had to be cut short as the westerlies made her cough so badly.37 In 1962 Ida suffered a collapse and a fall that threatened her life and put her into a coma for some time. No one is quite sure of the sequence of events: some friends and relatives think she might have fallen in the flat; others believe she fell out of bed while in Cabarisha Hospital suffering from pneumonia; nobody, except Manning Clark, thinks she collapsed in the street in North Sydney. Helen Sheils, who was living in London, received two letters from Ida in November 1962, one written by her ‘special’ nurse, the other painstakingly penned in a shaky, but recognisable version of her own neat script. She was in constant pain and had lost her will to live. ‘I’m sure it would be best if I could die,’ she writes, ‘but I don’t know how to manage it.’38 Ida was still in hospital in early 1963 when Helen Sheils wrote to Phyllis Mander Jones, who was then working at the Australian High Commission in London, to ask if she could suggest a replacement for a particularly difficult index she had arranged for Ida to do before she became ill. It was for a book Helen was editing for the newly formed Institute of Aboriginal Studies, a volume of their 1961 conference proceedings.39 She needed an indexer with a background of knowledge in several fields of Australian research: ‘anthropology is the biggest single 181
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emphasis, of course, but there are also chunks of pre-history, genetics, linguistics, music and psychology’.40 Indexers of Ida’s calibre were not easy to find and Phyllis was only able to suggest a few institutions in London to approach. Frail and ill, Ida was eventually taken home by her younger brother Victor, who intended to stay for a while to look after her. But although despondent, she had not completely lost her independent spirit and ordered him to leave immediately.41 She was in and out of Cabarisha for the next year, tended by her long-term friends, the doctors of the Rivett family. Even so, she did manage to do the index and bibliography for Nancy Phelan’s book on her travels in Turkey: ‘in pencil because she was in bed—every little dot in the right place. She was so meticulous’.42 Ida did not live to see the book published, however, and in the acknowledgments to Welcome the Wayfarer the ‘late Ida Leeson’ is thanked. Ida died in Cabarisha Hospital on 22 January 1964, just before her seventy-ninth birthday. The attendance at her private funeral was small; after all, she did not have a loving companion to rally friends and relatives as Florence had had just over six years earlier. The Library was represented at the funeral by the current Principal Librarian, Gordon Richardson, Mitchell Librarian Marjorie Hancock and Ida’s old foe, Jean Arnot, who recalled years later that ‘none of us were friends of hers but we thought that we should go. There was hardly anyone there. She didn’t have a lot of personal friends, I don’t think.’43 Jean was quite wrong there. It is true that Ida had alienated a few who had been close to her, such as Florence’s twin nephews, but many of her friends had died by 1964 and others were scattered across Australia or living in the United Kingdom, the United States and the Pacific Islands. She is, however, remembered with great affection by most of those who knew her well. Helen Sheils recalls her ‘liveliness and warmth, and the way she related to everybody as individual human beings’.44 Peter Ryan believes ‘she was as useful and benevolent a public official as Australia has ever known; and as modest’.45 In her writerly way, Nancy 182
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A researcher to the end Phelan searched for a word to describe Ida Leeson and decided upon ‘valiant’. She chose it, she says: because to me it infers a certain generosity. It’s not just being brave, it’s a bit bigger than that . . . I wonder how many women there are like Ida now, because it has all changed so much— the sort of things that Ida had to cope with no longer exist in the same way.46
It may be true that women, at least in this country, for the most part no longer have to endure the discrimination in the workplace that those of Ida’s generation suffered; it is also easier for women who love women to live openly with their chosen partners. But, though the challenges may have shifted, they nonetheless exist and we can still learn much from valiant women like Ida Leeson.
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13
The spinster’s bloomers
The spinster’s bloomers
a
curious story circulates among people who knew Ida Leeson. It concerns her mythical underwear, the subject of which has become so inflated with hot air that I can imagine her tiny, bloomer-clad figure becoming airborne and disappearing into the sky, bound for a more congenial planet. The story’s source is the historian, dream weaver and storyteller, Manning Clark, who was known to relate it to friends and even, at times, in public speeches.1 He also included it in one of his two volumes of autobiography, The Quest for Grace, published in 1990, the year before his death: She [Ida] was a genuine eccentric. She wore bloomers which reached down below the knees where they were kept in place by coloured garters, tied in a most becoming and dignified bow. I know this because one of the competitions the young readers had each day was who would first see Ida’s garters. That was easy. You asked her for a book so high on the shelves in the reading room that she needed to climb up a ladder to fetch it. During the climb the hem of the tweed skirt she wore slid high enough for the garter of the day to be visible.2
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The spinster’s bloomers Many people I spoke to in the course of my research mentioned (without my prompting) some version of the bloomers story. One relative giggled over it; another was incensed; a librarian thought there was a photograph somewhere of Ida Leeson in a houndstooth check suit standing on or by a ladder; a former librarian said she never wanted to hear that damn bloomers story again. The son of Alfred Conlon recounted, with some relish, a spinoff version he had heard from Manning Clark: Some years ago he told me that when he was in the Mitchell, working at a table there, Ida came in and went up a ladder nearby where he was working. When she came down he said, ‘Ida, I hanker for your parts.’ He said that deliberately to inflame her, which it did.3
In 2004 Peter Ryan, former director of Melbourne University Press, published a series of pen portraits of characters from his long life; the only woman among the fifteen is Ida Leeson. He had met her when he was a young recruit in Alf Conlon’s rather odd army unit, the Directorate of Research and Civil Affairs, in 1944 when she had just arrived. His first encounter was memorable as he burst into a room where she was sitting, unaware it was occupied. His apologies to ‘Sir’ were profuse, after which, he writes: ‘The major rose. I noted the diminutive build, the snowwhite, close-cropped hair, the rimless spectacles. The major smiled, extended a friendly handshake, and stepped from behind the desk. The major was a lady!’4 Towards the end of this affectionate portrait, Peter Ryan mentions Manning Clark’s account of the Mitchell Librarian in his memoir, commenting: ‘Then he spoils a gracious compliment by sniggering at her old-fashioned bloomers which she used to secure by elastic below the knee. This he had learned by peering up her skirt as she ascended ladders in the Library.’5 A reviewer of Peter Ryan’s book then takes him to task for recounting the bloomers story: ‘Thus Ryan spoils a gracious biographical glimpse with an unlovely and unnecessary snippet 185
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about his subject, and a snide crack at a man who brought much kudos (and profit?) to Ryan’s Melbourne University Press.’6 When I interviewed Peter Ryan and John Legge (who had also been a young soldier in Alf Conlon’s unit in the 1940s) about their memories of Ida Leeson, the bloomers subject came up several times. Towards the end of our conversation, Peter mused: I think it’s curious that Manning was sufficiently interested in it a) to put it into print and b) obviously to mention it to people. I would have thought that if I had been searching for a topic of less interest than Ida’s bloomers I’d have found it quite hard.
To which John Legge replied quietly, ‘Though you’ve dwelt upon them this morning.’7 We have already been told about the men who made the young library assistants uncomfortable by looking up their skirts as they ascended staircases in the old Public Library in the 1930s. What is it about female librarians up ladders and staircases that haunts the history of the State Library of New South Wales? And why does this particular story of Ida Leeson’s bloomers continue to reverberate into the twenty-first century? Before I try to tease out its significance, let us look at another question, that is, is there any truth to Manning Clark’s original story? Manning Clark is well known for being wayward with dates and facts; as historian Carl Bridge comments: ‘Clark could not resist a good effect, or scene, even if the evidence was dubious.’8 Manning dates his meeting with ‘Ida Leeson, the Mitchell Librarian’ as occurring in the spring of 1947 when, as a young man of thirty-two, he visited Sydney from Melbourne, where he was on the staff of the university. He recalls her photographic memory and recounts the bloomers story. But Ida had left the Mitchell to join the army in 1944; in 1947 she was working at the Australian School of Pacific Administration. Perhaps Manning remembers her at the Mitchell from earlier visits to Sydney. He says he and Ida became ‘close friends’ and that she and Florence 186
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The spinster’s bloomers visited his family at Croydon where Ida played cricket with his children and entertained the family with stories of the men and women she had known. These visits would presumably have happened on the women’s regular trips to Melbourne. Whether or not Manning Clark actually had much personal experience of Ida’s phenomenal memory through his own research in the Mitchell Library, he would have been familiar with it as her prowess was legendary. He was a friend of James McAuley’s during the war, the poet who penned the famous lines about Ida in ‘A Short History of Australia’. His head of school at the University of Melbourne, Professor Crawford, who was much admired by Ida, knew her work well. No doubt Manning Clark was impressed with the ease with which she could summon up dates and historical facts, but perhaps his admiration was tinged with something less complimentary. It also distinguished the pedantic researcher from the young man who valued imagination over dry-as-dust historical correctness. Dodgy dates aside (on Manning Clark’s part, that is), there are other problems with the bloomers story. Apart from the extreme severity of her attire, Ida Leeson’s dress was quite conservative. The whole effect of her appearance was sensible and neat. She did not wear her mannish suits with the deliberately sexual panache of a Radclyffe Hall. Ida’s hair was not slicked back with grease or shaped into sideburns or kiss curls. She never wore trousers like the more bohemian Marion Mahony Griffin. She was a no-nonsense woman. No doubt she did wear sensible underwear, but the notion of the coloured garters tied in bows below the knees seems exaggerated and fanciful. Frills and bows were Florence’s domain. Nor would Ida have spent her days scaling the reading room ladders, fetching books for the ‘young readers’. For one thing, the Mitchell Library reading room did not need to have ladders to access books as the shelves were not high enough. Only reference books were held there and readers fetched them themselves. Other books were brought up from the stacks. In Ida Leeson’s time, most readers were not students but established 187
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scholars, although some postgraduates would have had readers’ tickets. Fetching books would not have been the task of the Mitchell Librarian, who inhabited the beautiful office off the marble corridor adjacent to the reading room. This office did contain a ladder as the shelves there were higher, so perhaps that is the source of the story that burgeoned in Manning Clark’s imagination. I suggest the bloomers story is a male fantasy. And since the wearer was not a young woman but one in late middle age, the motivation was not that of the male readers (‘the lookers’) in the old Bent Street Public Library, who leant back in their chairs for a better view up the skirts of the library assistants as they walked along the open iron-work galleries above them.9 It’s more of a snigger than a tale of hidden lust. So, though this rather silly and decidedly non-sexy story of the bloomers might have been affectionate, it was also condescending, even with a whiff of prurience. Non-sexy, it is nonetheless sexual. Androgynous women like Ida are unsettling and create unconscious gender anxiety, particularly among heterosexual men, and the symbolism of peering up their skirts to see what is there, or not there, is obvious. The sexual innuendo in stories by men about Ida Leeson went beyond the silly Manning Clark bloomers story. John Kerr, later Governor-General of Australia, for whom Ida had great affection when he was a young soldier in Alf Conlon’s army unit, used it to undermine her importance as a reader of secret intelligence material for Alf Conlon, who would then report to the commander-in-chief, General Thomas Blamey. John Kerr relates the story of General Blamey visiting Duntroon and inspecting a parade of the soldiers, including Ida Leeson: I remember Blamey’s words very well and I could only think he must have had Ida in mind because he said, ‘Colonel, as fine a body of men as I’ve ever seen.’ Brought the house down amongst the people in the immediate vicinity.10
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The spinster’s bloomers John Kerr then concludes in a patronising tone: ‘No, I think there would be nothing that Ida could say of any interest to Blamey.’ Ida’s own quite proud memory of that parade makes John Kerr’s remark even more offensive. ‘Blamey was remarkable, you know,’ recalled Ida, who had only met him once and didn’t think he’d know who she was or what she was doing. ‘But as he walked around at the parade, he stopped and spoke to us and he asked me about my work which showed he knew perfectly well what I was doing.’11 Ida Leeson seems to have encouraged men to treat her, in her business dealings and in her friendships with them, as they would another man. Perhaps this was her strategy of managing her situation as one of the few women in a male-dominated professional world. It seems that her contemporaries, such as William Ifould, did treat her this way, at least to some extent. One librarian, who was a junior at the time, recalled that ‘Miss Leeson and the Chief used to shout at each other’. Then she commented, ‘I think they probably enjoyed it. It was a bit of a feud.’12 Feud or not, there is an equality about such an image that is very different from the Principal Librarian’s relationship with the other tearful or devoted women who worked for him. When Alfred Conlon’s widow, Willna, was asked if her husband treated Ida differently when she was in the army because she was a woman, she replied, ‘No, oh no. He had a great respect for Ida. They were men together.’13 Yet John Kerr, in a nudge-nudgewink-wink tone, says of Alfred Conlon: ‘He was a very earthy, amusing fellow with wide-ranging sexual imagery and all sorts of peculiar activities. I don’t think he ever expanded the full range of his conversational style to Ida.’14 Much of the currency of mateship in conversations between men depends on a ribaldry that does not admit women, especially quite proper women, which Ida in her own way was. She certainly never stood around the bar in the army Mess after dinner with the men. She was in the odd position of flouting ‘feminine’ convention while not being one of the blokes. So no matter how 189
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much Ida Leeson wanted to be regarded as an equal by her male colleagues and no matter how much they loved and respected her, her sexual difference from them was marked by the stories they told behind her back.
In the decades after Ida Leeson left the Mitchell Library in 1944 and until her death, memory of her reign there was gradually lost as her former colleagues retired and new regimes were instituted. No memorial to her had been set up; even her personnel file had somehow disappeared. It was not until 1985 that her career was remembered in a paper presented at an Australian library history conference by Baiba Berzins, the librarian who then held the Mitchell Librarian position. An historian and political analyst by academic training and an archivist by profession, she detailed Ida’s achievements as a librarian and also dropped in the line, ‘In her domestic life, Ida Leeson maintained an openly lesbian relationship’.15 This was an honest and wellintentioned statement by someone who wanted Ida Leeson’s important, and brave, relationship with Florence Birch to be acknowledged and not simply glossed over. This comment about Ida Leeson’s sexuality was made in the wake of the heady years of the sexual revolution and the gay and women’s liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Lifewriting conventions had started to change and progressive biographers and historians had begun to acknowledge the interdependence of public and private in their subjects’ lives. What the comment achieved was to open up a space where the love-that-dare-not-speak-its-name could be mentioned, where what one relative now refers to as ‘that lesbian business’ could be referred to openly. But conventions change slowly and mention of the unconventional, and for many people deviant, sexuality of a single woman in a public position also caused ripples of disapproval that are still circling today. Taking their cue from the statement made in 1985, the few later researchers who mention Ida Leeson refer to her matter-of190
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The spinster’s bloomers factly as a lesbian. One states of her relationship: ‘They set up house as man and wife, with Florence in the feminine domestic role.’16 William Ifould’s biographer speculated whether Ida’s lesbian sexuality was an unacknowledged factor in the controversy over her promotion to Mitchell Librarian.17 On the other hand, certain family members I spoke to in the course of my research bridled at the public ‘outing’ of their famous relative, concerned about the lack of ‘proof’. Women who had worked with Ida tended to laugh about their own naiveté, saying they didn’t know about such things then. Nancy Phelan, Ida’s colleague at the South Pacific Commission when she was in her sixties, recalls: You know, all the time we knew Ida, it never entered our heads— I don’t think the subject was ever mentioned, whether they were lesbians or not. Then one day, after I’d left the SPC, I was talking to Hal Missingham and he just casually referred to ‘those two old lesbians’. I said, ‘Who told you they were lesbians?’ He said, ‘Oh everyone said they were lesbians’. I don’t think there was any proof. It doesn’t matter if they were, but it just never occurred to anybody.18
The difference between men’s and women’s responses to the two women and their sexuality is encapsulated in Nancy’s recollection. Ida knew Florence Birch for nearly fifty years and lived with her for about thirty-five of them, until Florence’s death in 1957. On official documents, she named her older brother and her ‘friend’ as her next of kin. Everyone who knew Ida comments on the fact that she talked about Florence constantly, quoting her at length; in the words of Peter Ryan, ‘Florence was always on her lips’.19 The two women’s domestic relationship was an established one and they were very much part of each other’s families. They visited Florence’s closest brother and his wife in Melbourne regularly and took a keen interest in their sons, particularly the twins, Charles and Sidney. The young men were fond of the two women, but also reacted in a way typical of the 191
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young towards older relatives. Sid remembers an incident when he and his brother were living in Sydney: they were going into Cahills for a cup of tea and Charles went in first and came straight out, saying ‘The aunts are in there’, and they ducked off before the women saw them.20 In their later years, Ida and Florence were regular visitors for Sunday lunch at the home of Ida’s nephew, Jack, and his wife, June. The family would say, ‘Oh, you’re having Heart and Darl for lunch’, affectionately mocking the pet names the women used for each other. When Florence died in December 1957, a huge wreath of flowers lay on her coffin, with the message, ‘For my Darling’. The day after the funeral, as she was being farewelled at the wharf on an overseas trip, Nancy Phelan, Ida’s colleague, was surprised to see the small figure walking towards her. Nancy recalls: She looked absolutely frightful. She was sort of a pale yellow. And she brought champagne and cats’ tongues (you know those biscuits), which she loved . . . Just a gesture. And I said, ‘How are you, Ida?’ And she said, ‘Bleeding inside’.21
This was, by any reckoning, a devoted friendship. It cannot be written off as a convenient arrangement where two single women shared a house as a way of saving money and avoiding loneliness. But did Ida Leeson live in an ‘openly lesbian relationship’ or was that statement made through late twentieth-century eyes? The intriguing question is how did Ida and Florence perceive their relationship? To my knowledge, Ida never used the word herself, nor did she take up an openly ‘sexual’ stance in relation to Florence, as, for instance, writer Radclyffe Hall did with her lover Una Troubridge in England at around the same time. Of course, friendship and lesbianism are not necessarily oppositional terms, as I have argued elsewhere in earlier research about Australian poet, Mary Fullerton. From the love poems written in the early twentieth century to her long-term friend and companion, Mabel Singleton, it is clear that Mary understood their relationship to 192
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The spinster’s bloomers be a friendship of the highest order, but one which could incorporate passion and desire.22 Mary Fullerton and Mabel Singleton, whose relationship we would today call lesbian, did not bear the commonly assumed lesbian ‘sign’ of the mannish/feminine couple. On the other hand, women who appear mannish are not necessarily lesbian; one who comes to mind from Ida Leeson’s circle at the Directorate of Research in the 1940s is English anthropologist, the Honourable Camilla Wedgwood, who has been described as having ‘a very handsome moustache’.23 Wedgwood’s biographers note, somewhat cryptically, that ‘though mannish in appearance, she was not what is known in colloquial language as “butch”’.24 One of the problems with such an historically, culturally and morally loaded term as ‘lesbian’ is that everyone assumes they know what it means without deconstructing their own assumptions, without considering how these are filtered through their particular attitudes and beliefs. It is also a term that still carries such opprobrium that many people prefer to use encoded ways of speaking about it. I have contended earlier that John Metcalfe was drawing, possibly unconsciously but certainly negatively, on the common conflation of feminist with lesbian and man-hater when he asserted in an interview in 1974 that Ida Leeson was a ‘leading feminist’.25 The statement by another commentator that categorised the couple as ‘man and wife’ is simply unthinking and reduces a complex relationship between two professional women to a parody of a heterosexual marriage. Some people find the notion of lesbianism difficult to even engage with, so it is possible the women who are adamant that it never occurred to them that Ida and Florence may have been lesbians are being just a little artless. Even though the female librarians I have spoken to insist there was no gossip among the staff about Miss Leeson’s living arrangements, her description as ‘mannish’ is ubiquitous and was certainly noted by all. Jean Arnot modifies the ‘no gossip’ stance by mentioning two other librarians who lived together for many years—Zoe Bertles and Mollie Barrington. About those women she says there was no ‘question 193
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of any lesbian association’ because they were ‘two feminine women together’ whereas with the other couple ‘there might have been talk about it because Miss Birch was a feminine woman and Miss Leeson favoured the males’.26 This distinction implies Jean Arnot was aware of common assumptions about lesbians. Like John Metcalfe, Jean Arnot was interviewed decades after the period she is talking about, an added problem here because everyone whose stated or implied opinions we have access to about Ida and ‘that lesbian business’ looks back to that era and is influenced, whether consciously or not, by the changing understandings of sexuality and same-sex relationships that have occurred within society in the last three decades. One of the most crucial differences between then and now is that a person’s sexuality was not considered to be the core aspect of their identity in the 1920s and 1930s in the way it is today. It is quite possible that Ida loved Florence without ever finding it necessary to categorise her feelings as sexual or otherwise. Even today, the range of difference between individuals concerning sexual expression is extensive. Helen Fenbury (nee Sheils), one of Ida’s much younger colleagues at the Australian School of Pacific Administration and the South Pacific Commission, feels that there was ‘a sort of directness and innocence in her (in a Blake sense) that is rare to find’.27 Helen sums up the contradictions of this apparently feminine/masculine couple perceptively: I remember my mother later saying Florence was like a tree full of sparrows at sunset. She did tend to twitter all over the place. My impression was of a pretty strong personality underneath; whereas Ida, who was so direct and in some ways masculine in her presentation, had lots of warmth and empathy for people, and a lovely sort of enjoyment of people’s individuality, and of the everyday humanity of life around her, when she wasn’t feeling oppressed by her protestant work ethic.28
Trying to comprehend how women from the past like Ida Leeson and Florence Birch understood their relationships is made 194
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The spinster’s bloomers more difficult by the dearth of personal material that survives. The ‘proof’ or evidence that is demanded by some people that theirs was a lesbian relationship is as intangible as chasing rainbows. (And it is usually relatives with a vested interest in ‘proving’ that they were not lesbians who are concerned to find such evidence.) Unlike the diaries and fragile bundles of love letters of heterosexual couples that are handed down through generations or left in library archives, personal material between friends and life-long companions is very rare. This may be simply because maiden aunts and bachelor uncles are not part of the central family line; such material may be also lost through censorship by the person concerned or by family members. It is ironic, though understandable, that the woman whose life was spent collecting other peoples’ papers did not organise her own and arrange for them to be preserved. And her family either did not think them worth preserving or did not want her personal documents to be publicly available. After Ida Leeson died in January 1964, just before her 79th birthday, the Principal Librarian, Gordon Richardson, wrote to her brother Victor to ask whether ‘any of her private papers, correspondence, diaries or similar records might be available for permanent preservation in the Mitchell Library’.29 A memo from a telephone conversation indicates that her brother had destroyed most personal items. And one of Ida’s nephews is known to have had a bonfire of papers after cleaning out her flat. 30 That conflagration may have included Florence’s papers too, because her family have none. Imagine how many letters must have travelled across the Tasman in the 1910s when Ida was in Sydney and Florence in Wellington or, later, when Ida was working in Melbourne at the Directorate of Research in the 1940s. Not one survives. Without any letters that might give us a sense of the emotional dynamics of the two women’s relationship or any diaries that might give an insight into their personal feelings, it is the context of their lives that we must rely on for interpreting it. From that context, I would concur with Baiba Berzin’s comments in 1985 195
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that Ida and Florence lived in what we would call today a longterm lesbian relationship. Does it matter what we call it? It does to the extent that people often do not consider how socially constructed such terms are, and continue to deny the possibility or to simply reproduce reductive stereotypes, usually negative, which perpetuate prejudice and fail to take into account the complexities of all relationships. Since Manning Clark’s words opened this chapter, let us give him another chance with this non-stereotyping description of the two women’s influence on him as a young man: I was drawn to Florence because she had a thirst to believe. I was drawn to Ida because she was tormented by doubt about everything. At the time I did not see anything odd in a young man with great hopes for humanity knowing a rare moment of heart’s ease in the company of two eccentrics who spoke eloquently about spirituality, who disdained all those who equated material well-being with virtue and happiness. They taught me something about love.31
I hope his story of Ida Leeson’s bloomers can now be consigned to the realms of schoolboy fantasy, where it belongs.
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14
Acknowledging Ida
Acknowledging Ida
r
econstructing a ‘life’ requires a careful selection and stitching together of myriad fragments into some kind of whole garment. Although its shape is dependent upon the particular fragments that survive and could alter radically if just another set of letters or a lost diary were to surface, traditionally the finished fabric is made to appear seamless, the joins carefully concealed, the holes invisibly mended. Today, that model of biography is often challenged, or at least modified, even in the writing of lives for which there is an abundance of source ‘material’. Instead, it has been found that making the connections visible and exploring the gaps and silences can reveal new aspects of individual lives and open up different ways of interpreting them; the process may also uncover patterns that can be understood at levels beyond the individual. Writing a version of Ida Leeson’s life has been challenging, the fragments just too few and the holes too gaping to even attempt to create a seamless whole. Once a prominent public figure, she has almost disappeared from view: she left few papers, she wrote no memoirs, she did not make provisions for awards to commemorate her name after her death, no volume of essays 197
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has been written to commemorate her career. Her life did not conform to the usual trajectories laid down for women either: she did not marry and have children but nor did she live the conventional life of a ‘spinster’, as many of her female contemporaries in the library world did. Following the dual threads of her professional life as a librarian and researcher and her personal life with her life-long companion, Florence Birch, has raised many questions that I cannot answer, but the process has brought the woman who was Ida Leeson into sharper focus, as well as allowing patterns from a broader societal level to emerge, in particular those concerning gender, class and unconventional sexuality. Ida Leeson rates only a few footnotes in the memorial volume of essays dedicated to John Wallace Metcalfe, the librarian who by virtue of his gender (or, as Miles Franklin would say, his genitals) was promoted above her in 1932.1 John Metcalfe’s subsequent career justified his selection by William Ifould from the small pool of male librarians available and he amply repaid his mentor’s professional training, if not his attempts to improve the young man’s personal grooming and presentation. In his long career, John Metcalfe was instrumental in the development of the Free Library Movement; he established the Australian Institute of Librarians in 1937; he also overcame his early failure at cataloguing and wrote copiously on the subject, furthering the education of librarians in Australia. After holding the position of Principal Librarian at the Public Library from 1942 to 1959, he became the founding head of the first graduate school of librarianship at the University of New South Wales in 1960. A brilliant and eccentric figure, he inspired many stories, often contradictory—about ‘his sloppy dressing, erratic car driving, sexism, racism and professional ruthlessness’, but also about ‘his humility, kindness and extraordinary determination to increase the use and numbers of libraries in Australia’.2 Yet John Metcalfe’s long-held anxiety about the culturally inscribed gendered nature of his profession was still evident at the time of his resignation as Principal Librarian in 1959. In his 198
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Acknowledging Ida address to the Board of Trustees on the occasion, he states that he ‘never subscribed to the view . . . that the gender of all things to do with books is feminine’. Referring to the predominance of women in the profession (though not at the most senior levels) when he entered it, he claims credit for ‘some restoration of the balance of sexes on the staff’. Without any sense of irony, he announces: ‘I take this opportunity of thanking the sex, which was once distinguished by its external trousers, for showing that, in a fair field with no favour, both sexes can hold their own.’3 He would probably be gratified to know he is now thought to be ‘rightly considered the father of Australian librarianship’.4 Having rescued Ida Leeson from footnote status and elevated her into the body of my text, I am aware of having made assumptions about her at the outset that I would now question. When I first learnt about the devious machinations that allowed her to become Mitchell Librarian while barring the way for further promotion, I assumed that she was thwarted in her desire to eventually become Principal Librarian. However, the more I have discovered about the distinctions between the positions—the administrative, bureaucratic demands of the Principal Librarian’s position and the more collection and research-based nature of the Mitchell Librarian’s job (at least as it was in the 1930s)—the more that assumption appears unwarranted. For it has become abundantly clear during the course of the writing that Ida Leeson’s passions lay in the direction of collection-building and research and not in administration, library buildings or developing the library profession itself. Her passions were also directed towards offering her knowledge to others, specifically to facilitate researchers and scholars. The biographer of Beatrice Davis, chief editor at Angus & Robertson for many years, characterises her as ‘a conduit, a facilitator, making contacts, bringing people together’.5 The same could be said for her friend and colleague, Ida Leeson. Beatrice preferred to remain an editor rather than seeking to become a publisher. Likewise Ida Leeson, I now believe, set her sights on 199
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becoming Mitchell Librarian, but never sought the control of the Principal Librarian’s position. The anger and frustration that led her to appeal against the circumstances surrounding her appointment were directed at the injustice of the position being downgraded and the salary reduced. The greatest injustice of all, of course, was having a librarian who did not have the experience and knowledge to become Mitchell Librarian be appointed above her to the newly created position of Deputy Principal Librarian. And being Ida Leeson, she never forgave him for it. Many of Ida’s colleagues have commented on the paradox of her genuine modesty about her capacities and her definite opinions about how things should be done. Like several of the men she revered, she was less interested in personal power and recognition than in being an unseen influence behind the scenes. Alf Conlon’s name is the most obvious in this regard, but Walter Burley Griffin and Harry Maude also shared the quality to a certain extent. That retiring position is usually perceived to be a ‘feminine’ quality and it is interesting and revealing that the woman who was regarded as ‘mannish’ should have chosen as her idols men who exhibited such a preference. I now begin to understand why this collector of other people’s papers did not find it necessary to organise her own to be left for posterity. That would have been to adopt a position of personal importance she never sought in life. Rather than anxiously defending her profession against its perceived femininity as John Metcalfe did, Ida settled happily into the position of conduit and facilitator, in line with the conventional understanding of the librarian’s role. She combined this with a dedication to honing her skills as a librarian and her knowledge as an expert in the field of Australiana, to a degree that meant she was sought out by scholars, writers and institutions until the end of her life. Her name has been left for posterity, in an unobtrusive way that would have pleased her—in the acknowledgments pages of the books written by countless scholars who have conducted their research in the Mitchell Library, and writers who have benefited from her meticulous attention to 200
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Acknowledging Ida detail in their books’ bibliographies and indexes. The acknowledgment in Marjorie Barnard’s A History of Australia speaks for many: ‘Miss Ida Leeson, without whose expert (and tolerant) advice I should not have dared to publish this book.’6
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Endnotes
Endnotes
Introduction 1
2 3
4 5 6
See Greg Dening, Mr Bligh’s Bad Language: Passion, Power and Theatre on the Bounty, Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp. 355–6. I thank him for providing me with information about the MGM press books held in the New York Public Library. Pacific Islands Monthly, 21 May 1935, p. 5. Ida Leeson papers, ML MS 860X. There is no indication that this was published, but it probably formed the basis for part of an ABC radio series devised by T.D. Mutch in 1937. Charles Birch, telephone conversation with Ros Bowden, April 1985, Ros Bowden Papers ML 2123/84. Daphne Gollan, interview with Ros Bowden, September 1985, ML CYMLOH 23/2. Franklin to Kate Baker, n.d. 1937, Kate Baker Papers, NLA MS 2022.
Chapter 1 1
2
See David J. Jones, A Source of Inspiration and Delight: The Buildings of the State Library of New South Wales since 1826, Sydney, Library Council of New South Wales, 1988, Chapter 1. H.C.L. Anderson, ‘Women as Library Assistants’, Library Record of Australasia, vol. 1, no. 3, October 1901, pp. 98–9.
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Endnotes 3 4
5
6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14
15 16 17 18
Nita Kibble Papers, ML MS4103 Add-on 1897. Jim Cleary, ‘Women Librarians at the Public Library of New South Wales: The first generation’, in Peopling a Profession: Papers from the Fourth Forum on Australian Library History, Frank Upward and Jean P. Whyte (eds), Ancora Press, 1991, p. 143. Ailsa Merrick, ‘Reminiscences’ ML MS 5215; Heather Sherrie, interview with Paul Brunton and Pat Beddie, June 1985, MLOH 35/1–3. Merrick, ‘Reminiscences’. Sherrie, interview with Paul Brunton and Pat Beddie. Merrick, ‘Reminiscences’. Wilma Radford, interview with author, 15 September 2003. Axel Clark, Christopher Brennan: A Critical Biography, Melbourne University Press, 1980, p. 94. ibid. Nancy Phelan, The Romantic Lives of Louise Mack, University of Queensland Press, 1991, pp. 59–60. Sherrie, interview with Paul Brunton and Pat Beddie. Clark, Christopher Brennan p. 182 ; David J. Jones, ‘William Herbert Ifould and the development of library services in NSW, 1912–1942’, PhD thesis, University of New South Wales, 1993, ML MSS 5943, p. 47. Manning Clark, The Quest for Grace, Penguin, 1991, pp. 167–8. Christopher Brennan Notebook, NLA MS 8441; ‘Vocabulary of New South Wales Aboriginal Dialects’, ZML MS 5677. ibid. John Metcalfe, interview with Hazel de Berg, April 1974, NLA.
Chapter 2 1 2 3 4
5
See Max Solling and Peter Reynolds, Leichhardt: On the Margins of the City, Allen & Unwin, 1997, Chapter 7. ibid., p. 79. Nancy Collins, interview with author, 11 August 2003. The information in this section comes from Kegworth Centenary 1887–1987, n.d., published to commemorate the centenary of Kegworth Public School, Leichhardt. Notes by Victor Leeson, Ida Leeson papers, ML MS 860X.
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6 7
8 9 10 11 12
13 14 15
16 17
18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29
Discussed in Nancy Phelan, The Romantic Lives of Louise Mack, University of Queensland Press, 1991. This excerpt from Teens is quoted in Lilith Norman, The Brown and Yellow: Sydney Girls’ High School 1883–1983, Oxford University Press, 1983, pp. 27–8. Collins, interview with author. Nancy Collins, personal collection. June Leeson, interview with author, 18 August 2003. Information in this section from Norman, The Brown and Yellow. The discovery of the 24-page report for 1900 is recorded in Fragment: The Magazine of Angus & Robertson and Halstead Press, no. 9, May 1957, p. 20. I thank Caroline V. Jones for drawing my attention to this item. The honour boards are on display now in the School Hall of the present Sydney Girls’ High School at Moore Park. Collins, personal collection. Amy McGrath, A Short History of the N.S.W. Association of University Women Graduates, Part One, 1882–1920, NSW Association of University Women Graduates, 1988, p. 8. Leeson papers, ML MS 860X. Ursula Bygott and K.J. Cable, Pioneer Women Graduates of the University of Sydney 1881–1921, University of Sydney Monograph no. 1, 1985, pp. 31, 35. Brian H. Fletcher, History and Achievement: A Portrait of the Honours Students of Professor George Arnold Wood, Braxus Press, 1999, p. 41. McGrath, A Short History, p. 26. ibid. Cited in Laura Doan, Fashioning Sapphism: The Origins of Modern English Lesbian Culture, Columbia University Press, 2001, p. 100. Susan Magarey, Passions of the First Wave Feminists, University of New South Wales Press, 2001, p. 107. Fletcher, History and Achievement, p. 43. G.V. Portus, Happy Highways, Melbourne University Press, 1953, pp. 56–7. ibid., p. 58. Fletcher, History and Achievement, p. 54. Cited in Fletcher, History and Achievement, pp. 56–7. ibid., p. 50. Portus, Happy Highways, p. 61.
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Endnotes 30 Fletcher, History and Achievement, p. 51.
Chapter 3 1
2
3 4 5 6 7 8 9
10 11 12
13 14 15 16 17
For accounts of Mitchell’s life and his bequest, see Anne Robertson, Treasures of the State Library of New South Wales: The Australiana Collections, Sydney, Collins in association with the SLNSW, 1988, Chapter 1; David J. Jones, A Source of Inspiration and Delight: The Buildings of the State Library of New South Wales since 1826, Library Council of New South Wales, 1988, Chapter 2. Robertson, Treasures, p. 14; Caroline V. Jones cites the memoirs of Rebecca Wiley as the source of Robertson’s influence on Mitchell, in ‘The Influence of Angus & Robertson on Colonial Knowledge’, RAHS Journal, vol. 89, no. 1, June 2003, p. 1. Judith A. Allen, Rose Scott: Vision and Revision in Feminism, Oxford University Press, 1994, p. 65. Anderson, ‘Reminiscences’, p. 5. ibid., p. 50. ibid., p. 6. References from 3 volumes of press cuttings on the Mitchell Library Q027.5/M. Cited in Robertson, Treasures, p. 22. Ida Leeson, The Mitchell Library, Sydney: Historical and Descriptive Notes, Trustees of the Public Library of New South Wales, 1936, p. 4. References from press cuttings Q027.5/M. Robinson, Treasures, p. 11. Manning Clark, The Quest for Grace, Penguin, 1991, p. 167. Manning Clark’s memory was not accurate as he dates his meeting with Ida Leeson in the library as 1947, a year after she had resigned as Mitchell Librarian. James McAuley, Under Aldebaran, Melbourne University Press, 1946. Anderson, ‘Reminiscences’, p. 33. Leeson, The Mitchell Library, p. 13. Jones, A Source of Inspiration, p. 63. David J. Jones, ‘“A Dormant Commission”: Ifould and the Rise of John Metcalfe’, in W. Boyd Rayward (ed.), Libraries and Life in a Changing World: the Metcalfe Years, 1920–70, School of Information,
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18
19
20 21
22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31
32
33 34 35 36 37 38
Library and Archive Studies, University of New South Wales, 1993, p. 48. Departmental Board, Department of Public Instruction, Public Library of NSW. Transcript of Notes of evidence, (stamped) 18 March 1912. SLNSW NPL88 (1911–12). Librarians today would argue that even with computerisation, cataloguing is still a matter of skill and ingenuity. The database, Kinetica, with its extraordinary range of quality, demonstrates this. Suzanne Mourot, interviews with Paul Brunton, 1985, tape 1. Jim Cleary, ‘Women Librarians at the Public Library of New South Wales: The first generation’, in Peopling a Profession: Papers from the Fourth Forum on Australian Library History, Frank Upward and Jean P. Whyte (eds), Ancora Press, 1991, p. 152. ibid., p. 153. The third, Florence Rutherford, resigned in 1907. Peter Biskup, Libraries in Australia, Centre for Information Studies, 1994, p. 492. Heather Sherrie, interview with Paul Brunton and Pat Beddie, June 1985. Cleary, ‘Women Librarians’, p. 148. Axel Clark, Christopher Brennan: A Critical Biography, Melbourne University Press, 1980, p. 197. Maude Yeomans Fitzhardinge papers, ML MSS 340. Cleary, ‘Women Librarians’, p. 150. Phyllis Mander Jones, interview with Baiba Berzins, 1983, ML MS 6479; Cleary, ‘Women Librarians’, p. 148. David J. Jones, ‘William Herbert Ifould and the development of library services in NSW, 1912–1942’, PhD thesis University of New South Wales, 1993, ML MSS 5943. David J. Jones, ‘“Only a librarian”: WH Ifould and the Sydney Establishment’, Australian Academic and Research Libraries, 22 June 1991, p. 128. ibid., p. 130. Cited in Jones, A Source of Inspiration, p. 98. Sherrie, interview with Paul Brunton and Pat Beddie. Wilma Radford, interview with author, 15 September 2003. Cleary, ‘Women Librarians’, p. 154. Salary Register 1895–1932, ML NPL116.
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Chapter 4 1 2
3 4
5
6
7 8 9
10
11 12 13 14 15 16 17
H.C.L. Anderson, ‘Reminiscences of D.S. Mitchell’, 1920, ML A1830, p. 24. Jim Cleary, ‘Women Librarians at the Public Library of New South Wales: The first generation’, in Peopling a Profession: Papers from the Fourth Forum on Australian Library History, Frank Upward and Jean P. Whyte (eds), Ancora Press, 1991, p. 151. PLNSW Annual Reports 1896–1968, ML Q027.5/25. Hugh Wright, letters to WH Ifould on his overseas trip to US and UK 1913–14, ML A3593. All further references to this trip are taken from this document. For a full account, see Peter Biskup, ‘Captain Cook’s Endeavour journal and Australian Libraries’, Australian Academic and Research Libraries, September 1987, pp. 137–49. The lengths to which Ifould went to confuse his rivals are detailed in David J. Jones, ‘Manoeuvres of a man of principle: An investigation of W.H. Ifould’, Australian Library Journal, August 1992, pp. 162–4. Cited in Biskup, ‘Captain Cook’s Endeavour Journal’, p. 141. Dowling to Ifould, 27 March 1923, PLNSW NPL 241; cited in Biskup, ‘Captain Cook’s Endeavour Journal’, p. 142. Greg Dening, ‘MS1 Cook, J. Holograph Journal’, in Remarkable Occurrences: The National Library of Australia’ First 100 Years, Peter Cochrane (ed.), National Library of Australia, 2001, p. 1. Ida Leeson, The Mitchell Library, Sydney: Historical and Descriptive Notes, Trustees of the Public Library of New South Wales, 1936, pp. 19–20. Central Correspondence Files, Series 235, D299—Cook relics, Australian Museum Archives. Ailsa Merrick, ‘Reminiscences’, ML MS 5215. Daphne Gollan, interview with Ros Bowden, September 1985, CYMLOH 23/1–5, no. 2. Heather Sherrie, interview with Paul Brunton and Pat Beddie, June 1985, MLOH 35/1–3. Gollan, interview with Ros Bowden. Jean Arnot, interview with Ros Bowden, March 1985, CYMLOH 23/1–5, no. 1. Sherrie, interview with Paul Brunton and Pat Beddie.
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18 Gollan, interview with Ros Bowden. 19 W.H. Ifould to Ida Leeson, 3 August 1927, ML MSS 94. 20 Ida Leeson, ‘Report on work done and to be done in copying overseas . . .’, 1933, ML Doc.1835, p. 10. 21 Unless otherwise stated, this section is based on letters from Ida Leeson to W.H. Ifould, 1927, PLNSW Records, 1927–33, ML MSS 94. 22 Charles Birch, notes from a telephone interview by Ros Bowden, 30 April 1985, ML 2123/84. 23 Leeson, The Mitchell Library, p. 26. For more information and visual material, see Matthew Flinders: The Ultimate Voyage, an exhibition at the State Library of New South Wales 2001/2, www.sl.nsw.gov.au/exhibitions/flinders. 24 PLNSW Records, 1927–33, ML MSS 94. 25 Leeson, The Mitchell Library, p. 26. 26 My thanks to Paul Brunton for the information relating to the Public Record Office files. 27 Leeson, ‘Report on work done’, p. 12.
Chapter 5 1 2 3 4
5 6 7 8 9
Wilma Radford, interview with author, 15 September 2003. Ailsa Merrick, ‘Reminiscences’, ML MS 5215. Radford, interview with author. Alexander Dix, interview with Ros Bowden, April 1985, ML CYMLOH 23/1–5; written recollections of Ida Leeson by Helen Fenbury (nee Sheils), July 1985, Ros Bowden papers ML 2123/84. Cited in Suzanne Mourot, This Was Sydney, Ure Smith, 1969, p. 103. John Metcalfe, interview with Hazel de Berg, April 1974, p. 9947, NLA. This argument was used in an article in The Age, 6 December 1932, about the appointment of the new Mitchell Librarian. I thank Arthur Easton for that information. See Noeline Kyle, ‘Woman’s “natural mission” but man’s real domain: The masculinisation of the state elementary teaching service in New South Wales’, in Battlers and Bluestockings: Women’s place in Australian education, Sandra Taylor and Miriam Henry
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Endnotes
10 11 12
13
14
15 16 17
18 19
20 21 22
23 24 25
(eds), Australian College of Education, 1988. See also the work of Marjorie Theobald for the teaching context. Heather Sherrie, interview with Paul Brunton and Pat Beddie, June 1985, MLOH 35/1–3. Merrick, ‘Reminiscences’. F.M.B. Cass, Librarians in New South Wales: A Study, Libraries Board of South Australia, 1972. For further discussion of the work of Michael Cass and the subsequent debate, see Peter Biskup, Libraries in Australia, Centre for Information Studies, 1994, pp. 491–502. Trustees Minute Books, 19 September 1918, cited in Jones, ‘William Herbert Ifould and the development of library services’ in NSW, 1912–1942, PhD thesis, University of New South Wales, 1993, p. 130. For a detailed account of Ifould’s attempts to recruit male staff, see David J. Jones, ‘A Dormant Commission: W.H. Ifould and the Rise of John Metcalfe’, 1993. Metcalfe, interview with Hazel de Berg, p. 9947. Jones, ‘A Dormant Commission’, p. 52. Radford, interview with author; Jean Arnot; interview with Ros Bowden, March 1985, CYMLOH 23/1–5, no. 1; and Daphne Gollan; interview with Ros Bowden, September 1985, CYMLOH 23/1–5, no. 2. Metcalfe, interview with Hazel de Berg, p. 9944. Enid Moon, Memoirs of a Galley Slave, Studies in Australian Bibliography no. 34, Book Collectors’ Society of Australia, 1991, p. 41. Radford, interview with author. Jones, ‘William Herbert Ifould and the development of library services’, pp. 199–200. Nita Kibble papers, ML MSS 4103 Add-on 1897; David J. Jones, A Source of Inspiration and Delight: The Buildings of the State Library of New South Wales since 1826, Library Council of New South Wales, 1988 p. 66. Jones, ‘William Herbert Ifould and the development of library services’, p. 127. Employment Register 1915–1927, SLNSW NPL115; Australian Dictionary of Biography, 1940–80. Arnot, interview with Ros Bowden.
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26 Ifould to Trustees, 15 August 1932, cited in Jones, ‘William Herbert Ifould and the development of library services’, p. 212. 27 PLNSW Confidential Papers. 28 This account of Drummond’s life is taken from J. Belshaw, ‘David Henry Drummond 1890–1930: The Formative Years’, Armidale and District Historical Society Journal, no. 22, 1979, pp. 19–42. Belshaw’s article is based on a manuscript by Drummond and family papers in the University of New England Archives. 29 Jones, ‘William Herbert Ifould and the development of library services’, p. 212. 30 Judy Mackinolty, ‘To stay or to go: Sacking married women teachers’ in In Pursuit of Justice: Australian women and the law 1788–1979, Judy Mackinolty and Heather Radi (eds), Hale & Iremonger, 1979, p. 146. 31 PLNSW Confidential Papers. 32 Cited in Jones, ‘A Dormant Commission’, pp. 63–4. 33 PLNSW Confidential Papers. 34 Jones, ‘A Dormant Commission’, p. 64. 35 Metcalfe, interview with Hazel de Berg, p. 9910. 36 PLNSW Box PL/N6, file: ‘Mitchell Librarianship’. 37 Arnot, interview with Ros Bowden. 38 Ida Leeson’s appeal (draft, handwritten and unsigned, 17 May 1933), located in Phyllis Mander Jones papers, Box 3, Mitchell Library file, MSS 4337. 39 Metcalfe, interview with Hazel de Berg, p. 9909. 40 Arnot, interview with Ros Bowden.
Chapter 6 1
2 3 4 5 6
Baiba Berzins, then Mitchell Librarian, had realised how little documentation there was on Ida Leeson’s life when she was writing her entry for the Australian Dictionary of Biography. My thanks to James Weirick for this lead. Pamphlet entitled ‘Provisional Scheme for the training of YWCA Secretaries’, 1910. YWCA Sydney Annual Reports, 1908–09. Sidney and Jenny Birch, interview with author, 12 August 2003. June Leeson, interview with author, 18 August 2003.
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Endnotes 7 8 9 10 11 12 13
14
15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26
27 28
Drusilla Modjeska and Marjorie Pizer (eds), The Poems of Lesbia Harford, Angus & Robertson, 1985, p. 51. Mary Fullerton papers, ML MSS 2342/10. YWCA Echoes (Melbourne), no. 1, March 1913. Sidney and Jenny Birch, interview with author. Max Kelly, Faces of the Street: William Street Sydney 1916, Doak Press, 1982, pp. 53–62. Lottie E. Austin, Outline Sketch of the YWCAs of Australasia, National Board of the YWCA, 1913, p. 36. YWCA Wellington Annual Report 1912–13. The Wellington Annual Reports held in Mitchell Library have pencilled on the title page in Ida’s handwriting—‘Don. Leeson’—plus various dates. See Cecil & Celia Manson, Doctor Agnes Bennett, Michael Joseph, 1960. Later, Agnes Bennett was to head the Scottish Women’s Hospital’s unit that Miles Franklin joined on its mission to Macedonia in 1917. YWCA Wellington Annual Report 1917. Information for this paragraph is from Ethel Law, Down the Years, YWCA of New Zealand, n.d. Wellington Gazette, vol. 2, November 1923. Nancy Collins, personal collection. Leeson, interview with author; NSW electoral rolls. Nancy Collins, interview with author, 11 August 2003. Victor Leeson, interviewed by Patricia Ryan, 1991. My thanks for allowing me access to this tape from the family archive. Leeson, interview with author. YWCA Annual Report 1924–25. The Doorway (formerly Young Women’s Gazette), December 1928, April 1929. The Doorway, June 1929, August 1929, September 1930. Goetheanum archives, Dornach, Switzerland; Robert Williams, ‘History of the Anthroposophical Society, St Johns Group, Sydney and the Anthroposophical Society in Australia’, unpublished typescript held at the Anthroposophical Society Library, Sydney. Information provided by James Weirick and the Glenaeon School website. Jill Roe, ‘The Magical World of Marion Mahony Griffin: Culture and community at Castlecrag in the inter-war years’, in Minorities: Cultural diversity in Sydney, Shirley Fitzgerald and Garry
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29 30 31 32
33 34
Wotherspoon (eds), State Library of New South Wales Press, 1995, p. 94. Garry Richardson, ‘Anthroposophy . . . Western Occultism’, reprinted from Honi Soit, vol. 43, nos. 16 and 18, n.d. Rosemary Dinnage, ‘Benign dottiness: The world of Rudolf Steiner’, New Society, 2 July 1981. Telford and Willna Conlon, interview with Ros Bowden, 17 April 1985, ML CYMLOH 23/1–5, no. 5. Cited in James Weirick, ‘The Magic of America: Vision and text’, in Walter Burley Griffin: A Re-View, Monash University Gallery, 1988, p. 12. See Sara Hardy, The Unusual Life of Edna Walling, Allen & Unwin, 2005, Ch. 7. Some researchers have thought that the two women rented Johnson House at 4 The Parapet and I myself have concurred with that in writing, but further research and information received from Wanda Spathopoulos, who grew up in Castlecrag in the 1930s, point to 46 The Parapet as being the house they lived in. No. 46 still exists recognisably today, but its twin has been replaced by a newer house.
Chapter 7 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
Edgar Deans, ‘Castlecrag: The early years’, typescript, Edgar Deans Papers, NLA MS 2019. Unpublished memoirs by Dr Ronald Rivett. My thanks for allowing me to quote from these. Knitlock blocks were made of concrete and covered with a veneer of crushed sandstone. Jill Roe, ‘Paradigms of the City’, Sydney Gazette, no. 5, December 1982, p. 16. I. Anson, ‘Building for the Future’, Advance! Australia!, September 1, 1927, p. 119. Wanda Spathopoulos, who kindly made notes from her forthcoming book on Castlecrag available to me. Marie Nicholls, interview with author, July 2003. My thanks to James Weirick for this information. Bim Hilder, ‘Memories of the Griffins’, typescript held in Willoughby Library, Castlecrag file.
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Endnotes 10 Pakie’s Club Records (1928–94), NLA MS 9071. 11 Extract from Louise Lightfoot’s ‘Memories of the Burley Griffins’, photocopy held in Willoughby Library, Castlecrag file. 12 Marion Mahony Griffin, ‘The Magic of America’, vol. 4, p. 232, microfilm copy, NLA. 13 Cited in Robert Freestone, ‘Early Historic Preservation in Australia: The Walter Burley Griffin Connection’, Landscape Journal, vol. 18, no. 1, 1999, p. 84. 14 Mahony Griffin, ‘The Magic of America’, vol. 4, p. 159. 15 ibid., vol. 3, p. 430ff. 16 ibid., vol. 1, p. 55. 17 ibid., vol. 4, pp. 437–8. 18 ibid., vol. 1, p. 95a, p. 102a. 19 Betty Roland, The Devious Being, Sydney, HarperCollins, 1990, p. 37. 20 Mahony Griffin, ‘The Magic of America’, vol. 1, p. 104. 21 ibid., pp. 129–30. 22 ibid., p. 204. 23 A librarian recently trying unsuccessfully to locate the provenance for the volume of Griffin documents donated by Ida Leeson commented to me, ‘They breathed a rarified air, those old Mitchell Librarians.’ 24 14 January 1947, King O’Malley papers, NLA MS 460. 25 The Australian Home Builder, no. 5, August 1923, pp. 34–45.
Chapter 8 1 2 3
4
5
Miles Franklin to Kate Baker, 25 February 1937, NLA MS 2022. Dulcie Penfold interview, May 2003, NLA TRC 4964. Ida Leeson to A.H. Spencer, 15 February 1933. The series of letters quoted from in this chapter is contained in the Hill of Content correspondence, SLV MSS 12361, box 3164/3. The Mitchell Committee consisted of seven of the fifteen Library trustees—six appointed annually plus the President as Chairman. This committee was responsible for the general management of the institution and the control of the endowment fund. I.E. Leeson, The Mitchell Library, Sydney: Historical and Descriptive Notes, Trustees of the Public Library of New South Wales, 1936, p. 9. Leeson to Spencer, 27 March 1933.
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6 7 8
9 10 11 12
13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31
A.H. Spencer to George Robertson, 27 April 1933. Jacqueline Kent, A Certain Style: Beatrice Davis, a literary life, Penguin, 2002, p. 42. See David J. Jones, A Source of Inspiration and Delight: The Buildings of the State Library of New South Wales since 1826, Library Council of New South Wales, 1988, pp. 70–3. Memorandum of 29 October 1930, Angus & Robertson, part 1, correspondence re purchase of MSS by Mitchell Library, ML1549/70. Memorandum to Trustees, 25 January 1933, ML 1549/70. A.H. Spencer to W.H. Ifould, 7 February 1933, ML 1549/70. David J. Jones, ‘Please destroy all my letters on this subject’, Australian Library Journal, May 1990, p. 104. I am indebted to Jones’s discovery and analysis of the Leeson/Spencer correspondence. Leeson to Spencer, 15 February 1933. Leeson is here referring to Spencer’s letter to Ifould of 7 February urging him to buy the collection. Robertson to Spencer, 24 February 1933. Leeson to Spencer, 7 March 1933. Rebecca Wiley, ‘Memories and Reminiscences of Angus & Robertson’, ML MSS5238, p. 475. Memorandum W.H. Ifould to Mitchell Library Committee, 9 March 1933, ML 1549/70. ‘Thomas Davies Mutch’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, 1891–1939, Melbourne University Press, 1990, pp. 655–7. Spencer to Leeson, 9 March 1933. Spencer to Robertson, 17 February 1933. Spencer to Leeson, 17 February 1933. Leeson to Spencer, 20 February 1933. Spencer to Leeson, 22 February 1933. Leeson to Spencer, 23 February 1933. Memorandum W.H. Ifould to Trustees, 7 March 1933, ML 1549/70. Spencer to Robertson, 22 and 23 March, 1933. Robertson to Ifould, 25 March 1933. Leeson to Spencer, 27 March 1933. Spencer to Leeson, 30 March 1933. The volumes of illustrations were to remain with Angus & Robertson until 1959 when they were purchased by the trustees for ‘considerably more than the value of their bindings’, which
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Endnotes was all Ifould thought they were worth. Jones, ‘Please destroy all my letters’, p. 109. 32 Spencer to Robertson, 20 April 1933. 33 Leeson to Spencer, 23 February 1933.
Chapter 9 1 2
3
4 5
6
7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17
Victor Leeson, interview with Patricia Ryan, August 1991. Morris Miller papers, NLA MS 87; A Bibliography of Australian Literature to 1935, Oxford University Press, 1940. Edmund Morris Miller (1881–1964) was Professor of Psychology and Philosophy and later Vice-Chancellor at the University of Tasmania. Geoffrey Lewis, ‘A biography of the Honourable Thomas Davies Mutch’, M.A. thesis, University of New England, 1977, p. 348; Miles Franklin pocket diary, 22/9/37, ‘. . . and to ABC to hear Ida Leeson on Bligh and home at 11.30’, Miles Franklin papers, ML MSS364/2. Miles Franklin to Kate Baker, 24 March 1937, Kate Baker papers, NLA MS 2022. Flora Eldershaw (ed.), The Peaceful Army, The Women’s Executive Committee and Advisory Council of Australia’s 150th Anniversary Celebrations, 1938. Paul Brunton (ed.), The Diaries of Miles Franklin, Allen & Unwin, 2004, p. 247. For a wickedly cruel portrait by Miles Franklin of John Metcalfe, see pp. 241–8. Miles Franklin pocket diary, Saturday, 19 January 1935, Miles Franklin papers, ML MSS364/2. Miles Franklin to Mary Fullerton, 20 January 1935, Miles Franklin papers, ML MSS364/17. Vance Palmer, The Swayne Family, Angus & Robertson, 1934. Franklin to Fullerton, 12 January 1937. Franklin to Fullerton, 23 February 1937. Miles Franklin pocket diary, 18 May 1940. Suzanne Mourot, interviewed by Paul Brunton, 1985, tape 1. Brunton (ed.), The Diaries of Miles Franklin, pp. 47–51. Miles Franklin pocket diary, 21 and 25 September 1936. Brunton (ed.), The Diaries of Miles Franklin, pp. 59–60 and footnote; also Miles Franklin pocket diary, 22 January 1937. Miles Franklin pocket diary, 9 April 1937.
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18 Franklin to Fullerton, April 1937. 19 This description of ‘Anniversary Day’ is taken from The Bulletin, 2 February 1938. 20 http://www.cityofsydney.nsw.gov.au/barani/themes/theme6.htm, accessed 12 September 2005. 21 The Bulletin, 16 February 1938. 22 The Bulletin, 3 February 1938. 23 Brunton (ed.), The Diaries of Miles Franklin, p. 97. 24 The Bulletin, 9 February 1938. 25 Brunton (ed.), The Diaries of Miles Franklin, p. 98. 26 This event is recorded as the genesis of the novel in a Sydney Morning Herald article written by their friend, writer Florence James, 3 July 1939; Dymphna Cusack also describes it in her tribute to Miles Franklin after Miles’s death in 1954, Miles Franklin—A tribute, Bread and Cheese Club, 1955. 27 Brunton (ed.), The Diaries of Miles Franklin, p. 99. Since Miles Franklin’s version was recorded at the time, it is likely to be the more accurate account of the beginning of the collaboration. 28 Jacqueline Kent, A Certain Style: Beatrice Davis, a literary life, Penguin, 2002, p. 117. 29 Marilla North (ed.), Yarn spinners: A story in letters, University of Queensland Press, 2001, pp. 56–8. 30 Miles Franklin and Dymphna Cusack, Pioneers on Parade, Angus & Robertson, 1939, p. 73. 31 Richard T. Baker, The Australian Flora in Applied Art, Part 1, The Waratah, Sydney, Technological Museum, 1915. 32 Baker to Franklin, 16 March 1940, Miles Franklin Papers, ML MSS 364/32. Only Baker’s side of the correspondence survives. Richard Baker gave Miles Franklin the now famous Waratah Cup, designed by Royal Doulton for him. It is now one of the Mitchell Library’s ‘treasures’. 33 Brunton (ed.), The Diaries of Miles Franklin, p. 124. This is recorded in a letter to Mary Fullerton that was never sent. 34 Miles Franklin to M.H. Ellis, 24 August 1939, Miles Franklin papers, ML MSS364/32. 35 Brunton (ed.) The Diaries of Miles Franklin, p. 125. 36 M.H. Ellis, interview with Hazel de Berg, November 1967, NLA, pp. 4021–2. 37 Kent, A Certain Style, p. 90.
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Endnotes 38 Commonwealth Literary Fund—M.H. Ellis, NAA: A463. The following material on the controversy comes from this file. 39 George Mackaness to Temby, 1 April 1941 [dated 1940 incorrectly]. 40 Temby to Ellis, 26 May 1941. 41 Andrew Moore, ‘The “Great Literary Witch-Hunt” Revisited: Politics, Personality and Pique at the CLF, 1952’, in Labour History, vol. 82, 2002. 42 M. Barnard Eldershaw, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, Georgian House, 1947. 43 Cited in Maryanne Dever, ‘“No Time is Inopportune for a Protest”: Aspects of the Political Activities of Marjorie Barnard and Flora Eldershaw’, Hecate, vol. 17, no. 2, 1991, p. 9. 44 Marjorie Barnard, Macquarie’s World, Australian Limited Editions Society, 1941. 45 M.H. Ellis, Lachlan Macquarie: His life, adventures and times, Angus & Robertson, 1947.
Chapter 10 1 2
3
4
5
6
Daphne Gollan, interview with Ros Bowden, September 1985, CYMLOH 23/2. The letters by Ida Leeson and W.H. Ifould are found in an uncatalogued Mitchell file labelled ‘John Metcalfe—Salary’, which also contains several applications for salary increases by John Metcalfe. My thanks to Arthur Easton for locating this file. Ida Leeson, The Mitchell Library, Sydney: Historical and Descriptive Notes, Trustees of the Public Library of New South Wales, 1936, p. 10. These and the following reminiscences are drawn from interviews with Daphne Gollan by Ros Bowden, 1985; Dulcie Penfold, interview by author 25 August 2003; Noel Gray, interview by author 11 December 2003, and June Greenhalgh, interview by author, 25 October 2004. R. Munn and E.R. Pitt, ‘Australian Libraries: A Survey of Conditions and Suggestions for their Improvement’, Australian Council for Educational Research, 1935. 1935 annual report, PLNSW Annual Reports 1896–1968, Q027.5/25.
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7 8 9 10 11
12 13 14
15 16 17 18
19 20 21 22 23
24
David J. Jones, ‘“A Dormant Commission”: Ifould and the Rise of John Metcalfe’, p. 69. Australian Women’s Weekly, 23 February 1935, p. 2. 1936 annual report, PLNSW Annual Reports 1896–1968, Q027.5/25. Letter to J.S. McDonald (Director of the National Gallery of Victoria), May 1931, J.S. McDonald papers, NLA MS 430. W. Boyd Rayward, ‘Reflecting on a wider world: Metcalfe’s overseas travels and the creation of a modern library profession in Australia’, in Libraries and Life in a Changing World: The Metcalfe Years, 1920–1970, W. Boyd Rayward (ed.), School of Information, Library and Archive Studies, University of New South Wales, 1993, p. 9. Sydney Morning Herald, 30 May 1939. Victor Leeson, interview with Patricia Ryan, August 1991. In a letter to the Librarian at Newberry College, Chicago, 26 February 1943, Ida thanks him for inviting her to visit the library and says she had intended to go to Chicago in 1939 on her planned copying trip for a ‘personal reason’—to visit her friend, Marion Griffin. ML Out-letters, 1943. Instructions in case of emergency (war) 1939–41, NPL 248. 1940 annual report, PLNSW Annual Reports 1896–1968, Q027.5/25. http://www.nla.gov.au/collect/ajcp.html, accessed 30 August 2005. David J. Jones, A Source of Inspiration and Delight: The Buildings of the State Library of New South Wales since 1826, Library Council of New South Wales, 1988, pp. 70–3. 25 June 1940, ML in-letters, 1940. Jean Arnot, interview with Ros Bowden, March 1985, CYMLOH 23/1. Jones, A Source of Inspiration and Delight, p. 97. 1942 annual report, PLNSW Annual Reports 1896–1968, Q027.5/25. These war reminiscences are drawn from interviews with Daphne Gollan and Jean Arnot by Ros Bowden, 1985; Heather Sherrie by Paul Brunton, 1985; and Dulcie Penfold and Wilma Radford by author, 2003. Alfred Conlon to Ida Leeson, 2 December 1942, ML In-letters, 1942. She made the ‘life-changer’ statement in her radio interview with John Thompson in 1961, broadcast under the title ‘A Man
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25 26 27
28 29
30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38
Unknown’ and later published in Five to Remember, Lansdowne Press, 1964, p. 107. Leeson to Conlon, 10 December 1942, ML Out-letters, 1942. Unedited transcript of Ida Leeson’s radio interview with John Thompson, 1961, Ros Bowden papers, ML 2123/84. The following material on the Allied Geographical Section, unless otherwise indicated, comes from a file marked ‘Pacific Bibliography’ filed in ML In-letters, 1944. Ida Leeson to W. Baud, 22 April 1943, ML Out-letters, 1943. Lois Mander Jones, ‘A World to be Spanned and Enjoyed’, Archives and Manuscripts, vol. 14, no. 1, May 1986, p. 16. A tribute issue to Phyllis Mander Jones. Baiba Berzins, ‘An Interview with Phyllis Mander Jones’, Archives and Manuscripts, vol. 14, no. 1, May 1986, p. 42. The following material comes from the unedited transcript of Ida Leeson’s radio interview with John Thompson, 1961. Army pay book, Ida Leeson papers ML MSS 860X. Nita Kibble papers, ML MSS 4103, Add-on 1897. Helen Fenbury (nee Sheils) suggested Alf had ‘charmed her away’ from her post as Mitchell Librarian, personal communication. John Kerr, interview with Ros Bowden, August 1985, ML CYMLOH 23/1–5, no. 3. The following material is drawn from SLNSW General File— Mitchell Librarianship, Box 1468 SL0204. Suzanne Mourot, ‘To Work Under Her Was a Privilege and a Challenge’, Archives and Manuscripts, vol. 14, no. 1, 1986, p. 19. Suzanne Mourot, interview with author, 1 October 2003.
Chapter 11 1 2 3
Peter Ryan remembers her telling him this; Peter Ryan, Brief Lives, Duffy & Snellgrove, 2004, p. 141. John Kerr, interview with Ros Bowden, 7 August 1985, ML CYMLOH 23/1–5, no. 3. Professor Wright’s nickname is variously spelt ‘Pansy’ and ‘Panzee’, but Professor John Legge remembers that the original was ‘Pansy’, coined because the professor was so clearly not gay. He believes the idea of ‘Panzee’ being short for chimpanzee came later. Personal communication.
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4 5
6 7 8 9
10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17
18 19 20 21
22 23 24 25
In John Thompson’s ABC radio broadcast, ‘A Man Unknown’, 1961. Ryan was awarded the Military Medal and was mentioned in dispatches for his work conducting intelligence patrols in Japaneseoccupied New Guinea in 1942–3. For the full account, see Michael Heyward, The Ern Malley Affair, University of Queensland Press, 1993. In Thompson, ‘A Man Unknown’. Robert Manne, review of Cassandra Pybus’s The Devil and James McAuley, Australian Book Review, August 1999. In Thompson, ‘A Man Unknown’. The woman whom Ida Leeson was not prepared to name in the radio interview was Wilma Radford, a librarian at the Public Library of New South Wales. Miss Radford, who later became Australia’s first professor of librarianship, told me this same story in an interview in 2003. Richard Hall, The Real John Kerr, Angus & Robertson, 1978, p. 37. Alfred Austin Conlon Personal File, NAA: A7103/1. Ryan, Brief Lives, p. 30. Committee on National Morale folder, NAA: A1608/1. Kerr, interview with Ros Bowden. Telford and Willna Conlon, interview with Ros Bowden, April 1985, ML CYMLOH 23/1–5, no. 5. Kristin Kerr, interview with author, 5 September 2003. This story is recounted in Heyward, The Ern Malley Affair, p. 84, and Hall, The Real John Kerr, p. 45. In other versions the remark was made to Blamey, not Lloyd: Pybus, The Devil and James McAuley, University of Queensland Press, 1999, p. 36, and Ryan, Brief Lives, p. 33. Ryan, Brief Lives, p. 34. Brian Jinks, ‘Alfred Conlon, The Directorate of Research and New Guinea’, Journal of Australian Studies, no. 12, 1983, p. 24. Ryan, Brief Lives, p. 35. Unedited transcript of Ida Leeson’s interviews for John Thompson’s radio program ‘A Man Unknown’, Ros Bowden papers, ML MS2123/84. In Thompson, ‘A Man Unknown’. Kerr, interview with Ros Bowden. James Plimsoll, in Thompson, ‘A Man Unknown’. Telford Conlon, interview with author, 17 October 2003.
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Endnotes 26 My thanks to Peter Tyler for information about the social stigma and covering up of TB in the early twentieth century. 27 Defence records, NAA: B884, VF515690. 28 Sidney Birch, interview with author, 12 August 2003. 29 Ida Leeson papers, ML MSS 860X. 30 Kerr, interview with Ros Bowden. 31 Pybus, The Devil and James McAuley, pp. 56–7. 32 Ryan, Brief Lives, p. 42. 33 John Legge and Peter Ryan, interview with author, 8 December 2004. 34 Pybus, The Devil and James McAuley, p. 56. 35 Unedited transcript of Leeson’s interviews for Thompson, ‘A Man Unknown’. 36 ibid. 37 Ryan, Brief Lives, p. 46. 38 Pacific Islands Monthly, vol. 15, no. 11, June 1945, p. 17, cited in Jinks, ‘Alfred Conlon’, p. 28. 39 Ryan, Brief Lives, p. 145. 40 Legge and Ryan, interview with author. 41 John Legge, personal communication; D. Wetherell and C. CarrGregg, Camilla: A Life, New South Wales University Press, 1990, p. 186. 42 ibid. 43 Unedited transcript of Leeson’s interviews for Thompson, ‘A Man Unknown’. 44 Helen Fenbury (nee Sheils), interview with author, January 2004. 45 Legge, interview with author. 46 Ryan, Brief Lives, p. 145. 47 Peter Ryan, unpublished. My thanks for allowing me to quote from this. 48 Legge and Ryan, interview with author. 49 Peter Ryan, Fear Drive My Feet, Preface, p. 3. The latest edition is by Duffy & Snellgrove, 2001. 50 Unedited transcript of Leeson’s interviews for Thompson, ‘A Man Unknown’. 51 Ryan, Brief Lives, pp. 149–50. 52 Jinks, ‘Alfred Conlon’, p. 29. 53 Kerr, interview with Ros Bowden.
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54 Unedited transcript of Leeson’s interviews for Thompson, ‘A Man Unknown’. 55 Pybus, The Devil and James McAuley, p. 75. 56 Colonel J.K. and Mrs Murray, interview 14 January 1974, NLA TRC 243. 57 Helen Fenbury (nee Sheils), written correspondence with Ros Bowden. 58 Ida Leeson papers, ML MSS 860X. 59 Fenbury (nee Sheils), written correspondence with Ros Bowden. 60 For fuller accounts of this controversy, see I.C. Campbell, ‘The ASOPA Controversy’, Journal of Pacific History, June 2000 and Robert Dixon, Prosthetic God: Travel, Representation and Colonial Governance, University of Queensland Press, 2001, Chapter 6. 61 Campbell, ‘The ASOPA Controversy’, p. 9. 62 Helen Fenbury (nee Sheils), written correspondence with Ros Bowden. 63 John Kerr to Edward Ward, 17 July 1947, ASOPA Papers, PMB 1158. 64 Pybus, The Devil and James McAuley, pp. 87–8. 65 Kerr, interview with Ros Bowden. 66 J.K. Murray, interview 14 January 1974, NLA TRC 243. 67 Unedited transcript of Leeson’s interviews for Thompson, ‘A Man Unknown’. 68 Fienberg to O’Donnell, 3 May 1949, Gus O’Donnell papers, NLA MS8340, Series 2, Box 5. 69 J.K. Murray to Ida Leeson, 10 October 1949, Ida Leeson papers. 70 Information for these two paragraphs comes from the unedited transcript of Leeson’s interviews for Thompson, ‘A Man Unknown’.
Chapter 12 1
2 3
4
Miles Franklin to Dymphna Cusack, 31 May 1949, in My Congenials: Miles Franklin and Friends in Letters, Jill Roe (ed.), vol. 2, Angus & Robertson, 1993, p. 223. Evelyn Latter, interview with author, November 2003. The information about Ida’s time in Noumea comes from the unedited transcripts of John Thompson’s ABC radio program, ‘A Man Unknown’, 1961. The Bulletin, 8 March 1950.
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Endnotes 5 6 7
8 9
10 11 12 13
14
15 16 17 18
19 20 21 22
Nancy Phelan, interview with author, 18 September 2003. Anthony Murray-Oliver to Ida Leeson, 18 April 1950, Ida Leeson papers, ML MSS860X. Henry Evans and Honor Courtney Maude papers, University of Adelaide Library, MSS 0003. Maude’s comment is made in introducing the correspondence with Ida Leeson, 1958–63, in Section H, restricted until 2010. H.E. Maude, Of Islands and Men: Studies in Pacific History, Oxford University Press, 1968. A Bibliography of Cargo Cults and Other Nativistic Movements in the South Pacific, South Pacific Commission Technical Paper no. 30, Sydney, South Pacific Commission, 1952; A Bibliography of Bibliographies of the South Pacific, Oxford University Press, 1954. Nancy Phelan, interview with Ros Bowden, May 1985, ML CYMLOH 1–5, tape 5. Phelan, interview with author. Paquita Crouch, interview with author, 3 August 2004. Alexander Dix, interview with Ros Bowden, April 1985, ML CYMLOH 1–5, tape 1, side B. Dix later became well known as the 1982 author of the Dix Report into the Australian Broadcasting Commission. This and other material for this section is based on Nancy Phelan’s book, Pieces of Heaven: In the South Seas, University of Queensland Press, 1996, which is dedicated to ‘the two Helens, Alex, Ida, and Harry Maude who sent me to the Islands’. Helen Godard, via personal communication with Helen Fenbury (nee Sheils), 2004. Phelan, Pieces of Heaven, p. 9. Helen Fenbury (nee Sheils), written communication, Ros Bowden Papers. Dix, interview with Ros Bowden. This indicates that Ida did keep at least some correspondence, but very little of it survives and not this letter. Phelan, interview with author. ibid. See Niel Gunson (ed.), The Changing Pacific: Essays in Honor of H.E. Maude, Oxford University Press, 1978. Leeson to Phelan, 1 September 1958, Nancy Phelan papers, ML MSS 6427/9.
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23 Charles Birch became Challis Professor of Biology in 1963 and is a prolific author. He was also a prominent evangelical Christian at a time when that was unfashionable among intellectuals and particularly scientists. 24 June Leeson, interview with author, 18 August 2003. 25 Phelan, interview with author. 26 Manning Clark, The Quest for Grace, Penguin, 1991, p. 168. 27 22 March 1962, Ida Leeson papers, ML MSS 860X. 28 ibid., 8 June 1960. 29 Noel Gray, interview with author, December 2003. 30 Leeson, interview with author. 31 Betty Goodyear, interview with author, December 2003. 32 Suzanne Mourot, interview with author, October 2003; Jean Arnot, interview with Ros Bowden, March 1985, ML CYMLOH 23/1–5, tape 1. 33 Jacqueline Kent, A Certain Style: Beatrice Davis, a literary life, Penguin, 2002, pp. 248–9. Kent mistakenly refers to Arnot as ‘the Mitchell Librarian’. On 2 April 1958, the prize was awarded to Patrick White for his novel Voss and the cheque for £500 was presented by the prime minister, Robert Menzies. 34 Arnot, interview with Ros Bowden. 35 Peter Ryan, interview with author, 8 December 2004. 36 Leeson, interview with author. 37 Leeson to Phelan, 1 September 1958, Nancy Phelan papers. 38 Helen Fenbury (nee Sheils), personal papers. 39 Helen Sheils (ed.), Australian Aboriginal Studies: A symposium of papers presented at the 1961 research conference, Oxford University Press, 1963. 40 Helen Sheils to Phyllis Mander Jones, 16 February 1963, Phyllis Mander Jones papers, ML MSS 4337, Box 3. 41 Leeson, interview with author. 42 Nancy Phelan, Welcome the Wayfarer: A Traveller in Modern Turkey, Macmillan, 1965. 43 Arnot, interview with Ros Bowden. 44 Fenbury (nee Sheils), written communication, Ros Bowden papers. 45 Peter Ryan, Brief Lives, Duffy & Snellgrove, 2004, p. 142. 46 Phelan, interview with author.
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Chapter 13 1
Baiba Berzins recalls the story being aired by Clark at an afterdinner speech to the inaugural meeting of the Australian Society of Archivists in 1975 (Berzins, ‘Remembering the Seventies’, Australian Society of Archivists NSW Branch Newsletter, April/May 2005). She also remembers him telling the story to the 1988 Library Association of Australia 50th Anniversary meeting; at a lecture at Macquarie University; and in private conversation. (personal communication). 2 Manning Clark, The Quest for Grace, Penguin, 1993, p. 167. 3 Telford Conlon, interview with author, 17 October 2003. 4 Peter Ryan, Brief Lives, Duffy & Snellgrove, 2004, p. 141. Ryan’s memory is a little innacurate as Ida Leeson joined the Directorate as a captain, only being given her majority in 1945. 5 ibid., p. 151. 6 Mary Lord, ‘Quirks and Crotchets’, Australian Book Review, February 2005, p. 15. There is a subtext to this latest exchange that has nothing to do with Ida Leeson. In 1993, Peter Ryan, editor and publisher of Clark’s six-volume work, A History of Australia, wrote a blistering attack on his former friend’s writing in Quadrant, two years after the historian’s death. This caused a huge furore in the press. Mary Lord, who was commissioned to write the review of Brief Lives, was also caught up in an exposé of a writer in 1993, in her biography of Hal Porter. She would no doubt be familiar with Ryan’s assault on Manning Clark and here obliquely gives her comment on it. See Peter Craven, ‘The Ryan Affair’, in Manning Clark: Essays on his Place in History, Carl Bridge (ed.), Melbourne University Press, 1994, pp. 165–87. 7 John Legge and Peter Ryan, interview with author, 8 December 2004. 8 Bridge, Manning Clark, Introduction, p. 7. 9 Dulcie Penfold, interview with Rosemary Block, 1998, ML CYMLOH 292/1–2. 10 John Kerr, interview with Ros Bowden, August 1985, ML CYMLOH 23/1–5, no. 3. 11 Unedited transcript of radio interview with John Thompson, 1961, Ros Bowden papers, ML 2123/84. 12 Penfold, interview with Rosemary Block.
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13 Telford and Willna Conlon, interview with Ros Bowden, April 1985, ML CYMLOH 23/1–5, no. 5. 14 Kerr, interview with Ros Bowden. 15 Baiba Berzins, ‘Ida Leeson’, in Australian Library History, Papers from the Second Forum on Australian Library History, Peter Biskup and Maxine K. Rochester (eds), July 1985, Canberrra College of Advanced Education, 1985, p. 101. 16 Jim Cleary, ‘Women Librarians at the Public Library of New South Wales: The first generation’, in Peopling a Profession: Papers from the Fourth Forum on Australian Library History, Frank Upward and Jean P. Whyte (eds), September 1989, Monash University, Ancora Press, 1991, p. 155. 17 David J. Jones, ‘William Herbert Ifould and the development of library services in NSW, 1912–1942’, PhD thesis, University of New South Wales, 1993, ML MSS 5943, p. 215. 18 Nancy Phelan, interview with author, 18 September 2003. Hal Missingham was the Director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1945–71. 19 Legge and Ryan, interview with author. 20 Sidney and Jenny Birch, interview with author, 12 August 2003. 21 Phelan, interview with author. 22 Sylvia Martin, Passionate Friends: Mary Fullerton, Mabel Singleton and Miles Franklin, Onlywomen Press, 2001. 23 Phelan, interview with author. 24 D. Wetherell and C. Carr-Gregg, Camilla: A Life, New South Wales University Press, 1990, p. 188. 25 John Metcalfe, interview with Hazel de Berg, April 1974, p. 9909, NLA. 26 Jean Arnot, interview with Ros Bowden, March 1985, CYMLOH 23/1–5, no. 1. 27 Helen Fenbury (nee Sheils), typed recollection of Ida Leeson, July 1985, Ros Bowden papers, ML 2123/84. 28 ibid. 29 Ida Leeson Correspondence File, ML 163/64. 30 Noel Gray, interview with author, December 2003. 31 Clark, The Quest For Grace, p. 168.
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Chapter 14 1
2
3
4 5 6
W. Boyd Rayward (ed.), The Variety of Librarianship: Essays in honour of John Wallace Metcalfe, Library Association of Australia, 1976. Bill Tully, ‘John Metcalfe: Librarian by Accident, Eccentric by Nature, and Democratic by Instinct’, Australian Academic and Research Libraries, vol. 29, no. 1, March 1998, p. 43. John Metcalfe, ‘Remarks to the Trustees of the Public Library of NSW on his Resignation, 1959’, in Developing a Profession of Librarianship in Australia, Travel Diaries and Other Papers of John Wallace Metcalfe, W. Boyd Rayward (ed.), Scarecrow Press, 1995, pp. 203–4. Boyd Rayward (ed.), The Variety of Librarianship, p. 5 (my emphasis). Jacqueline Kent, A Certain Style: Beatrice Davis, a literary life, Penguin, 2002, p. 301. Marjorie Barnard, A History of Australia, New York, Frederick A. Praeger, 1963.
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Bibliography
Archival sources Australian Archives series NAA: A7103/1; NAA: A1608/1; NAA: A463; NAA: B884, VF15690
Manuscripts Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales H.C.L. Anderson, ‘Reminiscences of D.S. Mitchell’ Angus & Robertson papers Ros Bowden papers Maude Yeomans Fitzhardinge papers Miles Franklin papers Mary Fullerton papers Phyllis Mander Jones papers Nita Kibble papers Ida Leeson, letters to W.H. Ifould, PLNSW records, 1927–33 Ida Leeson papers Ida Leeson, ‘Vocabulary of New South Wales Aboriginal Dialects’ Ailsa Merrick, ‘Reminiscences’ Nancy Phelan papers Rebecca Wiley, ‘Memories and Reminiscences of Angus & Robertson’ Hugh Wright, letters to W.H. Ifould 1913–14
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Bibliography
National Library of Australia Kate Baker papers Christopher Brennan notebook Edgar Deans papers Marion Mahony Griffin, ‘The Magic of America’ (microfilm copy) J.S. McDonald papers Morris Miller papers King O’Malley papers Gus O’Donnell papers Pakie’s Club records
Other Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand, YWCA collection Anthroposophical Society Archives, Sydney Australian Museum Archives, Correspondence files, Cook relics La Trobe Collection, State Library of Victoria, Hill of Content correspondence Pacific Manuscripts Bureau, Australian National University, Australian School of Pacific Administration papers University of Adelaide Library, Henry Evans and Honor Courtney Maude papers Willoughby Library, Walter Burley Griffin and Castlecrag file
Sound recordings Mitchell Library Jean Fleming Arnot, Telford and Willna Conlon, Alexander Dix, Daphne Gollan, John Kerr and Nancy Phelan (interviewed by Ros Bowden) Phyllis Mander Jones (interviewed by Baiba Berzins) Heather Sherrie (interviewed by Paul Brunton and Pat Beddie) Suzanne Mourot (interviewed by Paul Brunton) Dulcie Penfold (interviewed by Rosemary Block)
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National Library of Australia M.H. Ellis, John Metcalfe, J.K. Murray, Dulcie Penfold
Other Victor Leeson (interviewed by Patricia Ryan), family archive John Thompson, ‘A Man Unknown’, ABC radio broadcast 1961
Interviews by author Baiba Berzins, Sidney and Jenny Birch, Nancy Collins, Telford Conlon, Paquita Crouch, Helen Fenbury (nee Sheils), Cissy Godfrey, Betty Goodyear, Noel Gray, June Greenhalgh, Kristin Kerr, Evelyn Latter, June Leeson, John Legge, Suzanne Mourot, Marie Nicholls, Dulcie Penfold, Nancy Phelan, Wilma Radford, Ronald Rivett, Patricia Ryan, Peter Ryan, Wanda Spathopoulos
Newspapers and magazines The Age Advance! Australia! Australasian The Australian Home Builder Australian Women’s Weekly The Bulletin Daily Guardian The Doorway Fragment: The Magazine of Angus & Robertson and Halstead Press Hermes Honi Soit Pacific Islands Monthly Pix Sydney Morning Herald Wellington Gazette The Worker YWCA Echoes Young Women’s Gazette
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Bibliography
Other works consulted Allen, Judith A., 1994, Rose Scott: Vision and Revision in Feminism, Oxford University Press, Melbourne Anderson, H.C.L., 1901, ‘Women as Library Assistants’, Library Record of Australasia, vol. 1, no. 3, October Anson, I., 1927, ‘Building for the Future’, Advance! Australia!, 1 September Austin, Lottie E., 1913, Outline Sketch of the YWCAs of Australasia, National Board of the YWCA Baker, Richard T., 1915, The Australian Flora in Applied Art, Part 1, The Waratah, Sydney, Technological Museum Barnard, Marjorie, 1941, Macquarie’s World, Australian Limited Editions Society, Sydney ——1963, A History of Australia, Frederick A. Praeger, New York Belshaw, J., 1979, ‘David Henry Drummond 1890–1930: The Formative Years’, Armidale and District Historical Society Journal, no. 22 Berzins, Baiba, 1985, ‘Ida Leeson’, in Peter Biskup and Maxine K. Rochester (eds), Australian Library History, Papers from the second forum on Australian library history, July 1985, Canberra College of Advanced Education, Canberra ——1986, ‘An Interview with Phyllis Mander Jones’, Archives and Manuscripts, vol. 14, no. 1, May ——2005, ‘Remembering the Seventies’, Australian Society of Archivists NSW Branch Newsletter, April/May Biskup, Peter, 1987, ‘Captain Cook’s Endeavour journal and Australian Libraries’, Australian Academic and Research Libraries, September ——1994, Libraries in Australia, Centre for Information Studies, Wagga Wagga Bridge, Carl (ed.), 1994, Manning Clark: Essays on his Place in History, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne Brunton, Paul (ed.), 2004, The Diaries of Miles Franklin, Allen & Unwin, Sydney Bygott, Ursula and Cable, K.J., 1985, Pioneer Women Graduates of the University of Sydney 1881–1921, University of Sydney Monograph no. 1, Sydney Campbell, I.C., 2000, ‘The ASOPA Controversy’, Journal of Pacific History, June
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Cass, F.M.B., 1972, Librarians in New South Wales: A Study, Libraries Board of South Australia, Adelaide Clark, Axel, 1980, Christopher Brennan: A Critical Biography, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne Clark, Manning, 1991, The Quest for Grace, Penguin, Melbourne Cleary, Jim, 1991, ‘Women Librarians at the Public Library of New South Wales: The First Generation’, in Frank Upward and Jean P. Whyte (eds), Peopling a Profession: Papers from the Fourth Forum on Australian Library History, Monash University, September 1989, Ancora Press, Melbourne Craven, Peter, 1994, ‘The Ryan Affair’, in Carl Bridge (ed.), Manning Clark: Essays on his Place in History, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne Dening, Greg, 1992, Mr Bligh’s Bad Language: Passion, Power and Theatre on the Bounty, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge ——2001, ‘MS1 Cook, J. Holograph Journal’, in Peter Cochrane (ed.), Remarkable Occurrences: The National Library of Australia’s First 100 Years, National Library of Australia, Canberra Dever, Maryanne, 1991, ‘“No Time is Inopportune for a Protest”: Aspects of the Political Activities of Marjorie Barnard and Flora Eldershaw’, Hecate, vol. 17, no. 2 Dinnage, Rosemary, 1981, ‘Benign dottiness: The world of Rudolf Steiner’, New Society, 2 July Dixon, Robert, 2001, Prosthetic Gods: Travel, Representation and Colonial Governance, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia Doan, Laura, 2001, Fashioning Sapphism: The Origins of Modern English Lesbian Culture, Columbia University Press, New York Eldershaw, M. Barnard, 1947, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, Georgian House, Melbourne Ellis, M.H., 1947, Lachlan Macquarie: His life, adventures and times, Angus & Robertson, Sydney Fletcher, Brian H., 1999, History and Achievement: A Portrait of the Honours Students of Professor George Arnold Wood, Braxus Press, Sydney Franklin, Miles, 1938, ‘Rose Scott’, in Flora Eldershaw (ed.), The Peaceful Army, The Women’s Executive Committee and Advisory Council of Australia’s 150th Anniversary Celebrations, Sydney
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Bibliography Franklin, Miles, and Cusack, Dymphna, 1939, Pioneers on Parade, Angus & Robertson, Sydney Freestone, Robert, 1999, ‘Early Historic Preservation in Australia: The Walter Burley Griffin Connection’, Landscape Journal, vol. 18, no. 1 Gunson, Niel (ed.), 1978, The Changing Pacific: Essays in Honor of H.E. Maude, Oxford University Press, Melbourne Hall, Richard, 1978, The Real John Kerr, Angus & Robertson, Sydney Hardy, Sara, 2005, The Unusual Life of Edna Walling, Allen & Unwin, Sydney Heyward, Michael, 1993, The Ern Malley Affair, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia Jinks, Brian, 1983, ‘Alfred Conlon, The Directorate of Research and New Guinea’, Journal of Australian Studies, no. 12 Jones, Caroline V., 2003, ‘The Influence of Angus & Robertson on Colonial Knowledge’, RAHS Journal, vol. 89, no. 1, June Jones, David J., 1988, A Source of Inspiration and Delight: The Buildings of the State Library of New South Wales since 1826, Library Council of New South Wales, Sydney ——1990, ‘Please destroy all my letters on this subject’, Australian Library Journal, May ——1991, ‘“Only a librarian”: WH Ifould and the Sydney Establishment’, Australian Academic and Research Libraries, vol. 22, June ——1992, ‘Manoeuvres of a man of principle: An investigation of W.H. Ifould’, Australian Library Journal, August ——1993, ‘William Herbert Ifould and the development of library services in NSW, 1912–1942’, PhD thesis, University of New South Wales ——1993, ‘“A Dormant Commission”: Ifould and the Rise of John Metcalfe’, in W. Boyd Rayward (ed.), Libraries and Life in a Changing World: The Metcalfe Years, 1920–70, School of Information, Library and Archive Studies, University of New South Wales, Sydney Jones, Lois Mander, 1986, ‘A World to be Spanned and Enjoyed’, Archives and Manuscripts, vol. 14, no. 1, May Kegworth Centenary 1887–1987, 1988, published to commemorate the centenary of Kegworth Public School, Sydney Kelly, Max, 1982, Faces of the Street: William Street Sydney 1916, Doak Press, Sydney
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Kent, Jacqueline, 2001, A Certain Style: Beatrice Davis, a literary life, Penguin, Melbourne Kyle, Noeline, 1988, ‘Woman’s “natural mission” but man’s real domain: The masculinisation of the state elementary teaching service in New South Wales’, in Sandra Taylor and Miriam Henry (eds), Battlers and Bluestockings: Women’s place in Australian education, Australian College of Education, Melbourne Law, Ethel, n.d., Down the Years, YWCA of New Zealand Leeson, Ida, 1936, The Mitchell Library, Sydney: Historical and Descriptive Notes, Trustees of the Public Library of New South Wales, Sydney ——1952, A Bibliography of Cargo Cults and Other Nativistic Movements in the South Pacific, South Pacific Commission Technical Paper no. 30 ——1954, A Bibliography of Bibliographies of the South Pacific, Oxford University Press, London Lewis, Geoffrey, 1977, ‘A biography of the Honourable Thomas Davies Mutch’, M.A. thesis, University of New England, Armidale Lord, Mary, 2005, ‘Quirks and Crotchets’, review of Peter Ryan’s Brief Lives, Australian Book Review, February McAuley, James, 1946, Under Aldebaran, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne McGrath, Amy, 1988, A Short History of the N.S.W. Association of University Women Graduates, Part One, 1882–1920, NSW Association of University Women Graduates, Sydney Mackinolty, Judy, 1979, ‘To stay or to go: Sacking married women teachers’, in Judy Mackinolty and Heather Radi (eds), In Pursuit of Justice: Australian women and the law 1788–1979, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney Magarey, Susan, 2001, Passions of the First Wave Feminists, University of New South Wales Press, Sydney Manson, Cecil and Manson, Celia, 1960, Doctor Agnes Bennett, Michael Joseph, London Maude, H.E., 1968, Of Islands and Men: Studies in Pacific History, Oxford University Press, Melbourne Martin, Sylvia, 2001, Passionate Friends: Mary Fullerton, Mabel Singleton and Miles Franklin, Onlywomen Press, London Metcalfe, John, 1995, ‘Remarks to the Trustees of the Public Library of NSW on his Resignation, 1959’, in W. Boyd Rayward (ed.),
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Bibliography Developing a Profession of Librarianship in Australia, Travel Diaries and Other Papers of John Wallace Metcalfe, Scarecrow Press, Lanham, Md Miles Franklin—a Tribute, 1955, Bread and Cheese Club, Melbourne Modjeska, Drusilla and Pizer, Marjorie (eds), 1985, The Poems of Lesbia Harford, Angus & Robertson, Sydney Moon, Enid, 1991, Memoirs of a Galley Slave, Studies in Australian Bibliography no. 34, Book Collectors’ Society of Australia Moore, Andrew, 2002, ‘The “Great Literary Witch-Hunt” Revisited: Politics, Personality and Pique at the CLF, 1952’, Labour History, vol. 82 Mourot, Suzanne, 1969, This Was Sydney, Ure Smith, London ——1986, ‘To Work Under Her Was a Privilege and a Challenge’, Archives and Manuscripts, vol. 14, no. 1 Norman, Lilith, 1983, The Brown and Yellow: Sydney Girls’ High School 1883–1983, Oxford University Press, Melbourne North, Marilla (ed.), 2001, Yarn spinners: A story in letters, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia Palmer, Vance, 1934, The Swayne Family, Angus & Robertson, Sydney Phelan, Nancy, 1958, Atoll Holiday, Angus & Robertson, Sydney ——1965, Welcome the Wayfarer: A Traveller in Modern Turkey, Macmillan, London ——1991, The Romantic Lives of Louise Mack, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia ——1996, Pieces of Heaven: In the South Seas, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia Portus, G.V., 1953, Happy Highways, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne Pybus, Cassandra, 1999, The Devil and James McAuley, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia Rayward, W. Boyd (ed.), 1976, The Variety of Librarianship: Essays in honour of John Wallace Metcalfe, Library Association of Australia, Sandy Bay ——1993, ‘Reflecting on a wider world: Metcalfe’s overseas travels and the creation of a modern library profession in Australia’, in W. Boyd Rayward (ed.), Libraries and Life in a Changing World: The Metcalfe Years, 1920–1970, School of Information, Library and Archive Studies, University of New South Wales, Sydney
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Robertson, Anne, 1988, Treasures of the State Library of New South Wales: The Australiana Collections, Collins in association with the SLNSW Press, Sydney Roe, Jill, 1982, ‘Paradigms of the City’, Sydney Gazette, no. 5, December —— (ed.), 1993, My Congenials: Miles Franklin and Friends in Letters, 2 vols, Angus & Robertson, Sydney ——1995, ‘The Magical World of Marion Mahony Griffin: Culture and community at Castlecrag in the inter-war years’, in Shirley Fitzgerald and Garry Wotherspoon (eds), Minorities: Cultural diversity in Sydney, SLNSW Press, Sydney Roland, Betty, 1990, The Devious Being, HarperCollins, Sydney Ryan, Peter, 2001, Fear Drive My Feet, Duffy & Snellgrove, Sydney ——2004, Brief Lives, Duffy & Snellgrove, Sydney Sheils, Helen (ed.), 1963, Australian Aboriginal Studies: A symposium of papers presented at the 1961 research conference, Oxford University Press, Melbourne Solling, Max and Reynolds, Peter, 1997, Leichhardt: On the Margins of the City, Allen & Unwin, Sydney Spathopoulos, Wanda, 2006 (forthcoming), The Crag, Brandl & Schlesinger, Blackheath Theobald, Marjorie, 1996, Knowing Women: Origins of Women’s Education in Nineteenth-century Australia, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne Tully, Bill, 1998, ‘John Metcalfe: Librarian by Accident, Eccentric by Nature, and Democratic by Instinct’, Australian Academic and Research Libraries, vol. 29, no. 1 Walker, Meredith, Kabos, Adrienne and Weirick, James (eds), 1994, Building for Nature: Walter Burley Griffin and Castlecrag, Walter Burley Griffin Society, Castlecrag Weirick, James, 1988, ‘The Magic of America: Vision and text’, in Walter Burley Griffin: A Re-View, Monash University Gallery, Melbourne Wetherell, D. and Carr-Gregg, D., 1990, Camilla: A Life, New South Wales University Press, Sydney YWCA Sydney Annual Reports YWCA Wellington Annual Report 1912–13, 1917
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Allied Geographical Section (AGS) 140–2, 153 Anderson, Francis 19 Anderson, Henry Charles Lennox 2–3, 6, 23–4, 26–7, 30, 35, 54–6 Angus, David Mackenzie 98 Angus & Robertson 16, 36, 97–110, 121, 158, 174, 176, 179 Anniversary Day 118–20 anthroposophy 77–9, 86–8, 91, 156, 168, 178, 181 festivals 86–8 Arnot, Jean 41–2, 57, 59–60, 64, 65, 137, 139, 145, 179–80, 182, 193–4 ASOPA see Australian School of Pacific Administration Australian history 20, 23, 28–9, 35, 98, 99–100, 119 Australian Joint Copying Project 135–6, 146 Australian School of Pacific Administration 161–4, 173 Australian Subscription Library 1 Barnard, Marjorie xiii, 40, 125–7, 201 Barrington, Mollie 42, 64, 127, 132, 193–4 Becking, Laurens Gerhard Marinus Baas 169–70
Bennett, Agnes 74 Bertles, Zoe 17, 58, 59, 60, 64, 193–4 Berzins, Baiba vii, 190 Birch, Charles 177–8, 191–2 Birch, Florence Maud 43, 48, 63, 67–80, 83–94, 95, 115, 178, 190–5, 198 Birch, Sidney 70, 153, 177–8, 191–2 Bladen, Frank Murcott 5–6, 31 Blamey, Thomas 143, 151–2, 188–9 Bligh, Captain ix, x–xi, 112, 117, 164 see also Mutiny on the Bounty Bolckow, H.W.F. 37 Bowden, Ros 68 Brennan, Christopher 5, 6, 19, 27, 32, 57, 60, 97, 152, 174 Bruce, Stanley 38, 155 Cass, Michael 56 Castlecrag 79–80, 81–95, 115, 167, 174 amphitheatre 87–92, 167 festivals 86–8, 90–1, 115 Casuals Club 32 cataloguing xiv, 5, 27–30, 32, 34, 43–4, 60, 166, 180 Clark, Manning xiii, 6, 26, 55, 178, 181, 185–8, 196 Collins, Nancy see Leeson, Nancy
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Committee on National Morale 139–40, 142, 150 Commonwealth Literary Fund 124–6 Conlon, Alfred Austin Joseph 139–44, 147–56, 159, 161–5, 167–8, 178, 185–6, 188–9, 200 Conlon, Telford 143, 151 cultural positioning and gender xiv Cusack, Dymphna 85, 120–1, 167 Davis, Beatrice 115, 121, 158, 176, 181, 199 de Dragffy, Elisabeth 170 Depression xiv, 7, 10, 13, 51, 53, 61–2, 83, 99, 107, 128, 130 Dickinson, Evelyn 18 Directorate of Research and Civil Affairs 143–5, 147–61, 185, 193, 195 Dixson, William 98–101, 107 Dobbie, May 30 Drummond, David Henry 61–3, 116 Drummond, Lute 77–9, 167
gender xi, xiv, 2, 7–8, 9–10, 29–32, 55–6, 62–3, 109, 162, 188, 198–9 see also working women Gifford, George 59 Gollan, Daphne 40–1, 57, 130–2, 137–8 Griffin, Marion Mahony 79, 81–94, 115–17, 120, 135, 167, 174, 187 Griffin, Walter Burley 79, 81–94, 115, 200 Hall, James Norman ix–xi Hall, Radclyffe 187, 192 Hallstrom, Edward 163–4, 167 Herlihy, Thomas 12 Hogbin, Ian 148, 155
Eldershaw, Flora 112, 126–7 Ellis, Havelock 40 Ellis, Malcolm Henry 113, 123–7 Emberson, Mary Ann see Leeson, Mary Ann ‘Ern Malley’ 148–9 Evatt, H.V. 86, 119–20 feminism xiv, 7, 18, 29–30, 56, 61–3, 65–6, 113, 189–90, 193–4, 200 Fenbury, Helen 161–2, 173–5, 181–2, 194 Fitzhardinge, Maude Yeomans 7, 29–32, 35–6, 65 Flinders, Matthew 21, 37, 44–7, 77, 134 Flower, Monica 64, 131–2, 144 Franklin, Miles xiii, 85, 90, 95–6, 112–18, 120–4, 167, 180, 198 All That Swagger 117–18, 121, 123 Pioneers on Parade 121–3 Free Public Library 1
Fullerton, Mary xiii, 67, 72, 112–14, 118, 124, 192–3
Ifould, William Herbert 32–4, 36–9, 42–3, 45–50, 52–65, 96–110, 116, 120, 127–30, 133–8, 142, 144, 189, 191, 198 Iolanthus College 2 Immigration Restriction Act 1901 6 Jones, David J. 32, 100 Jones, Phyllis Mander 7, 41, 127, 142, 145–6, 180, 181 Jordan, Frederick 32 Kegworth Public School 11–13 Kerr, Kristin 151 Kerr, John 144, 148, 151–2, 160–3, 165, 168, 188–9 Kibble, Nita Bernice 3, 29–31, 33–4, 58–60, 64, 127, 144 King, Phillip Parker 46–8 Land Headquarters School of Civil Affairs 139, 155–7, 161 see also Australian School of Pacific Administration (ASOPA) Lang, Jack 52 Lawson, Bertha 40, 85, 132, 174
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Index overseas travel xi, 42–50, 77, 134, 135, 169 photographic memory 26 physical appearance xii, 16, 18, 41–2, 66, 68–9, 75–6, 83, 86, 161–2, 172, 185 portrait 16, 68–9, 71–2, 75–6 Principal Accessions Officer 34, 39, 42, 53, 60, 63, 74, 95, 111, 132 professionalism xi, 6, 26, 28–9, 30, 33–4, 39, 48, 109–10 proofreading 6 relationship with Alf Conlon 159 relationship with Camilla Wedgwood 157 relationship with Christopher Brennan 5, 6 relationship with Florence Birch 43, 48–9, 67–80, 95, 176–8, 190–6 relationship with Jean Arnot 41–2, 59–60, 64, 179–80, 182 relationship with Malcolm Ellis 124 relationship with Marjorie Ross 40 relationship with Miles Franklin 113–15 relationship with W.H. Ifound 33 religion/spirituality 9–10, 77–80 researcher 46–9, 60, 111–12, 137, 153–4, 156, 171, 175–6, 179, 199 retirement 144–5, 168, 175 service in Armed Forces 136–7, 139, 143–5, 147–66 social class 7–8 Social Development section 170–1, 175 South Pacific Commission 168–76, 191 style of dress xii, 14, 84, 86, 172, 184–8, 196 Sydney Girls’ High School 12–15, 17, 25, 40, 121 Sydney Harbour Bridge xiv, 52 teaching profession 2 University of Sydney xiv, 2, 5, 7,
Lawson, Henry 97–109, 132, 174 Leeson, Ethel 10 Leeson, Ida Emily academic record 12–13, 17, 19 awarded King’s Jubilee Medal 115 bibliographer 111, 139–43, 152–3, 171, 179, 182, 200–01 bloomers (underwear) 184–8, 196 born 10 cataloguing xiv, 5, 27–30, 34, 43–4, 60, 166, 180 character xii–xiv, 7, 26, 28–9, 33–4, 41, 61, 83, 112–13, 130–1, 157, 159, 171–2, 174–5, 178–9, 182–3 childhood 9–14, 61 death 178, 182, 195 Depression xiv, 7, 10, 13, 51, 53, 61–2, 83, 99, 107, 128, 130 Easter Festival production 90–1 education 2, 6–7, 11–20, 41, 59–60 family members 7, 9–11, 13–14, 73–4, 76–7 and femininity xiv health 181–2 indexes 111 Kegworth Public School 11–13 Land Headquarters School of Civil Affairs 155–7 and lesbianism 48–9, 65–6, 192–6 letters 195 library profession 2–3, 39–40, 109–10, 111–12 long-service leave 42–3 manner xii, 28–9, 33–4, 39, 41 Mitchell Librarian xi–xii, 6–7, 39, 41, 50, 58–65, 86, 95–6, 100, 122, 128–9, 143–5, 199–200 and the Mitchell Library xi–xiv, 2–7, 22, 26, 27, 30–1, 39–43, 53–5, 58, 111–13, 128, 136, 143–4, 161, 179–80, 190, 199–200 The Mitchell Library: Historical and Descriptive Notes 47, 115–16, 129
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16–19, 22, 27, 56, 58–9, 74, 132, 150, 161, 177 ‘Vocabulary of New South Wales Aboriginal Dialects’ 6 wages 2, 27, 28, 34, 53, 64, 113, 128–9, 143 war years 135–46, 147–66 Women’s College 18–20 and working women xiv, 3, 6–7, 29–31, 53, 55, 69, 189–90 Leeson, Jack 176–7, 192 Leeson, June 177, 180–1, 192 Leeson, Mary Ann 9–10, 13–14, 73–4 Leeson, Nancy 76, 90 Leeson, Thomas 9, 10–11 Leeson, Victor Sidney 10, 14, 73, 76–7, 111, 135, 182, 195 Leeson, Violet Annie 10 Leeson, William Henry 10, 13–14, 73, 76 Legge, John viii, 148, 154–5, 157–8, 186 Leighton, Lennie 12–13 Lending Branch 2 lesbianism 65–6, 190–3 librarians ‘blue-stocking ladies’ 7, 9 and gender xiv, 2, 5, 7, 9–10, 29–31, 32, 48–9, 53–66 male 5–6, 7, 29–31, 32–3, 34, 48, 53–8, 62–3 overseas trips 35–8 role of xiv wages 2, 3, 27, 30, 34, 53, 65, 75, 113, 128–9, 143 librarianship, professionalising 58, 65–6 libraries and women xi, xii, xiv, 2–5, 7, 9–10, 29–34, 39–41, 53–66, 129–30, 134, 143–4, 198–9 library conditions 3–5, 27–8, 37, 39–40, 51, 130, 134 profession, ‘feminisation’ of 56, 65 stereotypes xii, 7, 196 uniforms 4 Lightfoot, Louise 85, 89
McAuley, James 26, 148–9, 154–5, 161, 165, 187 MacCallum, Mungo 17, 19 MacDonald, Louisa 18 McDowell, Thomas Crawford 78 McKay, Helen 131 Mack, Louise 12–13, 15 Mackaness, George 120, 124–7 Married Women (Teachers and Lecturers) Act 1932 7, 61–2 Maude, Harry E. 170–1, 173, 175–6, 179, 200 manuscripts xiii, 6 Angus & Robertson Papers 97–110 Australiana 35 Captain Cook’s Endeavour Journal 37–9, 99, 118 de Quiros 43 Henry Lawson 97–8, 101, 103, 132 Macquarie 36, 124 Matthew Flinders 21, 37, 44–7, 77, 134 Mutiny on the Bounty ix–xi, 112, 117, 134, 164 Metcalfe, John Wallace 7, 9–10, 56–8, 63–6, 95, 100, 113, 127–8, 134–7, 144–5, 193–4, 198–200 Mitchell, David Scott 20, 22–7, 98, 107, 116 Mitchell Library 20, 22–37, 136 extension 136 H.C.L. Anderson 2–3, 6, 23–4, 26–7, 30, 35, 54–6 hierarchy 62–3 Hugh Wright xi, 27–9, 31, 36–7, 43, 45, 53, 55, 61–2, 127–9 Ida Leeson xi–xiv, 2–7, 27, 30–1, 39–43, 53–5, 111–13, 128, 143–4, 161, 179–80, 190, 199–200 John Metcalfe 7, 9–10, 56–8, 63–6, 95, 100, 113, 127–8, 134–7, 144–5, 193–4, 198–200 official opening 27 Phyllis Mander Jones 7, 41, 127, 142, 145–6, 180, 181
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Index physical conditions 3–5 proposed site 25–6 and social class 27–8, 31–2 readers’ ticket system 24, 27–8 war years 135–40, 145–6 Mourot, Suzanne 145–6, 179 Munn-Pitt Report 133–4 Murray, J.K. (Jack) 148, 154–5, 160, 163–5 Murray-Oliver, Anthony 169 Mutch, Tom 60, 62, 64, 85, 103–04, 112, 115, 117, 120, 127 Mutiny on the Bounty ix–xi, 112, 117, 134, 164 ‘National Library’ 24, 26, 35, 38–9, 59, 93, 99, 136 National Parliamentary Library 38–9 Newling, Cecil Bede 20 Nicholls, Eric 82, 84 Nicholls, Marie 83 O’Malley, King 92 Parsons, Ida 64 Penfold, Dulcie 96, 130–1, 138–9 Pentelow, Samuel Thomas Otho 56–8, 64 Phelan, Nancy 173, 175–8, 182–3, 191–2 Atoll Holiday 175–6 Phelps, Editha 113 Pierce, James 30 Plimsoll, James 148, 152 Portus, G.V. 19 Prichard, Katharine Susannah 85, 113–14 Prior Memorial Prize 117, 123–5, 127 Public Library of New South Wales 1–4, 33, 34, 133, 136 Acting Principal Librarian 134 Deputy Principal Librarian 62, 100 hierarchy 62–3 Principal Accessions Officer 34, 39, 42, 53, 60, 63, 74, 95, 111, 132
Principal Librarian 2, 3, 6, 24, 31, 32–3, 34, 53, 54, 56–7, 60, 62–5, 100, 128, 144, 198, 199–200 Quinn, John 32 Radford, Wilma 57–8, 138 religion 9–10 Rivett, Edward 85–6, 92, 182 Robertson, George 23, 25, 33, 55, 97–104, 106–8, 110 Ross, Marjorie 40, 132 Ryan, Peter 148, 154–6, 158, 180–2, 185–6, 191 salaries see wages Scott, Rose 23, 65, 112 Sheils, Helen see Fenbury, Helen Sherrie, Heather 40–2, 139, 145–6, 180 Singleton, Mabel 67, 192–3 Small, Ellen 131 South Pacific Commission 168–76, 191, 194 Social Development Section 170–1, 175 Spencer, A.H. (Bert) 33, 97, 99–106, 107–9 Stantke, Victor 150–1 State Library of New South Wales xiii, 65, 186 Steiner, Rudolph 77–8 stereotype, library xii, 7, 196 Stewart, Harold 148–9, 154, 160 Stone, Julius 131, 142, 155 Street, Jessie 63, 65 Sydney Church of England Grammar School for Girls 2 Sydney Harbour Bridge 52 Sydney Girls’ High School 12–15, 17, 25, 40, 121 Thomas, G.R. 62 Troubridge, Una 192 Turner, Ethel 15–16 universities and women 17–18 University of Sydney xiv, 5, 16–19,
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22, 27, 56, 58–9, 74, 132, 150, 161, 177 Victoria Barracks 139, 147–8, 150 wages, women’s 2, 3, 27, 30, 34, 53, 64, 65, 75, 113, 128–9, 143 Walker, Mary Ann see Leeson, Mary Ann Wedgwood, Camilla 148, 154–7, 161, 173, 193 Wells, June 41, 132–3 Wentworth, William Charles 26, 126 White Australia Policy 6 Wiley, Rebecca 103 Windeyer, Margaret 7, 23, 28–32, 60, 65 women career opportunities 109 and universities 17–18 women in libraries xi–xii, xiv, 2–5, 7, 9–10, 29–34, 39–41, 53–66, 129–30, 134, 143–4, 198–9
Women’s College 18–20 Wood, George Arnold 19–21, 43 women and education 14, 17 working women xiv, 3, 6–7, 29–31, 53, 55, 69, 189–90 and child care 30 Married Women (Teachers and Lecturers) Act 1932 7, 61–2 wages 2, 3, 27, 30, 34, 53, 64, 65, 75, 113, 128–9, 143 World War I 53 World War II 48, 135–40, 150, 152, 155, 157–9, 169 see also Mitchell Library, war years Wright, Hugh xi, 27–9, 31, 34, 36–7, 43, 45, 53, 55, 61–2, 127–9 Wright, Roy (Pansy) 148, 162–3 Wymark, Fred 99–100 Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) 69–75, 77, 167
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