Friends in Dusty Places

I wish I had been more attentive to an item I glimpsed on television some weeks ago. Its general drift, as I recall, was that an environmental scientist had been richly rewarded by the results of a super-scrupulous scan of a very tiny area. Instead of studying the ecology of (say) a mountain range, or a peninsula, he crept on hands and knees over a single paddock, magnifying-glass in hand like a caricature of Sherlock Holmes. (It was something like that.) This intensive scrutiny identified two species up till now unknown to science, several creatures not thought to occur within the region under study, local hybrids and variants from the standard type specimens. (Again, it was something like that.)

All unwitting, I find myself concluding a somewhat similar process. I have resumed, after a gap of several years, the task of parcelling up the remainder of my private papers for transmission to the manuscript collection of the National Library in Canberra.

As folders have been removed from cabinets where they have long lain undisturbed; as individual letters have been scraped from the bottoms of old desk drawers; as dust-thick brown-paper parcels have been retrieved from the shed (not to mention the rich yields from the cupboard under the stairs) I could have given several days of happy employment to an ecologist, sitting beside me to classify the inevitable cohabitants of my papers: silverfish; moths of great variety; spiders, from tiny, lively little black ones scurrying in search of fresh cover, to languid monsters with an eight-centimetre leg span; beetles of all kinds and of many colours; creatures which hopped and creatures which crawled. Doubtless, such pullulating immigrant populations are a routine problem for the National Library, whose insecticidal cordon sanitaire must remain unbreachable.

Though it happened going on for ten years ago, I still recall my first contact with the archives side of the Library through Graeme Powell, the then Manuscript Librarian. It was one of the most agreeable acquaintances I ever made. Powell has retired, but I am told that he remains active in Canberra. It was a great relief to find that the same “friendly to laypersons” atmosphere still prevails. And help this layperson needed.

During twenty-six years as Director of Melbourne University Press, plus fifteen years service to the Supreme Court of Victoria, as Secretary to its Board of Examiners for Barristers and Solicitors, I seem to have acquired friends (I steal here a phrase from Claudio Veliz) “as an Andalusian dog acquires fleas”. And friends mean letters, or used to, until the advent of e-mail.

All sorts of judgments must be made before a letter can responsibly be placed for access in a public collection: Is it too trifling to be worth the cost of cataloguing and keeping? (“Fred—see you for lunch Friday.”) Is a letter such that the sender would have been entitled to a presumption of confidentiality? Might a certain letter or document be more usefully deposited with a local or regional archive which is active, than sequestered in Canberra? Such practical and ethical questions may well require consideration by the professionals.

Under the tactful tutelage of the Library, all such decisions have been made (I hope wisely) and one archive box is almost ready for dispatch. Last time there were several boxes, all courteously supplied by the Library itself.

I consign such boxes, by the Library’s courier, with a deep sigh of relief, mixed with a deep perplexity: how could that pile of the utmost heterogeneity ever be converted to a rational order, which could be classified and catalogued and rendered accessible to scholars and authors (and stickybeaks)? In an amazingly short time—perhaps a couple of months—I am informed that the job is complete, and receive a copy of the cataloguing result. How do they manage it?

My early evidence that the exercise might have been worth while comes from phone calls and informal notes, mostly from academics working at the ANU: “Dear Peter, I see that your papers make some reference to so-and-so. Maybe you have other information on this subject? Can I pop in one day and discuss it?”

Then, after a much longer interval, more substantial traces appear: here a footnote in a learned volume; there a word of acknowledgment in some author’s preface. It is pleasant to receive these little reminders that the right thing was done, and that the temptation—sometimes strong—has been resisted, to consign the entire pile in exasperation to the rubbish tip.

I dare say that many readers have a similar problem with old papers: for example, that carefully sealed parcel of Great-great-grandpa’s, from the days of the Victorian land boom of the 1880s; Grandpa’s letters to Grandma from France in 1917; those sheaves of letters, tied up in ribbon or office tape, written by an even remoter ancestor in the roaring days of the gold rushes.

These papers are taking up drawer space which you could undoubtedly use for other purposes, and you can depend on it that they are breeding their associate populations of creepy-crawlies. Before yielding to the emotionally satisfying course of heaving the lot into the recycling wheelie-bin, ask the National Library for a copy of its short and helpful paper of preliminary guidance. Then you won’t be assailed by later nagging doubts that you may have thrown away nuggets of historical gold, or silver ingots of traditional lore and folk-memory.