AustLit

William Walker was born in Hobart in 1861, studied civil engineering at Melbourne University and devoted his fortune from mining and railway shares to book collecting and library philanthropy. As Heather Gaunt has uncovered, Walker seems to have developed his sense of book heroism from his reading of Thomas Carlyle in essays like ‘The Hero as Man of Letters’ (Gaunt 10). This cultural idealism was shared and re-enforced by Walker’s professional friendship with Morris Miller, who represented a very effective conjunction of idealism (his first book was on Kant) and pragmatism (he also wrote the first Australian monograph on librarianship, Libraries and Education, 1912). This intellectual impetus of Walker’s was fused with a charged moment of discovery that he recounts, as a young man, of a three-volume Quintus Servinton in ‘a second-hand shop in Melbourne around 1880’ (Gaunt 109). This very rare copy of Savery’s novel is now in the Tasmanian Archive and Heritage Office. Notably, Walker was also a collector of Australian popular fiction and of erotica. The rich holdings of Louis Becke, Nat Gould, Guy Boothby and Ethel Turner, amongst others, in the Tasmaniana library of the State Library of Tasmania are a legacy of this interest (Gaunt 12). Walker’s obsession with Tasmanian colonial texts, like The Hermit in Van Diemen's Land: from the Colonial Times, his collecting of early Australian and Tasmanian publications, together with his later interests in popular fiction, indicates that his interests were never narrowly literary. He had an interest in the broader culture of literary production and of book history, both locally and nationally. Ten years younger than Sir John Quick (1852-1932), and twenty years older than Sir John Ferguson (1881-1969) and Morris Miller (1881-1964), Walker shared these bibliographers’ and librarians’ devotion to Australian book history but not their vision of a canonically centred and scholarly based infrastructure. Walker made foundational donations to the Tasmanian Public Library during his lifetime and his will provided for his remaining books to go to the library after his death. Walker’s import of large numbers of pornographic books involved a special import postal licence and how he managed this activity remains an untold chapter in the history of banned books in Australia. What exactly happened to this large collection after his death also remains a mystery (see Mead, ‘What happened to the Walker books?’).

Robert Carl Sticht (1856-1922) was a very different kind of bibliophile but just as interesting. So interesting in fact that Sticht and his legend are represented in Geoffrey Blainey’s history The Peaks of Lyell, in Marie Bjelke Petersen’s novel of the West coast of Tasmania, Dusk (where he appears as the character Jack Terrigan), and in Jan Senberg’s paintings of the Queenstown minescape (see Haynes 260). Where Carlyle was Walker’s inspiration, Sticht’s seems to have been Goethe. Born in Hoboken, New Jersey, Sticht was a US and German trained metallurgist and mining engineer who came to Tasmania in 1895 to manage the new Mount Lyell Company mine at Queenstown. He made a fortune for the mine out of a pyritic smelting technique that he invented and in 1903 was both the most highly paid man in Tasmania and possibly the most remotely located. Queenstown was only accessible by sea at this time, near Macquarie Harbour, the site of the old penal settlement. His later years were troubled financially but he lived on at Penghana, the mine manager’s house on top of the highest hill in Queenstown that he had built in 1898. It included a heritage garden, currently under restoration. Sticht died in 1922 having spent his last years in cataloguing his collection in five 180-page volumes arranged by Penghana’s rooms – den, front hall, back library etc. (Gaunt, ‘Library’ 15). Sticht turned Penghana into a remote, jealously guarded cave filled with thousands of books, collected mostly between 1900 and 1913. Unlike Walker, with his interest in nineteenth-century Australian and popular publications, Sticht was interested in manuscript, print and typographic treasures of global value and significance. After his death in 1923 Sticht’s library was auctioned in Melbourne and the Melbourne Public Library and Art Gallery bought up a large proportion of his collection. The collection of early typographical works, bought by the Felton Bequest for the Melbourne Public library consisted of 2,200 items (Gaunt, ‘Library’ 1). Sticht also collected Australiana and Tasmanian historical documents and books from James Backhouse Walker and J.W. Beattie. The provenance of some of Melbourne’s most valuable library holdings, then, lies in the mineral wealth of the remote West coast of Tasmania. Heather Gaunt’s published research into Walker, Sticht and the wider role of libraries in the formation of national culture and public memory has important perspectives on Tasmania’s role in this cultural history.

W.E.L.H. Crowther and E. Morris Miller are also significant figures in this field of Tasmanian print history. Crowther was the great-grandson of William Crowther, the early Hobart medical practitioner, and specialised in collecting Tasmaniana. Inspired by David Scott Mitchell in Sydney and William Walker in Hobart, he donated his collection to the State Library of Tasmania in 1964. E. Morris Miller, appointed to the University of Tasmania in 1913 and later Vice-Chancellor, was a founder of library studies in Australia and the first great bibliographer of Australian literature. Michael Roe devotes a chapter to Morris Miller in his 1984 study Nine Australian Progressives : Vitalism in Bourgeois Social Thought 1890-1960.

Clifford Craig’s (1896-1986) Notes on Tasmaniana: A Companion Volume to the Engravers of Van Diemen’s Land, Old Tasmanian Prints and More Old Tasmanian Prints (Launceston: Foot & Playsted, 1986) is a first person and very personal account of Craig’s collecting of Tasmaniana over the period 1938 to the 1970s and contains much interesting detail about the history of maps of Tasmania, early printing and publishing, almanacs, Tasmanian bank robberies, ‘Anti-Transportation literature,’ the history of Christ College, Bishopsbourne, early railways and theatres, turning up early lithographs of Van Diemen’s Land in Charing Cross Road antiquarian shops, as well as personal histories of reading William Hay’s The Escape of the Notorious Sir William Heans(1919) and Caroline Leakey’s The Broad Arrow. Craig also made a special study of the Van Diemen’s Land Pickwick Papers, a pirated edition of Dickens’s novel published by the Launceston printer Henry Dowling in 1838 (also the publisher of John West’s History of Tasmania): The Van Diemen's Land Edition of the Pickwick Papers : A General and Bibliographical Study with some Notes on Henry Dowling(Cat & Fiddle, 1973). Perhaps like elsewhere, the philanthropy of professional men is aligned with the fetishism of collecting, to the benefit of Tasmania’s archive and its record of Tasmanian-ness.

In other words, all Robinson’s journal and report writing had behind it the intention of a ‘narrative’ and it’s hard not to imagine that this narrative didn’t have, in his mind, some kind of literary shape, however inchoate and cloudy. Given his lack of formal education, the genres of missionary, scientific and exploratory writing that his correspondents exemplified must have seemed daunting if not impossible. Equally daunting, but perhaps more tantalising, were the more literary forms of imperial ethnography and missionary narrative, suggested perhaps by a handwritten ms amongst his papers, ‘A Short Dialogue between a Master & Servant’ (1858). But Robinson’s literary pretensions are also suggested by scattered moments of lyric insight and metaphysical speculation in the Friendly Mission journals, as Greg Lehman notes, and most strikingly in the vision of children and burning trees at Wybalenna in his journal for 25 September, 1837 (Weep in Silence, pp. 479-80). We know that Robinson must have read and admired Thomas Moore’s enormously popular 1817 ‘oriental romance’ Lalla Rookh: the name he gave to Truganini in a renaming ceremony on Flinders Island on 15 January, 1836 (Weep in Silence, pp. 336-37). (Ships, houses and gold mines were also named ‘Lalla Rookh’.) Perhaps he also absorbed Moore’s schemata of a non-Christian, chaotic uncivilization awaiting ‘the rationalizing influence of European Empire’ and Christianity (Brown 23). And at the beginning of his journal writing in 1829, where he notes in only his third entry (for 1 April) – ‘6am got under way; fair weather, adverse winds. Traversed the shore. Saw remains of the natives’ fires. Reached Little Cove [North Bruny Island]; remained here this night. Saw footmarks of natives on the shore’ (p. 54) – he must have been thinking of himself as George Augustus Robinson Crusoe, another English castaway and narrator of remote island life. In the end, the only thing Robinson published, in Bath, was a pamphlet of five poems, Stray Lyrics (Bath: Meyler & Son, 1858). But his Robinsonade that he returned from his Island of Despair to his other island, England, to write was only completed by his Tasmanian editor N.J.B Plomley – a foundational, if problematic, Robinsonade for a reader like Greg Lehman.

This recognition of the narrative and literary tradition that ghosts Robinson’s journals of his time amongst the Tasmanian Aborigines also helps an understanding of the fictional threads in Australian literature more broadly that those journals have done much to engender: Robert Drewe’s The Savage Crows, Mudrooroo’s Doctor Wooreddy's Prescription for Enduring the Ending of the World (1983), Richard Flanagan’s Gould's Book of Fish (2001), Craig Cormick’s Of One Blood: the Last Histories of Van Diemen’s Land (2007) (see also Robert Drewe, ‘The Savage Crows: A Personal Chronology,’ Kunapipi 5.1 1983: pp. 65-72).