| In the previous issue of the EALRGA Newsletter I described my first few years at the National Library, from 1973 up to my leaving for Indonesia in the middle of 1979. Having written recently about my four years as Indonesian Acquisitions Librarian in National Library of Australia News, December 2003, I will try to avoid repeating myself and instead cover matters which I hope are of interest to EALRGA readers. My primary task was acquiring current Indonesian publications, which were mainly in Bahasa Indonesia or English, with some in regional languages such as Javanese and Balinese. The position also had a liaison role. This included contact with Indonesian libraries on exchanges of publications, staff training in Australia and other development programs. I also assisted visiting Australian academics and librarians, including the Director-General of the National Library, Harrison Bryan and his wife and Alan Horton, Librarian at the University of New South Wales, who was coordinating Australian university aid to Indonesia. Initially I was reporting to Marion Linley back at the Library in Canberra. Marion retired for health reasons, and was succeeded by Marie Sexton. She had been in charge of APAIS when I worked there, and would later become head of Asian Collections in 1989. Although Indonesia has a significant Chinese minority, there was virtually no publishing in Chinese at that time. This had not been the case during the earlier period of the Republic. Some Chinese titles are held by the National Library as part of the New York Public Library Collection it acquired covering 1950s and early 1960s Indonesian imprints. After the 1965 coup, which was partly blamed on the influence of the People’s Republic of China and local Chinese sympathisers, the New Order government of President Suharto banned almost all public use of Chinese script as well as Chinese language in films, videos and so forth. The prohibition included publications and shop signs. Even imported magazines such as Time with Chinese characters in advertisements had the Chinese blacked out by the censor. Faded, illegible characters could still sometimes be seen on buildings in the old Chinatown district of the capital. In the same area was what had been the Embassy of the PRC, locked up and overgrown since relations were severed after 1965. Other East Asian languages were not affected by the ban. I often drove past a Japanese language centre, which had a large sign in kanji and kana. After Suharto’s fall in 1998 there was a revival of publishing in Chinese. One authorized exception to the ban on Chinese script was the Jakarta newspaper Yindunixiya ri bao = Harian Indonesia. It had appeared in Chinese and Indonesian since 1966, and was intended to provide government information to older Chinese speakers. The National Library holds this title. During my four years in Indonesia I met several visiting Japanese scholars and librarians with an interest in Southeast Asia. They were keen for Japan to improve its holdings on the region and learn how the Australian, American and Dutch library acquisition offices in Jakarta were obtaining contemporary Indonesian materials. My work involved travelling fairly extensively within Indonesia for acquisition trips and conferences as well as making a few visits to Singapore and Malaysia. One of the last I made was to the Javanese city of Yogyakarta in March 1983 as one of two Australian representatives at the International Federation for Documentation’s Commission for Asia and Oceania Congress. My main task was to read a paper written by a distinguished Australian librarian who was unable to attend. It was on science databases, by no means my area of expertise. Fortunately the other Australian delegate was able to help me out in question time with tricky technical queries. It was during this conference I heard on the radio that Malcolm Fraser had lost the 1983 elections to Labor under Bob Hawke. Shortly afterwards I briefly met the new Foreign Minister Bill Hayden and later Bob and Hazel Hawke at Australian Embassy receptions during their first official visits to Indonesia after taking government. The gathering for the Hawkes was held outdoors and I recall it was one of the rare occasions in Indonesia when I wore a suit and tie. The Prime Minister made it clear we should all remove our jackets which was a great relief in the Jakarta heat. Towards the end of my time in Jakarta, I had discussions with Pauline Haldane, Principal Librarian with responsibility for Orientalia, about returning to work there. Originally my posting had been for two years, and it was then extended for twelve months. During my third year the Fraser government undertook a review of overseas posts, popularly known as the Razor Gang. This had a brief to reduce staffing at Australia's embassies. Although the review committee members highly praised the work of the National Library's Indonesian Acquisitions Office they still recommended it be downgraded once my term finished. I agreed to stay in Jakarta longer while the Library fought this proposal. Unfortunately, despite the Library receiving strong support from many individuals and organizations, the decision was not reversed. Although the office continued to operate it was another ten years before the position was fully reinstated. In July 1983 my family and I left Indonesia, and after extended leave I took up the position of Senior Librarian, Chinese in September. The period I was in this position, from late 1983 to the end of 1985 was one of considerable change at the National Library. Undoubtedly the most dramatic event was the major fire on the evening of Friday 8 March 1985. I was staying with my parents in the country that weekend and was woken on the Saturday morning by my father who had heard the news on the radio. Moko Eade of the Japanese Unit was on a lake cruise with friends on the Friday evening and as they sailed past the library saw smoke pouring from the building. Fortunately, despite the seriousness of the fire, few books were lost, though there was some soot and water damage. In Orientalia only one Japanese serial issue was damaged beyond repair. However many publications were soaked. The main method of dealing with this was placing the items on the floor in the Orientalia Reading Room with electric fans operating and blotting paper between the pages. At regular intervals the staff had to replace the blotting paper, a process we called "changing the nappies." As a result of the fire there was no air-conditioning so for the only time in my career the library's windows were left open during the day. There was further disruption during 1985 as asbestos was being removed from the building and on days when there was a high-fibre reading all staff and readers had to be evacuated. Orientalia, still headed by Sidney Wang, had become part of a larger section under Pauline Haldane. In 1979 this new section called the Australian International and Ethnic Library (AUSINTEL) was set up to cover both the Orientalia and South and Southeast Asian subsections as well as other foreign language collections and services. AUSINTEL's name was changed to Area Studies in 1982, and in 1987 to Asian Collections, after which it had a focus just on Asia. During the early 1980s the two parts of the section were physically separate. Orientalia remained on the Third Floor, while Pauline Haldane and the staff dealing with foreign language resources apart from East Asian were housed on the Lower Ground Floor (LG1) in a rather claustrophobic subterranean stack area with no natural light. During October 1984 I acted for Ilse Soegito as Chief Librarian, Area Studies, and during this time HRH Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn of Thailand came to the library. The Thai staff Rosemary Borthwick and Lek McFadden showed the royal visitor around. As she inspected the collection I remember the large number of accompanying Thai journalists walking backwards in deference to the Princess. Space does not allow me to list all the staff in Orientalia during these years. The Chinese librarian George Yuan had retired in 1979 and was succeeded by Beatrice Tam early the following year. Others in the Chinese Unit included C.P. Tang, Norma Chin, Jenny Cheng and Sharline Tsung. Several staff were employed in 1984 and 1985 under a community languages program. Two of them, Lily Li and Irina Chou, were to stay on long term in the section. In contrast one of the others taken on under this scheme resigned after less than a week. Nikki White, who headed the Japanese Unit, was assisted by Moko Moore (now Moko Eade) and Fumika Clifford, as well as librarians seconded from the Diet Library. Jung-Hee Fry was in charge of Korean, helped for a time by Min Jorgensen. There were many staff placements and visitors from East Asia in this period. The program with the National Diet Library continued to operate well. Mr Kazuhiko Shiraiwa of NDL succeeded Miss Kuniko Nosaka in May 1983 and was in Orientalia until July 1985. Mr Masaki Nasu replaced him at the end of 1985. In 1984 Mr Shiraiwa spent two months at ANU Library surveying and writing a report on the Japanese collection there and during that time Dr Li Lung-wah of ANU Library was on exchange to the Chinese unit in Orientalia. Several librarians from China came for training and work experience, including Mr Tan Jinkai of the National Library of China and Mr Shi Shikang of Nanjing University Library in 1984 and Ms Guan Ping and Ms Zhuang Xiaoying of the National Library of China during 1985. Major delegations included a senior Chinese library group headed by Mr Du Ke of the Ministry of Culture in November 1984; and a visit headed by the National Librarian of Vietnam, Mr Duc in June 1985. Mr Duc was particularly grateful that the National Library of Australia had continued its book exchanges with his library in Hanoi throughout the Vietnam War. The first half of the 1980s saw rapid growth of the Asian language collections, particularly Chinese, stemming partly from the publishing boom in the PRC after the Cultural Revolution. The Chinese collection doubled in size during the period 1980 to 1990. Growth of the Japanese collection was slower, reflecting rising prices and a weak Australian dollar. Staffing was tight as elsewhere in the public service. For a time in the early 1980s there was only one librarian cataloguing Chinese and one cataloguing Japanese publications. Not surprisingly the backlogs of uncatalogued titles grew considerably. Many Chinese books in particular were given only brief title slips in the card catalogue. Several major scholarly libraries were acquired in the first half of the 1980s. They included the Luce Collection on Burma, the McLaren-Human Collection of old and rare Korean books, and continuations of the Harold S. Williams Collection on Japan and the West and the Walter Simon Collection on Chinese, Tibetan, Manchu and other East Asian languages. Chinese collections donated included that of Wei Tung-fang on Chinese literature and Audrey Donnithorne on Chinese economics and agriculture. Space had also become a most serious problem. The building which had only opened in 1968 was rapidly filling up with books. By 1985 many Asian items including large sets had been moved to a warehouse, and the onsite shelves were packed tight, with some volumes on the floor. I recall helping to shelve some of the Chinese series which had been relocated to the warehouse, which was a rather bleak and dusty place to work, unlike the specially built warehouse now used by the Library. Retrieving East Asian publications caused difficulties for staff unable to read the script. On a number of occasions Orientalia had to help find the items or take readers out to the warehouse. On a positive note, new ways of providing access to the collections were being introduced. From 1981 Orientalia began to produce Current Awareness Bulletins listing major acquisitions in Chinese, Japanese and Korean. Distributed to readers and libraries they proved popular with scholars and a major source of interlibrary loan requests. As part of cooperation with other libraries, Orientalia had been maintaining the Union Catalogue of East Asian Monographs (UCEAM) and the Union List of East Asian Serials (ULEAS) in card form since 1956. These covered the Chinese, Japanese and Korean holdings of major Australian and New Zealand libraries. UCEAM was made available on microfilm in 1978 and in an expanded second edition in 1983. With the beginning of the Australian Bibliographic Network (ABN) in 1980, it became possible for East Asian records to be included in a national online system, but without the original Chinese, Japanese and Korean characters. By the mid 1980s the National Library and other libraries were cataloguing their East Asian monographs and serials onto the system in fully romanized form. Orientalia continued to maintain card catalogues containing the original CJK scripts, pending the introduction of a system capable of handling these characters. In 1983 the National Library began what was to become known as the Harold White Fellowship scheme. This has enabled selected researchers to make intensive use of the collections, and has been most valuable in promoting them. Toshio Akima of the University of Auckland was the first scholar to be awarded a fellowship specifically for East Asian resources. In 1985 he carried out research on Japanese myth, ritual and literature. Shortly afterwards Dr Carney Fisher of the University of Melbourne was given a fellowship to study Ming dynasty Chinese history of the sixteenth century. The East Asian Library Resources Group of Australia (EALRGA) was established in 1978 to promote East Asian librarianship in this country. Initially it was called the East Asian Librarians' Group of Australia. The founding committee consisted of Sidney Wang as Chairperson, Y.S. Chan of the ANU Library as Vice Chairperson/Editor and Nikki White of the National Library as Secretary/Treasurer. From then until now the committee has been based in Canberra and has consisted mainly of current and former National Library and ANU Library staff, though with strong support from colleagues outside the national capital. The EALRGA Newsletter, which first appeared in November 1978, remains the single most important source for the history of East Asian library developments in Australia over the past quarter century. For example Sidney Wang's "Survey of East Asian language collections in Australian libraries December 1983" was published in the December 1986 issue. This was the most detailed analysis of Australia's Chinese, Japanese and Korean resources to date and was based on a questionnaire answered by 50 libraries across the nation, 32 of them with East Asian language holdings. Early editors of the Newsletter included Y.S. Chan, Sidney Wang, Susan Prentice and myself. From 1987 Susan MacDougall was to edit it for more than 15 years, a truly magnificent contribution. During 1984 and 1985 I was the library representative on a new but short-lived organization, the Association of People Interested in Asia (APIA). This was the brainchild of a local Asian studies teacher, Noreen Redhead, and attempted to bring together a wide range of scholars, teachers, public servants, librarians and others interested in the teaching of Asian languages and studies in Australian schools. APIA held a large conference at the ANU in late 1985. In July 1985 Beatrice Tam and I represented the Library at the Sino-Australian Relations Conference, which examined the period since diplomatic ties with the PRC began in 1972. The conference was held at Griffith University in Queensland, and its beautiful bush setting and sunshine were most enjoyable after Canberra's winter weather. Like most attending I stayed in student accommodation on campus, where there were shared bathroom facilities. The first morning, there was a distinguished looking gentleman in a multi-coloured dressing-gown shaving. I realised it was Al Grassby, former Minister for Immigration, who was well known for his dazzlingly bright clothes. The conference was opened by the Queensland Premier the late Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen. The conference dinner was memorable as we were all served barramundi, but the fish was cold and half-frozen inside. At a subsequent Asian studies conference I arrived early and started chatting with other delegates, none of whom I recognized. All went well until one asked "So you are here for our NAGS conference?" I looked puzzled so he added "NAGS, the National Association of Gambling Societies." The Director-General of the National Library, Harrison Bryan, retired in July 1985. I attended his farewell dinner held in the Main Reading Room, which had been transformed into a most elegant dining-room. He was succeeded by Warren Horton, who was to serve two terms and remain head of the institution until 1999. In December 1985 Sidney Wang retired just prior to his sixty-fifth birthday. A huge farewell morning tea was held for him in the Orientalia Reading Room. Sidney had been head of Orientalia for a record 21 years, and was later awarded an Order of Australia Medal for his outstanding services to East Asian librarianship in Australia. It was the end of an era, especially as Enid Bishop, now Enid Gibson, Asian Studies Librarian at the ANU Library, had retired in April 1984, after 26 years at the university. She was succeeded by Y.S. Chan. I took over as Chief Librarian, Orientalia on Christmas Eve 1985, and in the next part of this series I hope to cover my experiences in this position during the second half of the decade. |
[Andrew Gosling retired from the National Library of Australia in February 2003 after thirty years, mostly spent in Asian Collections. He is continuing to write on Asian studies library topics. This is the second part of a series on his working life at the National Library].