Document ID: chunk:federal_register_of_legislation:F2019L00148:reg:2017:p1
Version: federal_register_of_legislation:F2019L00148
Segment Type: reg
Provision Reference: reg 2017 (pt 1/81)
Character Range: 42515–45578

2017                                                                       Dr Marie-Louise Ayres succeeds Anne-Marie Schwirtlich as Director-General.

                                                                           Theatre refurbished on Lower Ground 1.

2.3.1 The origins and early development of the National Library of Australia

The genesis of the Commonwealth National Library
The concept of a national library only became an issue when the federation of the Australian colonies began to look like an achievable objective.  Each of the colonies had established colonial libraries, which commonly had their origins in local subscription libraries.  Other nations had central national libraries, and it seemed inevitable that Australia would do the same, though considering the form of such a library was not a high priority for the politicians trying to negotiate their six respective colonies towards an agreed federated nation.

Edward Augustus Petherick put forward a proposal that foreshadowed a broadly-based national library collection, when he offered his private collection of Australiana and Pacificana to the Federal Council in the 1890s, through Sir Edward Braddon, Premier of Tasmania, as a 'nucleus of a State Library for the Federated Australian Colonies'.

Petherick (1847-1917) was born in the UK and brought to Australia as a child.  He was apprenticed at the age of 15 to book sellers Robertson and Mullens in Melbourne, and sent to London as a buyer in 1870, where he remained based until 1909.  Petherick developed a passion for collecting Australiana and Pacificana, especially early voyages, and after floating several other ideas for the long-term housing of his collection, offered it to the embryonic nation.  The collection, of over 10,000 items, was to be temporarily stored in the Australian section of the Imperial Institute Library in London.  Formal acceptance and transfer of the 'gift' was delayed because Petherick insisted that his services went with the collection.  This stipulation was finally accepted in 1909, and the Commonwealth government appointed him Commonwealth archivist at £500 per annum, a position he held until his death in 1917.  The acquisition was formally endorsed by Parliament in the Petherick Bill in 1911.[8]

At Federation, however, that acquisition was still a decade into the future, and the needs of the new Commonwealth government for access to a reference library were pressing.  While the federal parliament was housed in the Victorian Parliament House, however, it had access to that institution's library, and the Victorian State Library was close by, so the need to make hard and costly decisions about an independent library service for Parliament was able to be deferred.  This did not stop planning and lobbying by those who had aspirations for a national library.

Principal Librarian of the Public Library of NSW, Henry Charles Lennox Anderson, for example, lobbied Prime Minister Edmund Barton by letter on 26 February 1901, recommending that Barton establish a copyright