Peter Biskup 1926–2013

An Appreciation by R.L. Cope, Anzac Day, 25 April 2013

My earliest memories of Peter Biskup involve the review I did of the controversial publication The Commonwealth Parliamentary Library, 1901–27 and the Origins of the National Library of Australia by Andrew and Margaret Osborn (Cope, 1991). This book laid the foundation for our association and later friendship. Who today knows of this seminal, bizarre work? Issued in 200 copies by the Commonwealth Parliamentary Library and available from it, this book was not handled by the National Library, which had withdrawn from its original active sponsorship. But its emblematic importance should not be allowed to fade from notice. In a sense, much of Peter Biskup's historical research on the National Library of Australia relates to what the Osborns wrote or failed to write. Its personalities and events provided us both with much to discuss and speculate about in the ensuing years.

Peter's numerous writings on the National Library qualify him to be considered the leading historian of that institution. Knowledge of the Osborns' book is basic for a proper appreciation of continuing issues and queries, which is why attention is drawn to it here. In time Peter came to write appreciatively of Sir Harold White's great political skills and his achievements and legacy. Peter Biskup would have been the ideal biographer for this driven and occasionally protean personality. White and Osborn both attracted controversy and even enmity, but no one doubted their pre-eminence and importance. But there is much in their history that is still surrounded with pitfalls.

Whilst a prolific writer on a range of topics in Australian librarianship and also as author, in association with Doreen M. Goodman, of the major monograph Libraries in Australia,Peter Biskup was not an academic historian by training, but rather a lawyer. His writings show traces of a legal mind at many points and in the wide sweep of his interests, which went far beyond the library world. One topic where his unusual talents came to the fore is found in the significant piece he wrote for the Australian Library Journal in 1963 on Marx-Leninism and Soviet classification: it is a most lucid introduction to this dry abstruse topic. Few would disagree that his interests and passion for the precise detail reveal the character of a true historian. To my mind Peter's salient qualities as an historian are in full display in his lengthy article on the now largely forgotten librarian Richard Pennington, an Englishman whose fictitious autobiography Peterley Harvest is considered a modern classic (Biskup 1996). Peter Biskup had a long correspondence with Pennington who ended his days in France. The Biskup archive on him and other notable persons will be of great interest to scholars in years to come. Like the founding editor of AARL, Dietrich Borchardt, Peter had an impressive command of English style and linguistic fluency. This article on Pennington contains many indications of Peter's range of talents as well as the distinctive clarity and balance of his mind. The intellectual contribution of these two European additions to Australian library affairs has left a powerful legacy.

Peter Biskup had personal experiences of the harshness of life but was remarkably un-soured by his suffering under oppressive Czechoslovakian communism (Čechová, 2004). He was of a quiet temperament and impressively industrious and focused, but by no means unbending and without humour. I have no doubt that he had much to give to students of his courses in Canberra and elsewhere. I am grateful to have shared his friendship and benefited from his well-informed mind.