Vale Peter Biskup

Peter Biskup was born in Czechoslovakia in 1926 and studied law, eventually graduating with a doctorate from Comenius University, now in Bratislava. (Many years later it took Peter a long struggle to get the University of Canberra to accept this as a true doctorate.) After the Second World War he emigrated to Australia, where he regularly referred to himself as a “dud Czech”. He worked in Papua New Guinea and as an historian at the ANU, publishing A Short History of New Guinea in 1970 (with Jinks and Nelson) and Not Slaves, Not Citizens on Aboriginal history in Western Australia (1973).

Peter was then appointed Senior Lecturer in librarianship at the then Canberra College of Advanced Education, now the University of Canberra, where he was to spend the remainder of his career. He retained his interest in history throughout, cooperating first with John Balnaves on Australian Libraries and then with Doreen Goodman on Libraries in Australia, and contributing to the Australian Library History Forum (and with Maxine Rochester organising and editing the 1985 meeting). He also edited several other volumes. He was a regular oral history interviewer for the National Library, again focusing principally on library history. He published a large number of journal articles on a wide variety of topics including individual librarians, library history and current library issues, but also for example Aboriginal history, Popper, and Stalinism.

As a lecturer he inspired generations of students, especially in teaching reference work. He liked to set reference “questions” to which there was no one right answer – of course, exactly what reference librarians encounter every day, however frustrating the experience. He affected to take his teaching responsibilities lightly; as someone who later inherited some of his teaching subjects (and students) I found how far from the case this was.

I first met Peter in the very early 1970s, giving guest lectures for him on government publications (at the time I was the ANU's first Official Documents Librarian), then tutoring for him, and finally as a colleague with an office next door to his. I worked most closely with him when I became Associate Editor and Book Editor of Australian Academic & Research Libraries in the last five years of his editorship, 1992–97. We used to do proof reading at each other's homes, reading aloud alternate paragraphs – a wonderful way to pick up typos and missed editorial opportunities (and wonderful experience for the incoming Editor).

Peter had assumed the Editorship of AARL in 1990. He was punctilious about making the journal as free as possible of error. He was also perfectly ready to rely on his own judgement of the quality of contributions. Of course, ever since the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society was first published in 1660, most editors have done just that. Peter would, of course, use referees as necessary, but did not always consider it necessary. When an article by Warren Horton, then Director General of the National Library, was published without formal refereeing (Vol 28 No 2, June 1997), some controversy arose: this was not how things were now supposed to be done. Too bad; he was unrepentant. However, since then all articles in AARL have been fully refereed.

After Peter had settled in Australia for many years, his brother from Czechoslovakia decided to visit – but had no English. The two brothers wanted to travel around Australia. No problem, Peter thought, he could simply translate. To his surprise, he found that not only had he forgotten much of his native language, but that there was a whole vocabulary that post-dated his departure from Europe: television, unleaded petrol…

Peter was a warm and engaging person, with a keen sense of humour and a commitment to excellence in whatever he did. He will be missed.