Early Public Libraries and Colonial Citizenship in The British Southern Hemisphere

In a presentation to the New Librarians Symposium 9 in 2019, Mary Carroll (Charles Sturt University) lamented the lack of – and lack of interest in – Australia’s library history. She encouraged new librarians to become more interested as a way of critically engaging with what we do now as librarians. Early Public Libraries and Colonial Citizenship in the British Southern Hemisphere fills some of that lack.

The book is framed around three debates of interest to the colonies: the competing demands of colonial reading publics and social classes, the need to provide both leisure reading and reference collections (usually framed as light versus serious reading), and ‘the enlightenment universalist aspirations of the “national” collection and the desire to promote local archival collection and ethnographic field work’ (p. 4). The first two debates would be familiar to anyone who has delved into public library history and the third can be recognised in current debates, particularly in relation to Indigenous or First Nations collections. It examines early colonial libraries and their development into public libraries in Australia, South Africa, and Singapore. The book itself sets out some of the findings of the SouthHem research project at University College Dublin, which is centred around four work packages: Books and Readers, Settler Literary Culture, Translations, and Encounters.

The authors provide an in-depth examination of how the development of public libraries supported the importation of British culture into the colonised countries as well assisting the development of national identities, both in competition with each other and the United Kingdom. They discuss the tension between the desire of the reading public for fiction and the desire of librarians and library governors (predominantly rich or middle-class white men) for more enlightened and serious reading through non-fiction collections such as science, history, and biography. They also examine how the colonial libraries dealt with the resident cultures and ‘salvage ethnography’, noting differences between the colonies in their approaches and how such ethnographic collections contributed to racism in the various colonies which viewed the Indigenous and First Nations peoples as ‘dying’ or ‘disappearing’.

As an output of the SouthHem project, it is a valuable addition to our understanding of how our public libraries developed in the Southern Hemisphere. Whilst many works of library history that I have read focus on a single institution or the libraries of a single country, this book differs in comparing the development across three countries, with forays into Indian and New Zealand libraries. This makes it one to read and its parent project (SouthHem) one to watch.