Research

Public Libraries in the Southern Colonies and Straits Settlements, 1817-1875

Image: ‘George Street, Sydney, 1883’ by Alfred Tischbauer. Oil on canvas. Courtesy of the Dixson Galleries, State Library of New South Wales.

Dr Lara Atkin, Dr Sarah Comyn, Prof Porscha Fermanis, and Dr Nathan Garvey (UCD)

Colonial libraries are often dismissed as provincial attempts to create ‘Little Britains’ in the settler colonial world by importing books from Britain, and replicating metropolitan reading practices and standards of taste. This study argues that the early colonial public library was a major nineteenth-century cultural organization that did much more than match books to readers. Shaping the civic and intellectual culture around them, such libraries also engaged in wider intersecting debates about access to knowledge and education; social mobility and the composition of colonial society; nation-building, self-governance, and self-determination; philanthropy, humanitarianism, and social engagement; taste-formation and cultural capital; and the production and dissemination of colonial knowledge, particularly in relation to disciplinary fields such as philology, ethnography, and natural history. Drawing on the expertise of all members of the SouthHem team, this project is a book-length comparative study of a range of early or embryonic public libraries in the southern hemisphere and Straits Settlements from 1817-1875. The study includes the Penang Library (est. 1817); the South African Public Library (est. 1818); the Singapore Library (est. 1844) and Raffles Library (est. 1874); the Sydney Australian Subscription Library (est. 1826) and Free Public Library (est. 1869); the Melbourne Public Library (est. 1856); the South Australian Institute (est. 1856); and the Tasmanian Public Library (est. 1860). Such libraries united spatially and culturally disparate groups of settlers and indigenous elites, as well as, in the case the South African Public Library, playing an important role in establishing the cultural hegemony of an Anglophone literary culture that worked in tandem with efforts to anglicize administrative and legal systems in previously Dutch spheres of influence. At the same time, these libraries also addressed transnational and diasporic public spheres through their engagement with local, regional, and long-range networks of readers, collectors, librarians, and learned societies. By adapting and extending British and other European library models, we argue that the early colonial public library helped to create both actual and ideal colonial reading publics that reflected the distinct civic identities of emerging colonial states in the Cape, Australia, New Zealand, and the Straits Settlement, while also developing important regional and transnational identity formations during the nineteenth century.

Publications and Presentations:

• Comyn, S. and Fermanis, P. ‘A ‘resort for loungers’?: Public Libraries and Book Holdings of the Colonial Southern Hemisphere’, British Association of Victorian Studies Annual Conference, ‘Victorian Patterns’, University of Exeter. 29-31 August 2018.
• Atkin, L. and Fermanis, P. ‘The Emergence of Public Libraries in the Southern Hemisphere and Straits Settlements, 1817-1871’, Books, Readers, and Reading Conference: Celebrating 250 Years of the Leeds Library. 20-22 September 2018.
• Atkin, Lara, Sarah Comyn, Porscha Fermanis, and Nathan Garvey, Early Public Libraries and Colonial Citizenship in the British Southern Hemisphere (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).