Australian Scholarly Editions Centre Projects (ASEC)

HOBA 98 Conference

Metcalfe Auditorium
State Library of NSW
19-20 September 1998

We welcome you to the fourth History of the Book in Australia (HOBA) conference

The HOBA project is dedicated to producing a complete history of print culture in Australia by the centenary of Federation. Three volumes are in preparation, Volume One: From Origins to 1890; Volume Two, 1890 to 1945; and Volume Three, 1946 to the Present. Over the past three years annual meetings have been held, bringing together interested parties and contributors, drawn from libraries, the academic world and the book trade. We extend a warm welcome to our interstate and overseas visitors, as they testify to the collaborative nature of the HOBA Project.

Each annual conference has involved academics, independent researchers, librarians and people fascinated by the history of the Australian book, reflecting a groundswell of interest, at a local and national as well as international level, in the history of Australian print culture. HOBA has sister-projects around the world, and is part of a world-wide upsurge of interest in book and print culture. At the same time, the HOBA project tells a unique story, flowing from the peculiar development of the book trade, publishing and print culture in Australia. We are delighted to support and contribute to a vibrant area of current research.

The first conference, held at the State Library of Victoria, dealt with material from nineteenth-century Australia, while the second conference, held at the State Library of NSW, focused on the history of Australian print culture and reading practices in the period 1890 to 1945. The third conference, exploring post-war book culture, was hosted by RMIT and again held at the State Library of Victoria. This fourth conference is more wide-ranging in its concerns, drawing upon all three chronological periods of the HOBA project, and with a special focus on minority and non-English print cultures, reflecting the broad-based and interdisciplinary character of the HOBA project.

We gratefully acknowledge the assistance of the Australian Research Council, which has funded HOBA since 1996, and our hosts the Library Society of the State Library of New South Wales. In addition, we thank Rosemary Moon, Anette Bremer and Lee Watt for their assistance in the organisation of this meeting.

Martyn Lyons and Elizabeth Webby

Conference Contents

Please note: Abstracts of all the papers are available by clicking the relevant heading. Some contain links to the full paper.

Abstract

Keith Adkins: Books and Reading in Colonial Tasmania: The Evandale Subscription Library, 1847-1861.

Students of book history are confronted with a lack of evidence to support the study of reading habits and practices of past generations. The chance survival of the manuscript collection of the Evandale Subscription Library provides a rare opportunity to analyse the borrowings of a known and largely traceable group of readers (and at a time when Tasmanian society was experiencing the challenge of the cessation of convict transportation and the establishment of representative government).

The Evandale Subscription Library is particularly significant in that it was established within a geographically defined community and heavily patronised - especially in its early years - with the books remaining in situ until the late 1940s when it was finally disbanded. In the course of this enquiry some 300 volumes have been located and accounted for.

This paper will detail the history of the Library and its borrowers and the electronic database that lists the 115 readers, the 1911 volumes, and the 11,671 borrowings from the foundation of the Library in 1847 through to 1861. Elizabeth Webby and Wallace Kirsop have both identified Tasmanian colonial society as in want of further study and have by their writings and example invited the analysis of available data. In many ways this study is in response to that challenge.

View paper

Editorial Committee

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Last Updated : 24 March 2000