Our thirty-fourth treasure is a valuable donation of rare books from a beloved Australian artist. From the Rare Book Collection comes the Sir Russell Drysdale gift of rare books.
Dr. Nathan Garvey answers the question "why is this significant?"
In 1971, soon after James Cook University’s establishment, the eminent artist
Sir Russell Drysdale donated a small but significant collection of rare books to the University Library. The dowdy, mimeographed donation labels affixed to the flyleaves of each of the 56 volumes in the collection decidedly understate the value of the gift Drysdale bestowed on JCU.
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| An example of the mimeographed donation labels on the Sir Russell Drysdale's gift of rare books. |
The Drysdale gift represents a carefully cultivated selection of some of the rarest works of print Australiana, in the form of contemporary published accounts of early European exploration, expansion and incursions into the Pacific and continental Australia. The nine volumes comprising
the ‘official narratives' of James Cook’s voyages (published 1773-1784) are perhaps the centerpiece, but there are many other notable titles, including Matthew Flinders’s
Voyage to Terra Australis (1814), William Bligh’s
account of the Bounty expedition (somewhat delayed, 1792), and a
1729 collection of voyage narratives that included an account of William Dampier’s travels. All the major published accounts of the First Fleet voyage are here, as are a few rare examples of
spurious and/or plagiarised First Fleet narratives. The Drysdale gift also includes several folio works featuring maps and engraved illustrations of early colonial scenes, notably a copy of James Wallis’s
An Historical Account of the Colony of New South Wales (1821), which includes illustrations by the convict artist Joseph Lycett. Aside from the voyage and early settlement narratives, there are early accounts of inland exploration, and several ethnographic and anthropological works from the later nineteenth century, the latter perhaps reflecting Drysdale’s noted interest in Indigenous Australian culture and society, which was increasingly important in his art from the 1950s on.
Drysdale was a noted reader and bibliophile; the artist Donald Friend recorded in his diaries the ‘miles of books’ that lined the inner-city Sydney apartment that Drysdale shared with his first wife, Bon, and their family. But Drysdale’s personal papers, held at the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, reveal that his interest in Australiana rare book collecting was particularly influenced by his friendship with the colourful, New Zealand-born art dealer
Sir Rex Nan Kivell, director of the Redfern Gallery in London. The Redfern Gallery championed postwar modernist artists, including Australian artists such as Drysdale, Sidney Nolan, and Arthur Streeton, and for Drysdale at least, Nan Kivell also seems to have served as a nexus between the worlds of contemporary art and antiquarian book collecting. Nan Kivell would eventually bequeath his own fabled collection of colonial art and antiquarian books to the National Library of Australia—despite having never once visited the country—in exchange for the Australian Government’s recommendation to a knighthood.
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| Drysdale (far right) at home with friends, c.1960. Photograph reproduced with permission from the collection of the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales. |
Drysdale inscribed his books with the same neat signature he applied to his artworks. In roughly half the books in JCU’s Drysdale donation, he also added a date—apparently of acquisition. From this, it appears that unlike Nan Kivell, who had assembled most of his collection in London, the majority of Drysdale’s collecting took place in Sydney, with the mid-1950s to the early 1960s being his main period of activity. The books remain in remarkably good condition, and the artist clearly had an eye for quality bindings and fine copies. Many of the works bear bookplates, and other evidence of provenance, indicating their previous places in genteel British private libraries of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Besides ownership autographs and the like, few of the volumes contain marginalia or significant annotations. An exception here is Drysdale’s copy of a rare, privately- printed 1906
Aboriginal Dictionary (Woradgery [i.e. Wiradjuri] Tongue) compiled by J. F. H. Mitchell. JCU’s copy of this work includes an insert of several pages of additional linguistic notes and comments, apparently in Drysdale’s own hand.
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| A selection of books from Sir Russell Drysdale's gift of rare books. Photograph by Michael Marzik. |
Sir Russell Drysdale’s connections with north Queensland are well known. He spent part of his childhood at Pioneer, on the Burdekin, where the family owned a historic sugar plantation. Drysdale joined the board of Pioneer Sugar Mills in 1947, and in later life spoke of Pioneer as his ‘spiritual home’. In this context we can regard this gift as an important philanthropic gesture toward the north Queensland community, and its newly independent university. Rare books from the early period of European contact with Australasia continue to hold a strong cultural cachet in our national institutions, and Drysdale’s donation seems designed to help the new university establish an outstanding collection of national significance. His gift remains one of JCU library’s great treasures.
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| A selection of books from Sir Russell Drysdale's gift of rare books. Photograph by Michael Marzik. |
Over the course of 2020, JCU Library's Special Collections will be unveiling 50 Treasures from the collections to celebrate 50 years of James Cook University.
Author Biography
Dr. Nathan Garvey completed a PhD on early Australian book history at the University of Sydney in 2007. He held postdoctoral research positions at the University of Queensland (2010-2015), and University College, Dublin (2016-2018), and library fellowships at the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, and the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D.C. He is currently a Research and Data Repository Officer within JCU's Library and Information Services team.
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