The lost library of Borroloola

Robin Hardiman questions a well-established myth

Andrew Carnegie, founder of the Carnegie Steel Corporation of America, was the richest man in the world. He was the greatest philanthropist in the world but he had so much money he said he couldn't even give it all away.
Borroloola once was called the remotest settlement in the world. Remote and desolate. A last frontier and lawless. But this settlement had a treasure. Borroloola had a library, the Carnegie Library.
Except it never was that.

Mounted Constable Cornelius Power joined the South Australian Police Force when he was about nineteen. Twelve years later he was posted to Port Darwin - the Northern Territory was administered by the government of colonial South Australia then. Later that same year, 1885, Power became Senior Constable at the young McArthur River port town of Borroloola.
Borroloola was a few years younger than Constable Power and nowhere near as respectable. The place'd begun as a 'blind tiger', a sly-grog shop, a shanty really, under a paperbark tree. That's one of the stories, anyway. Cashing in on the OTC - the 'Loo was a depot for building supplies for the new Overland Telegraph that would link the Australian colonies to the greater world. The government certainly believed there was a future for the place. Stock routes from Queensland brought men who'd need at least a feed and a drink and sometimes a fight and sometimes, even, someone died, as in murder, so Adelaide sent a magistrate. And a cop, Cornelius Power.
Ten years later in 1895 the McArthur River Institute was opened with the expected fanfare. This institute was not the first of its kind in the frontier township for a Borroloola Institute had existed previously. What happened to that one, we may never know. One thing's clear, the early high hopes for Borroloola as a centre of the cattle trade, as the entrepot for the Barkly, were fading fast. Fever and ticks decimated cattle. Sheep - which never had a chance - fell victim to burrs and grass-seeds and finally fire. Isolation and fever and grog beset the interloping white man. Yet if the great gulf port was only a dream, some part of that dream survived.
A National Library of Australia document reports that Corporal Power was sent one thousand books initially, the gift later increased to three. The donation, according to the document, seems to have been made in 1901 or 1902 when Lord Hopetoun was 'Governor of Australia'. It goes on to say that the library was set up in the Court House. Hopetoun, in fact, was the Governor of colonial Victoria and the first Governor General of Australia. Journalists and writers of reports are mostly scrupulous about their facts - relating what happens is their living, after all - but the factual recording of this story has been really sloppy. There are oddly careless discrepancies. Yet from the distance of a hundred years the oddest thing of all is that this settlement, Borroloola, never very populous even though thought of as a place of great potential, should receive such a whopping bequest. Three thousand books.
But back to what we know. Cornelius Power left Borroloola in January 1901 to return to Darwin for medical treatment. He never left the Top End again. In October that same year he was promoted to the rank of corporal but he didn't long enjoy the elevation for within three years he was dead.
The first library on this island continent of Australia was selected by the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge and transported to the penal settlement in the First Fleet. Some of the titles: two hundred copies of Exercises against Lying, fifty Cautions to Swearers, a hundred Exhortations to Chastity, another fifty Religions made Easy, Bibles, prayer books, other religious works. A library was an indispensable part of the newly arrived imperial civilisation. A library after all is all about the written word. Its record. And literature and religious propaganda and history. Which is just about as near as we will ever get to what happened in the past, except in this case history doesn't seem to be what happened.
Spencer and Gillen
At the end of the nineteenth century the postmaster of Stuart, now Alice Springs, was passionate for photography. In 1894 Frank Gillen, the postmaster, met Walter Baldwin Spencer, Professor of Biology at Melbourne University, an anthropologist and a camera buff. That introduction saw the start of a ten year partnership recording the people and the culture of the Northern Territory.
Throughout 1901, the first year of the new Federation, the postmaster and the professor crossed Australia in a buggy. They carried with them three thousand feet of movie film, almost five hundred glass plates, cameras, chemicals, photographic paper, even a mobile dark room, a black tent which they suspended from a tree.
The expedition began at Oodnadatta - Camp 1 was struck just after ten in the morning, mid- March 1901, the journey ending in November at Camp 70.
They made that last camp in the Court House. Spencer's photograph of a barren plain, a post, a barbed wire fence, a ringbarked tree and in the distance the squat spreading corrugated iron roof has a real poignancy for, despite a hundred years of change, you can recognise that townscape in Borroloola today.
Spencer writes in his diary:
"at length we have come to the end of our journey over a miserable plain with gum trees and grasshoppers and nothing else ... Borroloola is a kind of central port for all this part of the world. Stores come round here to the mouth of the river from Port Darwin and outlying stations for some one or two hundred miles around....".
Gillen's diary is anticipation and disillusionment: in the saddle at 5.45 full of eagerness to see the capital of the Gulf country, Borroloola ....
we arrived at a drearily cheerless hot looking sun-stricken place with nothing about its immediate surroundings to indicate that it is in the tropics ... the ghastly uninteresting reality is worse than anything that we anticipated".
Ten days later, the expeditioners were contemplating their departure the next morning. The mail boat was due in the evening and after some days of pleasant inactivity, they were ready to be off. Gillen had passed the time in 'letter writing and light literature:
"Borroloola is provided with a very decent library to which we have access. The books circulate among the stations for 200 miles out and must indeed be a great boon to them. The Police Trooper acts as Librarian".
This policeman wasn't Cornelius Power, he'd already left for Darwin. As it happened, Spencer and Gillen didn't get to leave Borroloola the following day for the rains set in. And stayed. Gillen wrote that the days were long and dragged heavily, the heat intense, muggy and depressing, his time spent reading the fine assortment of books in the local library. The rain continued to fall.
That the Court House housed the Borroloola Library has long been accepted as fact. A note in Baldwin Spencer's diary has to make you wonder:
"We settled down as comfortably as we could ... under the shelter of the verandah of the court-house that was completely empty save for a few bats".
You'd expect him to notice three thousand books.
The wet that year was a whopper. Spencer and Gillen were marooned, the professor with his anthropology, the postmaster with the books. A meticulous man, he wrote down all the titles and his taste was clearly for novels. A considerable number of them. By the time Christmas and New Year had passed, he sounded jaded. He wrote that he was 'trying to kill time reading novels'.
They finally got out in February in a pilot boat sent by the Queensland Government.
There's not much more we know for sure about the three thousand books of the Borroloola Library. There are some library records and plenty of anecdotes. We'll get to them.
Carnegie and Hopetoun
Andrew Carnegie was a lofty sort of man. He wrote that he'd decided that 'there was no use to which money could be applied so productive of good... as the founding of a public library'. His name became synonymous with libraries. Canada got one hundred and sixteen of them, New Zealand got eighteen, South Africa twelve and Australia four. Hobart was the Federal first followed by Mildura, then Northcote in Victoria and Midlands Junction WA in 1909. Of a Carnegie Library in Borroloola however, the Carnegie Foundation has no trace:
Strangely, what does turn up in the Carnegie records is that Lord Hopetoun was what we'd call a lobbyist for the City of Mildura. As they say in the Olympics, his was the successful bid.
So we can establish that link between Hopetoun and Carnegie. So far so good. Now to the melodrama.
The Press and Ernestine Hill
The Sunday Sun and Guardian was a Sydney paper. On 25 June 1933, under the heading 'TOWN DIES, BOOKS LIVE' was a photograph of the Court House at Borroloola 'that houses the forgotten library'. The subheading for the article reads 'LOST LIBRARY OF BORROLOOLA'.
Closed in by the jungle and forgotten of men in the furthest recesses of the Gulf country is a library of 3000 books - the finest and most comprehensive in the North - that for thirty years has defied the passing of time and the white ants.
That little locked library in the wild bush, the silent rows of canvas covered volumes discoloured by rain and sun; tell of the once great days of Borroloola.
The unmistakable prose of Ernestine Hill.
Local history tells that it was a policeman of a bookish turn of mind, one Corporal Power, who established the library. A letter from this remote outpost direct to Lord Hopetoun brought an immediate response in a consignment of 1000 volumes by horse team, with promises of frequent private contributions and later a government subsidy of pound for pound.
Mrs Hill presents as evidence of her claims the authority of 'local history'. Her visit to Borroloola was short and her informants were 'characters' for she goes on to say that Borroloola at the time of her visit had a population of 'four old men'. Her two published travel books on the Northern Territory, The Great Australian Loneliness (1937) and The Territory (1951) frequently rehashed articles which she had written for newspapers as she journeyed through the outback from 1933 to 1936. Take, for example, the article from that Sydney paper quoted above. The text reappears, somewhat embellished, in The Great Australian Loneliness, in a chapter entitled 'Ulysses of the Gulf'. Power's supposed letter to Lord Hopetoun here assumes far grander proportions:
"...a long time ago there was a policeman ... of bookish turn of mind. His name was Corporal Power, and he wrote to Lord Hopetoun in Melbourne, when he was Governor General, asking for books - good books, intellectual books, something to bite on, manna in the wilderness. Lord Hopetoun responded immediately. He sent up over a thousand volumes that were delivered by horse team, two years in transit, with contributions by private persons to follow, and a Government subsidy for a library of pound for pound."
Mrs Hill's first Borroloola story was written after a one day visit to the township in 1933 and the account was first published in the Sydney Sunday Sun. In its second incarnation the prose is decidedly purplish.
"The Macarthur River Institute became a kindly light of sanity to men half mad with loneliness. (They) ... would ride away gloating over a wealth of poetry and prose in the pack-bags ... would borrow bound copies of the Parliamentary Debates....a complete set of Lytton, and another of Mark Twain... an eighteenth century Shakespeare... a tome of a Gibbon of which the pages crumble as you turn."
It's not known if Mrs Hill ever revisited the 'Loo after that one time in 1933. Years later, she was to write about the 'intellectual converse' of 'erudite and philosophic ... lonely white men.'
"Where books are six months in transit, and then have to last a lifetime, you would starve on Edgar Wallace and Berta Ruck.... You must have something to bite on, three hundred years old for preference, in a good solid small print tome where a paragraph ... gives food for reflection all the next week as you ride behind the cattle. The little lost library at Borroloola has produced more classic scholars than any university in Australia."
This is the point of divergence when we seem to step out of history and into romance. Here lies the beginning of a myth. There are no more recollections, like those of postmaster Gillen, of good long relaxing reads. From now on, the images are of the classics and philosophy, of bush philosophers, an image that has endured along with the next accretion to the library legend, that of a Carnegie connection. To what extent the image was born in the charged imagination of an enterprising and adventurous journalist, to be repeated and elaborated for more than fifty years will forever remain moot, for although adherents of the myth will surrender Carnegie without a fight, they will not relinquish the classics.
Bilarni and Morey
The appearance in print of a specific Carnegie Library attribution came in 1957, in Life Among the Aborigines, a book written by Bill Harney, although the process of confusing the Borroloola Library with books provided by a Carnegie Library Service was already well established by that date. Carnegie's name had appeared in Borroloola long before Harney's time although not in connection with the library. Spencer and Gillen themselves were aware of Andrew Carnegie's philanthropic reputation. Gillen wrote to Baldwin Spencer from his new home at Moonta on the shores of Spencer Gulf in December 1902: ...
"I should write to Carnegie, send him a copy of our work and ask him to provide funds for future work.... Carnegie would be only too glad to have an opportunity of devoting some of his surplus wealth to such a purpose".
There is no evidence that such a letter was ever written.
A Carnegie Library Service which provided a limited quantity of books on temporary loan to the remoter areas began in 1938 with sixty books going to Alice Springs. Four years later, the Administrator of the Northern Territory received a letter on headed paper, The Parliament of the Commonwealth, asking: "Are the Carnegie libraries still functioning under Government control and are they providing any reading service for the forces"?
Here a conflation of a Carnegie funded book service and a Carnegie Library is revealed, an amalgamation of two quite separate entities. That such a solecism could come from the national Parliament in Canberra makes it easier to understand that in the minds of ordinary folk, a bookplate announcing the Carnegie Library Service was tantamount to a declaration that the borrower was using a Carnegie Library.
Ted Morey was a mounted policeman whose patch went from down Borroloola way across the Roper to the Gulf, through Beswick and Elsey and Mataranka as far afield as Katherine. In the wet season of 1929-30, he looked after a convalescent old man, Charles Joseph Scrutton, the last surviving member of the1864 Jardine expedition to Cape York in Far North Queensland. Writing of 'old Scrutt', Morey noted wryly that he claimed to have read the Borroloola Library through three times. As the library contained more than two thousand books, this could be a slight exaggeration.
Harney was in Borroloola first in 1919 where he encountered the redoubtable Scrutton. Presumably referring to his bladder, 'old Scrutt remarked something about Tolstoy and his writing, that 'even the Czar cannot hold his water'
Bilarni, as he was known, returned to Borroloola in 1949. It was during that visit that the sergeant of Police gave him the Court House keys remarking, "Have a look at our library in the Court House, not a bad one".
This account scarcely stands up to scrutiny.
In May 1949 the Acting Superintendent of Police in Darwin wrote to the Government Secretary, noting in passing... "I bought also two or three volumes from the Carnegie Grant Library - but they fell to pieces".
There was a good reason why the Borroloola books were being sold off by the 1940s. The Court House where the books reputedly were stored was destroyed in a cyclone in 1937 and the surviving books were moved. Judy King, daughter of the mounted policeman, Ted Morey, told me that her father had learned to read from that Borroloola Library. The story, as she remembered it, was that if you were somewhere remote and needed a library, the Carnegie Foundation would supply it. A bloke clipped out a coupon and sent it off and some time later the boat came up the river - it came every three months - with this load of books. They were housed, she said, in an upturned rainwater tank. There are echoes in her reminiscence of Harney's suggestion that he learned to read in the Borroloola Library while doing time in jail in the 'Loo (for a conviction that was later quashed) in 1919, the year he wrote of meeting Scrutton.
Steve Johnston, a contemporary of 'Bilarni', who now lives on Vanderlin Island, talked to me about his recollections. In answer to a question about the library, he said that anyone could use it; in those days, not many Aboriginal people could read or write but they were welcome there, he believed. Johnston once owned one volume of an encyclopedia from the library, it was Volume C or D he thought, he was unsure, he gave it to the Darwin Museum in the 1950s along with some Macassan coins.
The following quotation is a long one but it is the crucial account in the burgeoning legend of Borroloola's Carnegie Library.
"A notice on the library door informed all who entered that this place was started by a Carnegie Grant to one Corporal Power of the Police in the last century .... Row upon row, those old books stood on the shelves. Greek and Latin classics and every subject from Geology to Medical Science. I looked up the index book ... Borroloola Library had its glory before my coming and now it was beginning to decay .... I saw the signs of its destruction. I found its tomes in blacks' camps .... A splendid edition has been used to light some campfire and my first introduction to Plutarch was in the lavatory of the local pub. In that place of restful reading, I read the laws of Solon".
Harney's account has its inconsistencies for later in the telling, the books appear not to be in the Court House but in the police cells.
And now ...
"... the old police station's galvanised iron cells ... were cluttered up with books from the old library, yellow in their decay. Of the library building, nothing could be seen".
A year after the publication of Harney's book, the Commonwealth Bank of Australia's journal, Bank Notes, in an article entitled 'Borroloola Regrets' says it is established that late in the 1800s in response to a request for cultural nourishment, between three and five thousand books were presented to Borroloola by the Carnegie Corporation of New York .
Here at last is the myth in full flush - and the myth is still growing. Far from dead at the end of the twentieth century, it has now assumed a life of its own so that it may well continue to flourish despite inaccuracy and inconsistency for the myth seems to serve a wider purpose.
Before discussing this last consideration, I shall conclude my survey of the legendary library. We may never know how a library which appeared so general, so genteel and 'Victorian' in tone in the Gillen diaries of 1901/1902 came to possess such an aura of classicism and philosophical enquiry. There is no inkling in accounts appearing after Ernestine Hill wrote her unreliable memoirs that the Borroloola Library might have served a general readership. It is presented solely as a collection of the loftiest kind.
Douglas Lockwood is another contributor to the story. In his 1964 travel book, Up The Track, he mentions a resident of Borroloola having read his way along the shelves - Plutarch, Aristotle, Hippocrates, even Hansard.
Farwell, Smith and Attenborough
George Farwell published his Ghost Towns of Australia in 1965, in which he wrote of...
"...the Carnegie Library. This was the most celebrated building in the 'Loo.... The older hands remember a notice nailed on the library door".
One cannot help but wonder did Farwell base his words on Harney's lines published almost a decade before?
The Encyclopedia of Australia's entry for Borroloola reads:
"A former port on the Macarthur River 50 miles from its mouth, with under 20 inhabitants and reached only by 200 miles of rough road from the Stuart Highway; it has been called 'the end of the line'. Famed for its Carnegie Library astonishingly acquired by a local policeman and now lost or eaten by white-ants".
Dick Smith's Australian Geographic magazine at least characterised the information it printed as 'legend'. The legend said that Borroloola's 3000 volumes were a munificent gift of a wealthy American industrialist, Andrew Carnegie, after someone in town had written tongue in cheek asking for reading material .
In March of 1962 a young English naturalist gave illustrated slide show lectures during the lunch hour at the Majestic Theatre, King William Street for the new Adelaide Festival of the Arts. He had recently completed filming monitor lizards on the Indonesian island of Komodo and such was the subject of his lectures. At the end of his Adelaide engagement he drove north to make his first Australian film, The Hermits of Borroloola. Interviewing one of the township's old inhabitants, David Attenborough questioned the man about his reading habits. The publican, a soft spoken Irishman, talked about the books he liked to read in his solitude, books from the Borroloola library. Novels. Sea stories. W.W.Jacobs's adventures set in the Channel ports of England's east coast. There was no mention of Thucydides nor Themistocles, no Solon of Athens nor Aristotle. It sounded just like any other local library. It sounded like the 'very decent library' to which Frank Gillen had access in that Christmas of 1901. Of course, any collection of 3000 books could be characterised in a variety of ways, as a reference collection, or for the poetry, or indeed for the philosophy and classics on its shelves. Yet the single minded emphasis on the ancients is all we get of Borroloola - and it is strangely unconvincing. Attenborough pressed the publican for more anecdotal information. He had read, he said, their entire set of Jacobs. He was fond too of a medical book. Another of the so-called hermits, Roger Jose, who lived in the township in an upturned rainwater tank, another provocative echo, said to Attenborough that his favourite authors were Thomas Gray and Shakespeare. 'Only one book survives' says Attenborough at the end of the interview, 'The Imitation of Christ by Thomas a Kempis'.
Today one book survives in Borroloola from the lost library and it is a volume of Ezra Pound's Cantos.
The Carnegie Library myth shows no signs of dying. John Mulvaney is one of the nation's most respected historians with a career spanning more than forty years. His most recent book is My Dear Spencer: The Letters of F.J.Gillen to Baldwin Spencer published in 1997. A footnote reads Spencer and Gillen had access to the library donated by Andrew Carnegie.
There is great tenacity in this widespread misapprehension.
The myth survives, but to what purpose? A wider purpose, certainly, than puffing Borroloola. Is it simply part of a Territorian conceit, that we once possessed something so extraordinary? Is it part of a wider Australian hunger for stature in the world, for intellectual pretension? Is it simply a childlike, innocent desire to fantasise, to insist that what never was, is? Is it darker than any of these considerations, is it a screen, does it serve to obscure the gross injustices of that distant time, a time of rape and killing and unrelenting inhumanity? Perhaps it serves none of these. Perhaps it serves all such purposes.