Emerald city’s rare gem

New State Librarian Dr John Vallance has put some of the nation’s most important artworks and artefacts on display

John Vallance, the state librarian of the State Library of NSW

The State Library of NSW — the oldest in Australia — is a remarkable and underappreciated institution in the city of Sydney, with a vast collection of books, documents and historical memorabilia stored in stacks that go down 10 stories below Macquarie Street. It also features a magnificent reading room, a vast space filled with light and peace, lined with books and crowded with scholars and students working silently yet in tacit company on anything from primary historical research to school or university essays.

Designers of modern libraries too often have forgotten that the combination of space, and especially height, with the proximity of other people also intent on reading or research produces the most favourable conditions for clarity of mind, attention and intellectual focus. Too many of our university libraries were designed in a postwar period when such subtleties were overlooked in favour of a misconceived model of industrial efficiency, and isolate students in grim reading cubicles as though they were battery hens of the mind.

But the beautiful State Library reading room was almost lost in 2013-14 in a singular rush of stupidity when a so-called renewal plan envisaged turning the library into some kind of social hub. Readers were to be banished to a much smaller room where they could carry on their quaint activities, presumably until the last of them had disappeared by natural attrition.

Fortunately there was such an outcry from writers, scholars and others that the vandalising of the reading room was avoided.

The State Library of NSW’s Mitchell Reading Room

The incumbent state librarian, my friend and former colleague John Vallance, came to the position last year after 17 years as headmaster of Sydney Grammar School. I have heard that he is the first state librarian for a generation to explore the stacks on a regular basis. When we visited them together I was impressed by his ability to find his way around this rambling underground maze, with a detailed memory for the location of books, folios of drawings or reserves of photographic negatives.

As a former trustee of the library he already had an intimate knowledge of its premises, resources, and also deficiencies. One of Vallance’s first innovations, within months of taking up the position, was to create a special reading area with open-shelf access for recent literature. The plan was to ensure that any book reviewed in a serious literary journal such as The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books or Australian Book Review, or indeed in these pages, should be acquired and catalogued as a matter of priority, so readers whose appetite have been whetted by a review should be able to browse through the book itself within a week or so.

But anyone familiar with Vallance’s record of building and restoration at College Street, where he was responsible for adding the classical portico facing Hyde Park, planned in the 1830s but never executed, as well as excavating the colossal underground theatre now known as the John Vallance Hall, would have expected more dramatic reforms of an architectural nature, and they would not be disappointed by what has been achieved in the past year or so.

The library has always had a suite of handsome exhibition rooms in which several temporary exhibitions reviewed here have been held, but the rooms themselves felt a little tired. At the same time, the institution also had a considerable collection of paintings and works on paper, as well as particularly important holdings of artists’ sketchbooks and other documents. Few of these works had been seen in public for decades, except when individual pieces have been lent to specialist exhibitions. When inspected more closely it was clear that many were in need of conservation or cleaning.

From the moment Vallance took over the library, he conceived the plan of turning the galleries into a permanent exhibition space for the collection. This entailed restoring the galleries themselves, but also the substantial process of conserving the works to be brought up for exhibition. It also meant the library would lose ­spaces for temporary exhibitions unless alternative accommodation were found. So adjacent administrative offices were evacuated, and even the old state librarian’s office was sacrificed, to make room for a new suite of galleries.

And this was not all. Several smaller rooms were restored, including a space for resident scholars to work, which was sponsored by Don­ald Horne’s family and includes his desk and other furniture, and a project space for school boys and girls as well as a smaller reading nook for younger children. There is also an enormous new display area for the physical treasures of the library, including everything from Henry Lawson’s death mask to Matthew Flinders’s sextant and the original copper plates used to print Norman Lindsay’s etchings. What is really extraordinary about these initiatives is that so much has been achieved in such a short time.

Charles Conder’s Stockyard, near Jamberoo. Picture: State Library of NSW

One can’t help contrasting this kind of energy and achievement with the stagnation at the nearby Art Gallery of NSW, where bureaucrats and consultants grow fat but nothing ever seems to happen.

Our biggest state gallery has lived for years on promises of a massive expansion project that has failed to inspire general conviction or support because it has never been supported by a vision for the future of the collection.

The new rooms at the State Library are intended to make much more of that institution’s collection not only visible but also accessible, thanks to thoughtful display and labelling and the provision of other explanatory materials. Many precious books and other objects are now shown, including the journals of Flinders, for example, and of William Bligh, open at a page where he describes how the officers of the Bounty were put into a longboat by Fletcher Christian, while he himself was tied to the mast.

Altogether 10 collections that are listed by UNESCO are now displayed to the public. Of particular interest, of course, are the pictures from the permanent collection, which are displayed in a dense salon hang in three enormous rooms. The style of hanging is similar to that adopted by the National Gallery of Victoria for its recent rehanging of the smaller works of the 19th century, which I reviewed here almost a year ago. There are no labels because they would have made the display too cluttered. Instead there are digital readers on which viewers can identify the works, or they can take a room brochure that includes a schema of each wall and a list of titles.

This remarkable collection represents about a quarter of the library’s holdings. Most of the pictures are landscapes or portraits, and most date from the early 19th to the mid-20th centuries so that together they present a remarkable mosaic of insights into life in Australia, and particularly in Sydney, from the beginning of colonisation until the modern period. There are numerous views of the city by Conrad Martens, as well as others by GE Peacock, but also valuable glimpses of earlier decades and surprising images such as Picnic at Mrs Macquarie’s Chair (c. 1855).

Another and later set of works shows how quickly, as the city grew into a late-Victorian colonial capital, artists began to look with nostalgia at the remains of an older Sydney. Several pictures by Julian Ashton, Howard Ashton, Sydney Long and others, in particular, depict the Rocks area in around 1901 and were made for an exhibition held in 1902, at Julian Ashton’s instigation, to document the old Rocks area before it was demolished and redeveloped. Ashton’s exhibition was commemorated in a show at the Museum of Sydney in 2010, Painting the Rocks. No doubt also belonging to that exhibition is an attractive little picture by Alice Muskett who is today obscure but was one of Julian Ashton’s favourite pupils.

Other important colonial works include Jos­eph Lycett’s Corroboree at Newcastle (c. 1818), invaluable as an early documentation of ceremonies and practices that were often lost in the ensuing decades. John Glover’s view of the city of Hobart from his house and garden (1832) is, in contrast, a vivid image of the new and rapidly growing world of the British colonists. Meanwhile, John Lewin’s painting of Male and Female Red Kangaroos (c. 1819) is one of the first images of the living animals in their natural habitat.

Detail of Male and Female Red Kangaroos, attributed to J.W. Lewin

Most of the other great figures of the colonial period are represented, including Eugene von Guerard with Sunset in New South Wales (1865), as well as Nicholas Chevalier with a fine study of Castle Rock at Cape Schanck. In later periods too there are delightful surprises, such as the little Charles Conder plein-air study of Stockyard, Near Jamberoo (1886).

Important portraits abound, starting with Augustus Earle’s grand full-length of Captain John Piper (c. 1826) and its more homely companion piece, depicting Piper’s wife surrounded by their children. Dozens of others from the early colonial period onwards are worthy of note. A century later it is George Lambert who stands out with his Man with a Rabbit (1910), an extraordinary family group in a convex mirror (c. 1916), painted while his son Constant was gravely ill, and, finally, the undated and unfinished Portrait of a Woman, which allows rare insight into the artist’s process as he works from the underpainting still visible in the lower part, and then in successive stages to the final level of articulacy and polish.

Man with a Rabbit by George Washington Lambert

The absence of labels in this exhibition makes us reflect how often and how automatically we resort to reading before looking at paintings in a gallery or museum display; but the trouble with this is that we don’t actually encounter the painting until we have ascertained both the identity and the importance of the artist. It is a completely different thing, and can even feel uncomfortable at first, to look before knowing because it throws us back on our own resources and judgment, and forces us to come to an assessment not only about who painted a particular work or what period it is from but also how good we think it is.

This can be difficult because, consciously or unconsciously, we are afraid of being wrong, of misattributing or misjudging. But in fact it is a habit that is worth cultivating even in museums with labels. Try looking first, before resorting to the crutch of the label; try to identify the style and hand but above all give the work your attention — because this is really learning to look at pictures.