AARL

For someone special: the development of the Bob Hawke Prime Ministerial Library

Alan Bundy

Abstract The Bob Hawke Prime Ministerial Library (BHPML) is the world's first prime ministerial library established during the lifetime of the prime minister, and is the only prime ministerial library complemented by a research institute. Its developmental challenges, scope and potential, are thus similar to those of the US presidential libraries the planning for which normally commences before the president leaves office. Established in 1997 as part of a university library-led initiative for the Bob Hawke Prime Ministerial Centre, the BHPML has made considerable progress in digitising Bob Hawke's speeches, acquiring his papers and those of cabinet colleagues, collecting memorabilia, and responding to enquiries from children, scholars and the general public. Among issues identified in a 2004 external review of the library were the need for greater funding and staffing for it, formalisation of its collection policy, a targeted digitisation strategy, and a renewed fundraising strategy. The development of a prime ministerial library in a new university, and university library, with limited funds and no collecting tradition has tested the philosophy and processes of both the university and its library. The issues encountered with its funding and development highlight whether all universities, old or new, do have responsibilities as national collecting institutions in areas appropriate to their location or mission. In particular it raises the issue of whether an academic institution and its library can absolve itself of such a responsibility on the grounds of the institutionally marginal funding required for it.

This is a revision of a paper given at the first national Bob Hawke Prime Ministerial Library conference Someone special: issues in the development of person specific libraries, archives and collections 18-20 October 2001.

Those of religion perhaps aside, the two most enduring institutions of civilisation are libraries and universities. Libraries rank only in part before universities because that is their place alphabetically. Chronologically, too, libraries are placed very long before universities. The 1892 ninth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica - still a very useful resource - records that the earliest known library was an organised collection of clay tablets containing political and religious transactions in Babylonia in the 21st century BC, and which recorded the contribution of the dynasty and leader of the day.

The very first library was thus a form of presidential or prime ministerial library, a collection for someone special. It was to be 3000 years after its establishment that the first discernible universities in Salerno and Bologna commenced in the 9th and 10th century AD. Libraries and universities do have much in common, apart from the fact that a true university without a library, or at least access to one, is implausible. They are educational agencies, custodians and disseminators of the record of human civilization in their own right.

Both should provide for the identification, conservation, enhancement and dissemination of learning and recorded knowledge. Both are now challenged by societal change and technology to rediscover, redefine and re-emphasise what they are, what they can contribute to an information enabled world, and most critically the values for which they stand in the 21st century.

In partnership with archivists, librarians have long had primary responsibility as the identifiers, collectors, custodians and providers of access to the documentary and published record - analog and now digital - of civilisation. It is librarians and archivists, for example, who are leading in debating and finding solutions to maintaining the digital record. That role as identifier, collector, conservator, custodian, and access provider has never been more critical, or more intellectually and technologically challenging. Nor has the fundamental commitment of the profession of librarianship to the free flow of information and ideas and intellectual freedom been more needed.

South Australia: paradise of dissent

It is with that background about the complementarity of libraries and universities that the story of how a university library initiative led to a major university and national development - the Bob Hawke Prime Ministerial Centre - can be told. Before doing so, some South Australian context is appropriate. Officially settled in 1836, after years of negotiation with the British Colonial Office, South Australia had as its settlement basis Edward Gibbon Wakefield's theory of systematic colonisation by using Crown land sales to pay for the emigration of labourers. Unlike its distant colonial neighbours, it was to receive no convicts although not a few were subsequently to slip from them into South Australia. The first South Australian settlers arrived with a sense of moral superiority, a sense maintained for many years to come.

If there was one overriding characteristic of the Province, it was that it was planned, with a planned system of land sales, a planned city and port, and a controlled population composition. It was therefore an irony that contentious division of settlement administration and development between Captain John Hindmarsh as Governor, James Hurtle Fisher as Resident Commissioner and William Light as Surveyor General was to bedevil the early days of the Province, and help send Light to an unhappy early grave.

If there was one overriding characteristic of the state which developed from that Province, it was that it was a city-state, being likened by British Fabian tourists Sidney and Beatrice Webb in 1898 to a German principality. That characteristic prevails.

It has also been a state, a 'paradise of dissent', of political and social initiatives. For example, it was the second part of the world, soon after New Zealand, to accord women the vote. Its famous sons and daughters include Charles Kingston, Catherine Helen Spence, Don Dunstan and Roma Mitchell. It was Charles Kingston who as premier of the state from 1893-1899 introduced the franchise for women and played a very major role in the Premiers' Conference which drafted the Australian federal constitution. But for ill-health he would have become the second Prime Minister of Australia in succession to Edmund Barton, who said of him 'His labours were not concluded by the setting of the sun ... but the hour of exhaustion.'

A South Australian Prime Minister

So Charles Cameron Kingston was not to become the first South Australian Prime Minister of Australia. That distinction was to be accorded Robert James Lee Hawke, four times elected Prime Minister of Australia from 1983 to 1991, the longest serving Labor prime minister, and the third longest serving Australian prime minister after Menzies and Howard. Hawke's birthplace of Bordertown, on the road from Adelaide to Melbourne, just scrapes into South Australia, but it was as a third generation South Australian of Cornish stock that he entered the world on 9 December 1929, and as the nephew of a 1950s Western Australian premier, Albert Hawke. Interestingly, Hawke is the only prime minister who can fairly claim, as he does, national rather than state affiliation. He spent his formative years in South Australia, his developmental years in WA, his working years before politics in Victoria, his political years in Canberra, and his post prime ministerial years in NSW. All other prime ministers are more clearly identified with just one state. Even John Curtin, a Victorian, is claimed by WA.

The essential connection

And it was on that main road between Adelaide and Melbourne that the writer drove from time to time in the 1980s, a highway which before it bypassed Bordertown displayed at the entrance to the town a large carved brown wooden sign 'Bob Hawke's birthplace'. Although not ignorant of Bordertown's claim to fame, it was to be that sign which was to precipitate the thought that if the US had a presidential library system why should not Australia have a system of prime ministerial libraries, of which the Bob Hawke Prime Ministerial Library could be the first? That connection was made in 1987. It was followed by research about the presidential libraries which showed that a few of them had complementary research institutes.[1] The idea was put on hold by two events. The first was a time consuming year as president of the then Library Association of Australia in 1988. Second was persistent speculation about the future of the South Australian College of Advanced Education of which the writer was the college librarian.

The University of South Australia

The outcome of that speculation was the establishment in 1991 of the University of South Australia as a large multicampus university, merging the South Australian Institute of Technology and the major part of the South Australian College of Education. In 2005 it is only 14 years old. Following the writer's appointment as university librarian in 1992, the next two years of a merger not without its operational, personnel and fiscal challenges were not conducive to proposing a prime ministerial centre for the university. The idea was not revisited until late 1994. By that time the John Curtin Prime Ministerial Centre at Curtin University of Technology was under way. This was independently conceived following a visit by an associate director at Curtin, John Sharpham, to the Truman Presidential Centre in Independence, Missouri in the late 1980s.

'Our future enterprise'

Still very much in its infancy, in 1995 the University of SA had no overt policy or developmental framework to consider a vague proposal for a prime ministerial centre, so in June of that year the writer unofficially arranged a meeting with Bob Hawke in his William Street, Sydney, office. At that meeting was discussed a proposition for a Bob Hawke Prime Ministerial Centre consisting of a library, a visitor centre, a research institute, and conducting an annual Hawke Lecture. The nature and focus of the research institute seemed something that should accord with the themes of the Hawke ministries, and with the distinctive equity, social justice, and public policy concerns of the university itself, a university which, for example, has a special responsibility for Indigenous education. After discussion with John Hepworth, a UniSA political scientist and radio commentator, an institute focused on conflict resolution was proposed. And with a still very unofficial but quite specific proposal for the Bob Hawke Prime Ministerial Centre, the writer and Hepworth visited Hawke on 14 November 1995 and received his endorsement to make an approach to the university's senior management. The date can be specified because a valued book in the Bob Hawke Prime Ministerial Library (BHPML) is a volume of Hawke's memoirs bearing a dated message from him '... with best wishes and shared hopes for our future enterprise'.

It was an unorthodox order of events, which certainly surprised the then deputy vice chancellor Professor Denise Bradley when it was raised with her. However, she rapidly assessed and broadened the concept's possibilities for a new university seeking to develop a distinctive state, national and international profile, and also needing a research focus in the social sciences and humanities to balance its significant research institutes in telecommunications, science and technology. As far as the potential of a prime ministerial library was concerned, it was fortuitous that there was at the time considerable publicity about the public or private ownership of the Churchill papers, of which Professor Bradley was aware. It was also very helpful that by then Curtin University of Technology was making good progress with its John Curtin Centre.

The proposal presented to her for consideration by the management of the university incorporated

• a research institute focused on national and international conflict resolution;
• a prime ministerial library and visitor centre;
• a 'classroom for democracy' - an idea from the Truman Center - as a contribution to civics and citizenship education for children throughout South Australia; and
• an annual Hawke Lecture.

The model

None of these ideas were new. They were all to be found, in one iteration or another, in the US presidential centers.[2] However, the model is closest to that of the Carter Center in Atlanta, which opened in 1986, as is the Curtin Centre also. As an example of the scope of the presidential libraries, it alone contains 27 million pages of documents, 1.5 million photographs and 40 000 objects. Major projects of the Carter Center have included international conflict resolution, African governance, human rights, domestic and international health policy. The success of the Center has led to the claim that Jimmy Carter - a one-term incumbent - is the only US president to have used the presidency as a leaping off point to bigger and better things. The Johnson Presidential Library in Adelaide's sister city of Austin, Texas, also has a public policy institute associated with it.

The Hawke Centre

The scope of the Hawke Centre and its library has depended to a significant degree on what has been learned from visits to all of the presidential centers. The memorandum of understanding for the Hawke Centre's development was signed on Bob Hawke's birthday, 9 December 1997, in a public event in the university attended by people from all sides of politics.

The Centre, under its director Elizabeth Ho, a former librarian, is now progressing well. The Hawke Research Institute for Sustainable Societies was approved in 2004 as the university's third fully funded research institute. Under the leadership of Professor Alison MacKinnon, it brings together activities across several disciplines. The annual Hawke Lecture is in its seventh year. Hawke Lecturers have been Bob Hawke, Sir Zelman Cowen, Dr Mamphela Ramphele, Sir Gustav Nossal, Noel Pearson, Gareth Evans and Irene Khan. The Prime Ministerial Library has videoed and published all of the Lectures.

The Prime Ministerial Library

The Bob Hawke Prime Ministerial Library thus officially commenced in 1997 and became one of the over 400 named libraries or collections in Australia, the majority of which, however, are not person-specific libraries or collections. Jenni Jeremy was entrusted with the role of development librarian for it. Within a very constrained budgetary and accommodation context, its achievements to date are largely hers.

The library consists of over 150 000 pages of Hawke's private papers, in the main transferred at his request from the National Archives of Australia in Canberra. In addition, there are over 10 000 pages of prime ministerial speeches, not to mention the papers of Hawke ministers. For example, Chris Hurford has transferred his private papers of some 100 000 pages and Rosemary Crowley her even larger collection. These papers are located in the Sir Eric Neal Library at the Mawson Lakes campus pending construction of the Hawke Centre building at the City West campus of the university. Archival treatment of them commenced in earnest in 2000, with a focus on the preparation of Hawke's speeches for digitisation and web access.[3] The other main part of the library is a growing collection of relevant political and biographical texts, journal articles, cartoons, photographs and an interesting collection of electoral, political and personal memorabilia ranging from a replica of the Panther motorcycle on which Hawke almost killed himself as a student at the University of WA, to the jacket worn by him at the America's Cup victory celebration at the Royal Perth Yacht Squadron, to a hide belt presented to him by President Reagan, to a selection of prime ministerial briefcases. An acquisition unveiled by the vice chancellor in 2001 in the presence of Bob Hawke and Kim Beazley is a fine portrait of Hawke by distinguished South Australian artist, Robert Hannaford. A similar portrait also now hangs in Hawke's Oxford college, University College.

The BHPML has been developing within the constraints faced by many university libraries as the result of increased demands on them, the high cost of electronic resources and the fluctuating Australian dollar. The current annual budget allocation only permits the employment of the development librarian, and a part time archivist. They are supported by limited volunteer staff and infrastructure support from within the university library, but the increasing workload suggests that by the time the university's Hawke Centre building opens in 2006/7 the staff will need to double. The BHPML has had a modest start, but it is already, because of its focus and the developing knowledge of the staff, proving to be a valued research and educational resource beyond that which could reasonably be expected of a large general library or archive.

Consistent with the university library's own strategic program of professional conferences and seminars, the BHPML has initiated a program of biennial conferences uniquely bringing together librarians, archivists, collectors and scholars. In 2001 the topic was Someone Special, in 2003 Famous People Famous Collections, and on 28-30 September 2005 will be Simply the Best: Women's Collection in Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums.[4]

The Hawke Centre Building

Fundraising for the Hawke Centre, not unlike the Curtin Centre in its early days, has not proven to be easy despite wide support for it, including acceptance by Nelson Mandela of its international patronage. This support has included endorsement from the Prime Minister John Howard as 'enhancing research into the political and public policy process, including the role of the Prime Minister ... and contribute to the health of our democratic system'. However there has been progress with fundraising and significant in-kind support from organisations such as Fuji Xerox Australia. The university is committed, in the second stage of its new City West campus, to a large, high quality and architecturally distinctive Hawke Centre building in 2006/7. This will bring together the Hawke Centre administration, aspects of the Research Institute, a Visitor Centre/Museum and the BHPML. The building will also provide high-quality conference and meeting facilities, accommodate the university's Chancellery, and house its large Art Museum, the second largest in the state after the Art Gallery of SA.

Unlike the US presidential libraries and the Curtin Library, the Hawke Library and Visitor Centre will thus be in an accessible CBD location, at one end of a potential tourist trail commencing at the east end of Adelaide's North Terrace cultural boulevard with the National Wine Centre. The first US presidential library to be in a genuine downtown location is the Clinton Library and Museum, although the Carter Center is not too far from downtown Atlanta. The BHPML is working closely with the District Council of Tatiara, of which Bordertown is the administrative centre, in mutual promotion of the Hawke connection. It is intended that this will be a feature in the new building's visitor centre.

Prime Ministerial Libraries

There are critics of the US presidential library system who contend that all of the presidential papers should be held together in Washington. Similarly, there are those who would argue the same principle for the papers - public and private - of Australian prime ministers, but the ultimate test is not professional preference or territoriality. It is client convenience and satisfaction.

Researchers often need a range of resources from papers, to speeches, to photographs, to videos, to books, to journal articles, to artifacts. Such broad collections are typical of the presidential libraries.

Digitisation clearly has a major role in enhancing access to some of these resources, but it is unlikely, as the presidential libraries have found, that everything can ever be digitised. Priorities still need to be identified, but perhaps the most critical point is that researchers and students also need interaction with enthusiastic and knowledgeable librarians and archivists - professionals who know their subjects, and their collections, very well.

In the light of the events of 11 September 2001 a more distributed but connected national archive - which prime ministerial libraries are becoming - is a sensible form of risk management. Several libraries, and their staff, were lost in the attack on the World Trade Center, and a library was in that part of the Pentagon which was destroyed.

Australian - US comparisons

It may be considered that because the Australian and US political, constitutional and cultural contexts are different, the imperatives which have led to the US presidential library system do not apply in Australia. However, as the then director of the Carter Library, Don Schewe, pointed out in his paper Papers of Chief Executives which he gave at the 1998 Adelaide conference of the Australian Library and Information Association:

In 1215AD a group of dissident aristocrats forced the King of England to sign a document that limited his powers over them. The government the Magna Carta envisioned was not a representative democracy as we think of it today, but it was a step away from an autocratic chief executive who was responsible only to himself, and established an underlying principle that government must be accountable for its actions to other than the chief executive. That English tradition is today the backbone of our concept of representative democracy - that the government is accountable to the people. And since Australia and the United States share a common English heritage we also have that tradition of governmental accountability.

Central to the English concept of governmental accountability is the idea that citizens must have access to the documents that show what the government is doing. This underlies the emphasis we place on freedom of the press and the public right to know. Access to the documents created by government is essential if citizens are to know what the government is doing, and thereby hold government accountable for its actions. It is no accident that autocratic governments are less open with official documents than freely elected democratic societies, and the more autocratic the government is, the less open it is with its information.

But there are other concepts inherent in a democratic society - among them the right to hold private property and the right to privacy. And the existence of these concepts creates an inherent conflict with the idea of public access. Some of the papers created by government officials are also their private property, and some contain information about private citizens that should not be released to the public. To honor the principle of public access would be to violate the right to privacy and right to hold private property.

The reality is that, although elected by different pathways and constituencies, the Australian prime minister and the US president are both the accountable chief executive officers of their countries. They also, in practice, have had a not dissimilar period of tenure since the second world war.

From 1939 there have been, excluding the incumbent, 12 US presidents. For all of them there is a presidential library administered by the US National Archives and Records Administration, the exception being Nixon's Library. In the same period Australia has had ten prime ministers, for five of whom there is now at least a foundation element of a university-based prime ministerial library.

Whilst it is true that Australian prime ministers, like Gorton and Hawke, may be ousted by their own parliamentary colleagues, American presidents, like Kennedy and Nixon, have tended to succumb prematurely to metal or constitutional bullets.

Recognising Australian Prime Ministers

With the celebration of Australia's centenary as a nation in 2001 it has been appropriate and timely that after a century of Australian prime ministers, they are receiving more focused attention, firstly by developments such as the Curtin, Deakin and Hawke Libraries, and secondly through National Archives initiatives including a prime ministerial website, and increased digitisation of papers. It is ironic, however, that the federal funding to facilitate these National Archives initiatives was prompted by universities, such as the University of SA, requesting government support for their prime ministerial library initiatives. Nonetheless those National Archives initiatives will undoubtedly assist other universities who may develop prime ministerial libraries and centres.

Australia now has an embryonic prime ministerial library system, comprising the Curtin Library, the Hawke Library, the Deakin Library, the Whitlam papers at the University of Western Sydney, the Keating papers at the University of NSW and the Menzies Collection at the University of Melbourne. The UK has the Churchill Centre at Cambridge University which houses the disputed Churchill papers and temporarily, at least, the Thatcher papers, but any further development seems unlikely. Other countries, such as Canada, Brazil and Malaysia, have looked at the concept from a governmental perspective. Yet it is Australia, in pragmatic fashion, which is the first country outside of the US to endeavour to give more focused attention to the endeavours and outcomes of those who have provided its leadership.

The John Curtin Prime Ministerial Library is the world's first prime ministerial library, but it is retrospective, Curtin dying more than 50 years before its establishment, and leaving little in the way of an archive or memorabilia. More like the presidential libraries, however, the Hawke Library is the world's first prime ministerial library to be developed during the lifetime of the prime minister. This, as the US presidential library directors would confirm, can put a whole new dimension on library development, particularly if presidential egos and their wives became too interventionist. That has definitely not been the BHPML experience, except in its most positive sense.

Australians perhaps tend to be more iconoclastic about their national leaders than do Americans. However, surely that 'someone special' who undertakes the extraordinary demands of the prime ministership of the country is worthy of a greater focus than a general library or archive alone can sustain. The University of South Australia is therefore proud to be developing the Hawke Centre, of which the Prime Ministerial Library is an integral part, as a contribution to the nation's historical record and its future. It is also conscious that the BHPML reflects the contribution to Australia, and to its current prosperity, of the longest serving Labor prime minister and what political commentators have judged to be among the most competent federal ministries since federation.

The future

It is noteworthy that the US National Archives and Records Administration now requires presidential libraries to be associated with universities for infrastructure reasons. Despite funding issues, it would be surprising if more prime ministerial libraries and centres are not considered by Australian universities in the years ahead. The Malcolm Fraser Prime Ministerial Library at a Victorian university would seem an obvious candidate, as would the John Howard Prime Ministerial Library at a university in NSW. Desirably, planning for the latter should already be underway.

However, such developments may well have to run the philosophical, policy, and funding gauntlet of universities and their libraries - new and old - which have not given systematic consideration to their responsibilities and opportunities as national collecting institutions. Indeed this is a debate in which it is time the whole of the Australian university sector - the so-called national unified system - engaged in with the federal government and the other collecting institutions in Australia. The recent serious threat to the nationally-significant Noel Butlin Archives at the Australian National University shows what can occur because of a corporate policy vacuum in a university, and because of a narrow emphasis on cost, not investment. Its resolution required, and got, leadership at the highest level in the university.

It is time that the Australian Vice-Chancellors Committee (AVCC) had on its agenda an audit of how Australian universities are already collecting institutions beyond their art collections, and the development of policy frameworks within them to maintain and extend their responsibilities within a national collecting framework in the 21st century. Money to do so is not substantially the issue; it is rather recognition of the need and responsibility, and a policy response. It is currently too easy for a university, and its library, to unthinkingly absolve itself of any responsibility as a national collecting institution on the grounds of the institutionally marginal funding required.

Notes

1. A recent perceptive analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the US presidential library system is S Benedetti 'Archives and Museums: Balance and Development in Presidential Libraries' Collections: A Journal for Museum and Archives Professionals vol 1 no 1 August 2004 pp15-36
2. http://www.archives.gov/presidential_libraries/about/about.html
3. Available at http://www.hawkecentre.unisa.edu.au/speeches/speeches.htm
4. Details at http://www.hawkecentre.unisa.edu.au/library/conference/2005conference.htm

Dr Alan Bundy (please remove '.nospam' from address) retires as the foundation university librarian and director of the Bob Hawke Prime Ministerial Library, University of South Australia, in March 2005.