The Australian Library Journal

Editorial

John Levett

Vernacular terms

A little while ago, I was engaged with a group of graduate students at Monash, and talking about the importance of lay people in the early development of the great Australian libraries. I mentioned Sir Redmond Barry, and described him jocularly as 'the beak who topped Ned Kelly'. Blank incomprehension: on all three counts for some [the overseas students], and not all of the others were familiar with the vernacular terms.

I was made somewhat reflective by the experience, and a short time afterwards gave a Graduation Address to a very large, and very mixed audience. I took as my theme racial and cultural identity, and its representation and definition in Australia. I had searched for representations across the media spectrum, and came to the conclusion that the largest repository of images, verbal and graphic, of cultural identity was the libraries of Australia.

It is only there that a reliable authoritative and multi-dimensional canvas can be discerned. As an archive it is, naturally, biased towards documents in the English language. But if you want to discern with any degree of intellectual depth what it means to be alive in Australia today, or to have contributed to the development of an Australian culture or multi-culture, then it is to the libraries and the archives that you must have recourse.

No number of Olympic openings however lavish and redolent with budget, icon and cliche, can convey one thousandth as much meaning as can be retrieved from a relatively small public library collection, on any day of the working year. It is to these resources that we must have recourse if we would discover more about Redmond Barry the man and judge, the library to which he was godfather, and the man he condemned to death and the culture that produced him.

The collections of libraries are many things, but primarily and almost incidentally, they constitute the record and the picture of the culture in which they are embedded. Without this record, a culture has no residual sense of itself or its origins and components. It cannot begin to discern what it is, who belongs to it; what its origins are, what are the contributions of its members.

Without these understandings that culture is doomed to continual re-invention and re-enactment of the past; without a point of departure there can be no progress, no journey, no evolution, no growth. The one unique capacity of our species [in addition to its fascination with self-destruction] is its ability to accrete knowledge and understanding.

It does this at about the same pace as a major coral reef grows, and each single organism is a contributor to the entity as a whole. The library is the major reification of this process. It has as a consequence one other important capacity: it makes possible what ED Hirsch identified as 'cultural literacy' in a small but immensely significant [and largely unregarded] monograph published in the United States in 1988. [1]

His thesis was that the strength of a nation lay largely in the culture which it shared, and by whose mores and common heritage it was shaped. If we do not share the culture, we cannot share the language; if we cannot share the language, we cannot communicate; if we cannot communicate then the growth which comes from co-operation and shared understandings cannot occur, and the culture will eventually die off, or be superseded.

Hirsch listed, under the rubric 'what every literate American needs to know of and about' some '5000 essential names, phrases and dates'. There is, as far as I know, no Australian equivalent, although I have for some time and for my own amusement been developing a comparable list. A selection from Hirsch will illustrate the concept:

1066

1492

1776

1914-1918

1939-1945

1984 [book title]

absenteeism

absolute monarchy

academic freedom

acronym

Acropolis

Allen, Woody

Alzheimer's disease

Amicus curiae

Bankruptcy

'Between a rock and a hard place'

Berlin Wall

Berry, Chuck

It might be interesting, I think, to look at a similar selection of names and terms and to ask how broadly comprehended their implications are across Australian society today. Despite more expenditure on education than ever before, there is a general feeling of a dumbing-down, a narrowing of cultural boundaries and a poverty of understanding, especially of language, that bedrock of any society.

The Manglish which characterises not only the utterances of Olympic commentators, but also I am more disturbed to say, the writers of news bulletins for the 'National Broadcaster' does not facilitate communication and understanding: it blurs, fractures and scrambles it. Meaning is lost, and with it that precision of communication and understanding which is one of the great glories of language.

Against this pattern of almost wilful cultivation of ignorance and the celebration of boorishness, the collections of libraries are one of the few balances. If there were no other justification for their existence, this would be a sufficient service to society.

In this issue Russell Cope takes a further penetrating and critical look at Australian parliamentary libraries, their treasures and their occasionally indifferent host institutions; Libby Fielding reports on a substantial literature review which examines the opportunities and risks confronting public libraries in their sometimes half-hearted embrace of the internet; Janet Murray reviews research completed and the implications of providing school library service for disabled children, and Jane Shelling gives us a revealing and salutary close-up of one library's struggle to provide access to e-journals. A reader asks a penetrating question about the frustrations and difficulties inherent in purchasing the books that ALJ reviews and receives some useful advice from our reviews editor, Dr Gary Gorman, who has garnered another collection of stimulating reviews of interesting books.

This is the last issue for the year: once again I acknowledge what a pleasure it has been to work with the staff of the ALIA National Office presided over by Jennefer Nicholson; Ivan Trundle, who manages a large portfolio of which this journal is only a small part, Emma Davis-Bell who sees each issue into print and saves the editor from some of his more egregious gaffes; Dr Gary Gorman and his cadre of devoted, intelligent and often amusing reviewers, and all of those others in ALIA House who field the questions, and manage the infrastructure, including the subscription database. To all of these, my grateful thanks and best wishes for the coming year. God send that it passes more slowly than this one did.