The Australian Library Journal

Editorial

John Levett

'A small unsigned painting'

A little while ago, I had the pleasure of designing and teaching an online masters subject for my alma mater, Monash. It was called 'Documenting Australia' and it was intended to provide a grounding for students from a variety of contexts: librarianship, archives, records management, in the pervasive connection between life - as we in Western societies - experience it - and the document. In the design phase of the subject, I came across a paperback called A small unsigned painting which will stay on my bookshelves until my estate is inventoried (when it will no doubt be tossed out: which raises another set of questions for an editorial). It is by Stephen Scheding and it is a Vintage book published by Random House in Sydney in 1998.

It was a happy coincidence: every academic grapples with the problem of finding suitable readings for the courses s/he is teaching, and the conundrum was made more acute in this instance by the nature of the student group I was working with. They were nearly all employed in various occupations, savvy and autonomous and scattered across Australia, with one in Tokyo and another in Singapore. For such a group, I could not simply pick readings from the university library holdings and assign them, and I had only a very approximate idea of the range of resources available to each student.

Not that I have ever been hooked on the notion of 'set' or reserve readings at the post-graduate level. I find them too restrictive and binding: they also lead students into the intellectual swamp of reading/digesting/reformatting/ and regurgitating, a sterile process for all concerned, and in general I would prefer merely to assign a topic and encourage my flock to go forth and forage in the rich pastures of the university library. Confronted by anxious students who found this procedure nerve-wracking and unsettling, rather as I imagine barnacles might feel if they were suddenly given fins and prised from their comfortable rocks, I would say that I took it for granted that they could r. d. r. and r. and find their own readings: what I was interested in was what they actually thought about an issue.

In the case of this particular cohort, I could not afford to be quite so cavalier, and needed at least a general philosophical focus or two, accessible to all, and to which our electronic discussions might be anchored. This slight unease had its origins in the fact that I had never taught (physically) remote students before, and I had none of the consolations of precedence, for this was a pioneering exercise. I have always enjoyed and thrived on face-to-face teaching - at least before the teaching contexts became corporatised - and the emergence of the unique intellectual dynamic which each group would evolve for itself as its members grew into a working entity, and I wondered what might happen without even the consolation of the mediating instrument of voice. I need not have worried: like strangers conversing on an aeroplane journey, within two weeks we had reached a level of personal confidences in the exchange of detail about ourselves which had never occurred in my in-house seminars. In addition there were at least three continuing discourses on hand at any one time: the official one - the dialogue between each student and myself, the chat room, of which I was a de facto member, and the invisible (to me) conversations which went on across the group and its subsets to which I was not party. This I have always regretted, because it would have granted an invaluable, though no doubt often uncomfortable insight into what the students were making of their task schedule, and what the shortcomings of my approach as experienced by them might have been; properly archived, it would also have been of inestimable value to subsequent cohorts enrolled in the subject.

Anyhow, back to the question of readings. I gobbled Scheding's book, reread it, and without hesitation, set it as a background text for the work we were to do together: it was in print, cheap, accessible to all, and provided in a way that much more cumbersome, germane but lumbering texts did not, an effortless counterpoint to the central issue in my course, the importance of documentation in the conduct of human affairs. It's a slight book, with just under 300 pages, an excellent set of endnotes and a very good index. It costs less than $20, and is written in a totally appropriate and confiding style as the reader follows the evolution of the author's love affair with 'a small unsigned painting'.

Doesn't sound much, I know, and the CIP people at the National Library were content to classify it at 823.3 and give it merely an author and title entry. But I must have given away twenty copies (until the GST cut in) and I am still recommending it (as I do here) to all and sundry. Why? Let me quote from the blurb:

A true-life detective story set in the Australian art world, around the life of one of Australia's most famous painters, Lloyd Rees. Stephen Scheding, art collector and historian, buys a small painting of a boatshed at an auction in Melbourne. The painting is unsigned, but his first response is that it is a painting by Lloyd Rees from the 1920s. A small unsigned painting is the story of his attempts to authenticate the painting, from tracking clues in the painting and on its frame, to x-rays (which reveal a surprising 'signature'), to investigations of possible past owners of the painting (uncovering a story of lost love and tragic death in the process), to an examination of the life of Lloyd Rees and his contemporaries and the coming of modernism to Sydney in the 1920s. Told as a personal diary of the author's quest to find the artist, the book is not only a whodunit but a fascinating and immensely readable piece of art history and an insight into how works of art are evaluated. You may never look at a painting in quite the same way again...

'Ho hum' I hear you say. 'What's this got to do with us?' Fair question: but quite simply, this is one of the most readable accounts of the research process as it is experienced by a seeker after information that I have ever seen. If you wanted to understand the fascination of the processes involved from the punter's point of view, this book will illuminate it for you. It is the best exposition of the 'irresistible itch' which wittingly or not, drives everyone who works in the field of information management, discovery and recovery. It (especially in the particular context in which I used it) begs questions at every turn. It is revelatory to the beginner and refreshing to the veteran. Read it for yourself, buy it for the archivist or librarian in your life (but don't expect me to buy you a copy or lend you mine): I'd be pleased to hear what you think. And if you stumble across Stephen Scheding in your travels, tell him thanks from me.

In this issue Ian McCallum, raconteur, free spirit, Auroralist and bikie, shares with us his take on the stirring doings in Ithaca the other day. Pam Gatenby, assistant director general of the Collection Management Division of the National Library of Australia enlightens us regarding the built-in ephemerality of the digital record and what might be done to offset its shortevity. Liz Burke's approach to the future role of librarians in the virtual library environment locks on to another dimension of the phenomena raised by Pam: Liz is divisional librarian, Reference and Information Services at La Trobe University Library. Dr Alan Bundy, president of ALIA, and the only hero in living memory to want two bites at that particular cherry, explores a trans-sectoral (to use a word which was recently on all our lips) conjunction which seems so transparent in its possibilities that one wonders why it isn't universal (it, of course, isn't), and we run the usual two score reviews garnered from everywhere by our reviews editor, Dr Gorman, who is at the moment elsewhere (in Vietnam actually).

One more thing

If your professional parish includes any of those detention centers which reside in the jurisdiction of my fellow Amnesty International member, the Hon Phillip Ruddock, please make it your business to find out what information resources are accessible to the inmates. Tell those caring souls tasked (!) with managing the centers that John Levett sent you. On second thoughts, ask your local member. Mention my name. Oh: and a Happy New Year to you all. Make it the year you finally send that article you have been polishing and cherishing into ALJ.