Text of Speech by Richard Flanagan
Memory of the World Inscription Ceremony
Allport Library,
State Library of Tasmania, 1 April 2011
I am delighted to be here tonight. I am sure the ghost of Geoffrey Stillwell is shuffling foot to spectral foot in joy. This event, honouring the inscription of three works of documentary heritage into the UNESCO Memory of the World register is important not only because it recognises the significance of these works and bestows honour upon them, not only because of what these works tell us about the past, but because, as William Faulkner wrote, The past is never dead. It’s not even past.
And the documents of the past are never just what they seem.
Rather, like the millennia old seed we might find in a pharaoh’s tomb, they can, when planted in the soil of sympathetic imaginations, often grow into unexpected trees bearing hitherto unknown fruit of strange and exotic richness.
When Bob Dylan was going through an extraordinary period of creativity in his recording career in the mid 60s, his songs were being fuelled not so much by amphetamines and dope, as by his practice of spending his mornings in the New York Public library reading newspapers from the nineteenth century. In the language and concerns of the 1850s and 1860s he found a way of divining a tumultuous present that helped reshape culture globally. In such ways does the memory of the world forge the most wondrous alchemy.
In my own far humbler case, I know a seminal period of my life was spent in the Crowther and Tasmaniana Collection—as it was then called—and dreams, stories, nightmares, and jokes began to fill my mind in the form of a certain spirit that remains strong within me several novels later.
Who knows what beautiful works, what understanding not just of our past but of our future will arise from the works that are tonight being honoured with inscription on the UNESCO memory of the World Register—the Sydney Theatre Playbill of 1796, the Minutes Books of Pre-Federation Australian Trade Unions, and of course, my own favourite, William Buelow Gould’s Sketchbook of Fish.
I remember that wondrous day when Geoffrey Stillwell first fetched the fish out of the wardrobe in which he kept them hidden and showed me his great treasure. What would that rummy old convict Billy Gould have made of how far his fish have swum to arrive here tonight?
Because for all the wonders and utility of such works being digitised, there is no substitute for seeing the real thing—elusive, ethereal, grubby, mysterious, beautiful—an invitation to dream that returns again and again to reshape our reality for the better.
Finally, if you will forgive me a Tasmanian coda to a national event, I particularly want to pay tribute tonight to a very special group of people, those Tasmanian archivists, curators and librarians who have with little money and in the face of government indifference carefully collected and cared for those seeds of which I spoke earlier.
They have over decades assembled a most magnificent collection of records, papers, books and ephemera that document the history of this strange island and then gone on to make that collection available to the public with passion, with knowledge, with generosity of spirit, and with, dare I say it, a certain love. I personally owe these people, both past and present, a great debt. And tonight I wish to say thank you to you all—and thank you for listening to me.