Project leader: Professor Jill Julius Matthews

Welcome to Hidden Treasures of the Mitchell Library, one of the specialist research projects conducted within the AustLit Research & Publications Community.

This project began under a Nancy Keesing Fellowship at the State Library of New South Wales as a thorough survey of the Mitchell Library's large and unique collection of magazines published in Sydney between 1895 and 1930. The aim is to make the extent and coherence of those holdings more visible to researchers. In addition, it may help explore how generalist interpretations of the country's past and the possibilities of its people’s thoughts and actions have been somewhat distorted through reliance on the views of a limited number of magazines.

This dataset collects together a selection of sixty-two enhanced AustLit records for magazines whose contents expose an extraordinary diversity of opinion and commentary on the many activities of domestic, social, cultural, and political life. The internal formula and mix of each magazine individually provide us with clues about the complex multiplicity of identity, association, and interest of its individual readers. And the set or range of successful magazines at any one time provides us with clues about the whole population of readers.

Read Jill Julius Matthews's peer reviewed article HERE.

• Magazines sorted by title

The magazines in The Hidden Treasures of the Mitchell Library dataset were selected from the Mitchell Library's collection of Sydney periodicals published between 1895 and 1930. For more information about the history of Australian magazines see AustLit's Australian Magazines of the Twentieth Century subset.

The sixty-two publications that proved suitable for inclusion in this project were chosen from an initial list of 220 magazines. This initial list was itself constructed by excluding daily, bi-weekly, and annual publications from consideration, leaving a list of 220 weekly, fortnightly, monthly and quarterly publications likely to be magazines. At least forty of these periodicals could be classified as women’s magazines, including political, social, and home centred. At least seventy were religious, mission, and charity magazines. Some forty-five could be considered arts, theatre, or lifestyle magazines.

We would welcome the possibility of receiving further information about these magazines. Please contact info-austlit@austlit.edu.au to participate in the further development of this dataset.

Jill Julius Matthews

I am grateful to the State Library of New South Wales for awarding me the Nancy Keesing Fellowship in 2005. This provided me with unique access to the original format magazine holdings, without which this research would have been exceedingly difficult. In particular, I wish to thank the Council of the State Library, the Fellowship Committee, then Mitchell Librarian Elizabeth Ellis, the Coordinator of Bibliographic Access Collection Services Susanne Moir, Lynne Billington from eLibrary Services, and, most importantly, Mark Hildebrand, then Acting Coordinator of Collections and Australiana, and his Mitchell Reading Room staff.

I am also grateful for the existence of AustLit, and for the genius and patience of those who make it work. Kerry Kilner and Carol Hetherington were my primary points of contact. They were always available to guide me cheerfully through the intricacies of turning a simple list into a virtual reality.

Hidden Treasures of the Mitchell Library: Sydney Periodicals 1895-1930 is a separately published work within AustLit.
AustLit: The Australian Literature Resource 2004-

This work is published Under Creative Commons License: Attribution-Noncommercial 2.5 Australia:

You are free to copy, distribute, adapt and transmit this work on the condition that you must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). You may not use this work for commercial purposes without permission from the copyright holder. For further information see: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.5/au/

Hidden Treasures of the Mitchell Library: Sydney Periodicals 1895-1930

Bibliography.
Includes index.
ISBN - 9780980632231
1. Mitchell Library - Periodicals
2. Periodicals - Australia - History
I. Matthews, Jill Julius.