AustLit

This is a talk given by Dr Duncan Bruce Hose as the Fryer Library Fellow of 2017, speaking of his experiences of courting the daemon, or hanging out with the ghost in the archive.

His concluding words speak of the importance of the archive and the achivist:

I have loved being in jealous possession of the Forbes archive, and I have not quite learned to resist fetishizing this ‘stuff.’ The real charismatic transmission is in handing over the daemon. Yet I am a sucker still for time worn paper and the regular grace of Forbes’s handwriting, the wicked quality of his jokes, and the thrill of proximity to a first class daemon, which inheres in and exhorts us from these physical remains. Over the period of the Fellowship I have continually encountered the Ethos of the Fryer Library through the keepers of the archive, the librarians, and in their vocations I have found them impeccable in their manner, their foresight, their enthusiasm and their stealthy efficiency, so I can only presume that the Fryer Library as a human institution has an infectious genius that concerns itself with the transmission of culture, it has a good daemon.

This slideshow accompanies Dr Duncan Hose's lecture above.

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