AustLit

'On display for the first time in 2019–20 in State Library Victoria’s Victoria Gallery is the only surviving costume commissioned by the International Club of Victoria for the Pageant of Nations performed in 1934 and 1935 to celebrate Victoria’s centenary. The costume designed for the pageant’s protagonist, ‘Victoria’, was donated to State Library Victoria in 1998 by Jessie Clarke (nee Brookes),1 who played that role on the stage of Melbourne’s Town Hall for the three performances in 1934, and two additional enactments in 1935. Clarke also donated a hand-coloured studio portrait of herself wearing the costume (shown on page 28). The dynamic ensemble included a hand-painted hooped skirt and a shimmering silver bodice over which trailed a long green cloak veined with silver markings. The entire ensemble was crowned with a striking metallic headdress. State Library Victoria had no record of the identity of the costume’s designer until my own research into realia, manuscripts and pictures in the collection in 2013 led me to discover the story of a woman with talent and ingenuity who contributed an enduring legacy to Australia’s performing arts. This article adds to the previous La Trobe Journal article about the Jessie Clarke costume' (Introduction)

'State Library Victoria holds the most comprehensive collection of Australian children’s books in any public institution in the world. The Library’s Children’s Literature Collection fundamentally changed with the acquisition in 1994 of a private collection of 25,000 Australian and New Zealand children’s books amassed by Melbourne collector Ken Pound. This took the collection above 100,000 items, increasing the Library’s holdings of variant editions, ephemera, advertising, print-based games and short-lived Australian publishing house titles. Today the Library holds approximately 150,000 children’s books published over five centuries. This remarkable collection is of world significance.' (Introduction)

'How did the early European settlers talk to their children about Australia’s unique and unfamiliar landscape? What types of stories and images did they create to characterise and make sense of its strange fauna and flora? As a natural history illustrator, writer and avid reader I wanted to explore how the Australian environment, filled with new and unfamiliar species, was characterised in text and illustrations in children’s books in the 19th century and into the 20th century. ‘From curious creatures to bushland beasts: a graphic novel exploring representations of Australian fauna and flora in early Australian children’s book publishing’ was the title I proposed for my Children’s Literature Fellowship, undertaken at State Library Victoria in 2016–17. My aim was to view a selection of Australian children’s books, to discover how Australian fauna and flora were portrayed in both text and illustrations, and then to develop a creative response in the form of a graphic novel. My research method was to be autoethnographic: I would note and sketch my responses to the works I viewed.' 

 (Introduction)