Yesterday was the start of Melbourne Rare Book Week. I have an exhibition and I have also been invited to sketch at the events. I will be sketching at 20 of the 55 events of this ‘week’ (which is actually ten days) and posting on my blog each evening.

I have tried to visit the venues beforehand to sketch the building . I hope that will give my sketches context and interest. I plan to draw the speaker and also the audience, adding colour somewhere on the page. I will learn as I go, experimenting at each event .

The first event I attended was RARE BOOKS AND RARE TALES OF AUSTRALIA’S ORIENT, a talk by Professor David Walker, a historian who examines the many different ways that Australians have written about Asia. He discussed some of the key books which comment upon the rise of Asia in the late nineteenth century and its implications for Australia. Among these books are invasion stories, spy stories and travellers’ tales. Many of these books are now exceedingly rare.

My favourite title of the evening was Battle of Mordialloc written in the 1880s to awake the readers to the possibility of invasion of Victoria by forces from Japan, China & Russia. (Mordialloc is a outer Melbourne suburb……). The book I want to read is Madame Izam: a Tourist story…

The second event I attended was BOOKS FROM A TURBULENT TIME: a talk by Des Cowley and Richard Overell from State Library Victoria. They discussed the single greatest bequest of rare books that came to the State Library Victoria in 2015. They shared their insights into the John Emmerson Collection, and discussed some fascinating items from this extraordinary donation of 17th and 18th century material.

I sketched while I sat in the audience and once quietly moved to the back of the room. These two events were held at the same venue and I saw a few familiar faces. There was wine and food and lots of interesting conversation after the talks.