Melbourne Rare Book Week
There are over 45 events between 23 July and 1 August in the 12th year of the Melbourne Rare Book Week, culminating in the Melbourne Rare Book Fair, in its 52nd year. All events are free. I have been the official sketcher on location since 2016. Each year I take the week off work and sketch at as many events as I can, sharing my sketches with the MRBW and MRBR Teams and the organisations that I sketch at for them to use in any social media.
I will be posting everyday this week as I share them with everyone as well as keepimg my own personal record of the events. On my sketchbook pages I sketch on location, and write the event name, place, organisation etc. I will also add the information about the session from the MRBW program descriptions.
I sketched at 18 events. There are often four events spread over the day, but sometimes three at the same time. They are all generally within Melbourne CBD, but not always easy to get from one to another . Tough decisions must be made !
Each event is at a different venue, with different rooms,surrounds an attendees. This often inspires the sketch!
I began with …
Sketches of Early Melbourne
Victoria’s Parliamentary Library is the second oldest library in Victoria. The highlight of the Library’s rare book collection is William Strutt’s illustrated album Victoria the Golden. Strutt arrived in Melbourne in 1850 and captured key events in the embryonic colony, from the goldrush to the departure of the Burke and Wills expedition. In later years in England, he compiled his skilful sketches into albums, aware of their historical importance. Join Alisa Bunbury, art historian and curator, to learn about Strutt and his years in Victoria, followed by a rare viewing of the album, alongside other Strutt material held in the Library’s collection.
Suppression of Australian Literature in the Nineteenth Century
The nineteenth century in Australia is particularly interesting from the literary suppression point of view. In this talk, Dr Cains addresses suppression – items of literature withdrawn from the market and not available to the general reader – rather than censorship, a State based activity often invoked to protect the morals of the population. During this period, the Port Phillip colony moved with increasing confidence to self-government and federation, and there were tentative shoots of a domestic literature. But as a young boisterous colony, the excesses of expression and behaviour were curbed, often by legal means and occasionally by literary suppression: some of these instances are the subject of this lecture.
Speakers
