(Re)Constructing Australian Childhood: The Pound Collection at the State Library of Victoria, Australia

The history of book collecting in Australia, like the history of Australian literature, traces the country’s progress from British colony to independent nation. The first children’s books to feature Australian settings and characters were published in England and intended for a mixed audience of English and Australian children. Charlotte Barton’s didactic work, A Mother’s Offering to Her Children, by a Lady Long Resident in New South Wales (1841), was the first children’s book published in Australia, but only a handful of such books were published before 1900. It was not until the second half of the twentieth century that publishing for children became a significant part of Australian cultural production, fueled by the demands of a growing population and by the country’s transition from colony to nation state. The same sense of an emerging Australian national identity influenced the development during the second half of the twentieth century of a number of private and institutional collections of Australian children’s books, notably the Pound Collection.

Ken Pound spent more than twenty years gathering children’s books published in Australia or (in the case of works published in England) dealing with Australian subjects, and in 1994 his collection, comprising almost 25,000 items, was purchased by the State Library of Victoria in Melbourne. Cataloging of the collection began in 1995 and is still proceeding. By 2000, when the State Library will be refurbished, the collection will be housed adjacent to the State Library’s existing Children’s Literature Research Collection and, as the bibliographer Marcie Muir notes, will then constitute “one of the two great collections of children’s literature in Australia” (27)—the other being the Children’s Literature Research of the State Library of South Australia in Adelaide.

Pound’s passion for collecting children’s books had its beginnings in an orphanage in Cornwall where he learned as a child that the most effective way of combating the bleakness of life was to imagine himself into a fantastic world in which he could be free of adults, their demands on him, and the cruelty that he experienced at their hands. ¹ This world took the form of an idyllic space filled with trees and flowers, and it sustained Pound through his years in the orphanage. As an adult living in Australia many years later, his discovery of the illustrated books of the Australian artist Ida Rentoul Outhwaite constituted the recovery of the fantastic world of his childhood, and he resolved to concentrate his efforts on collecting Australian children’s books. Another motivation for his collecting was his sense (encapsulated in the question, “Why don’t you collect something worthwhile?”) that children’s books were treated by many dealers and collectors as unworthy of serious attention and that Australian books and illustrators were regarded as less significant, by reason of their colonial origins, than their British counterparts. ² When he began to collect in earnest during the 1970s, Pound had the advantage that Australian books, especially those for children, were less in demand (and cheaper) than British books. By the late 1980s, however, the cost of early Australian books had escalated as more collectors concentrated on Australian cultural products.

Like many other children from British orphanages, Ken Pound had been sent to Australia as part of a postwar scheme to populate the colonies. At fourteen he arrived in Australia, where he was trained as a farm hand and worked at various occupations: in a plant nursery, at a boys’ home, as a hospital orderly, as a park ranger. Eventually he began to work for an Anglican welfare organization, the Brotherhood of St. Laurence, caring for homeless elderly people. It was at this time, and over the next twenty years, that his collection developed; his work with the aged, which he regarded as a vocation, was balanced by a compelling interest in books written for (and sometimes by) Australian children. The converted church building where he cared for elderly people featured a large choir stall where he housed his collection.

The sources for Pound’s...