Lauren Smith:

Good afternoon and welcome to the National Library of Australia. I'm Lauren Smith. I'm the Assistant Director of Publishing here at the Library and I would like to begin by acknowledging Australia's first peoples as the traditional owners and custodians of the land and give my respect to elders past and present and through them to all Aboriginal Australian and Torres Strait Islander people.

Thank you for joining us for this event, whether you are here in person or joining us online. I'm coming to you from Ngunnawal and Ngambri Country. I'd also like to take this opportunity to remind everyone that now is a very good moment to put your phone on silent, to check you have no alarms scheduled to go off in the next hour. Just give us a bit of a sense of confidence as we begin. This afternoon's presentation, 'The Archival Imagination of Frank Moorhouse' is by Dr Matthew Lamb, a 2026 National Library of Australia Fellow.

Our distinguished Fellowships programme supports researchers to make intensive use of the National Library's rich collections through residencies of three months. Our National Library of Australia Fellowships are made possible through generous philanthropic support. Dr Matthew Lamb's fellowship has been kindly supported by the Ray Mathew and Eva Kollsman Trust for Research in Australian Literature.

Dr Matthew Lamb is the author of 'Frank Moorhouse: Strange Paths', which is wonderful if you have not read it. The first in a projected two volume cultural biography of Frank Moorhouse. He's a former editor of 'Review of Australian Fiction' and 'Island' and has PhDs in literature and philosophy. He currently writes the 'Public Things Newsletter' on the relationship between literary culture and democracy.

In his presentation today, Matthew will discuss his fellowship research into the Library's collections on Frank Moorhouse and the way in which Frank developed an 'archival imagination' and even identified as an archive.

Frank used libraries and archives prodigiously, submitted his own papers to various archives and developed a thorough note-taking style, his very own card catalogue from which he generated his many stories, books and essays. Please join me in welcoming Matthew Lamb.

Matthew Lamb:

Hello. So the working title for this talk was 'How Frank Moorhouse became an archive.' The syntax is important as will become evident. If it was allowed a subtitle, it would be something like 'How Frank Moorhouse became an archive' or 'The types of thoughts that occur when you sit silently for hours each day, for weeks on end in an archive with little human contact, which should probably never be said out loud and certainly should not become the basis of a public talk.' But here we are.

By way of introduction, I want to tell you a brief story. It is a story of coincidence. Frank himself would like the story because he very much liked stories of coincidence, although he had a very different understanding of them most people. Most people interpret coincidences revealing some underlying order or unity, but Frank held that we delight in such moments of accidental meaning precisely because life generally is random and disorderly and they remind us of how much the rest of our lives are completely meaningless. Or as the narrator of Frank's story, 'White Night', which is itself a story about coincidence says: "He did not really suffer from the illusion that the universe was rearranging itself to give him a personal message. He knew that was ultimate egoism." So here is a story about the universe not sending me a message.

I'm here as a Fellow at the National Library of Australia. My fellowship is supported by the Ray Mathew and Eva Kollsman Trust for Research in Australian Literature, for which I am very grateful. But I must admit, I was embarrassed when I received this that I did not know who Ray Mathew was.

Ray Mathew, for those of you who don't know, was an Australian writer mainly of plays, poetry and fiction. He was born in Sydney in 1929, 10 years before Frank was born, and he started publishing around 1950 before leaving Australia for good in 1960. His final publication was a novel in 1967 called 'The Joys of Possession' after which he finally settled in New York where he lived until his death in 2002.

Now, I happen to hold seriously that anybody who receives a grant or fellowship or award or even occupies a chair at a university that is endowed and named after a person, that it is the first obligation and duty of receiving that honour to find out something about the person whose life and work has created this opportunity. And so on my very first day here at the National Library, I requested some of Ray Mathew's books. I was particularly interested in a collection of short stories titled 'A Bohemian Affair' published in 1961, but on day two, I had to start my real work.

The first thing I did was request the microfilm for the Nation Review newspaper for early 1976 because Frank had serialised some short stories in that paper that later that year would be collected into his fourth book called 'Conference-ville.' The very first story I read that day on the microfilm reader was from January 23rd 1976 called 'In-Flight Sadism.' This is a story about the first person narrator, a non-academic writer, flying into a conference where he is to present a paper. On the same flight is a very passive aggressive academic critic named Markham who not only had previously given the narrator's first book a very poor review, but he was also the chair of the session at the conference that the narrator was going to present at and he was also the person designated to publicly respond to the narrator's paper. The story is about Markham chipping away at the narrator's self-confidence before they even arrive at the conference, hence the title 'In-Flight Sadism.' At one point, out of nowhere, Markham says to the narrator: "I saw Ray Mathew when I was on sabbatical." At which, the narrator says to himself: "Stuff Ray Mathew." They then have a conversation about Ray Mathew, how he hasn't published much recently, that he was once a star, a darling of the literary scene who had broken new ground. The narrator said that he had recently found a copy of 'A Bohemian Affair' in a bookshop where it had been on the shelf untouched for 20 years. At which Markham says: "I don't think those early books of his have a continuity beyond the time he wrote them. I suppose it can happen to any writer. No one reads him now." In this story, Markham uses the public fate of an actual Australian author, Ray Mathew, to passive aggressively imply that the narrator is also such an author, somebody that may have been a literary star who had broken new ground, but whose books would not be read beyond the time he wrote them. By extension, this was also the concern that Frank himself had in the mid 1970s. By the time he'd written this story, he had already published three books to much acclaim and he was quickly approaching 40 years of age. In such a moment, Frank turned to the supposed fate of Ray Mathew as a foreshadowing of his own fate.

Of course, Frank has not been forgotten and he is still being read, although not as much as I would like, but this question of posterity looms large in Frank's biography and in his own thinking about his legacy. How would his books be received? How would they be remembered? It is this question of posterity of literary immortality that we are looking at today. More importantly, it is the infrastructure of posterity that interests me and our libraries and archives are central pieces of this cultural infrastructure. Most literary writers are concerned about their public reception about how their works are received and understood by critics and readers. Many writers, as they get older, if they are lucky enough to become successful, become concerned to some extent with how their work will be remembered after they die. Some writers assist in the preparation of their own archives while others are approached by libraries. It is usually only so far - oh, sorry - to the extent that writers generally think about archives, it is usually only so far as thinking about their own and then as an afterthought. Something secondary to their main work, an administrative task to be undertaken, an excuse to clean out the cupboards or tidy up the shed.

What interests me about Frank is that he, as in many things he did, took matters further. He was not just interested in his own archive, but in the very question of archives and he did not see this question as being peripheral to his own literary work, but increasingly a central and fundamental aspect of his work and how he came to think about its production. This was not for Frank an administrative task, but part of the very act of creation itself, what he called the 'archival imagination.'

But Frank also took matters one step further again, and this will take us into a highly speculative part of the talk. Increasingly, Frank came to personally identify with the archive, both metaphorically and as I will try to make the case, literally. Frank not only came to see himself as an archive, a walking, talking archive, but he came to see his archival papers and books as an extension of his own personality, or rather as the scattered and fragmented site of his own decentred sense of self. Not so much walking, but still very much having something to say, and more importantly, existing in perpetuity. In order to make this case, how Frank Moorhouse became an archive, I will tell a series of stories from Frank's life, follow various lines of biographical inquiry, each one on its own not sufficient to prove this somewhat fanciful claim. but in the end, each of these stories do relate to one another and eventually reinforce and support each other. Not toward a tidy conclusion, but simply toward demonstrating why I keep obsessively returning to these unbidden thoughts as I work on Frank's biography.

So keeping that in mind, I want to introduce the first line of inquiry, which is how Frank himself came to use libraries and archives. This story begins, however, with the absence of both. Nowra, on the New South Wales south coast, sorry, in the 1950s, where Frank was born, did not at that time have a local library. For reading material, young Frank had to rely on what he found lying around, what other people, usually adults, had available to them and so made available to him. Later, he would categorise these sources of childhood reading as coming from what he found in the house, his parents' books and newspapers, books he was encouraged to read at school, books given to him as gifts, but also books he found or came across accidentally and finally illicit or pornographic material.

At high school, Frank discovered that the State Library of New South Wales provided a service to deliver books to regional centres. Each month, Frank received a cardboard box of books on the train from Sydney. It allowed him for the first time to choose what he was going to read and he chose books on every subject from history, psychology, sociology, economics, political theory, philosophy, as well as literature. At the same time, the Sydney Morning Herald ran a weekly series called 'Literary Australia,' which briefly outlined the life and work of an Australian author. This was Frank's informal introduction to Australian literature. And so if the newspaper ran a piece on say Steele Rudd or Katharine Susannah Prichard, for example, he would request their books from the library and within a month he'd be reading them for himself. After high school, Frank went to Sydney to work at the Daily Telegraph. He also started but never finished a course at the University of Sydney. In his letters home, he contrasted the busy, noisy newspaper offices, which contained the printing presses, to the quiet scholarly peacefulness of the university campus, and of course the university library, where he spent hours reading and discovering books and ideas he had never heard of before.

He then moved to Wagga Wagga where he continued to work as a journalist. They did have a public library, where Frank read many new and classic works of European and American literature. But then he moved to Lockhart where at the age of 20, he found himself as the editor of the local weekly newspaper. Lockhart did not have a public library. In his newspaper, Frank began a sustained campaign to advocate for the local council to establish a town library. The issue was drawn out for months with frequent articles and editorials about it, but all to no avail. The shire council finally abandoned the idea. They cited budget restrictions with one councillor saying, as Frank quoted in the newspaper: "I would also have to be convinced that there will be a demand for books by the future generations."

For the 1960s, Frank was back in Sydney and he used the State Library of New South Wales as a source for much of his intellectual work for the writing of his articles, his lectures, and his nonfiction pieces. For the most part, although many of these ideas filtered through the characters in his short stories, at this stage, Frank was writing in his fiction about contemporary life, which he found more in the streets, in the bars and in the interactions with other people rather than finding his stories among the library shelves and reading rooms. But in the early 1970s, Frank worked on three different projects, each of which shared the same historical focus, which was on the South Coast of New South Wales during the 1920s and 1930s. Significantly, this was his parents' generation and the period of time directly before he was born in 1938. The first project was a film called 'Between Wars.' The second was a book of short stories called 'The Electrical Experience' and the third was a non-fiction work, a technological history of the South Coast with a focus on the beginning of the dairy industry.

All of these projects caused Frank to go into the library, and beyond that into the archive, to find material for the writing of his fiction and to do so for the first time. He later abandoned the technological history, but much of the research informed 'The Electrical Experience.' The first edition of that book contains illustrations and historical fragments framing the short stories, which Frank gathered from this archival research. The stories themselves detailed process of the electrification of New South Wales, the history of ice manufacturing and changes in cordial and soft drink production.

One of the peripheral characters from 'The Electrical Experience' is a local doctor named Edward Trenbow. Trenbow is also the central figure of Frank's film 'Between Wars.' Again, this work is based upon Frank's archival research this time, including the history of medicine and psychiatry in Australia. In order to build this character, Frank looked to the obituaries of actual doctors upon which he could loosely model his own fictional creation. He then traced their careers backward through the archive for more detail.

One of the main figures he drew on for 'Between Wars' was Dr Reginald Ellery, born 1857, died 1955. He was a psychiatrist and author who fought the medical establishment for a more humane treatment of returned soldiers. This film was originally developed as a 10-part television series and Frank's plan was to use archival documents to frame each episode. What he proposed was that a document would be shown at the beginning of each episode on the screen and then the rest of the episode would present the more complicated and messy reality otherwise hidden behind each of the documents. The 10 documents Frank chose was, he chose and so this became the 10 episodes, which began during the first World War with a wartime medical certificate for an undiagnosed nervous disorder issued by a 25-year-old Dr Trenbow. This was followed in subsequent episodes by an army discharge form by an admission to a mental hospital for war psychosis, a marriage certificate, a birth certificate for Trenbow's son, a summons for an inquiry into practise into the hospital (allegations of malpractice), a bachelor of medicine degree, an eviction notice for returned soldiers squatting on government blocks, an invitation for Trenbow to address a medical conference on his controversial psychiatric methods, and finally his son's enlistment notice to serve in the Second World War. In many respects, this abandoned idea was the source of Frank using similar archival material to frame stories in 'The Electrical Experience.' For Frank, an abandoned idea is never completely abandoned, it is simply kept dormant and such ideas can be found sleeping in his archives.

Now, Frank had been aware of the League of Nations for most of his life. He was taught about it in high school, for example, but it was not really until the early 1970s when he started doing archival research for 'Between Wars' and 'The Electrical Experience' that he came across references to the League perhaps for the first time in his adult life. Dr Reginald Ellery, for example, had written about it in his books, and in a lecture Frank gave in Wollongong in 1975 discussing the making of the film, he raised for the first time publicly his own interest in the League of Nations. For the next decade, while working on other book, film and documentary projects, Frank continued to read and think about the League of Nations. Again, he turned first to the State Library of New South Wales, but he also built his own library of books about the league sourced from secondhand bookshops.

But then in 1986, Frank was awarded a fellowship here at the National Library. The Harold White Fellowship had been established in 1983 for historical research, but Frank was the first fiction writer to receive the fellowship. This was where he did his first sustained research into the League.

From the National Library of Australia in the late 1980s, Frank graduated to the actual League of Nations archives in Geneva in the early 1990s and it was this experience in Geneva, but started here in Canberra, where Frank began seriously thinking about the 'archival imagination.' He has described this in different ways over the years, but here is only one example. In 1995, after 'Grand Days' had been published, he described the encounter between the fiction writer, himself, and the bureaucratic files of the archive as an encounter between story and anti-story. "Bureaucratic files," he said, and I quote, "are popularly caricatured as dry as dust, dusty, arid, devoid of life. I found them far from this. I found the archival deposits imaginatively energising. For me, the deposited detail of these objects and documents generates an unpredictable and volatile imaginative process." By the time Frank said this, he was already a Woodrow Wilson scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Centre in the United States, where he continued working in archives otherwise unavailable to him when writing his first book. In writing the second book, what would become 'Dark Palace,' Frank worked with the Woodrow Wilson papers, but also the archives of the Library of Congress.

I could go on, but to round off this first line of inquiry, which is how Frank himself came to use libraries and archives, I want to mention how we can measure the very real impact of the 'archival imagination' on Frank's work. When he first applied for the Harold White Fellowship here, he said that his proposed book about the League of Nations was going to be a single volume of short stories, modelled loosely on 'The Electrical Experience.' After three months here at the National Library, after considering for the first time the scale of the material available, he said in his Fellowship talk that the project may be three novellas. But after three years in Geneva, the project had expanded again with 'Grand Days' being nearly 600 pages long and that only the first of two books regarding the League of Nations. Edith Campbell Berry, of course, proved bigger than both and so required a third book. A three-year project became a 25-year saga and one of the central reasons for that was because Frank allowed the scope and depth of the project to be determined by the archive itself as a source of possibility that Frank opened himself up to rather than trying to make the research component a secondary or prescribed activity dictated by his own conscious predetermined notions. We can, in other words, plot the literary career of Frank Moorhouse according to the growing importance and centrality of libraries and archives as a medium through which he came to think about the world and to write his own works.

It is against this background of the first line of inquiry that I now want to introduce a second line of inquiry: how Frank came to put together his own archive. Considering he grew up in Nowra in the 1940s and 50s without the experience of using a library, of even being in a library, let alone experiencing an archive, it is remarkable that very early on Frank began to organise his writing life along the lines of an archive. As a teenager still in high school, Frank would write on a typewriter, he would make multiple draughts of each story. He would keep all of the draughts in a folder, one folder per story. And for the final draught, the completed short story, he would type an extra clean copy, which he kept in a separate dated folder with all the other completed stories from that year. In the late 1950s, while a cadet journalist in Sydney, but still a teenager, Frank visited his family in Nowra and slept in his old room. He made this note in his journal. I quote: "Is my writing worth the time and the concentration? Have I a place in the world of writing? Here I sit at my old school desk where I wrote many to be world shattering short stories, which lie in the folders marked 1954, 1955, carefully preserved to assist those who want my old work when I am famous."

Soon after when Frank started submitting his stories to various publications, he would use the clean copy to type out a new copy of the story which he would then post to the editor. He would keep a copy of his own cover letter plus any correspondence from the editor, usually in the form of rejections in those early days, which he would then keep in another folder. In the early 1960s, he even started keeping a story ledger where he kept a record of each story as he completed it, when he completed it, when and where he submitted it, when he received a rejection or when it was accepted for publication. An extra copy of the actual printed journal or magazine that publishes stories would also be purchased for preservation. Significantly, this is not just Frank being organised for his own sake, but as he admitted in his early journal entry, he was also being organised for the sake of other people who may be interested in his work at some future point and he was carefully preserving his papers in order to assist those people, people like me. He was, in other words, from a very young age, adopting the posture of being his own archivist. So even though it was only in the late 1990s that Frank first started talking publicly about the 'archival imagination,' it is clear that his imagination was already structured like an archive from the very beginning of his writing career.

As an aside, in my personal dealings with Frank, he was often resistant to being interrogated as the subject of a biography, but I worked out pretty quickly that if I recruited him as a research assistant in the process of exploring his own archive, that he became much more open and involved in the process, even offering additional information that at that stage had not been submitted to his institutional archives. In many respects, that experience is kind of the basis of this talk. I started thinking about how Frank thought about himself in terms of his own archive.

And so in the mid 1970s, when he was first approached by the National Library to house an archive of his professional literary papers here, it did not come as a surprise. In fact, Frank had been preparing for this moment for the previous 20 years of his life. What did surprise Frank however was that the National Library was going to pay him for his archive. Frank understood the cultural value of his archive, but he hadn't by that stage fully appreciated that it also had an economic value. It was because of this financial consideration, of course, that after Frank had submitted the first consignment of his archive to the National Library, including all his literary papers from childhood up to and including the publication of his first book, 'Futility and Other Animals' in 1969, that all of his subsequent archival material for the remainder of his life went to the Fryer Library at the University of Queensland because they offered him more money.

I will return to this question of economic value soon because it isn't an important component in the larger story I'm trying to tell. But before that, I want to reinforce how our first line of inquiry, how Frank used libraries and archives is intertwined with the second line of inquiry, how Frank put together his own archive. Because the combined question really becomes, how did Frank come to use his own archives or rather how did he incorporate using his own archives amidst his broader use of libraries and archives generally into his own creative process? A process, of course, which as a byproduct continued to generate new material, draughts, notes, correspondence, and so on, which in turn would feed into an ever-expanding personal archive.

I sometimes think that Frank, most people write their work and then the archive is a byproduct. I sometimes think Frank made an archive and his work was the byproduct. I don't know. It's just something that I keep thinking about.

So there are many examples to illustrate this, but I'll offer only two, both associated with the book 'Forty-Seventeen.' So what's widely known is that one of the stories in this collection, 'Portrait of a Virgin Girl,' circa 1955, is made up of lightly revised and edited excerpts from letters that Frank's high school sweetheart and soon to be bride Wendy Halloway wrote to Frank when he was a cadet journalist in Sydney in the 1950s. But Frank had only rediscovered those letters while he was putting together a consignment of his own archival material for the Fryer Library.

What is not as widely known is that 'Forty-Seventeen' also contains another story called 'The Story Not Shown.' This isn't really a short story at all, but is rather an almost verbatim excerpt from a journal that Frank kept when he was a cadet journalist in Sydney in the late 1950s about an experience Frank had when visiting a prostitute in King's Cross. It did not go very well. Frank had only rediscovered this journal when he was a Harold White Fellow here in 1987, a document he had not seen since he first submitted his papers in the mid 1970s. There are many other examples, but the point is that Frank was only ever able to reuse his old material once he'd seen it anew through the lens of the archive. But the larger point is that somewhere through the course of all of this of both using libraries and archives and putting together his own archive, as well as using his own archive as a creative process, Frank began to see himself more and more as an archive.

Buckle up. Now admit at first blush, this sounds absurd, but I'm just the messenger. In Frank's archives in his public talks and correspondence throughout the 1990s, this is how Frank begins to refer to himself. Perhaps a Don Anderson, the Australian critic and longtime friend of Frank, is partly responsible. In a letter to Frank in 1992, he said, "By our age, we are what we write," but Don perhaps did not think that Frank would take this as literally as he did. In a lecture to the history department at the University of Sydney, for example, Frank would later say, I quote, "I would rather this talk today be seen as itself a document contributing to theoretical inquiry rather than an attempt at theory," to which he adds, "I may myself be a document."

In a private fax to friends, when he was researching in the United States, he wrote, and I quote, "Just a note from the archives of the Library of Congress. We are born to become archives, but there is something especially pathetic about someone who works in an archive before he becomes one. Although as I think about it, I'm already an archive." Frank's use of the term 'pathetic' here is not pejorative, I would suggest, but is perhaps best understood in the sense of the pathetic fallacy. The literary conceit whereby the external environment reflects the emotional interior of a character. In this case, Frank's own sense of self, which is already an archive, an inner archive, being emotionally consistent with his surroundings, an external archive. He concludes the same facts by stating, I quote, "I am disoriented in time and place and buried in the bowels of the Library of Congress and feel rather in harmony with myself because of it." Frank is, in other words, at home, a document amongst documents, an archive within an archive.

When he was being more precise, he would speak about the unconscious mind being an archive through which individuals remain anchored to the past. I quote, "The unconscious is an archive within us which the imaginative process can tap. This inner archive contains the impressions and whispers and sensations and things said but not understood, which come from parents and grandparents and others during our formative years. These are impressions on the wax cylinder of the unconscious from earlier generations and through the imagination they can be replayed." Now, this is an idea he began developing when he was initially researching the League while also writing 'Forty-Seventeen' and developing the character of Edith Campbell Berry - the link between both projects. He said at the time, I quote, "In some ways we are a walking archive of antiquated beliefs and genetic and cultural baggage, so this book looks at the archival ghosts we carry within us." Here, Frank has extended this notion. It's not just Frank who was an archive, we are all archives.

In fact, Frank really only came to see himself as an archive as an afterthought. First and foremost, he thought of other people as archives. In one interview, for example, Frank said, "What we never realise about old people is that they are living archives." He would later broaden this to all people of all ages considering human beings generally as walking museums of past beliefs. Earlier, I quoted Frank saying that we are all born to become archives, but as he later argued, we are all born as archives. We are always already these museums of antiquated beliefs and genetic and cultural baggage, and this connection with the past is both metaphorical and physical, both in our relationship with our own sense of self and in our interactions with other people. And this is how Frank came to think about our social worlds, all of us walking archives.

To repeat, this is not only abstract and metaphorical, but also physical. History is something concrete and ever present. In the 1990s, Frank cited an anecdote from Orson Welles who described what Frank was trying to express. The full quote comes from a book called 'This Is Orson Welles' from 1992. In a conversation between Welles and the filmmaker, Peter Baogdanovich, Welles is talking about how as a child he was taken to the theatre and how he met all the greats. It is a very long quote, which I won't give in full, but Welles says, I quote: "This hand that touches you now touched the hand of Sarah Bernhardt. Can you imagine that? That hand I took was a claw covered with liver spots and liquid white. When she was young, Mademoiselle Bernhardt had taken the hand of Madame George, who had been the mistress of Napoleon. Peter, just three handshakes from Napoleon. It's not that the world is so small, but that history is so short. Four or five very old men could join hands and take you right back to Shakespeare." When Frank told the story, he added the line, 'five linked hands.' Now that makes Shakespeare not some figure in the distant past, but somebody physically quite close. For Frank, this was not just a story, but a way of thinking that informed his own 'archival imagination.' History is short. It is only a page away.

He had already thought this way before reading the Orson Welles quote, but the quote helped him articulate his own thinking. Here are two examples of that. First, does anybody here know the Canadian author, Morley Callaghan? He's probably the Canadian Ray Mathew. I've actually got that written down. It seems spontaneous, but it's rehearsed. In 1988, Frank was part of a harbourfront festival of authors in Toronto, Canada. He later described having a spiritual experience at the festival. His words, not mine. An experience which he said involved a recommitment to the literary community. Callaghan was one of the original but lesser known literary figures in the 1920s and 1930s, part of the lost generation. Callaghan was in Paris when Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Gertrude Stein, among others, were in Paris and he was part of their group. He is famous for having a boxing match with Ernest Hemingway in which Callaghan knocked Hemingway down. This bruised more than Hemingway's male ego and they ceased to be friends. Many decades and 23 books later, an 85-year-old Morley Callaghan was at the same literary festival as Frank Moorhouse. And not only did Frank meet him and spend time with him, but more importantly, he shook his hands. Frank later described the experience as him shaking hands with the man who knocked down Ernest Hemingway. What he also meant was that in doing so, Frank himself was shaking hands with Hemingway and with Fitzgerald and with Gertrude Stein. As he said of the event, I quote, "As I talked with Morley over the week, it ceased to be literary history."

Now, when Frank said that this was a spiritual experience, a recommitment to the literary community, he meant that he had assumed a place not only among the living authors of his day, but also amongst the dead authors who continued to move amongst us. Through their books and through telling stories about their lives, that he was shoulder to shoulder with the living of the dead and each seemed as real as the other.

A second example and another story of coincidence. I described how Frank used the archives in the 1970s to find Dr Reginald Ellery, a historical figure, that he could use as a loose model for his character, Dr Edward Trenbow. Well, in Geneva, in the League of Nations archives, he tried to find a similar model upon which to loosely base the career of his character, Edith Campbell Berry. The league archivist suggested the Canadian woman, roughly the same age as Edith named Mary Magichi. So Frank acquainted himself with the archival ghosts of Mary Magichi, following her career at the League.

Soon after, at a dinner, he was introduced to two Canadians. In telling them about his project, he spoke about Mary Magichi. The coincidence is that they happened to know a Magichi in Canada, but they didn't know if they were at all related. So they swapped contact information and soon after Frank heard that these Magichi's in Canada were in fact the children of Mary Magichi, but they knew nothing about her working at the League of Nations. Frank had assumed that Mary was most probably dead, but to his amazement, she was still alive and in her 90s. Frank then arranged to fly to Canada from Geneva in order to meet her.

Significantly in his correspondence with his agent at the time, he was clear about his intentions. He didn't need to meet Mary for anything to do with the project. He just wanted to shake hands. And he did. At great expense. I mean, the rest of the message to his agent was about getting the money to go there just to shake hands with Mary. But by doing so, he felt it would pull him into the League of Nations, into all of the people involved in the League of Nations.

Even before Frank had started writing 'Grand Days,' he said in an interview, "After a while, you have a memory bank and you realise you can see connections of life and continuity before your birth. I find that I'm writing more about the period before I was born and begin to see it as something that happened to me." Let me repeat that last line. "I find that I'm writing more about the period before I was born and begin to see it as something that happened to me." This was 10 years before the fax he sent, which I've already quoted, where he said, "I'm disoriented in time and place and feel rather in harmony with myself because of it." He's disoriented in time and place, the period before he was born as being something that actually happened to him. This is a state of mind that only makes sense in terms of an 'archival imagination.'

Now there are two more lines of inquiry that I want to mention, which combined reinforce this claim that Frank saw himself as an archive and to point to a possible process of how he came to see himself as such. These are more discreet lines of inquiry, so shouldn't take much time, but they are also much more speculative. I'm actually trying to find reasons for this in his archive rather than me just coming up with ideas external to it. So I'm trying to find how he himself came to think this way.

But first, some background to tie what I'm about to say with what I've already said, how Frank used libraries and archives, how he came to put together his own archive. The bridge here is that point I made earlier about the question of economic value. Many authors engage with literature and archives, of course, and also build their own archives. Frank is not unique in this, but very few authors are actively involved in reconfiguring the very legal framework within which libraries and archives operate. A framework within which the role of the author is reconfigured in turn.

In the 1970s, Frank was involved in two legal battles that did precisely this. The first is already widely known, so I won't go into much detail, but I'm speaking of course about the 1974 copyright case where Frank sued the University of New South Wales for authorising the wholesale breach of an author's copyright in their libraries. This case set a legal precedent, which not only reshaped the copyright framework within which libraries and archives operated, but it also led directly to the establishment of the Copyright Agency Ltd to licence and raise fees for works to be used and copied in Australia. Frank was involved not just with the case, but as chair of the Copyright Council for 10 years while establishing the Copyright Agency. This shaped not just how Frank used libraries and archives, but how his own books would be used in turn by other people in libraries and archives.

The second legal battle is not so well known, but I think it is as important and certainly as consequential. When the National Library first approached Frank with an offer to begin purchasing his papers, he realised his manuscripts had an economic value. So he contacted his publisher, Angus and Robertson, and requested that they return all of his manuscripts. The problem was for the most part, they couldn't find them. They were lost or so he was told. So Frank sued them for the amount that he would've otherwise have gotten for them had he sold them to an archive. It was a complicated case and so I won't bore you with the details. You'll have to wait for volume two to come out to be bored by the details. But at one point in defending themselves, Angus and Robertson's lawyers tried to make the case that if an author does not request the return of a manuscript within a reasonable time, then they have abandoned the manuscript. When the court rejected that argument, they tried another one, which was that when an author signs a contract with a publisher in which the publisher has purchased the right to copy and to publish a manuscript, they've also implicitly purchased the manuscript itself. The court rejected that argument as well. So Frank won the case.

Before this case, there was no real legal precedent to clearly define ownership of manuscripts. Frank's case created clarity to the situation. The author owns their own manuscripts. More precisely, the case concluded that the author owns the paper and ink and the publisher merely purchases the right to copy the content of that paper and ink. Henceforth, it became the norm in publishing contracts for manuscripts to be returned to the author upon publication of their book, but this case also provided an additional legal framework within which libraries and archives came to operate and negotiate with more clarity and confidence when preparing archives. Because of Frank, authors had more control over their own archive and to decide what is included, what is not included, or at what stage certain material may or may not be available to these institutions and so to the public. And so between the copyright case and the manuscript case, one of the fundamental reasons why Frank would later come to see himself as an archive is because, I would argue, in a very real sense, he had contributed perhaps more than any other single literary author to shaping how libraries and archives actually operate and negotiate with authors and he did so in his own image. Libraries and archives had become a mirror of Frank's own literary personality.

It is against this background that I now want to trace the two final lines of inquiry. I offer these here in lieu of a conventional conclusion because there is really no satisfying way to end this. The first is to do with memory or how writing distorts or replaces memory. Now, all fiction writers to some extent draw on their own experience in order to write their works, but the resulting work is far removed from the original experience. Frank noted that this was largely because that original experience is usually mixed with other sources of inspiration. What one takes from one's reading, what one takes from other people's experience, what one takes from one's own thinking, and simply what one makes up. And then this is all filtered through the imagination, literary convention, and the internal demands of narrative and form. What appears on the page is very different from what happened before it reached the page.

But by the time he reached his thirties, even before he had published his first book in 1969, he began to realise that the works of fiction he produced often suppressed, obliterated, or otherwise replaced the memory of the original experience that may have initiated or motivated the writing of the story in the first place. He wrote at the time in a letter, I quote: "The worst thing is of course that the stories distort your memory. By incorporating one incident and processing it into fiction, I find it impossible to remember how the incident occurred in reality. I have difficulty in remembering now what incidents occurred in my life and what occurred in my stories. Am I going mad? Is this some mental disease, personality disturbance?"

This proved to be an ongoing disturbance. When he was in his forties, Frank said in an interview: "It gets very confusing. At the end of a group of stories, I can't remember what happened to me and what happened in the fiction." Again, in his fifties, in another interview, he explained why he couldn't accurately answer the questions put to him by saying, "But remember that I do suffer from being the writer, that I am still in the fog of the narrative to some extent. Under these circumstances, we can begin to see how then somebody like Frank could come to say that "I am a document" because for Frank, these documents, this paper and ink once written, very much replaced his own life as lived and they became the source material for his own sense of self.

For the second and final line of inquiry, I will reframe this notion into a more familiar and contemporary discourse, the language of copyright and the question of moral rights more specifically, albeit pushed to an extreme limit that everybody will disagree with.

It is well known that Frank was obsessed with the copyright law. As a literary author, he saw the imaginative potential in it and sometimes that potential went beyond what was currently legally enforceable, but this is why he also tried to change laws to fit his imagination rather than to curtail his imagination to fit some preexisting set of laws.

In 1979, the lawyers, David Catterns and Peter Banki had arranged a national symposium on the question of moral rights. It was actually Catterns and Banki who were the legal minds behind Frank's copyright case in 1974. It was they, along with Gus O'Donnell, founder of the Copyright Council, that deserved most of the public recognition for this case. Now, Australian creators at the time, and in fact, to this very day, do not have any binding moral rights protection, the purpose of that symposium was to ask the question of whether or not we should and to what degree existing copyright law picked up the weight of this absence.

I won't go into too much technical detail. I'll only mention a few of the salient points that speak to our larger topic paraphrased from this symposium. Moral rights are distinct from but co-equal with economic rights. This expanded dual conception of copyright covers both the moment of creation, the writing of a work and the moment of making it public, the publishing of a work. Banki defined moral rights in terms of a work expressing, I quote: "The personality of its author and the right to defend this is an essential feature of copyright. It is seen as a matter of integrity." He actually suggested in an Australian context a better term would be 'personal' or 'personality rights' rather than 'moral rights' because we have a much narrower conception of the term 'moral' than the French do, which is where the notion of moral rights largely originated.

Banki described this dual conception of copyright by citing a leading French copyright intellectual of the day, Henri Desbois, who said, "Every work is the mirror of a personality and the artist would be a victim of a breach of conscience if it were made public without his consent." Now what I'm suggesting is what Frank took from this and took seriously is the notion that the work expresses the author's personality. It is the mirror of a personality and that it is a matter of personal integrity, but moreover, that this personality, this sense of self appears only at the moment of creation in the very act of writing a work. We can see how this notion is consistent with the previous line of inquiry. On the one hand for Frank, the act of writing of producing a document usurps lived experience and becomes the experience itself. While on the other hand, the personality of the author only appears at the moment of writing at the moment the document is produced and it is this dual process in the creation of a document where both experience and personality reside that becomes the stable organised basis for Frank's own sense of self.

This symposium actually took place right in the middle of Frank's manuscript case against his publisher. Here, the symposium reinforced for Frank the importance of the ownership of an author's manuscripts, while at the same time Frank was fighting in the courts for the ownership of his own manuscripts in a sense, literally fighting for himself. And the symposium linked this to the notion of moral rights. As Catterns said, I quote: " Since copyright subsists automatically as soon as a work is created," and here he referred to section 32 of the Copyright Act of 1968, "the author can usually use his copyright to decide whether or not his work will be made public. Of course, his physical possession of his manuscripts helps too. He can lock it in the bottom drawer," or as Frank was learning, authors could make it public or else they could sell it to an archive.

But Frank took the further step outside the bounds of the existing Copyright Act and considered possession of the manuscript as at the same time a form of self-possession, a physical manifestation of his moral or personality as an author. Through various court cases, libraries and archives have become a mirror of Frank's own personality, but when Frank himself looked into that mirror in order to catch a glimpse of himself, he saw a library and an archive. These manuscripts, these papers sorted into folders, kept in boxes and shelved are in a very real sense Frank's personality incarnated. He is a document, or rather he is the sum total of all these documents. Frank Moorhouse is an archive. Thank you.

Lauren Smith:

Thank you, Matthew. For orienting and locating Frank within the bowels of this archive and the Fryer Library, it must be said, and for shoring up in your biography and the talk and your fellowship, he's continuity, hopefully. We now have time for some questions. I do ask that you wait for a microphone to come to you as this presentation is being recorded. Does anyone have any questions?

Audience member 1:

Thank you, Matthew. That was a really fascinating talk. I've been reading recently about the idea that archives are inherently and necessarily incomplete and the idea, forgive me, it either comes from Carolyn Steedman or Edmund de Waal. I was wondering if you got a sense from Moorhouse that he ever felt that his archive personally and the literal archive that he made were incomplete.

Matthew Lamb:

I think that's partly the reason why he identified with it. Frank is very much an incomplete person by his own account. His own sense of self was always fraught and I mean there's even references, this is kind of in his stories, but also in his own notes where he talks about how he has no centre, he has no sense of self and so he kind of latched onto these external things to kind of help orient himself. So I think that's very much the case and of course all archives are incomplete. As anyone who's worked in it, there's always that frustrating bit between this and this. You want to know what happened in there and there's just no way of showing it. So I think in telling the story based on archives and particularly in the biography, I have also tried to show the gaps and not to try to come up or to think that there is any way I can use them to create a definitive image of Frank, because that's impossible.

Audience member 2:

Thanks, Matthew. That was terrific. You reinforced my good fortune of having shaken Frank Moorhouse's hand quite a few times. There was something right at the beginning of your talk that I just wanted you to expand on that I thought was really interesting in reading 'Strange Paths,' not once but several times I think he and you quoted a piece refers to him "when I'm a famous author writer or famous author" or something like that. Of the many authors I've been fortunate enough to know, I've never heard one of them describe themselves from a perspective of being famous and I wondered whether and that didn't come through to me at least in the latter part of Frank's life. I wonder whether he did actually see himself as a teenager when he wrote that piece that you quoted as being famous one day and that was a motivating force that somehow or other getting to fame.

Matthew Lamb:

So the question of fame, I think that was more just a teenage thing because you remember at the time, this is like in the 1950s and he's encountering people like reading Ernest Hemingway who was being portrayed in the media as a famous writer.That's how they were described. So that's what he was aspiring to at the time. I think he just meant more an established author and author taken seriously. That's why that recommitment that happened with Morley Callaghan in the late '80s, he'd kind of felt like before that he'd kind of felt like he was not losing his way but kind of not being taken seriously or not being understood or not really understanding himself what he was doing. He'd also gone into making films at that point and he'd just realised that maybe he shouldn't be making films. He should be really just focusing on the writing. So that kind of recommitted him to the literary community. I think it was more, not so much fame as in he wanted to be a household name and have everyone know him and be a celebrity. I think it was more he just wanted to be a well-known author up there with his idols like Hemingway and so forth. Does that make sense? Yeah.

Audience member 3:

Thank you so much for your talk. That was amazing. Even though as an archivist, I'm a bit upset being called pathetic, even though he changed his mind.

Matthew Lamb:

Let me just stop you there. My girlfriend is a librarian and she said to me that everything I said was wrong or simplistic. So you're in good company.

Audience member 3:

That aside, I'm curious as to whether you think his intense sort of curation of his own archive has lent itself to a creation of his character and how he wants to be remembered and how he wants his archive to sort of display him as, especially coming from that childhood sort of like, "I want to be famous. I want to be remembered." Do you think he's trying to tell a narrative through his archive?

Matthew Lamb:

I do. There is a sense, because one of the things with Frank very early on, and this gets into more his personal life and the fact that he was always conflicted about what his gender and sexuality was, but also about his place in the world just generally. And the argument I make in the first volume is he ... Sorry, his broader argument against censorship and his arguments for free expression was precisely because he felt that because he didn't have the information available to him as a young person, he wasn't able to work out who he was. So it wasn't he was saying: "I know who I am and I just want to express it" he's going: "The conditions of our society did not allow me to do that."

So as society changed and he was part of changing that society, he himself had different understandings of himself at different points in his life and I do think that that is sometimes reflected. It's certainly reflected in his public statements. Sometimes he would say, so for example, the first time he admitted to having homosexual relationships was in a student newspaper, was in 'Tharunka,' but he definitely wouldn't have said that in The Bulletin because his parents read that. But then later he would say it more publicly in like The Australian ... So it was at different points in his life. He was comfortable to reveal stuff and I think his own curation of his archives and the consignments over the years also does reflect that to a degree. The one that's here [at the National Library] is really just very professional. It is all that stuff that I said, everything in the folders and the manuscripts and the letters and the correspondence, but the Fryer [Library] has some of the more private stuff from this period.

But then of course at the end of his life, and this is kind of a grey area, is that after he passed and his house was packed up, everything was just kind of boxed and sent to the Fryer [Library], but it hadn't been accessioned or looked at when I was given permission from the estate to see it. So it was kind of a different experience because when you given permission to go into an archive, you kind of have permission. Whereas this was just boxes of stuff and there was stuff in there that wasn't in the archive and there was some stuff I had to mention should probably not be in the archive. Yeah. So he did kind of keep some stuff of himself separate. Does that answer that? Don't worry. It's nothing nefarious. It doesn't change our impression of him.

Audience member 4:

Can I follow on from that and ask whether you found material that was not in his archive but does exist and reveals stuff about him?

Matthew Lamb:

Thank you, because now you've given me the opening of talking about how wonderful librarians and library assistants are. So while I was here, I discovered the talk that he gave when he was the Harold White Fellow and that was in 1987. And during that period, he even went through his own archives and was looking back at what they have and what he'd given, including what he said was his first published short story, which was in a student newsletter, school annual in like, I think it was like 1954 or something. And so that's as far as Frank was concerned, his first published short story. But I knew that he went to Wollongong Tech before that, so that was at Nowra High, but in the three years before that, he went to Wollongong Tech. So I just contacted the library there and asked them if they happened to have any student newsletters or anything from that period. And one of the great library assistants, who is in the acknowledgements, went through their own boxes of stuff out the back, dug up and not only found a newsletter that Frank edited, but it had his first essay that he'd written about the history of the printing press and it had his very first short story written when he was about 12 years old called 'Trouble at the Tech.' So yes, I did find lots of stuff outside of the official archives, which kind of helped. Then I'd share that with Frank and it kind of helped him reconfigure his own thinking about things. Does that answer the question? Good.

Audience member 5:

Just on the question of the archive being partly here and partly in Queensland, was that a difficult decision for him? Does the financial motivation...

Matthew Lamb:

It was entirely the financial motivation.

Audience member 5:

But I guess having carefully created an archive with an eye to posterity, splitting it would seem to be...

Matthew Lamb:

Yeah, but sometimes everyday expenses come in. He and his agent would joke that sometimes when he was ... So he'd put together his forward planning and part of it would be how much he's going to get from royalties, how much he's projecting to get from things. And then sometimes if there's a gap, he'd go: "Let's see what I can find to put in a box and sell to the archive." And there's even a documentary in the 1980s which has him scrambling around underneath his studio in the dirt, just pulling out boxes that have been sitting there for like 20 years and then looking at stuff in there, which I've then subsequently seen in the archive. So yeah, he did sometimes do that, but he saw it because once he saw it as a ... So for him being a writer meant you had to make money from your writing in any way you can in order to continue writing. So for him, he saw it as a source of income. The whole idea that you can make money from your own archive was just a revelation to him and it is worth. It's worth every penny.

Lauren Smith:

This will be our last question, just so everybody ...

Audience member 6:

Hi Matthew. My name's Jude Dodd. I spoke to you by email some years ago.

Matthew Lamb:

Hello, how are you?

Audience member 5:

Good, thank you. I'm just wondering, posthumous arrangements for archives, both of them, what are they normally or in this particular situation?

Matthew Lamb:

I don't know. You're going to have to ask somebody here at the [National] Library.

Audience member 5:

Are you able to access both of them...

Matthew Lamb:

Ah yeah.

Audience member 5:

Now that Frank's died?

Matthew Lamb:

Yeah.

Audience member 5:

Yes you are. Interesting.

Matthew Lamb:

Yeah.

Audience member 5:

I'm just curious to know how it works.

Matthew Lamb:

Yeah. So I had this incident when I was first fresh, didn't understand what I was doing, going in and trying to just work stuff out. And this is at Fryer [Library] so nobody here can be blamed. So I was at Fryer [Library] and I was doing stuff and I was photocopying some stuff and the person behind the counter was trying to tell me I couldn't photocopy all of that stuff and I was trying to tell them that I could. And then we got into an argument, but I kept my cool because I've been on the other side of the desk, so I kept my cool and I was like: "Okay, that's okay. I won't do it now. I'll sort it out."

I then happened to the next week to be seeing and Frank in Sydney and he introduced me to his friend and lawyer, Peter Banki, who as I said, actually helped write the Copyright Act and the subsequent court case and everything. So between Peter Banki and Frank Moorhouse, they wrote a letter that Frank signed giving me permission to do anything I wanted, which I then took back in and went. So it's one of those kind of weird Kafkaesque moments where not many people who work in archives get to have the person that created the legal framework, write you a letter explaining what you can do within that legal framework.

The only other thing like that, which I'm just thinking of now, which has nothing to do with your question was when I met Frank's childhood friend, Paul Coombs, and visited him - I normally don't dress as well as this - and I met him in Nowra and he thought I was a bum. And he was tidying out his stuff and he gave me some of his old clothes, which I then had to walk around with in a plastic bag, which just made me look like more of a bum. But then I would occasionally, the trousers didn't fit and so I gave them to my girlfriend who would wear them in the garden and occasionally I'd just look out the window and have this moment of going: "She's wearing Frank Moorhouse's childhood best friend's trousers. What the hell am I doing?" There's weird things like that. So I can see why Frank does get very disoriented in time and place. You kind of have these really jarring moments of going: "I don't know what's happening here." Or meeting people such as yourself who know exactly what the correspondence was about.

Lauren Smith:

Thank you everybody. Those were great questions, very good stories. A few quick plugs as we finish today. If you enjoyed today's presentation and would like to know more, copies of 'Strange Paths' are available in our bookshop upstairs, as I said, it's very good.

I also hope you can join us for our next fellowship lecture. These are always great. It doesn't matter if you have a particular interest in it or not. Every fellowship presentation is eyeopening and a brand new way of understanding our collections and the world. And so please come along to the next one, which is 'Experiences of Polio in 1950s Australia,' which will be delivered by 2025 National Library Fellow Professor Catharine Coleborne at 12:30 Thursday the 18th of June. On our website and our YouTube channel, there are also videos of previous fellowship presentations and this is well worth your time.

Thank you for attending today, whether it was online or here in person with us. If you could join me in thanking [Dr] Matthew Lamb one more time.