Martindale Library
Author: Tully Barnett
The name Mortlock will always be associated with books and libraries, both in South Australia and in the ever-circulating lists of the world’s most beautiful libraries. The Mortlock Wing of the State Library of South Australia is picturesque, but it is guarded both literally and figuratively by the shadow of the Mortlock family. A photographic portrait of Jack Mortlock sits, somewhat uneasily, at the entrance to the wing named after him and his family, the second owners of Martindale Hall. In the portrait, John Andrew Tennant (Jack) Mortlock sits holding a gun below the family crest in the upper right-hand corner, guarding the family’s baronial pretensions.
After Dorothy Mortlock died in 1979, the bequest Jack Mortlock had made before his own death was fulfilled, leaving $1.8 million to the State Library of South Australia, which funded the renaming of the Jervois Wing, the original 1884 building, in 1986 as the Mortlock Library of South Australiana. The building that became the Mortlock Wing had originally opened on 18 December 1884 serving as a public library, museum and art gallery for the colony of South Australia.
Why the bequest? The State Library of South Australia’s website suggests that Jack Mortlock frequently went to the public library to ask a question about identifying a species of flower or similar and found the knowledge and service there transformative.
About 126 kilometres north of the Mortlock Wing is the library at Martindale Hall, the supervising architect for which was also the architect of the Mortlock Wing of the State Library. The library at Martindale comprises ten bookcases of shelves, a dresser, framed pictures and memorabilia, and in the centre of the room an imposing billiard table that was too big to be extracted when the Bowmans sold the building in 1891.
Like much in the Hall, the collection of books there today is what has survived the decades of changing ownership (the Mortlocks to the University of Adelaide to the Department of Environment and Water) and the mixed use of the space (as a host residence for agricultural-studies students and as bed-and-breakfast accommodation that holds famed How to Host a Murder Mystery parties). Dorothy gave many books away before she died. Some of the books there now have been introduced during the Hall’s shifting identities, including cosy thrillers for the B&B guests. But the majority of the books in the current collection contain the J. A. T. Mortlock bookplate glued inside the front cover.
The books are diverse in their content and style, including British, royal and military histories, travel narratives describing far-flung places, popular texts of their time, and many jolly good reads. There are some classics of literature, particularly Charles Dickens, but more non-fiction works that are in keeping with the Mortlock family’s aristocratic yearnings, colonial militantism and agricultural acquisition.
Another interesting concentration of books in the Martindale Hall library are science-fiction works. There are a number of texts by H. G. Wells, for example.
The bookplate means that it is possible to identify books that once belonged to Mortlock in other collections, primarily the University of Adelaide’s library because of the association between the university and the Mortlock family both before Jack Mortlock died and after. But some items from the Mortlock collection circulate in the used-book market.
Prior owners are evident in the Mortlock collection as well. The family purchased books second-hand from other libraries or second-hand sellers and then put the Mortlock bookplate in them. We wonder whether he purchased books by the metre.
But it is not accurate to suggest that the library existed only as a tool for self-fashioning. Rather, many sources describe Jack Mortlock as an avid reader.
For example, Jack Mortlock was described as an ‘omnivorous reader’ in a 1924 edition of Our Great Northerner (a newspaper of northern South Australia). The author, V. de P. Gillen, in describing Jack Mortlock’s lack of interest in sport, says that ‘by nature and by virtue of his indubitably great intellect and love of learning he was predestined to be a University professor. The inescapable fact that he was an inheritor of great wealth doubtless dimmed his ambitions’.
Those ambitions were directed towards developing his family’s place in a quasi-aristocracy of the super-wealthy agricultural producers of colonial Australia.
The Bookplate
According to the State Library of South Australia, Jack Mortlock’s bookplate, pasted into many of the books in the library at Martindale Hall, bears the family coat of arms, which was purchased by J. A. T. Mortlock in 1936. The bookplate has the inscription ‘Hic labor hoc opus’, which means ‘This is the difficulty, this the task’ or ‘This work, this toil’. The purchasing of a coat of arms was consistent with the Mortlocks’ self-fashioned barony.
The bookplate makes it easier to identify the books that had once been part of the Mortlock library that may now be in other library collections such as the University of Adelaide or in the private market such as antiquarian booksellers or eBay.
These do not always tell the stories that align with contemporary values. And this creates dilemmas for researchers in the telling of these histories. For example, in seeking items in the world with the Mortlock bookplate inside them, we found on eBay a book called To-Day and To-Morrow by J. H. Curle. It was listed as a first edition published in 1926. At first, we thought it was a science-fiction text, a favoured genre in the Mortlock family library at Martindale. We are interested in what role science-fiction might have played in the family’s imaginings of family, country, future and identity.
However, on closer inspection of the publication in other library catalogues, we discovered that the subtitle of the book is The Testing Period of the White Race. We discovered Curle was a prominent member of the Eugenics Society and gave them £2,000 in his will.
The dilemma. What to do with this book?
It has a J. A. T. Mortlock bookplate. It is no longer at Martindale Hall but somehow found its way to sale on eBay. Was it given away by Dorothy? Was it pinched by a guest staying at the Hall? Was it quietly disposed of because of its unsavoury content?
Digitisation enables researchers to reunite dispersed book collections. But there is an ethics to the representation. We continue to wrestle with how to do this. But it is important to acknowledge that this, and any other problematic text in the collection, is connected to a series of behaviours that are emblematic of and contribute to the relationship between the Mortlock family and the cultural and intellectual milieus that supported their claim to colonial power.