Academic literature on the topic 'City library Dresden'

This contribution shows an approach to match historical images from the photo library of the Saxon State and University Library Dresden (SLUB) in the context of a historical three-dimensional city model of Dresden. In comparison to recent images, historical photography provides diverse factors which make an automatical image analysis (feature detection, feature matching and relative orientation of images) difficult. Due to e.g. film grain, dust particles or the digitalization process, historical images are often covered by noise interfering with the image signal needed for a robust feature matching. The presented approach uses quadrilaterals in image space as these are commonly available in man-made structures and façade images (windows, stones, claddings). It is explained how to generally detect quadrilaterals in images. Consequently, the properties of the quadrilaterals as well as the relationship to neighbouring quadrilaterals are used for the description and matching of feature points. The results show that most of the matches are robust and correct but still small in numbers.

The author considers the publications of the “Formula of Concord” (lat. Formula Concordiae), one of the principal symbolic books of Lutheranism. For the first time the article reveals part of the collections of the Russian State Library (RSL), containing within the displaced cultural values ten editions of the “Formula of Concord” in German, the first of them (Dresden, 1580, Shtekel and Berg Printers) is presented in four copies. The article traces the entire history of the monument, which is equal by dogmatic significance to the “Augsburg Confession” — the earliest exposition of the doctrinal statements of Lutheranism. “Book of Concord” was supposed to stop the strife between Orthodox Gnesiolutherans and Pro-Calvinist Melanchthonists that arose after Luther’s death, when his friend and associate Philip Melanchthon, inclined to Calvinism, became the head of Lutherans. In matters of faith, he showed pliability, which provoked conflicts. Jacob Andreae became the author of the concise version of Concordia. Martin Chemnitz took over the editorship of the article “On Free Will”, and David Khitreus, who was involved in the issues of Communion, joined the work. The first version of the “Formula of Concord” was completed in the summer of 1576 in the city of Torgau, where Elector Augustus of Saxony convened the theological Convention. After receiving comments and minor amendments, the document was solemnly signed in Berg on May 29, 1577.The author analyses the composition of the book. The original version in 12 articles was written in German, and then translated into Latin by Lucas Osiander. However, the desire to unite all Lutheran churches under the auspices of the new symbol did not succeed — the “Formula of Concord” received Church’s recognition only in the electorates of Saxony and some other areas.The study of all ten copies of “Concordia” from the RSL leads to the conclusion that this almost complete collection of all published editions of “Formula of Concord” gives a largely comprehensive view of them: demonstrates borrowings, imitations of the first edition (Dresden, 1580), as well as features and innovations of individual publications. Some of them are unique, for example, the personal copy of the Saxon elector Augustus or the illuminated copy belonged to the Dukes of Saxony. The article may be of interest to art historians, book historians, source researchers and museum workers.

The diversity of Masurian dialects, the lack among the Masurian society of well-educated people who use these dialects on a daily basis made it impossible to develop a uniform dialect pattern. This, in turn, caused that there are no examples of Masurian dialect literature. In 1975, Prof. Wojciech Chojnacki described John Bunyan’s “The Holy War”, which was published in 1900 in Herne, Westphalia, translated into the Masurian dialect and given the dialect title “Ta Swenta Woyna”. The book was translated and published by a miner, Jacob Sczepan. A renewed interest in the translation of Bunyan’s work appeared after the publication of its digitized version by the University Library of the University of Warmia and Mazury in Olsztyn in 2017. The analysis of the dialect used by Sczepan allowed to classify it to the West Masurian dialect in its Nidzica form. Research queries of address and parish registers revealed only one person who could have been the author of the translation, i.e. Jacob Sczepan, born on 21.7.1867 in Witówko (Nidzica Poviat). The same Jacob Sczepan, a mining foreman, was recorded in the address register of the city of Herne in 1900. The Westphalian miner from Masuria was probably a member of the Fellow-ship Movement, while Bunyan’s work was one of the most significant and popular pietistic works. Sczepan ad-dressed his translation to pious Masurian exiles like him. For this reason, his dialect is faithful to the language spo-ken at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries by the inhabitants of the Nidzica, Działdowo and Szczytno areas. This authenticity of Sczepan’s dialect makes his work unique. There is no other such extensive and authentic record of the already extinct dialect in the Masurian culture. The translation of Bunyan’s book was intended to enlighten and comfort his countrymen torn from steeped-in-traditional-piety Masuria, who were thrown into the industrialised world of the Ruhr region. However, for us, it is a valuable monument of the culture that no longer exists today.

The Franciscan Monastery of St Domnius at Kraj on the island of Pašman houses an incunable edition of Augustine’s The City of God (De Civitate Dei) which was printed in Venice by Nicolas Jenson in 1475. The incunable features beautiful Renaissance multi-coloured illuminations painted in tempera, sepia, ink and water colours while gold foils and gold dust were used on fol. 17 (the page number is not original but was subsequently added in pencil; this folio contains the beginning of Book 1) and a number of other folios. The illumination on fol. 17 consists of two phytomorphic initials, a decorative border and independent figural scenes while a number of other folios are decorated with phytomorphic initials of the littera notabilior type, the height of which corresponds to two lines, painted in red or blue. The top and left margin of the first page of Book 1 are filled with a decorative border terminating in trilobes on each end. The ornamental scheme of the border consists of a band made up of five thin lines which undulates in a spiral and thus forms circles. These are filled with flowers, leaves and berries painted in blue, green and cyclamen purple but also with gold stylized burdock flowers (Lat. Arctium lappa; some scholars call them gold dots, that is, bottoni dorati). The remaining fields are filled with bent scrolls. In the upper left corner of the frame is a goldfinch. The initial I, composed of phytomorphic motifs in blue, green and cyclamen purple and their shades, is painted against a gold background of the rectangular field situated at the beginning of the text column on the left-hand side. Inside the decorative border, placed at the height which corresponds to the centre of the initial, is a medallion with the bust of St Augustine depicted in the open sky with elongated white clouds and no other details. The illusion of the spatial depth was achieved through the use of tonal gradations: the shades of blue are darker at the top and lighter in the lower half of the sky. St Augustine is dressed in a white robe and a red cloak with a black hood. He is wearing a white mitre with a horizontal and perpendicular band highlighted with gold dust. The shadows and folds of his clothes were articulated with black and white lines. His right hand is pointing to the open book which was painted at the height of his chest. The fingers on his right hand are elongated and thin. St Augustine’s gold nimbus was painted as a full circle the left half of which was outlined in white and the right half in black. St Augustine is directing his gentle and sad gaze upwards. His head is slightly bent. His round and bony head is marked by the large round eyes with prominent sclera and dark circles underneath while the arched eyebrows are thinner at their ends. The nose is small and the mouth is turned downwards. The plasticity of the face and its complexion were articulated with white and pink shades. The trimmed dark beard is depicted with short lines in lighter and darker shades. The ornamental frame which fills the top margin corresponds to the one in the left margin but was decorated more modestly because the miniaturist placed the scroll bearing the printer’s name and the scroll identifying the text as belonging to Book 1 at the centre of the frame which left only the beginning and the end of the frame to be decorated. The scroll with the printer’s name is emphasized by a golden burdock flower at the top of the frame and a golden teasel flower (Lat. Dipsacus fullonum) at the bottom. The lower margin features two symmetrical angels, rendered in a somewhat imprecise drawing, who kneel on the ground painted in the shades of green and brown. The physiognomy of the angels is similar to that of St Augustine. Their round heads have small eyes and noses, shaded circles under the eyes and arched eyebrows. The mouths are depicted as thin lines with pronounced ends and are further accentuated by a dot beneath the lower lip. The plasticity of their faces was achieved through the tonal gradation of pink and white. The angels’ hair, ochre in colour and highlighted with gold dust, is thick and short and covers the tops of their heads like a helmet. The outspread wings were painted in dark and light shades of blue. Two wide red scrolls with white highlights emerge symmetrically from behind the angels at their waist height. Wavy tendrils and gold stylized teasel flowers extend from the red scroll. The angels hold a laurel wreath between them. The colour of the circular field inside the wreath is cyclamen purple. The wreath is formed by three rows of leaves which are bound by four regularly spaced ties. The leaves’ edges and tips were painted in light and dark shades of green. Inside the wreath is a Renaissance crest surrounded by thin white wiggly tendrils with sprouting leaves. The shield, in the shape of a horse’s head, is divided horizontally into the dark blue upper half and the red lower half. It features a gold lion with his mouth wide open who is facing right and holding a tree with his front paws. The tree’s pyramidal top is decorated with small dots indicating leaves and fruit. The shield’s right half is outlined in white and the left one in black. The second text column on the first page of Book 1 is decorated with the painted initial letter G. It consists of phytomorphic motifs in blue, red, yellow and cyclamen purple and their shades. Two small leaves are attached to the initial on its left-hand side. As is the case with the crest, the initial was additionally decorated with elegant white tendrils sprouting leaves and highlighted with gold dust. The background is also gold while the rectangular field around the initial is outlined in a thin black line. Two wavy tendrils and two gold stylized teasel flowers emerge from the corners of the frame on the left-hand side while a green leaf appears at the centre. Apart from these illuminations and initials on fol. 17, the incunable contains other initials, one for the beginning of each of the remaining twenty one book, and all of them consist of blue, green and cyclamen pink phytomorphic motifs painted against a gold background inside a black rectangular frame. The plasticity of these initials was achieved through tonal gradation and the use of yellow while thin white undulating tendrils with variations in width and highlights in gold dust enriched the decoration. Some sentences in the text were emphasized by numerous initials in red or blue of the littera notabilior type the height of which corresponds to two lines of the text. The illuminations of this incunable edition of the De Civitate Dei belong to north Italian or Venetian Renaissance painting and they demonstrate numerous significant similarities with the works of the well-known Venetian miniaturist whom the scholarly literature identified as Maestro del Plinio di Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (Maestro del Plinio di Pico or, more commonly, Maestro di Pico). The attribution of the illuminations in this incunable to Maestro di Pico, who may have been helped by his workshop and assistants especially during the painting of the decorative frame and initials, is based on the figure of St Augustine and the angels who support the crest. Their features display the same typology which characterizes the works of Maestro di Pico. Identical angels appear in the bottom margin of Brunetto Latini’s Il Tesoro (Gerardus de Lisa, Treviso, 1474; Cambridge, Mass., Harvard, Houghton Library, Inc. 6459, c. 7). The figure of St Augustine shows pronounced similarities with the figure of a Dominican monk, set inside the initial O of the littera historiata type, in Nicolaus de Auximo’s Supplementum (Franciscus Renner et Nicolaus de Frankofordia, Venice, 1474; Biblioteca Marciana, Inc. Ven. 494, c.2). Identical angels and putti can be found in the bottom margins of Strabo’s Geographica (Minneapolis, Univ. of Minnesotta Library, Ms. 1460/f St., c.1), and in two copies of Pliny’s Historia Naturalis (Venice, N. Jenson, 1472, Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, Vèlins 498 and Venice, N. Jenson, 1472, San Marino, CA, Huntington Library, n. 2289). A beautiful comparative example is the Biblia Latina (Franciscus Renner & Nicolaus de Frankfordia, 1475, Dallas, Texas, Southern Methodist University, Bridwell Library) and its first page which has a similar composition to that in the incunable from Kraj. The figure of St Jerome, depicted inside a littera historiata provides a plethora of specific Morellian details which are essential for the attribution of the illuminations in the incunable from Kraj to Maestro di Pico. Striking similarities in the depictions of saints, phytomorphic initials and decorative frames can also be found in two psalters (one in Venice, Biblioteca Querini Stampaglia, Inc. 6, the other in Siena, Biblioteca S. Bernardino del Convento dell’Osservanza) and in the first page of the Psalms in a breviary from Paris (Bibliothèque Ste-Geneviève, OE XV 147 Rés). Similar saints and angels all of which belong to the same figural typology were used to decorate three copies from the Commissioni series made for Doge Agostino Barbarigo (Commissione del doge Agostino Barbarigo a Girolamo Capello, 1487, Venice, Bib. Del Museo Correr, MS Cl. III. 33 (fig. 15); Commissione del doge Agostino Barbarigo a Paolo di Canale, 1489, Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, Lat. 4729, c.2, and Commissione del doge Agostino Barbarigo a Tommaso Loredano, 1490, Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, Lat. 4730, c.1). Further parallels can be found in the illuminations of a breviary from Augsburg (c. 1480, Universitätsbibl., Cod. I.2.2o 35) the first page of which has a lettera istoriata with the figure of St Paul whose physiognomy closely resembles that of St Augustine in the incunabule from Kraj, while the bottom margin features centrally placed angels which are identical to those at Kraj. Equally important comparative material is found in three Paduan incunables (Biblioteca del Seminario Vescovile) which contain illuminations attributed to Maestro di Pico. The distinctive features of the angels, putti and saints as well as the type of decoration used in the margins of these incunables also demonstrate striking similarities with the illuminations from Kraj. Other examples include Lattanzi’s Opera (Giovanni da Colonia and Johannes Manthen, Venice, 1478; Forc. M. 3.2), Jacopo da Varagine’s Legenda aurea (Gabriele di Pietro, Venice, 1477, with a likely contribution of his workshop; Forc. M. 2.22) and Cipriano’s Opera (Vindelino da Spira, Venice, 1471; Forc. K. 2.12). On the basis of the comparative analyses outlined above and the similarities which have been noted, it can be concluded that the illuminations in the incunable of St Augustine’s De Civitate Dei (Nicolas Jenson, Venice, 1475), housed in the Monastery of St Domnius at Kraj, were painted by the well-known Venetian Renaissance miniaturist Maestro di Pico. Regardless of the possible input of his workshop and assistants during the painting process of the decorative frame and initials, these illuminations help expand the catalogue of Maestro di Pico’s works and represent valuable contribution to the painting in Renaissance Dalmatia.

Rexroth, Frank / Teresa Schröder-Stapper (Hrsg.), Experten, Wissen, Symbole. Performanz und Medialität vormoderner Wissenskulturen (Historische Zeitschrift. Beihefte (Neue Folge), 71), Berlin / Boston 2018, de Gruyter Oldenbourg, 336 S. / Abb., € 89,95. (Lisa Dannenberg-Markel, Aachen) Enenkel, Karl A. E. / Christine Göttler (Hrsg.), Solitudo. Spaces, Places, and Times of Solitude in Late Medieval and Early Modern Cultures (Intersections, 56), Leiden / Boston 2018, Brill, XXXIV u. 568 S. / Abb., € 165,00. (Mirko Breitenstein, Dresden / Leipzig) Tracy, Larissa (Hg.), Medieval and Early Modern Murder. Legal, Literary and Historical Contexts, Woodbridge 2018, Boydell Press, 486 S., £ 60,00. (Benjamin Seebröker, Dresden) Müller, Mario, Verletzende Worte. Beleidigung und Verleumdung in Rechtstexten aus dem Mittelalter und aus dem 16. Jahrhundert (Hildesheimer Universitätsschriften, 33), Hildesheim / Zürich / New York 2017, Olms, 410 S. / Abb., € 78,00. (Gerd Schwerhoff, Dresden) Heebøll-Holm, Thomas / Philipp Höhn / Gregor Rohmann (Hrsg.), Merchants, Pirates, and Smugglers. Criminalization, Economics, and the Transformation of the Maritime World (1200 – 1600) (Discourses of Weakness and Resource Regimes, 6), Frankfurt a. M. / New York 2019, Campus, 431 S., € 43,00. (Sebastian Kolditz, Heidelberg) Fox, Yaniv / Yosi Yisraeli (Hrsg.), Contesting Inter-Religious Conversion in the Medieval World, London / New York 2017, Routledge, VI u. 276 S. / Abb., £ 110,00. (Benjamin Scheller, Essen) Gruber, Elisabeth / Christina Lutter / Oliver J. Schmitt (Hrsg.), Kulturgeschichte der Überlieferung im Mittelalter. Quellen und Methoden zur Geschichte Mittel- und Südosteuropas (UTB, 4554), Köln / Weimar / Wien 2017, Böhlau, 510 S. / Abb., € 29,99. (Grischa Vercamer, Passau) Heiles, Marco, Das Losbuch. Manuskriptologie einer Textsorte des 14. bis 16. Jahrhunderts (Beihefte zum Archiv für Kulturgeschichte, 13), Wien / Köln / Weimar 2018, Böhlau, 574 S. / Abb., € 70,00. (Klaus Oschema, Bochum) Dartmann, Christoph, Die Benediktiner. Von den Anfängen bis zum Ende des Mittelalters (Urban-Taschenbücher; Geschichte der christlichen Orden), Stuttgart 2018, Kohlhammer, 301 S. / Abb., € 26,00. (Kai Hering, Dresden) Linde, Cornelia (Hrsg.), Making and Breaking the Rules. Discussion, Implementation, and Consequences of Dominican Legislation (Studies of the German Historical Institute London), Oxford / New York 2018, Oxford University Press, XII u. 438 S. / Abb., £ 85,00. (Jens Röhrkasten, Birmingham) Bünz, Enno, Die mittelalterliche Pfarrei. Ausgewählte Studien zum 13.–16. Jahrhundert (Spätmittelalter, Humanismus, Reformation, 96), Tübingen 2017, Mohr Siebeck, IX u. 862 S., € 109,00. (Michele C. Ferrari, Erlangen) Beuckers, Klaus G. / Thomas Schilp (Hrsg.), Fragen, Perspektiven und Aspekte der Erforschung mittelalterlicher Frauenstifte. Beiträge der Abschlusstagung des Essener Arbeitskreises für die Erforschung des Frauenstifts (Essener Forschungen zum Frauenstift, 15), Essen 2018, Klartext, 364 S. / Abb., € 32,00. (Helmut Flachenecker, Würzburg) Schöller, Bettina, Zeiten der Erinnerung. Muri und die Habsburger im Mittelalter (Murenser Monografien, 2), Zürich 2018, Chronos, 191 S. / Abb., € 38,00. (Bruno Meier, Baden (CH)) Mandry, Julia, Armenfürsorge, Hospitäler und Bettel in Thüringen in Spätmittelalter und Reformation (1300 – 1600) (Quellen und Forschungen zu Thüringen im Zeitalter der Reformation, 10), Wien / Köln / Weimar 2018, Böhlau, 1052 S. / Abb., € 125,00. (Stefan Michel, Leipzig) Roth, Stefan, Geldgeschichte und Münzpolitik im Herzogtum Braunschweig-Lüneburg im Spätmittelalter, 2 Bde., Teil 1: Die Rechnungsbücher der Braunschweiger Münzstätte; Teil 2: Geldgeschichte und Münzkatalog (Veröffentlichungen der Historischen Kommission für Niedersachsen und Bremen, 293 bzw. 294), Göttingen 2018, Wallstein, 292 S. / Abb., € 19,90 bzw. 717 S. / Abb., € 49,00. (Manfred Mehl, Hamburg) Föller, Carola, Königskinder. Erziehung am Hof Ludwigs IX. des Heiligen von Frankreich (Beihefte zum Archiv für Kulturgeschichte, 88), Wien / Köln / Weimar 2018, Böhlau, 252 S., € 50,00. (Benjamin Müsegades, Heidelberg) Das Urbar des Hochstifts Augsburg von 1316, bearb. v. Thaddäus Steiner (Veröffentlichungen der Schwäbischen Forschungsstelle Augsburg der Kommission für Bayerische Landesgeschichte bei der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Schwäbischen Forschungsgemeinschaft. Reihe 5a: Urbare, 4), Augsburg 2019, Wißner, VIII u. 168 S., € 19,80. (Wolfgang Wüst, Erlangen) Just, Thomas / Kathrin Kininger / Andrea Sommerlechner / Herwig Weigl (Hrsg.), Privilegium maius. Autopsie, Kontext und Karriere der Fälschungen Rudolfs IV. von Österreich (Veröffentlichungen des Instituts für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung, 69; Mitteilungen des Österreichischen Staatsarchivs, Sonderband 15), Wien / Köln / Weimar 2018, Böhlau, 388 S. / Abb., € 70,00. (Patrick Fiska, Wien) Wolfinger, Lukas, Die Herrschaftsinszenierung Rudolfs IV. von Österreich. Strategien – Publikum – Rezeption (Symbolische Kommunikation in der Vormoderne), Wien / Köln / Weimar 2018, Böhlau, 924 S. / Abb., € 110,00. (Benjamin Müsegades, Heidelberg) Brachthäuser, Urs, Der Kreuzzug gegen Mahdiya 1390. Konstruktionen eines Ereignisses im spätmittelterlichen Mediterraneum (Mittelmeerstudien, 14), Paderborn 2017, Fink / Schöningh, 822 S., € 99,00. (Georg Jostkleigrewe, Halle) Pilat, Liviu / Ovidiu Cristea, The Ottoman Threat and Crusading on the Eastern Border of Christendom during the 15th Century (East Central and Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages, 450 – 1450, 48), Leiden / Boston 2018, Brill, VIII u. 337 S. / Abb., € 174,00. (Thomas Woelki, Berlin) Dümling, Sebastian, Träume der Einfachheit. Gesellschaftsbeobachtungen in den Reformschriften des 15. Jahrhunderts (Historische Studien, 511), Husum 2017, Matthiesen, 250 S., € 39,00. (Birgit Studt, Freiburg i. Br.) Buondelmonti, Christoforo, Description of the Aegean and Other Islands. Copied, with Supplemental Material, by Henricus Martellus Germanus. A Facsimile of the Manuscript at the James Ford Bell Library, University of Minnesota, hrsg. u. übers. v. Evelyn Edson, New York 2018, Italica Press, X u. 190 S. / Abb., $ 100,00. (Ingrid Baumgärtner, Kassel) Schneider, Joachim, Eberhard Windeck und sein „Buch von Kaiser Sigmund“. Studien zu Entstehung, Funktion und Verbreitung einer Königschronik im 15. Jahrhundert (Geschichtliche Landeskunde, 73), Stuttgart 2018, Steiner, 369 S. / Abb., € 62,00. (Gerhard Fouquet, Kiel) The London Customs Accounts. 24 Henry VI (1445/46), hrsg. v. Stuart Jenks (Quellen und Darstellungen zur Hansischen Geschichte. Neue Folge, 74), Köln / Weimar / Wien 2018, Böhlau, LXIII u. 407 S., € 60,00. (Harm von Seggern, Kiel) Pietro Montes „Collectanea“. The Arms, Armour and Fighting Techniques of a Fifteenth-Century Soldier, hrsg. u. übers. v. Jeffrey L. Forgeng, Woodbridge 2018, The Boydell Press, VII u. 313 S. / Abb., £ 60,00. (Patrick Leiske, Heidelberg) Sander-Faes, Stephan, Europas habsburgisches Jahrhundert. 1450 – 1550 (Geschichte kompakt), Darmstadt 2018, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 160 S. / Abb., € 19,95. (Thomas Winkelbauer, Wien) Helmrath, Johannes / Ursula Kocher / Andrea Sieber (Hrsg.), Maximilians Welt. Kaiser Maximilian im Spannungsfeld zwischen Innovation und Tradition (Berliner Mittelalter- und Frühneuzeitforschung, 22), Göttingen 2018, V&R unipress, 300 S. / Abb., € 45,00. (Nadja Krajicek, Innsbruck) Krajicek, Nadja, Frauen in Notlagen. Suppliken an Maximilian I. als Selbstzeugnisse (Quelleneditionen des Instituts für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung, 17), Wien 2018, Böhlau, 198 S. / Abb., € 39,00. (Manfred Hollegger, Graz) Sebastiani, Valentina, Johann Froben, Printer of Basel. A Biographical Profile and Catalogue of His Editions (Library of the Written Word, 65; The Handpress World, 50), Leiden / Boston 2018, Brill, XII u. 830 S. / Abb., € 215,00. (Charlotte Kempf, Stuttgart) Sharman, Jason C., Empires of the Weak. The Real Story of European Expansion and the Creation of the New World Order, Princeton / Oxford 2019, Princeton University Press, XII u. 196 S., £ 22,00. (Wolfgang Reinhard, Freiburg i. Br.) MacDougall, Philip, Islamic Seapower during the Age of Fighting Sail, Woodbridge 2017, The Boydell Press, XVII u. 241 S. / Abb., £ 65,00. (Stefan Hanß, Manchester) Head, Randolph C., Making Archives in Early Modern Europe. Proof, Information, and Political Record-Keeping, 1400 – 1700, Cambridge [u. a.] 2019, Cambridge University Press, XVII u. 348 S. / Abb., £ 90,00. (Markus Friedrich, Hamburg) Keller, Vera / Anna M. Roos / Elizabeth Yale (Hrsg.), Archival Afterlives. Life, Death, and Knowledge-Making in Early Modern British Scientific and Medical Archives (Scientific and Learned Cultures and Their Institutions, 23), Leiden / Boston 2018, Brill, XI u. 276 S. / Abb., € 105,00. (Markus Friedrich, Hamburg) Jaumann, Herbert / Gideon Stiening (Hrsg.), Neue Diskurse der Gelehrtenkultur in der Frühen Neuzeit. Ein Handbuch, Berlin / Boston 2016, de Gruyter, XXIII u. 877 S., € 219,00. (Marian Füssel, Göttingen) Reinalter, Helmut, Freimaurerei, Politik und Gesellschaft. Die Wirkungsgeschichte des diskreten Bundes, Wien / Köln / Weimar 2018, Böhlau, 255 S., € 20,00. (Joachim Bauer, Jena) Jarzebowski, Claudia, Kindheit und Emotion. Kinder und ihre Lebenswelten in der europäischen Frühen Neuzeit, Berlin / Boston 2018, de Gruyter Oldenbourg, VIII u. 343 S. / Abb., € 89,95. (Christina Antenhofer, Salzburg) Bepler, Jill / Svante Norrhem (Hrsg.), Telling Objects. Contextualizing the Role of the Consort in Early Modern Europe (Wolfenbütteler Forschungen, 153), Wiesbaden 2018, Harrassowitz in Kommission, 269 S. / Abb., € 68,00. (Melanie Greinert, Kiel) Gantet, Claire / Christine Lebeau, Le Saint-Empire. 1500 – 1800 (Collection U: Histoire), Malakoff 2018, Armand Colin, 270 S. / graph. Darst., € 27,00. (Guido Braun, Mülhausen / Mulhouse) Willasch, Friederike, Verhandlungen, Gespräche, Briefe. Savoyisch-französische Fürstenheiraten in der Frühen Neuzeit (Beihefte der Francia, 85), Ostfildern 2018, Thorbecke, 344 S., € 45,00. (Matthias Schnettger, Mainz) Del Soldato, Eva / Andrea Rizzi (Hrsg.), City, Court, Academy. Language Choice in Early Modern Italy, London / New York, Routledge 2018, IX u. 228 S., £ 105,00. (Bettina Pfotenhauer, München) Lobenwein, Elisabeth / Martin Scheutz / Alfred St. Weiß (Hrsg.), Bruderschaften als multifunktionale Dienstleister der Frühen Neuzeit in Zentraleuropa (Veröffentlichungen des Instituts für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung, 70), Wien 2018, Böhlau, 548 S. / Abb., € 90,00. (Patrick Schmidt, Rostock) Bergerfurth, Yvonne, Die Bruderschaften der Kölner Jesuiten 1576 bis 1773 (Studien zur Kölner Kirchengeschichte, 45), Siegburg 2018, Schmitt, 438 S., € 34,90. (Hans-Wolfgang Bergerhausen, Würzburg) Walter, Philipp, Universität und Landtag (1500 – 1700). Akademische Landstandschaft im Spannungsfeld von reformatorischer Lehre, landesherrlicher Instrumentalisierung und ständischer Solidarität (Quellen und Forschungen zu Thüringen im Zeitalter der Reformation, 8), Wien / Köln / Weimar 2018, Böhlau, 1093 S., € 125,00. (Bernhard Homa, Stade) Kikuchi, Yuta, Hamburgs Ostsee- und Mitteleuropahandel 1600 – 1800. Warenaustausch und Hinterlandnetzwerke (Wirtschafts- und Sozialhistorische Studien, 20), Köln / Weimar / Wien 2018, Böhlau, 426 S. / Abb., € 65,00. (Mark Häberlein, Bamberg) Hoppe, Peter / Daniel Schläppi / Nathalie Büsser / Thomas Meier, Universum Kleinstadt. Die Stadt Zug und ihre Untertanen im Spiegel der Protokolle von Stadtrat und Gemeinde (1471 – 1798) (Beiträge zur Zuger Geschichte, 18), Zürich 2018, Chronos in Kommission, 320 S. / Abb., € 38,00. (Volker Reinhardt, Fribourg) Griffin, Carl J. / Briony McDonagh (Hrsg.), Remembering Protest in Britain since 1500. Memory, Materiality and the Landscape, Cham 2018, Palgrave Macmillan, XIV u. 253 S. / Abb., € 96,29. (Georg Eckert, Wuppertal / Potsdam) Queckbörner, Boris, Englands Exodus. Form und Funktion einer Vorstellung göttlicher Erwählung in Tudor-England, Bielefeld 2017, transcript, 596 S. / Abb., € 49,99. (Andreas Pečar, Halle a. d. S.) Fleming, Gillian B., Juana I. Legitimacy and Conflict in Sixteenth-Century Castile (Queenship and Power), Cham 2018, Palgrave Macmillan, XXI 356 S. / Abb., € 103,99. (Pauline Puppel, Berlin) Heidenreich, Benjamin, Ein Ereignis ohne Namen? Zu den Vorstellungen des „Bauernkriegs“ von 1525 in den Schriften der „Aufständischen“ und in der zeitgenössischen Geschichtsschreibung (Quellen und Forschungen zur Agrargeschichte, 9), Berlin / Boston 2019, de Gruyter Oldenbourg, IX u. 350 S., € 99,95. (Wiebke Voigt, Dresden) Lehmann, Sarah, Jrdische Pilgrimschafft und Himmlische Burgerschafft. Leid und Trost in frühneuzeitlichen Leichenpredigten (The Early Modern World, 1), Göttingen 2019, V&R unipress, 374 S. / Abb., € 50,00. (Volker Leppin, Tübingen) Hanß, Stefan, Lepanto als Ereignis. Dezentrierende Geschichte‍(n) der Seeschlacht von Lepanto (1571) (Berliner Mittelalter- und Frühneuzeit-Forschung, 21), Göttingen 2017, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 710 S. / Abb., € 85,00. (Cornel Zwierlein, Berlin) Hanß, Stefan, Die materielle Kultur der Seeschlacht von Lepanto (1571). Materialität, Medialität und die historische Produktion eines Ereignisses, 2 Teilbde. (Istanbuler Texte und Studien, 38.1 u. 38.2), Würzburg 2017, Ergon in Kommission, 1006 S. / Abb., € 148,00. (Cornel Zwierlein, Berlin) Nagel, Ulrich, Zwischen Dynastie und Staatsräson. Die habsburgischen Botschafter in Wien und Madrid am Beginn des Dreißigjährigen Krieges (Veröffentlichungen des Instituts für Europäische Geschichte Mainz. Abteilung für Universalgeschichte, 247), Göttingen 2018, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 464 S., € 80,00. (Hillard von Thiessen, Rostock) Mitchell, Silvia Z., Queen, Mother, and Stateswoman. Mariana of Austria and the Gouvernment of Spain, University Park Pennsylvania 2019, The Pennsylvania State University Press, XII u. 293 S. / Abb., $ 84,95. (Katrin Keller, Wien) Krause, Oliver, Die Variabilität frühneuzeitlicher Staatlichkeit. Die niederländische „Staats“-Formierung der Statthalterlosen Epoche (1650 – 1672) als interkontinentales Regiment (Beiträge zur Europäischen Überseegeschichte, 105), Stuttgart 2018, Steiner, 529 S., € 76,00. (Johannes Arndt, Münster) Stevens, Ralph, Protestant Pluralism. The Reception of the Toleration Act, 1689 – 1720 (Studies in Modern British Religious History, 37), Woodbridge / Rochester 2018, The Boydell Press, XIV u. 201 S., £ 65,00. (Frouke Veenstra-Vis, Groningen) Mitchell, A. Wess, The Grand Strategy of the Habsburg Empire, Princeton / Oxford 2018, Princeton University Press, XIV u. 403 S. / Abb., $ 27,00. (Simon Karstens, Trier) Pohlig, Matthias / Michael Schaich (Hrsg.), The War of the Spanish Succession. New Perspectives (Studies of the German Historical Institute London), Oxford 2018, Oxford University Press, IX u. 509 S. / Abb., £ 85,00. (Anuschka Tischer, Würzburg) Vollhardt, Friedrich, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. Epoche und Werk, Göttingen 2018, Wallstein, 490 S. / Abb., € 29,90. (Michael Maurer, Jena) Walliss, John, The Bloody Code in England and Wales, 1760 – 1830 (World Histories of Crime, Culture and Violence), Cham 2018, Palgrave Macmillan, XXIII u. 176 S. / graph. Darst., € 85,59. (Benjamin Seebröker, Dresden) „Die Schlesier im Ganzen taugen wahrlich nichts!“ Johann Gustav Gottlieb Büschings Briefe an seine Braut. An der Wiege der Breslauer Germanistik, hrsg., komm. u. mit einem Vorwort versehen v. Krzysztof Żarski / Natalia Żarska (Schlesische Grenzgänger, 10), Leipzig 2018, Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 575 S., € 49,00. (Michael Maurer, Jena)

Each year, The Economist magazine’s “Economist Intelligence Unit” ranks cities based on “healthcare, education, stability, culture, environment and infrastructure”, giving the highest-ranking locale the title of most ‘liveable’ (Wright). For the past six years, The Economist has named Melbourne “the world’s most liveable city” (Carmody et al.). A curious portmanteau, the concept of liveability is problematic: what may feel stable and safe to some members of the community may marginalise others due to several factors such as gender, disability, ethnicity or class.The subjective nature of this term is referred to in the Australian Government’s 2013 State of Cities report, in the chapter titled ‘Liveability’:In the same way that the Cronulla riots are the poster story for cultural conflict, the attack on Jillian Meagher in Melbourne’s Brunswick has resonated strongly with Australians in many capital cities. It seemed to be emblematic of their concern about violent crime. Some women in our research reported responding to this fear by arming themselves. (274)Twenty-nine-year-old Jill Meagher’s abduction, rape, and murder in the inner northern suburb of Brunswick in 2012 disturbs the perception of Melbourne’s liveability. As news of the crime disseminated, it revived dormant cultural narratives that reinforce a gendered public/private binary, suggesting women are more vulnerable to attack than men in public spaces and consequently hindering their mobility. I investigate here how texts written by women writers based in Melbourne’s inner north can latently serve as counter narratives to this discourse, demonstrating how urban public space can be benign, even joyful, rather than foreboding for women. Cultural narratives that promote the vulnerability of women oppress urban freedoms; this paper will use these narratives solely as a catalyst to explore literary texts by women that enact contrary narratives that map a city not by vicarious trauma, but instead by the rich complexity of women’s lives in their twenties and thirties.I examine two memoirs set primarily in Melbourne’s inner north: Michele Lee’s Banana Girl (2013) and Lorelai Vashti’s Dress, Memory: A memoir of my twenties in dresses (2014). In these texts, the inner north serves as ‘true north’, a magnetic destination for this stage of life, an opening into an experiential, exciting adult world, rather than a place haunted. Indeed, while Lee and Vashti occupy the same geographical space that Meagher did, these texts do not speak to the crime.The connection is made by me, as I am interested in the affective shift that follows a signal crime such as the Meagher case, and how we can employ literary texts to gauge a psychic landscape, refuting the discourse of fear that is circulated by the media following the event. I wish to look at Melbourne’s inner north as a female literary milieu, a site of boldness despite the public breaking that was Meagher’s murder: a site of female self-determination rather than community trauma.I borrow the terms “boldness”, “bold walk” and “breaking” from Finnish geographer Hille Koskela (and note the thematic resonances in scholarship from a city as far north as Helsinki). Her paper “Bold Walks and Breakings: Women’s spatial confidence versus fear of violence” challenges the idea that “fearfulness is an essentially female quality”, rather advocating for “boldness”, seeking to “emphasise the emancipatory content of … [women’s] stories” (302). Koskela uses the term “breaking” in her research (primarily focussed on experiences of Helsinki women) to describe “situations … that had transformed … attitudes towards their environment”, referring to the “spatial consequences” that were the result of violent crimes, or threats thereof. While Melbourne women obviously did not experience the Meagher case personally, it nevertheless resulted in what Koskela has dubbed elsewhere as “increased feelings of vulnerability” (“Gendered Exclusions” 111).After the Meagher case, media reportage suggested that Melbourne had been irreversibly changed, made vulnerable, and a site of trauma. As a signal crime, the attack and murder was vicariously experienced and mediated. Like many crimes committed against women in public space, Meagher’s death was transformed into a cautionary tale, and this storying was more pronounced due to the way the case played out episodically in the media, particularly online, allowing the public to follow the case as it unfolded. The coverage was visually hyperintensive, and particular attention was paid to Sydney Road, where Meagher had last been seen and where she had met her assailant, Adrian Bayley, who was subsequently convicted of her murder.Articles from media outlets were frequently accompanied by cartographic images that superimposed details of the case onto images of the local area—the mind map and the physical locality both marred by the crime. Yet Koskela writes, “the map of everyday experiences is in sharp contrast to the maps of the media. If a picture of a place is made by one’s own experiences it is more likely to be perceived as a safe ordinary place” (“Bold Walks” 309). How might this picture—this map—be made through genre? I am interested in how memoir might facilitate space for narratives that contest those from the media. Here I prefer the word memoir rather than use the term life-writing due to the former’s etymological adherence to memory. In Vashti and Lee’s texts, memory is closely linked to place and space, and for each of them, Melbourne is a destination, a city that they have come to alone from elsewhere. Lee came to the city after growing up in Canberra, and Vashti from Brisbane. In Dress, Memory, Vashti writes that the move to Melbourne “… makes you feel like a pioneer, one of those dusty and determined characters out of an American history novel trudging west to seek a land of gold and dreams” (83).Deeply engaging with Melbourne, the text eschews the ‘taken for granted’ backdrop idea of the city that scholar Jane Darke observes in fiction. She writes thatmodern women novelists virtually take the city as backdrop for granted as a place where a central female figure can be or becomes self-determining, with like-minded female friends as indispensable support and undependable men in walk-on roles. (97)Instead, Vashti uses memoir to self-consciously examine her relationship with her city, elaborating on the notion of moving from elsewhere as an act of self-determination, building the self through geographical relocation:You’re told you can find treasure – the secret bars hidden down the alleyways, the tiny shops filled with precious curios, the art openings overflowing onto the street. But the true gold that paves Melbourne’s footpaths is the promise that you can be a writer, an artist, a musician, a performer there. People who move there want to be discovered, they want to make a mark. (84)The paths are important here, as Vashti embeds herself on the street, walking through the text, generating an affective cartography as her life is played out in what is depicted as a benign, yet vibrant, urban space. She writes of “walking, following the grid of the city, taking in its grey blocks” (100), engendering a sense of what geographer Yi-Fu Tuan calls ‘topophilia’: “the affective bond between people and place or setting” (4). There is a deep bond between Vashti and Melbourne that is evident in her work that is demonstrated in her discussion of public space. Like her, friends from Brisbane trickle down South, and she lives with them in a series of share houses in the inner North—first Fitzroy, then Carlton, then North Melbourne, where she lives with two female friends and together they “roamed the streets during the day in a pack” (129).Vashti’s boldness not only lies in her willingness to take bodily to the streets, without fear, but also in her fastidious attention to her physical appearance. Her memoir is framed sartorially: chronologically arranged, from age twenty to thirty, each chapter featuring equally detailed reports of the events of that year as well as the corresponding outfits worn. A dress, transformative, is spotlighted in each of these chapters, and the author is photographed in each of these ‘feature’ dresses in a glossy section in the middle of the book. Koskela writes that, “if women dress up to be part of the urban spectacle, like 19th-century flâneurs, and also to mediate their confidence, they oppose their erasure and reclaim urban space”. For Koskela, the appearance of the body in public is an act of boldness:dressing can be seen as a means of reproducing power relations; in Foucaultian terms, it is a way of being one’s own overseer, and regulating even the most intimate spheres … on the other hand, interpreted in another way, dressing up can be seen as a form of resistance against the male gaze, as an opposition to the visual mastery over women, achieved by not being invisible or absent, but by dressing up proudly. (“Bold Walks” 309)Koskela’s affirmation that clothing can enact urban boldness contradicts reportage on the Meagher case that suggested otherwise. Some news outlets focussed on the high heels Meagher was wearing the night she was raped and murdered, as if to imply that she may have been able to elude her fate had she donned flats. The Age quotes witnesses who saw her on Sydney Road the night she was killed; one says she was “a little unsteady on her feet but not too bad”, another that she “seemed to be struggling to walk up the hill in her high heels” (Russell). But Vashti is well aware of the spatial confidence that the right clothing provides. In the chapter “Twenty-three”, she writes of being housebound by heartbreak, that “just leaving the house seemed like an epic undertaking”, so she “picked a dress a dress that would make me feel good … the woman in me emerged when I slid it on. In it, I instantly had shape, form. A purpose” (99). She and her friends don vocational costumes to outplay the competitive inner Melbourne rental market, eventually netting their North Melbourne terrace house by dressing like “young professionals”: “dressed up in smart op-shop blouses and pencil skirts to walk to the real estate office” (129).Michele Lee’s text Banana Girl also delves into the relationship between personal aesthetics and urban space, describing Melbourne as “a town of costumes, after all” (117), but her own style as “indifferently hip to the outside world without being slavish about it” (6). Lee’s world is East Brunswick for much of the book, and she establishes this connection early, introducing herself in the first chapter, as one of the “subversive and ironic people living in the hipster boroughs of the inner North of Melbourne” (6). She describes the women in her local area – “Brunswick Girls”, she dubs them: “no one wears visible make up, or if they do it’s not lathered on in visible layers; the haircuts are feminine without being too stylish, the clothing too; there’s an overall practical appearance” (89).Lee displays more of a knowingness than Vashti regarding the inner North’s reputation as the more progressive and creative side of the Yarra, confirmed by the Sydney Morning Herald:The ‘northside’ comprises North Melbourne, Carlton, Fitzroy, Collingwood, Abbotsford, Thornbury, Brunswick and Coburg. Bell Street is the boundary for northsiders. It stands for artists, warehouse parties, bicycles, underground music, lightless terrace houses, postmodernity and ‘awareness’. (Craig)As evidenced in late scholar John Maclaren’s book Melbourne: City of Words, the area has long enjoyed this reputation: “After the war, these neighbourhoods were colonized by migrants from Europe, and in the 1960s by the artists, musicians, writers, actors, junkies and layabouts whose stories Helen Garner was to tell” (146). As a young playwright, Lee sees herself reflected in this milieu, writing that she’s “an imaginative person, I’m university educated, I vote the way you’d expect me to vote and I’m a member of the CPSU. On principle I remain a union member” (7), toeing that line of “awareness” pithily mentioned by the SMH.Like Vashti, there are constant references to Lee’s exact geographical location in Melbourne. She ‘drops pins’ throughout, cultivating a connection to place that blurs home and the street, fostering a sense of belonging beyond one’s birthplace, belonging to a place chosen rather than raised in. She plants herself in this local geography. Returning to the first chapter, she includes “jogger by the Merri Creek” in her introduction (7), and later jokingly likens a friendship with an ex as “no longer on stage at the Telstra Dome but still on tour” (15), employing Melbourne landmarks as explanatory shorthand. She refers to places by name: one could physically tour inner North and CBD hotspots based on Lee’s text, as it is littered with mentions of bars, restaurants, galleries and theatre venues. She frequents the Alderman in East Brunswick and Troika in the city, as well as a bar that Jill Meagher spent time in on the night she went missing – the Brunswick Green.While offering the text a topographical authenticity, this can sometimes prove distracting: rather than simply stating that she goes to the library, she writes that she visits “the City of Melbourne library” (128), and rather than just going to a pizza parlour, they visit “Bimbo’s” (129) or “Pizza Meine Liebe” (101). Yet when Lee visits family in Canberra, or Laos on an arts grant, business names are forsaken. One could argue that the cultural capital offered by namedropping trendy Melburnian bars, restaurants and nightclubs translates awkwardly on the page, and risks dating the text considerably, but elevates the spatiality of Lee’s work. And these landmarks are important within the text, as Lee’s world is divided spatially. She refers to “Theatre Land” when discussing her work in the arts, and her share house not as ‘home’ but consistently as “Albert Street”. She partitions her life into these zones: zones of emotion, zones of intellect/career, zones of family/heritage – the text offers close insight into Lee’s personal cartography, with her traversing the map “stubbornly on foot, still resisting becoming part of Melbourne’s bike culture” (88).While not always walking alone – often accompanied by an ex-boyfriend she nicknames “Husband” – Lee is independently-minded, stating, “I operate solo, I pay my own way” (34), meeting up with various romantic and sexual interests through the text for daytime trysts in empty office buildings or late nights out in the CBD. She is adventurous, yet reminds that she was not always so. She recalls a time when she was still residing in Canberra and visited a boyfriend who was living in Melbourne and felt intimidated by the “alien city”, standing in stark contrast to the familiarity she demonstrates otherwise.Lee and Vashti’s texts both chronicle women who freely occupy public space, comfortable in their surroundings, not engaging on the page with cultural narratives and media reportage that suggest they would be safer off the streets. Both demonstrate what Koskela calls the “pleasure to be able to take possession of space” (“Bold Walks” 308) – yet it could be argued that the writer’s possession of space is so routine, so unremarkable that it transcends pleasure: it is comfortable. They walk the streets alone and catch public transport alone without incident. They contravene advice such as that given by Victorian Police Homicide Squad chief Mick Hughes’s comments that women shouldn’t be “alone in parks” following the fatal stabbing of teenager Masa Vukotic in a Doncaster park in 2015.Like Meagher’s death, Vukotic’s murder was also mobilised by the media – and one could argue, by authorities – to contain women, to further a narrative that reinforces the public/private gender binary. However, as Koskela reminds, the fact that some women are bold and confident shows that women are not only passively experiencing space but actively take part in producing it. They reclaim space for themselves, not only through single occasions such as ‘take back the night’ marches, but through everyday practices and routinized uses of space. (“Bold Walks” 316)These memoirs act as resistance, actively producing space through representation: to assert the right to the city, one must be bold, and reclaim space that is so often overlaid with stories of violence against women. As Koskela emphasises, this is only done through use of the space, “a way of de-mystifying it. If one does not use the space, … ‘the mental map’ of the place is filled with indirect descriptions, the image of it is constructed through media and the stories heard” (“Bold Walks” 308). Memoir can take back this image through stories told, demonstrating the personal connection to public space. Koskela writes that, “walking on the street can be seen as a political act: women ‘write themselves onto the street’” (“Urban Space in Plural” 263). ReferencesAustralian Government. Department of Infrastructure and Transport. State of Australian Cities 2013. Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia, 2013. 17 Jan. 2017 <http://infrastructure.gov.au/infrastructure/pab/soac/files/2013_00_infra1782_mcu_soac_full_web_fa.pdf>.Carmody, Broede, and Aisha Dow. “Top of the World: Melbourne Crowned World's Most Liveable City, Again.” The Age, 18 Aug. 2016. 17 Jan. 2017 <http://theage.com.au/victoria/top-of-the-world-melbourne-crowned-worlds-most-liveable-city-again-20160817-gqv893.html>.Craig, Natalie. “A City Divided.” Sydney Morning Herald, 5 Feb. 2012. 17 Jan. 2017 <http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/about-town/a-city-divided-20120202-1quub.html>.Darke, Jane. “The Man-Shaped City.” Changing Places: Women's Lives in the City. Eds. Chris Booth, Jane Darke, and Susan Yeadle. London: Paul Chapman Publishing, 1996. 88-99.Koskela, Hille. “'Bold Walk and Breakings’: Women's Spatial Confidence versus Fear of Violence.” Gender, Place and Culture 4.3 (1997): 301-20.———. “‘Gendered Exclusions’: Women's Fear of Violence and Changing Relations to Space.” Geografiska Annaler, Series B, Human Geography, 81.2 (1999). 111–124.———. “Urban Space in Plural: Elastic, Tamed, Suppressed.” A Companion to Feminist Geography. Eds. Lise Nelson and Joni Seager. Blackwell, 2005. 257-270.Lee, Michele. Banana Girl. Melbourne: Transit Lounge, 2013.MacLaren, John. Melbourne: City of Words. Arcadia, 2013.Russell, Mark. ‘Happy, Witty Jill Was the Glue That Held It All Together.’ The Age, 19 June 2013. 30 Jan. 2017 <http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/happy-witty-jill-was-the-glue-that-held-it-all-together-20130618-2ohox.html>Tuan, Yi-Fu. Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes and Values. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall Inc, 1974.Wright, Patrick, “Melbourne Ranked World’s Most Liveable City for Sixth Consecutive Year by EIU.” ABC News, 18 Aug. 2016. 17 Jan. 2017 <http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-08-18/melbourne-ranked-worlds-most-liveable-city-for-sixth-year/7761642>.

Special Care NoticeThis article discusses trauma and violence inflicted upon the Indigenous peoples of Tasmania through the processes of colonisation. Content within this article may be distressing to some readers. IntroductionThis article looks briefly at the collection, consultation, and digital sharing of stories essential to the histories of the First Nations peoples of Australia. Focusing on materials held in Sydney, New South Wales two case studies—the object known as the Proclamation Board and the George Augustus Robinson Papers—explore how materials can be shared with Aboriginal peoples of the region now known as Tasmania. Specifically, the authors of this article (a Palawa man and an Australian woman of European descent) ask how can the idea of the privileging of Indigenous voices, within Eurocentric cultural collections, be transformed from rhetoric to reality? Moreover, how can we navigate this complex work, that is made even more problematic by distance, through the utilisation of knowledge networks which are geographically isolated from the collections holding stories crucial to Indigenous communities? In seeking to answer these important questions, this article looks at how cultural, emotional, and intellectual ownership can be divested from the physical ownership of a collection in a way that repatriates—appropriately and sensitively—stories of Aboriginal Australia and of colonisation. Holding Stories, Not Always Our OwnCultural institutions, including libraries, have, in recent years, been drawn into discussions centred on the notion of digital disruption and “that transformative shift which has seen the ongoing realignment of business resources, relationships, knowledge, and value both facilitating the entry of previously impossible ideas and accelerating the competitive impact of those same impossible ideas” (Franks and Ensor n.p.). As Molly Brown has noted, librarians “are faced, on a daily basis, with rapidly changing technology and the ways in which our patrons access and use information. Thus, we need to look at disruptive technologies as opportunities” (n.p.). Some innovations, including the transition from card catalogues to online catalogues and the provision of a wide range of electronic resources, are now considered to be business as usual for most institutions. So, too, the digitisation of great swathes of materials to facilitate access to collections onsite and online, with digitising primary sources seen as an intermediary between the pillars of preserving these materials and facilitating access for those who cannot, for a variety of logistical and personal reasons, travel to a particular repository where a collection is held.The result has been the development of hybrid collections: that is, collections that can be accessed in both physical and digital formats. Yet, the digitisation processes conducted by memory institutions is often selective. Limited resources, even for large-scale digitisation projects usually only realise outcomes that focus on making visually rich, key, or canonical documents, or those documents that are considered high use and at risk, available online. Such materials are extracted from the larger full body of records while other lesser-known components are often omitted. Digitisation projects therefore tend to be devised for a broader audience where contextual questions are less central to the methodology in favour of presenting notable or famous documents online only. Documents can be profiled as an exhibition separate from their complete collection and, critically, their wider context. Libraries of course are not neutral spaces and this practice of (re)enforcing the canon through digitisation is a challenge that cultural institutions, in partnerships, need to address (Franks and Ensor n.p.). Indeed, our digital collections are as affected by power relationships and the ongoing impacts of colonisation as our physical collections. These power relationships can be seen through an organisation’s “processes that support acquisitions, as purchases and as the acceptance of artefacts offered as donations. Throughout such processes decisions are continually made (consciously and unconsciously) that affect what is presented and actively promoted as the official history” (Thorpe et al. 8). While it is important to acknowledge what we do collect, it is equally important to look, too, at what we do not collect and to consider how we continually privilege and exclude stories. Especially when these stories are not always our own, but are held, often as accidents of collecting. For example, an item comes in as part of a larger suite of materials while older, city-based institutions often pre-date regional repositories. An essential point here is that cultural institutions can often become comfortable in what they collect, building on existing holdings. This, in turn, can lead to comfortable digitisation. If we are to be truly disruptive, we need to embrace feeling uncomfortable in what we do, and we need to view digitisation as an intervention opportunity; a chance to challenge what we ‘know’ about our collections. This is especially relevant in any attempts to decolonise collections.Case Study One: The Proclamation BoardThe first case study looks at an example of re-digitisation. One of the seven Proclamation Boards known to survive in a public collection is held by the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, having been purchased from Tasmanian collector and photographer John Watt Beattie (1859–1930) in May 1919 for £30 (Morris 86). Why, with so much material to digitise—working in a program of limited funds and time—would the Library return to an object that has already been privileged? Unanswered questions and advances in digitisation technologies, created a unique opportunity. For the First Peoples of Van Diemen’s Land (now known as Tasmania), colonisation by the British in 1803 was “an emotionally, intellectually, physically, and spiritually confronting series of encounters” (Franks n.p.). Violent incidents became routine and were followed by a full-scale conflict, often referred to as the Black War (Clements 1), or more recently as the Tasmanian War, fought from the 1820s until 1832. Image 1: Governor Arthur’s Proclamation to the Aborigines, ca. 1828–1830. Image Credit: Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Call No.: SAFE / R 247.Behind the British combatants were various support staff, including administrators and propagandists. One of the efforts by the belligerents, behind the front line, to win the war and bring about peace was the production of approximately 100 Proclamation Boards. These four-strip pictograms were the result of a scheme introduced by Lieutenant Governor George Arthur (1784–1854), on the advice of Surveyor General George Frankland (1800–38), to communicate that all are equal under the rule of law (Arthur 1). Frankland wrote to Arthur in early 1829 to suggest these Proclamation Boards could be produced and nailed to trees (Morris 84), as a Eurocentric adaptation of a traditional method of communication used by Indigenous peoples who left images on the trunks of trees. The overtly stated purpose of the Boards was, like the printed proclamations exhorting peace, to assert, all people—black and white—were equal. That “British Justice would protect” everyone (Morris 84). The first strip on each of these pictogram Boards presents Indigenous peoples and colonists living peacefully together. The second strip shows “a conciliatory handshake between the British governor and an Aboriginal ‘chief’, highly reminiscent of images found in North America on treaty medals and anti-slavery tokens” (Darian-Smith and Edmonds 4). The third and fourth strips depict the repercussions for committing murder (or, indeed, any significant crime), with an Indigenous man hanged for spearing a colonist and a European man hanged for shooting an Aboriginal man. Both men executed in the presence of the Lieutenant Governor. The Boards, oil on Huon pine, were painted by “convict artists incarcerated in the island penal colony” (Carroll 73).The Board at the State Library of New South Wales was digitised quite early on in the Library’s digitisation program, it has been routinely exhibited (including for the Library’s centenary in 2010) and is written about regularly. Yet, many questions about this small piece of timber remain unanswered. For example, some Boards were outlined with sketches and some were outlined with pouncing, “a technique [of the Italian Renaissance] of pricking the contours of a drawing with a pin. Charcoal was then dusted on to the drawing” (Carroll 75–76). Could such a sketch or example of pouncing be seen beneath the surface layers of paint on this particular Board? What might be revealed by examining the Board more closely and looking at this object in different ways?An important, but unexpected, discovery was that while most of the pigments in the painting correlate with those commonly available to artists in the early nineteenth century there is one outstanding anomaly. X-ray analysis revealed cadmium yellow present in several places across the painting, including the dresses of the little girls in strip one, uniform details in strip two, and the trousers worn by the settler men in strips three and four (Kahabka 2). This is an extraordinary discovery, as cadmium yellows were available “commercially as an artist pigment in England by 1846” and were shown by “Winsor & Newton at the 1851 Exhibition held at the Crystal Palace, London” (Fiedler and Bayard 68). The availability of this particular type of yellow in the early 1850s could set a new marker for the earliest possible date for the manufacture of this Board, long-assumed to be 1828–30. Further, the early manufacture of cadmium yellow saw the pigment in short supply and a very expensive option when compared with other pigments such as chrome yellow (the darker yellow, seen in the grid lines that separate the scenes in the painting). This presents a clearly uncomfortable truth in relation to an object so heavily researched and so significant to a well-regarded collection that aims to document much of Australia’s colonial history. Is it possible, for example, the Board has been subjected to overpainting at a later date? Or, was this premium paint used to produce a display Board that was sent, by the Tasmanian Government, to the 1866 Intercolonial Exhibition in Melbourne? In seeking to see the finer details of the painting through re-digitisation, the results were much richer than anticipated. The sketch outlines are clearly visible in the new high-resolution files. There are, too, details unable to be seen clearly with the naked eye, including this warrior’s headdress and ceremonial scarring on his stomach, scars that tell stories “of pain, endurance, identity, status, beauty, courage, sorrow or grief” (Australian Museum n.p.). The image of this man has been duplicated and distributed since the 1830s, an anonymous figure deployed to tell a settler-centric story of the Black, or Tasmanian, War. This man can now be seen, for the first time nine decades later, to wear his own story. We do not know his name, but he is no longer completely anonymous. This image is now, in some ways, a portrait. The State Library of New South Wales acknowledges this object is part of an important chapter in the Tasmanian story and, though two Boards are in collections in Tasmania (the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart and the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, Launceston), each Board is different. The Library holds an important piece of a large and complex puzzle and has a moral obligation to make this information available beyond its metropolitan location. Digitisation, in this case re-digitisation, is allowing for the disruption of this story in sparking new questions around provenance and for the relocating of a Palawa warrior to a more prominent, perhaps even equal role, within a colonial narrative. Image 2: Detail, Governor Arthur’s Proclamation to the Aborigines, ca. 1828–1830. Image Credit: Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Call No.: SAFE / R 247.Case Study Two: The George Augustus Robinson PapersThe second case study focuses on the work being led by the Indigenous Engagement Branch at the State Library of New South Wales on the George Augustus Robinson (1791–1866) Papers. In 1829, Robinson was granted a government post in Van Diemen’s Land to ‘conciliate’ with the Palawa peoples. More accurately, Robinson’s core task was dispossession and the systematic disconnection of the Palawa peoples from their Country, community, and culture. Robinson was a habitual diarist and notetaker documenting much of his own life as well as the lives of those around him, including First Nations peoples. His extensive suite of papers represents a familiar and peculiar kind of discomfort for Aboriginal Australians, one in which they are forced to learn about themselves through the eyes and words of their oppressors. For many First Nations peoples of Tasmania, Robinson remains a violent and terrible figure, but his observations of Palawa culture and language are as vital as they are problematic. Importantly, his papers include vibrant and utterly unique descriptions of people, place, flora and fauna, and language, as well as illustrations revealing insights into the routines of daily life (even as those routines were being systematically dismantled by colonial authorities). “Robinson’s records have informed much of the revitalisation of Tasmanian Aboriginal culture in the twentieth century and continue to provide the basis for investigations of identity and deep relationships to land by Aboriginal scholars” (Lehman n.p.). These observations and snippets of lived culture are of immense value to Palawa peoples today but the act of reading between Robinson’s assumptions and beyond his entrenched colonial views is difficult work.Image 3: George Augustus Robinson Papers, 1829–34. Image Credit: Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, A 7023–A 7031.The canonical reference for Robinson’s archive is Friendly Mission: The Tasmanian Journals and Papers of George Augustus Robinson, 1829–1834, edited by N.J.B. Plomley. The volume of over 1,000 pages was first published in 1966. This large-scale project is recognised “as a monumental work of Tasmanian history” (Crane ix). Yet, this standard text (relied upon by Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers) has clearly not reproduced a significant percentage of Robinson’s Tasmanian manuscripts. Through his presumptuous truncations Plomley has not simply edited Robinson’s work but has, quite literally, written many Palawa stories out of this colonial narrative. It is this lack of agency in determining what should be left out that is most troubling, and reflects an all-too-familiar approach which libraries, including the State Library of New South Wales, are now urgently trying to rectify. Plomley’s preface and introduction does not indicate large tranches of information are missing. Indeed, Plomley specifies “that in extenso [in full] reproduction was necessary” (4) and omissions “have been kept to a minimum” (8). A 32-page supplement was published in 1971. A new edition, including the supplement, some corrections made by Plomley, and some extra material was released in 2008. But much continues to be unknown outside of academic circles, and far too few Palawa Elders and language revival workers have had access to Robinson’s original unfiltered observations. Indeed, Plomley’s text is linear and neat when compared to the often-chaotic writings of Robinson. Digitisation cannot address matters of the materiality of the archive, but such projects do offer opportunities for access to information in its original form, unedited, and unmediated.Extensive consultation with communities in Tasmania is underpinning the digitisation and re-description of a collection which has long been assumed—through partial digitisation, microfilming, and Plomley’s text—to be readily available and wholly understood. Central to this project is not just challenging the canonical status of Plomley’s work but directly challenging the idea non-Aboriginal experts can truly understand the cultural or linguistic context of the information recorded in Robinson’s journals. One of the more exciting outcomes, so far, has been working with Palawa peoples to explore the possibility of Palawa-led transcriptions and translation, and not breaking up the tasks of this work and distributing them to consultants or to non-Indigenous student groups. In this way, people are being meaningfully reunited with their own histories and, crucially, given first right to contextualise and understand these histories. Again, digitisation and disruption can be seen here as allies with the facilitation of accessibility to an archive in ways that re-distribute the traditional power relations around interpreting and telling stories held within colonial-rich collections.Image 4: Detail, George Augustus Robinson Papers, 1829–34. Image Credit: Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, A 7023–A 7031.As has been so brilliantly illustrated by Bruce Pascoe’s recent work Dark Emu (2014), when Aboriginal peoples are given the opportunity to interpret their own culture from the colonial records without interference, they are able to see strength and sophistication rather than victimhood. For, to “understand how the Europeans’ assumptions selectively filtered the information brought to them by the early explorers is to see how we came to have the history of the country we accept today” (4). Far from decrying these early colonial records Aboriginal peoples understand their vital importance in connecting to a culture which was dismantled and destroyed, but importantly it is known that far too much is lost in translation when Aboriginal Australians are not the ones undertaking the translating. ConclusionFor Aboriginal Australians, culture and knowledge is no longer always anchored to Country. These histories, once so firmly connected to communities through their ancestral lands and languages, have been dispersed across the continent and around the world. Many important stories—of family history, language, and ways of life—are held in cultural institutions and understanding the role of responsibly disseminating these collections through digitisation is paramount. In transitioning from physical collections to hybrid collections of the physical and digital, the digitisation processes conducted by memory institutions can be—and due to the size of some collections is inevitably—selective. Limited resources, even for large-scale and well-resourced digitisation projects usually realise outcomes that focus on making visually rich, key, or canonical documents, or those documents considered high use or at risk, available online. Such materials are extracted from a full body of records. Digitisation projects, as noted, tend to be devised for a broader audience where contextual questions are less central to the methodology in favour of presenting notable documents online, separate from their complete collection and, critically, their context. Our institutions carry the weight of past collecting strategies and, today, the pressure of digitisation strategies as well. Contemporary librarians should not be gatekeepers, but rather key holders. In collaborating across sectors and with communities we open doors for education, research, and the repatriation of culture and knowledge. We must, always, remember to open these doors wide: the call of Aboriginal Australians of ‘nothing about us without us’ is not an invitation to collaboration but an imperative. Libraries—as well as galleries, archives, and museums—cannot tell these stories alone. Also, these two case studies highlight what we believe to be one of the biggest mistakes that not just libraries but all cultural institutions are vulnerable to making, the assumption that just because a collection is open access it is also accessible. Digitisation projects are more valuable when communicated, contextualised and—essentially—the result of community consultation. Such work can, for some, be uncomfortable while for others it offers opportunities to embrace disruption and, by extension, opportunities to decolonise collections. For First Nations peoples this work can be more powerful than any simple measurement tool can record. Through examining our past collecting, deliberate efforts to consult, and through digital sharing projects across metropolitan and regional Australia, we can make meaningful differences to the ways in which Aboriginal Australians can, again, own their histories.Acknowledgements The authors acknowledge the Palawa peoples: the traditional custodians of the lands known today as Tasmania. The authors acknowledge, too, the Gadigal people upon whose lands this article was researched and written. We are indebted to Dana Kahabka (Conservator), Joy Lai (Imaging Specialist), Richard Neville (Mitchell Librarian), and Marika Duczynski (Project Officer) at the State Library of New South Wales. Sincere thanks are also given to Jason Ensor of Western Sydney University.ReferencesArthur, George. “Proclamation.” The Hobart Town Courier 19 Apr. 1828: 1.———. Proclamation to the Aborigines. Graphic Materials. Sydney: Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, SAFE R / 247, ca. 1828–1830.Australian Museum. “Aboriginal Scarification.” 2018. 11 Jan. 2019 <https://australianmuseum.net.au/about/history/exhibitions/body-art/aboriginal-scarification/>.Brown, Molly. “Disruptive Technology: A Good Thing for Our Libraries?” International Librarians Network (2016). 26 Aug. 2018 <https://interlibnet.org/2016/11/25/disruptive-technology-a-good-thing-for-our-libraries/>.Carroll, Khadija von Zinnenburg. Art in the Time of Colony: Empires and the Making of the Modern World, 1650–2000. Farnham, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 2014.Clements, Nicholas. The Black War: Fear, Sex and Resistance in Tasmania. St Lucia, U of Queensland P, 2014.Crane, Ralph. “Introduction.” Friendly Mission: The Tasmanian Journals and Papers of George Augustus Robinson, 1829-1834. 2nd ed. Launceston and Hobart: Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, and Quintus Publishing, 2008. ix.Darian-Smith, Kate, and Penelope Edmonds. “Conciliation on Colonial Frontiers.” Conciliation on Colonial Frontiers: Conflict, Performance and Commemoration in Australia and the Pacific Rim. Eds. Kate Darian-Smith and Penelope Edmonds. New York: Routledge, 2015. 1–14.Edmonds, Penelope. “‘Failing in Every Endeavour to Conciliate’: Governor Arthur’s Proclamation Boards to the Aborigines, Australian Conciliation Narratives and Their Transnational Connections.” Journal of Australian Studies 35.2 (2011): 201–18.Fiedler, Inge, and Michael A. Bayard. Artist Pigments, a Handbook of Their History and Characteristics. Ed. Robert L. Feller. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986. 65–108. Franks, Rachel. “A True Crime Tale: Re-Imagining Governor Arthur’s Proclamation Board for the Tasmanian Aborigines.” M/C Journal 18.6 (2015). 1 Feb. 2019 <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/1036>.Franks, Rachel, and Jason Ensor. “Challenging the Canon: Collaboration, Digitisation and Education.” ALIA Online: A Conference of the Australian Library and Information Association, 11–15 Feb. 2019, Sydney.Kahabka, Dana. Condition Assessment [Governor Arthur’s Proclamation to the Aborigines, ca. 1828–1830, SAFE / R247]. Sydney: State Library of New South Wales, 2017.Lehman, Greg. “Pleading Robinson: Reviews of Friendly Mission: The Tasmanian Journals and Papers of George Augustus Robinson (2008) and Reading Robinson: Companion Essays to Friendly Mission (2008).” Australian Humanities Review 49 (2010). 1 May 2019 <http://press-files.anu.edu.au/downloads/press/p41961/html/review-12.xhtml?referer=1294&page=15>. Morris, John. “Notes on A Message to the Tasmanian Aborigines in 1829, popularly called ‘Governor Davey’s Proclamation to the Aborigines, 1816’.” Australiana 10.3 (1988): 84–7.Pascoe, Bruce. Dark Emu. Broome: Magabala Books, 2014/2018.Plomley, N.J.B. Friendly Mission: The Tasmanian Journals and Papers of George Augustus Robinson, 1829–1834. Hobart: Tasmanian Historical Research Association, 1966.Robinson, George Augustus. Papers. Textual Records. Sydney: Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW, A 7023–A 7031, 1829–34. Thorpe, Kirsten, Monica Galassi, and Rachel Franks. “Discovering Indigenous Australian Culture: Building Trusted Engagement in Online Environments.” Journal of Web Librarianship 10.4 (2016): 343–63.

In PilsenTwenty-six Station Road,She climbed to the third floorUp stairs which were all that was leftOf the whole house,She opened her doorFull on to the sky,Stood gaping over the edge.For this was the placeThe world ended.Thenshe locked up carefullylest someone stealSiriusor Aldebaranfrom her kitchen,went back downstairsand settled herselfto waitfor the house to rise againand for her husband to rise from the ashesand for her children’s hands and feet to be stuck back in placeIn the morning they found herstill as stone, sparrows pecking her hands.Five Minutes after the Air Raidby Miroslav Holub(Calder 287) Holding Still Detonation. Affect. During the Second World War, London and other European cities were subjected to the terrors of aerial bombardment, rendered through nightmarish anticipations of the bomber (Gollin 7) and the material storm of the real air-raid. The fall of bombs plagued cities and their citizens with the terrible rain of explosives and incendiary weapons. A volatile landscape was formed as the urban environment was ‘unmade’ and urged into violent motion. Flying projectiles of shrapnel, debris and people; avalanches of collapsing factories and houses; the inhale and exhale of compressed air and firestorms; the scream of the explosion. All these composed an incredibly fluid urban traumatic, as atmospheres fell over the cities that was thick with smoke, dust, and ventilated only by terror (see for instance Sebald 10 and Mendieta’s 3 recent commentary). Vast craters were imprinted onto the charred morphologies of London and Berlin as well as Coventry, Hamburg and Dresden. Just as the punctuations of the bombing saw the psychic as well as the material give way, writers portraying Britain as an ‘volcano island’ (Spaight 5) witnessed eruptive projections – the volleys of the material air-war; the emotional signature of charged and bitter reprisals; pain, anguish and vengeance - counter-strikes of affect. In the midst of all of this molten violence and emotion it seems impossible that a simultaneous sense of quiescence could be at all possible. More than mere physical fixity or geographical stasis, a rather different sort of experience could take place. Preceding, during and following the excessive mobilisation of an air raid, ‘stillness’ was often used to describe certain plateuing stretches of time-space which were slowed and even stopped (Anderson 740). Between the eruptions appeared hollows of calm and even boredom. People’s nervous flinching under the reverberation of high-explosive blasts formed part of what Jordan Crandall might call a ‘bodily-inclination’ position. Slackened and taut feelings condensed around people listening out for the oncoming bomber. People found that they prepared for the dreadful wail of the siren, or relaxed in the aftermath of the attack. In these instances, states of tension and apprehension as well as calm and relief formed though stillness. The peculiar experiences of ‘stillness’ articulated in these events open out, I suggest, distinctive ways-of-being which undo our assumptions of perpetually fluid subjectivities and the primacy of the ‘body in motion’ even within the context of unparalleled movement and uncertainty (see Harrison 423 and also Rose and Wylie 477 for theoretical critique). The sorts of “musics of stillness and silence able to be discovered in a world of movement” (Thrift, Still 50), add to our understandings of the material geographies of war and terror (see for instance Graham 63; Gregory and Pred 3), whilst they gesture towards complex material-affective experiences of bodies and spaces. Stillness in this sense, denotes apprehending and anticipating spaces and events in ways that sees the body enveloped within the movement of the environment around it; bobbing along intensities that course their way through it; positioned towards pasts and futures that make themselves felt, and becoming capable of intense forms of experience and thought. These examples illustrate not a shutting down of the body to an inwardly focused position – albeit composed by complex relations and connections – but bodies finely attuned to their exteriors (see Bissell, Animating 277 and Conradson 33). In this paper I draw from a range of oral and written testimony archived at the Imperial War Museum and the Mass Observation wartime regular reports. Edited publications from these collections were also consulted. Detailing the experience of aerial bombing during the Blitz, particularly on London between September 1940 to May 1941, forms part of a wider project concerning the calculative and affective dimensions of the aeroplane’s relationship with the human body, especially through the spaces it has worked to construct (infrastructures such as airports) and destroy. While appearing extraordinary, the examples I use are actually fairly typical of the patternings of experience and the depth and clarity with which they are told. They could be taken to be representative of the population as a whole or coincidentally similar testimonials. Either way, they are couched within a specific cultural historical context of urgency, threat and unparalleled violence.Anticipations The complex material geographies of an air raid reveal the ecological interdependencies of populations and their often urban environments and metabolisms (Coward 419; Davis 3; Graham 63; Gregory The Colonial 19; Hewitt Place 257). Aerial warfare was an address of populations conceived at the register of their bio-rhythmical and metabolic relationship to their milieu (Adey). The Blitz and the subsequent Allied bombing campaign constituted Churchill’s ‘great experiment’ for governments attempting to assess the damage an air raid could inflict upon a population’s nerves and morale (Brittain 77; Gregory In Another 88). An anxious and uncertain landscape constructed before the war, perpetuated by public officials, commentators and members of parliament, saw background affects (Ngai 5) of urgency creating an atmosphere that pressurised and squeezed the population to prepare for the ‘gathering storm’. Attacks upon the atmosphere itself had been readily predicted in the form of threatening gas attacks ready to poison the medium upon which human and animal life depended (Haldane 111; Sloterdijk 41-57). One of the most talked of moments of the Blitz is not necessarily the action but the times of stillness that preceded it. Before and in-between an air raid stillness appears to describe a state rendered somewhere between the lulls and silences of the action and the warnings and the anticipatory feelings of what might happen. In the awaiting bodies, the materialites of silence could be felt as a kind-of-sound and as an atmospheric sense of imminence. At the onset of the first air-raids sound became a signifier of what was on the way (MO 408). Waiting – as both practice and sensation – imparted considerable inertia that went back and forth through time (Jeffrey 956; Massumi, Parables 3). For Geographer Kenneth Hewitt, sound “told of the coming raiders, the nearness of bombs, the plight of loved ones” (When the 16). The enormous social survey of Mass Observation concluded that “fear seems to be linked above all with noise” (original emphasis). As one report found, “It is the siren or the whistle or the explosion or the drone – these are the things that terrify. Fear seems to come to us most of all through our sense of hearing” (MO 378). Yet the power of the siren came not only from its capacity to propagate sound and to alert, but the warning held in its voice of ‘keeping silent’. “Prefacing in a dire prolepsis the post-apocalyptic event before the event”, as Bishop and Phillips (97) put it, the stillness of silence was incredibly virtual in its affects, disclosing - in its lack of life – the lives that would be later taken. Devastation was expected and rehearsed by civilians. Stillness formed a space and body ready to spring into movement – an ‘imminent mobility’ as John Armitage (204) has described it. Perched on the edge of devastation, space-times were felt through a sense of impending doom. Fatalistic yet composed expectations of a bomb heading straight down pervaded the thoughts and feelings of shelter dwellers (MO 253; MO 217). Waves of sound disrupted fragile tempers as they passed through the waiting bodies in the physical language of tensed muscles and gritted teeth (Gaskin 36). Silence helped form bodies inclined-to-attention, particularly sensitive to aural disturbances and vibrations from all around. Walls, floors and objects carried an urban bass-line of warning (Goodman). Stillness was forged through a body readied in advance of the violence these materialities signified. A calm and composed body was not necessarily an immobile body. Civilians who had prepared for the attacks were ready to snap into action - to dutifully wear their gas-mask or escape to shelter. ‘Backgrounds of expectation’ (Thrift, Still 36) were forged through non-too-subtle procedural and sequential movements which opened-out new modes of thinking and feeling. Folding one’s clothes and placing them on the dresser in-readiness; pillows and sheets prepared for a spell in the shelter, these were some of many orderly examples (IWM 14595). In the event of a gas attack air raid precautions instructions advised how to put on a gas mask (ARPD 90-92),i) Hold the breath. ii) Remove headgear and place between the knees. iii) Lift the flap of the haversack [ …] iv) Bring the face-piece towards the face’[…](v) Breathe out and continue to breathe in a normal manner The rational technologies of drill, dressage and operational research enabled poise in the face of an eventual air-raid. Through this ‘logistical-life’ (Reid 17), thought was directed towards simple tasks by minutely described instructions. Stilled LifeThe end of stillness was usually marked by a reactionary ‘flinch’, ‘start’ or ‘jump’. Such reactionary ‘urgent analogs’ (Ngai 94; Tomkins 96) often occurred as a response to sounds and movements that merely broke the tension rather than accurately mimicking an air raid. These atmospheres were brittle and easily disrupted. Cars back-firing and changing gear were often complained about (MO 371), just as bringing people out of the quiescence of sleep was a common effect of air-raids (Kraftl and Horton 509). Disorientation was usually fostered in this process while people found it very difficult to carry out the most simple of tasks. Putting one’s clothes on or even making their way out of the bedroom door became enormously problematic. Sirens awoke a ‘conditioned reflex’ to take cover (MO 364). Long periods of sleep deprivation brought on considerable fatigue and anxiety. ‘Sleep we Must’ wrote journalist Ritchie Calder (252) noticing the invigorating powers of sleep for both urban morale and the bare existence of survival. For other more traumatized members of the population, psychological studies found that the sustained concentration of shelling caused what was named ‘apathy-retreat’ (Harrisson, Living 65). This extreme form of acquiescence saw especially susceptible and vulnerable civilians suffer an overwhelming urge to sleep and to be cared-for ‘as if chronically ill’ (Janis 90). A class and racial politics of quiescent affect was enacted as several members of the population were believed far more liable to ‘give way’ to defeat and dangerous emotions (Brittain 77; Committee of Imperial Defence).In other cases it was only once an air-raid had started that sleep could be found (MO 253). The boredom of waiting could gather in its intensity deforming bodies with “the doom of depression” (Anderson 749). The stopped time-spaces in advance of a raid could be soaked with so much tension that the commencement of sirens, vibrations and explosions would allow a person overwhelming relief (MO 253). Quoting from a boy recalling his experiences in Hannover during 1943, Hewitt illustrates:I lie in bed. I am afraid. I strain my ears to hear something but still all is quiet. I hardly dare breathe, as if something horrible is knocking at the door, at the windows. Is it the beating of my heart? ... Suddenly there seems relief, the sirens howl into the night ... (Heimatbund Niedersachsen 1953: 185). (Cited in Hewitt, When 16)Once a state of still was lost getting it back required some effort (Bissell, Comfortable 1697). Cautious of preventing mass panic and public hysteria by allowing the body to erupt outwards into dangerous vectors of mobility, the British government’s schooling in the theories of panicology (Orr 12) and contagious affect (Le Bon 17; Tarde 278; Thrift, Intensities 57; Trotter 140), made air raid precautions (ARP) officers, police and civil defence teams enforce ‘stay put’ and ‘hold firm’ orders to protect the population (Jones et al, Civilian Morale 463, Public Panic 63-64; Thomas 16). Such orders were meant to shield against precisely the kinds of volatile bodies they were trying to compel with their own bombing strategies. Reactions to the Blitz were moralised and racialised. Becoming stilled required self-conscious work by a public anxious not to be seen to ‘panic’. This took the form of self-disciplination. People exhausted considerable energy to ‘settle’ themselves down. It required ‘holding’ themselves still and ‘together’ in order to accomplish this state, and to avoid going the same way as the buildings falling apart around them, as some people observed (MO 408). In Britain a cup of tea was often made as a spontaneous response in the event of the conclusion of a raid (Brown 686). As well as destroying bombing created spaces too – making space for stillness (Conradson 33). Many people found that they could recall their experiences in vivid detail, allocating a significant proportion of their memories to the recollection of the self and an awareness of their surroundings (IWM 19103). In this mode of stillness, contemplation did not turn-inwards but unfolded out towards the environment. The material processual movement of the shell-blast literally evacuated all sound and materials from its centre to leave a vacuum of negative pressure. Diaries and oral testimonies stretch out these millisecond events into discernable times and spaces of sensation, thought and the experience of experience (Massumi, Parables 2). Extraordinarily, survivors mention serene feelings of quiet within the eye of the blast (see Mortimer 239); they had, literally, ‘no time to be frightened’ (Crighton-Miller 6150). A shell explosion could create such intensities of stillness that a sudden and distinctive lessening of the person and world are expressed, constituting ‘stilling-slowing diminishments’ (Anderson 744). As if the blast-vacuum had sucked all the animation from their agency, recollections convey passivity and, paradoxically, a much more heightened and contemplative sense of the moment (Bourke 121; Thrift, Still 41). More lucid accounts describe a multitude of thoughts and an attention to minute detail. Alternatively, the enormous peaking of a waking blast subdued all later activities to relative obsolescence. The hurricane of sounds and air appear to overload into the flatness of an extended and calmed instantaneous present.Then the whistling stopped, then a terrific thump as it hit the ground, and everything seem to expand, then contract with deliberation and stillness seemed to be all around. (As recollected by Bill and Vi Reagan in Gaskin 17)On the other hand, as Schivelbusch (7) shows us in his exploration of defeat, the cessation of war could be met with an outburst of feeling. In these micro-moments a close encounter with death was often experienced with elation, a feeling of peace and well-being drawn through a much more heightened sense of the now (MO 253). These are not pre-formed or contemplative techniques of attunement as Thrift has tracked, but are the consequence of significant trauma and the primal reaction to extreme danger.TracesSusan Griffin’s haunting A Chorus of Stones documents what she describes as a private life of war (1). For Griffin, and as shown in these brief examples, stillness and being-stilled describe a series of diverse experiences endured during aerial bombing. Yet, as Griffin narrates, these are not-so private lives. A common representation of air war can be found in Henry Moore’s tube shelter sketches which convey sleeping tube-dwellers harboured in the London underground during the Blitz. The bodies are represented as much more than individuals being connected by Moore’s wave-like shapes into the turbulent aggregation of a choppy ocean. What we see in Moore’s portrayal and the examples discussed already are experiences with definite relations to both inner and outer worlds. They refer to more-than individuals who bear intimate relations to their outsides and the atmospheric and material environments enveloping and searing through them. Stillness was an unlikely state composed through these circulations just as it was formed as a means of address. It was required in order to apprehend sounds and possible events through techniques of listening or waiting. Alternatively being stilled could refer to pauses between air-strikes and the corresponding breaks of tension in the aftermath of a raid. Stillness was composed through a series of distributed yet interconnecting bodies, feelings, materials and atmospheres oriented towards the future and the past. The ruins of bombed-out building forms stand as traces even today. Just as Massumi (Sensing 16) describes in the context of architecture, the now static remainder of the explosion “envelops in its stillness a deformational field of which it stands as the trace”. The ruined forms left after the attack stand as a “monument” of the passing of the raid to be what it once was – house, factory, shop, restaurant, library - and to become something else. The experience of those ‘from below’ (Hewitt 2) suffering contemporary forms of air-warfare share many parallels with those of the Blitz. Air power continues to target, apparently more precisely, the affective tones of the body. Accessed by kinetic and non-kinetic forces, the signs of air-war are generated by the shelling of Kosovo, ‘shock and awe’ in Iraq, air-strikes in Afghanistan and by the simulated air-raids of IDF aircraft producing sonic-booms over sleeping Palestinian civilians, now becoming far more real as I write in the final days of 2008. Achieving stillness in the wake of aerial trauma remains, even now, a way to survive the (private) life of air war. AcknowledgementsI’d like to thank the editors and particularly the referees for such a close reading of the article; time did not permit the attention their suggestions demanded. Grateful acknowledgement is also made to the AHRC whose funding allowed me to research and write this paper. ReferencesAdey, Peter. Aerial Geographies: Mobilities, Bodies and Subjects. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010 (forthcoming). 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Introduction One of the ways in which ‘country’ is made to work discursively is in ‘country music’ – defining a genre and sensibility in music production, marketing and consumption. This article seeks to excavate one small niche in the historical geography of country music to explore exactly how discursive antecedents emerged, and crucially, how images associated with ‘country’ surfaced and travelled internationally via one of the new ‘global’ media of the first half of the twentieth century – sheet music. My central arguments are twofold: first, that alongside aural qualities and lyrical content, the visual elements of sheet music were important and thus far have been under-acknowledged. Sheet music diffused the imagery connecting ‘country’ to music, to particular landscapes, and masculinities. In the literature on country music much emphasis has been placed on film, radio and television (Tichi; Peterson). Yet, sheet music was for several decades the most common way people bought personal copies of songs they liked and intended to play at home on piano, guitar or ukulele. This was particularly the case in Australia – geographically distant, and rarely included in international tours by American country music stars. Sheet music is thus a rich text to reveal the historical contours of ‘country’. My second and related argument is that that the possibilities for the globalising of ‘country’ were first explored in music. The idea of transnational discourses associated with ‘country’ and ‘rurality’ is relatively new (Cloke et al; Gorman-Murray et al; McCarthy), but in music we see early evidence of a globalising discourse of ‘country’ well ahead of the time period usually analysed. Accordingly, my focus is on the sheet music of country songs in Australia in the first half of the twentieth century and on how visual representations hybridised travelling themes to create a new vernacular ‘country’ in Australia. Creating ‘Country’ Music Country music, as its name suggests, is perceived as the music of rural areas, “defined in contrast to metropolitan norms” (Smith 301). However, the ‘naturalness’ of associations between country music and rurality belies a history of urban capitalism and the refinement of deliberate methods of marketing music through associated visual imagery. Early groups wore suits and dressed for urban audiences – but then altered appearances later, on the insistence of urban record companies, to emphasise rurality and cowboy heritage. Post-1950, ‘country’ came to replace ‘folk’ music as a marketing label, as the latter was considered to have too many communistic references (Hemphill 5), and the ethnic mixing of earlier folk styles was conveniently forgotten in the marketing of ‘country’ music as distinct from African American ‘race’ and ‘r and b’ music. Now an industry of its own with multinational headquarters in Nashville, country music is a ‘cash cow’ for entertainment corporations, with lower average production costs, considerable profit margins, and marketing advantages that stem from tropes of working class identity and ‘rural’ honesty (see Lewis; Arango). Another of country music’s associations is with American geography – and an imagined heartland in the colonial frontier of the American West. Slippages between ‘country’ and ‘western’ in music, film and dress enhance this. But historical fictions are masked: ‘purists’ argue that western dress and music have nothing to do with ‘country’ (see truewesternmusic.com), while recognition of the Spanish-Mexican, Native American and Hawaiian origins of ‘cowboy’ mythology is meagre (George-Warren and Freedman). Similarly, the highly international diffusion and adaptation of country music as it rose to prominence in the 1940s is frequently downplayed (Connell and Gibson), as are the destructive elements of colonialism and dispossession of indigenous peoples in frontier America (though Johnny Cash’s 1964 album The Ballads Of The American Indian: Bitter Tears was an exception). Adding to the above is the way ‘country’ operates discursively in music as a means to construct particular masculinities. Again, linked to rural imagery and the American frontier, the dominant masculinity is of rugged men wrestling nature, negotiating hardships and the pressures of family life. Country music valorises ‘heroic masculinities’ (Holt and Thompson), with echoes of earlier cowboy identities reverberating into contemporary performance through dress style, lyrical content and marketing imagery. The men of country music mythology live an isolated existence, working hard to earn an income for dependent families. Their music speaks to the triumph of hard work, honest values (meaning in this context a musical style, and lyrical concerns that are ‘down to earth’, ‘straightforward’ and ‘without pretence’) and physical strength, in spite of neglect from national governments and uncaring urban leaders. Country music has often come to be associated with conservative politics, heteronormativity, and whiteness (Gibson and Davidson), echoing the wider politics of ‘country’ – it is no coincidence, for example, that the slogan for the 2008 Republican National Convention in America was ‘country first’. And yet, throughout its history, country music has also enabled more diverse gender performances to emerge – from those emphasising (or bemoaning) domesticity; assertive femininity; creative negotiation of ‘country’ norms by gay men; and ‘alternative’ culture (captured in the marketing tag, ‘alt.country’); to those acknowledging white male victimhood, criminality (‘the outlaw’), vulnerability and cruelty (see Johnson; McCusker and Pecknold; Saucier). Despite dominant tropes of ‘honesty’, country music is far from transparent, standing for certain values and identities, and yet enabling the construction of diverse and contradictory others. Historical analysis is therefore required to trace the emergence of ‘country’ in music, as it travelled beyond America. A Note on Sheet Music as Media Source Sheet music was one of the main modes of distribution of music from the 1930s through to the 1950s – a formative period in which an eclectic group of otherwise distinct ‘hillbilly’ and ‘folk’ styles moved into a single genre identity, and after which vinyl singles and LP records with picture covers dominated. Sheet music was prevalent in everyday life: beyond radio, a hit song was one that was widely purchased as sheet music, while pianos and sheet music collections (stored in a piece of furniture called a ‘music canterbury’) in family homes were commonplace. Sheet music is in many respects preferable to recorded music as a form of evidence for historical analysis of country music. Picture LP covers did not arrive until the late 1950s (by which time rock and roll had surpassed country music). Until then, 78 rpm shellac discs, the main form of pre-recorded music, featured generic brown paper sleeves from the individual record companies, or city retail stores. Also, while radio was clearly central to the consumption of music in this period, it obviously also lacked the pictorial element that sheet music could provide. Sheet music bridged the music and printing industries – the latter already well-equipped with colour printing, graphic design and marketing tools. Sheet music was often literally crammed with information, providing the researcher with musical notation, lyrics, cover art and embedded advertisements – aural and visual texts combined. These multiple dimensions of sheet music proved useful here, for clues to the context of the music/media industries and geography of distribution (for instance, in addresses for publishers and sheet music retail shops). Moreover, most sheet music of the time used rich, sometimes exaggerated, images to convince passing shoppers to buy songs that they had possibly never heard. As sheet music required caricature rather than detail or historical accuracy, it enabled fantasy without distraction. In terms of representations of ‘country’, then, sheet music is perhaps even more evocative than film or television. Hundreds of sheet music items were collected for this research over several years, through deliberate searching (for instance, in library archives and specialist sheet music stores) and with some serendipity (for instance, when buying second hand sheet music in charity shops or garage sales). The collected material is probably not representative of all music available at the time – it is as much a specialised personal collection as a comprehensive survey. However, at least some material from all the major Australian country music performers of the time were found, and the resulting collection appears to be several times larger than that held currently by the National Library of Australia (from which some entries were sourced). All examples here are of songs written by, or cover art designed for Australian country music performers. For brevity’s sake, the following analysis of the sheet music follows a crudely chronological framework. Country Music in Australia Before ‘Country’ Country music did not ‘arrive’ in Australia from America as a fully-finished genre category; nor was Australia at the time without rural mythology or its own folk music traditions. Associations between Australian national identity, rurality and popular culture were entrenched in a period of intense creativity and renewed national pride in the decades prior to and after Federation in 1901. This period saw an outpouring of art, poetry, music and writing in new nationalist idiom, rooted in ‘the bush’ (though drawing heavily on Celtic expressions), and celebrating themes of mateship, rural adversity and ‘battlers’. By the turn of the twentieth century, such myths, invoked through memory and nostalgia, had already been popularised. Australia had a fully-established system of colonies, capital cities and state governments, and was highly urbanised. Yet the poetry, folk music and art, invariably set in rural locales, looked back to the early 1800s, romanticising bush characters and frontier events. The ‘bush ballad’ was a central and recurring motif, one that commentators have argued was distinctly, and essentially ‘Australian’ (Watson; Smith). Sheet music from this early period reflects the nationalistic, bush-orientated popular culture of the time: iconic Australian fauna and flora are prominent, and Australian folk culture is emphasised as ‘native’ (being the first era of cultural expressions from Australian-born residents). Pioneer life and achievements are celebrated. ‘Along the road to Gundagai’, for instance, was about an iconic Australian country town and depicted sheep droving along rustic trails with overhanging eucalypts. Male figures are either absent, or are depicted in situ as lone drovers in the archetypal ‘shepherd’ image, behind their flocks of sheep (Figure 1). Figure 1: No. 1 Magpie Ballads – The Pioneer (c1900) and Along the road to Gundagai (1923). Further colonial ruralities developed in Australia from the 1910s to 1940s, when agrarian values grew in the promotion of Australian agricultural exports. Australia ‘rode on the sheep’s back’ to industrialisation, and governments promoted rural development and inland migration. It was a period in which rural lifestyles were seen as superior to those in the crowded inner city, and government strategies sought to create a landed proletariat through post-war land settlement and farm allotment schemes. National security was said to rely on populating the inland with those of European descent, developing rural industries, and breeding a healthier and yet compliant population (Dufty), from which armies of war-ready men could be recruited in times of conflict. Popular culture served these national interests, and thus during these decades, when ‘hillbilly’ and other North American music forms were imported, they were transformed, adapted and reworked (as in other places such as Canada – see Lehr). There were definite parallels in the frontier narratives of the United States (Whiteoak), and several local adaptations followed: Tex Morton became Australia’s ‘Yodelling boundary rider’ and Gordon Parsons became ‘Australia’s yodelling bushman’. American songs were re-recorded and performed, and new original songs written with Australian lyrics, titles and themes. Visual imagery in sheet music built upon earlier folk/bush frontier themes to re-cast Australian pastoralism in a more settled, modernist and nationalist aesthetic; farms were places for the production of a robust nation. Where male figures were present on sheet music covers in the early twentieth century, they became more prominent in this period, and wore Akubras (Figure 2). The lyrics to John Ashe’s Growin’ the Golden Fleece (1952) exemplify this mix of Australian frontier imagery, new pastoralist/nationalist rhetoric, and the importation of American cowboy masculinity: Go west and take up sheep, man, North Queensland is the shot But if you don’t get rich, man, you’re sure to get dry rot Oh! Growin’ the golden fleece, battlin’ a-way out west Is bound to break your flamin’ heart, or else expand your chest… We westerners are handy, we can’t afford to crack Not while the whole darn’d country is riding on our back Figure 2: Eric Tutin’s Shearers’ Jamboree (1946). As in America, country music struck a chord because it emerged “at a point in history when the project of the creation and settlement of a new society was underway but had been neither completed nor abandoned” (Dyer 33). Governments pressed on with the colonial project of inland expansion in Australia, despite the theft of indigenous country this entailed, and popular culture such as music became a means to normalise and naturalise the process. Again, mutations of American western imagery, and particular iconic male figures were important, as in Roy Darling’s (1945) Overlander Trail (Figure 3): Wagon wheels are rolling on, and the days seem mighty long Clouds of heat-dust in the air, bawling cattle everywhere They’re on the overlander trail Where only sheer determination will prevail Men of Aussie with a job to do, they’ll stick and drive the cattle through And though they sweat they know they surely must Keep on the trail that winds a-head thro’ heat and dust All sons of Aussie and they will not fail. Sheet music depicted silhouetted men in cowboy hats on horses (either riding solo or in small groups), riding into sunsets or before looming mountain ranges. Music – an important part of popular culture in the 1940s – furthered the colonial project of invading, securing and transforming the Australian interior by normalising its agendas and providing it with heroic male characters, stirring tales and catchy tunes. Figure 3: ‘Roy Darling’s (1945) Overlander Trail and Smoky Dawson’s The Overlander’s Song (1946). ‘Country Music’ Becomes a (Globalised) Genre Further growth in Australian country music followed waves of popularity in the United States in the 1940s and 1950s, and was heavily influenced by new cross-media publicity opportunities. Radio shows expanded, and western TV shows such as Bonanza and On the Range fuelled a ‘golden age’. Australian performers such as Slim Dusty and Smokey Dawson rose to fame (see Fitzgerald and Hayward) in an era when rural-urban migration peaked. Sheet music reflected the further diffusion and adoption of American visual imagery: where male figures were present on sheet music covers, they became more prominent than before and wore Stetsons. Some were depicted as chiselled-faced but simple men, with plain clothing and square jaws. Others began to more enthusiastically embrace cowboy looks, with bandana neckerchiefs, rawhide waistcoats, embellished and harnessed tall shaft boots, pipe-edged western shirts with wide collars, smile pockets, snap fasteners and shotgun cuffs, and fringed leather jackets (Figure 4). Landscapes altered further too: cacti replaced eucalypts, and iconic ‘western’ imagery of dusty towns, deserts, mesas and buttes appeared (Figure 5). Any semblance of folk music’s appeal to rustic authenticity was jettisoned in favour of showmanship, as cowboy personas were constructed to maximise cinematic appeal. Figure 4: Al Dexter’s Pistol Packin’ Mama (1943) and Reg Lindsay’s (1954) Country and Western Song Album. Figure 5: Tim McNamara’s Hitching Post (1948) and Smoky Dawson’s Golden West Album (1951). Far from slavish mimicry of American culture, however, hybridisations were common. According to Australian music historian Graeme Smith (300): “Australian place names appear, seeking the same mythological resonance that American localisation evoked: hobos became bagmen […] cowboys become boundary riders.” Thus alongside reproductions of the musical notations of American songs by Lefty Frizzel, Roy Carter and Jimmie Rodgers were songs with localised themes by new Australian stars such as Reg Lindsay and Smoky Dawson: My curlyheaded buckaroo, My home way out back, and On the Murray Valley. On the cover of The square dance by the billabong (Figure 6) – the title of which itself was a conjunction of archetypal ‘country’ images from both America and Australia – a background of eucalypts and windmills frames dancers in classic 1940s western (American) garb. In the case of Tex Morton’s Beautiful Queensland (Figure 7), itself mutated from W. Lee O’Daniel’s Beautiful Texas (c1945), the sheet music instructed those playing the music that the ‘names of other states may be substituted for Queensland’. ‘Country’ music had become an established genre, with normative values, standardised images and themes and yet constituted a stylistic formula with enough polysemy to enable local adaptations and variations. Figure 6: The Square dance by the billabong, Vernon Lisle, 1951. Figure 7: Beautiful Queensland, Tex Morton, c1945 source: http://nla.gov.au/nla.mus-vn1793930. Conclusions In country music images of place and masculinity combine. In music, frontier landscapes are populated by rugged men living ‘on the range’ in neo-colonial attempts to tame the land and convert it to productive uses. This article has considered only one media – sheet music – in only one country (Australia) and in only one time period (1900-1950s). There is much more to say than was possible here about country music, place and gender – particularly recently, since ‘country’ has fragmented into several niches, and marketing of country music via cable television and the internet has ensued (see McCusker and Pecknold). My purpose here has been instead to explore the early origins of ‘country’ mythology in popular culture, through a media source rarely analysed. Images associated with ‘country’ travelled internationally via sheet music, immensely popular in the 1930s and 1940s before the advent of television. The visual elements of sheet music contributed to the popularisation and standardisation of genre expectations and appearances, and yet these too travelled and were adapted and varied in places like Australia which had their own colonial histories and folk music heritages. Evidenced here is how combinations of geographical and gender imagery embraced imported American cowboy imagery and adapted it to local markets and concerns. Australia saw itself as a modern rural utopia with export aspirations and a desire to secure permanence through taming and populating its inland. Sheet music reflected all this. So too, sheet music reveals the historical contours of ‘country’ as a transnational discourse – and the extent to which ‘country’ brought with it a clearly defined set of normative values, a somewhat exaggerated cowboy masculinity, and a remarkable capacity to be moulded to local circumstances. Well before later and more supposedly ‘global’ media such as the internet and television, the humble printed sheet of notated music was steadily shaping ‘country’ imagery, and an emergent international geography of cultural flows. References Arango, Tim. “Cashville USA.” Fortune, Jan 29, 2007. Sept 3, 2008, http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/01/22/8397980/index.htm. Cloke, Paul, Marsden, Terry and Mooney, Patrick, eds. Handbook of Rural Studies, London: Sage, 2006. 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In Victorian times, when female travel narratives were read as excursions rather than expeditions, it was common for women authors to preface their travels with an apology. “What this book wants,” begins Mary Kingsley’s Travels in West Africa, “is not a simple preface but an apology, and a very brilliant and convincing one at that” (4). This tendency of the woman writer to depreciate her travel with an acknowledgment of its presumptuousness crafted her apology essentially as an admission of guilt. “Where I have offered my opinions,” Isabella Bird writes in The Englishwoman in America, “I have done so with extreme diffidence, giving impressions rather than conclusions” (2). While Elizabeth Howells has since argued the apologetic preface was in fact an opposing strategy that allowed women writers to assert their authority by averting it, it is certainly telling of the time and genre that a female writer could only defend her work by first excusing it. The personal apology may have emerged as the natural response to social restrictions but it has not been without consequence for female travel. The female position, often constructed as communal, is still problematised in contemporary travel texts. While there has been a traceable shift from apology to affirmation since the first women travellers abandoned their embroidery, it seems some sense of lingering culpability still remains. In many ways, the modern female traveller, like the early lady traveller, is still a displaced woman. She still sets out cautiously, guide book in hand. Often she writes, like the female confessant, in an attempt to recover what Virginia Woolf calls “the lives of the obscure”: those found locked in old diaries, stuffed away in old drawers or simply unrecorded (44). Often she speaks insistently of the abstract things which Kingsley, ironically, wrote so easily and extensively about. She is, however, even when writing from within the confines of her own home, still writing from abroad. Women’s solitary or “unescorted” travel, even in contemporary times, is considered less common in the Western world, with recurrent travel warnings constantly targeted at female travellers. Travelling women are always made aware of the limits of their body and its vulnerabilities. Mary Morris comments on “the fear of rape, for example, whether crossing the Sahara or just crossing a city street at night” (xvii). While a certain degree of danger always exists in travel for men and women alike and while it is inevitable that some of those risks are gender-specific, travel is frequently viewed as far more hazardous for women. Guide books, travel magazines and online advice columns targeted especially at female readers are cramped with words of concern and caution for women travellers. Often, the implicit message that women are too weak and vulnerable to travel is packaged neatly into “a cache of valuable advice” with shocking anecdotes and officious chapters such as “Dealing with Officials”, “Choosing Companions” or “If You Become a Victim” (Swan and Laufer vii). As these warnings are usually levelled at white, middle to upper class women who have the freedom and financing to travel, the question arises as to what is really at risk when women take to the road. It seems the usual dialogue between issues of mobility and issues of safety can be read more complexly as confusions between questions of mobility and morality. As Kristi Siegel explains, “among the various subtexts embedded in these travel warnings is the long-held fear of ‘women on the loose’” (4). According to Karen Lawrence, travel has always entailed a “risky and rewardingly excessive” terrain for women because of the historical link between wandering and promiscuity (240). Paul Hyland has even suggested that the nature of travel itself is “gloriously” promiscuous: “the shifting destination, arrival again and again, the unknown possessed, the quest for an illusory home” (211). This construction of female travel as a desire to wander connotes straying behaviours that are often cast in sexual terms. The identification of these traits in early criminological research, such as 19th century studies of cacogenic families, is often linked to travel in a broad sense. According to Nicolas Hahn’s study, Too Dumb to Know Better, contributors to the image of the “bad” woman frequently cite three traits as characteristic. “First, they have pictured her as irresolute and all too easily lead. Second, they have usually shown her to be promiscuous and a good deal more lascivious than her virtuous sister. Third, they have often emphasised the bad woman’s responsibility for not only her own sins, but those of her mate and descendents as well” (3). Like Eve, who wanders around the edge of the garden, the promiscuous woman has long been said to have a wandering disposition. Interestingly, however, both male and female travel writers have at different times and for dissimilar reasons assumed hermaphroditic identities while travelling. The female traveller, for example, may assume the figure of “the observer” or “the reporter with historical and political awareness”, while the male traveller may feminise his behaviours to confront inevitabilities of confinement and mortality (Fortunati, Monticelli and Ascari 11). Female travellers such as Alexandra David-Neel and Isabelle Eberhardt who ventured out of the home and cross-dressed for safety or success, deliberately and fully appropriated traditional roles of the male sex. Often, this attempt by female wanderers to fulfil their own intentions in cognito evaded their dismissal as wild and unruly women and asserted their power over those duped by their disguise. Those women who did travel openly into the world were often accused of flaunting the gendered norms of female decorum with their “so-called unnatural and inappropriate behaviour” (Siegel 3). The continued harnessing of this cultural taboo by popular media continues to shape contemporary patterns of female travel. In fact, as a result of perceived connections between wandering and danger, the narrative of the woman traveller often emerges as a self-conscious fiction where “the persona who emerges on the page is as much a character as a woman in a novel” (Bassnett 234). This process of self-fictionalising converts the travel writing into a graph of subliminal fears and desires. In Tracks, for example, which is Robyn Davidson’s account of her solitary journey by camel across the Australian desert, Davidson shares with her readers the single, unvarying warning she received from the locals while preparing for her expedition. That was, if she ventured into the desert alone without a guide or male accompaniment, she would be attacked and raped by an Aboriginal man. In her opening pages, Davidson recounts a conversation in the local pub when one of the “kinder regulars” warns her: “You ought to be more careful, girl, you know you’ve been nominated by some of these blokes as the next town rape case” (19). “I felt really frightened for the first time,” Davidson confesses (20). Perhaps no tale better depicts this gendered troubling than the fairytale of Little Red Riding Hood. In the earliest versions of the story, Little Red outwits the Wolf with her own cunning and escapes without harm. By the time the first printed version emerges, however, the story has dramatically changed. Little Red now falls for the guise of the Wolf, and tricked by her captor, is eaten without rescue or escape. Charles Perrault, who is credited with the original publication, explains the moral at the end of the tale, leaving no doubt to its intended meaning. “From this story one learns that children, especially young lasses, pretty, courteous and well-bred, do very wrong to listen to strangers, and it is not an unheard thing if the Wolf is thereby provided with his dinner” (77). Interestingly, in the Grimm Brothers’ version which emerges two centuries later an explicit warning now appears in the tale, in the shape of the mother’s instruction to “walk nicely and quietly, and not run off the path” (144). This new inclusion sanitises the tale and highlights the slippages between issues of mobility and morality. Where Little Red once set out with no instruction not to wander, she is now told plainly to stay on the path; not for her own safety but for implied matters of virtue. If Little Red strays while travelling alone she risks losing her virginity and, of course, her virtue (Siegel 55). Essentially, this is what is at stake when Little Red wanders; not that she will get lost in the woods and be unable to find her way, but that in straying from the path and purposefully disobeying her mother, she will no longer be “a dear little girl” (Grimm 144). In the Grimms’ version, Red Riding Hood herself critically reflects on her trespassing from the safe space of the village to the dangerous world of the forest and makes a concluding statement that demonstrates she has learnt her lesson. “As long as I live, I will never by myself leave the path, to run into the wood, when my mother has forbidden me to do so” (149). Red’s message to her female readers is representative of the social world’s message to its women travellers. “We are easily distracted and disobedient, we are not safe alone in the woods (travelling off the beaten path); we are fairly stupid; we get ourselves into trouble; and we need to be rescued by a man” (Siegel 56). As Siegel explains, even Angela Carter’s Red Riding Hood, who bursts out laughing when the Wolf says “all the better to eat you with” for “she knew she was nobody’s meat” (219), still shocks readers when she uses her virginity to take power over the voracious Wolf. In Carter’s world “children do not stay young for long,” and Little Red, who has her knife and is “afraid of nothing”, is certainly no exception (215). Yet in the end, when Red seduces the Wolf and falls asleep between his paws, there is still a sense this is a twist ending. As Siegel explains, “even given the background Carter provides in the story’s beginning, the scene startles. We knew the girl was strong, independent, and armed. However, the pattern of woman-alone-travelling-alone-helpless-alone-victim is so embedded in our consciousness we are caught off guard” (57). In Roald Dahl’s revolting rhyme, Little Red is also awarded agency, not through sexual prerogative, but through the enactment of traits often considered synonymous with male bravado: quick thinking, wit and cunning. After the wolf devours Grandmamma, Red pulls a pistol from her underpants and shoots him dead. “The small girl smiles. One eyelid flickers. She whips a pistol from her knickers. She aims it at the creature’s head and bang bang bang, she shoots him dead” (lines 48—51). In the weeks that follow Red’s triumph she even takes a trophy, substituting her red cloak for a “furry wolfskin coat” (line 57). While Dahl subverts female stereotypes through Red’s decisive action and immediacy, there is still a sense, perhaps heightened by the rhyming couplets, that we are not to take the shooting seriously. Instead, Red’s girrrl-power is an imagined celebration; it is something comical to be mused over, but its shock value lies in its impossibility; it is not at all believable. While the sexual overtones of the tale have become more explicit in contemporary film adaptations such as David Slade’s Hard Candy and Catherine Hardwicke’s Red Riding Hood, the question that arises is what is really at threat, or more specifically who is threatened, when women travel off the well-ordered path of duty. As this problematic continues to surface in discussions of the genre, other more nuanced readings have also distorted the purpose and practice of women’s travel. Some psychoanalytical theorists, for example, have adopted Freud’s notion of travel as an escape from the family, particularly the father figure. In his essay A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis, Freud explains how his own longing to travel was “a wish to escape from that pressure, like the force which drives so many adolescent children to run away from home” (237). “When one first catches sight of the sea,” Freud writes, “one feels oneself like a hero who has performed deeds of improbable greatness” (237). The inherent gender trouble with such a reading is the suggestion women only move in search of a quixotic male figure, “fleeing from their real or imaginary powerful fathers and searching for an idealised and imaginary ‘loving father’ instead” (Berger 55). This kind of thinking reduces the identities of modern women to fragile, unfinished selves, whose investment in travel is always linked to recovering or resisting a male self. Such readings neglect the unique history of women’s travel writing as they dismiss differences in the male and female practice and forget that “travel itself is a thoroughly gendered category” (Holland and Huggan 111). Freud’s experience of travel, for example, his description of feeling like a “hero” who has achieved “improbable greatness” is problematised by the female context, since the possibility arises that women may travel with different e/motions and, indeed, motives to their male counterparts. For example, often when a female character does leave home it is to escape an unhappy marriage, recover from a broken heart or search for new love. Elizabeth Gilbert’s best selling travelogue, Eat, Pray, Love (which spent 57 weeks at the number one spot of the New York Times), found its success on the premise of a once happily married woman who, reeling from a contentious divorce, takes off around the world “in search of everything” (1). Since its debut, the novel has been accused of being self-absorbed and sexist, and even branded by the New York Post as “narcissistic New Age reading, curated by Winfrey” (Callahan par 13). Perhaps most interesting for discussions of travel morality, however, is Bitch magazine’s recent article Eat, Pray, Spend, which suggests that the positioning of the memoir as “an Everywoman’s guide to whole, empowered living” typifies a new literature of privilege that excludes “all but the most fortunate among us from participating” (Sanders and Barnes-Brown par 7). Without seeking to limit the novel with separatist generalisations, the freedoms of Elizabeth Gilbert (a wealthy, white American novelist) to leave home and to write about her travels afterwards have not always been the freedoms of all women. As a result of this problematic, many contemporary women mark out alternative patterns of movement when travelling, often moving deliberately in a variety of directions and at varying paces, in an attempt to resist their placelessness in the travel genre and in the mappable world. As Heidi Slettedahl Macpherson, speaking of Housekeeping’s Ruthie and Sylvie, explains, “they do not travel ever westward in search of some frontier space, nor do they travel across great spaces. Rather, they circle, they drift, they wander” (199). As a result of this double displacement, women have to work twice as hard to be considered credible travellers, particularly since travel is traditionally a male discursive practice. In this tradition, the male is often constructed as the heroic explorer while the female is mapped as a place on his itinerary. She is a point of conquest, a land to be penetrated, a site to be mapped and plotted, but rarely a travelling equal. Annette Kolodny considers this metaphor of “land-as-woman” (67) in her seminal work, The Lay of the Land, in which she discusses “men’s impulse to alter, penetrate and conquer” unfamiliar space (87). Finally, it often emerges that even when female travel focuses specifically on an individual or collective female experience, it is still read in opposition to the long tradition of travelling men. In their introduction to Amazonian, Dea Birkett and Sara Wheeler maintain the primary difference between male and female travel writers is that “the male species” has not become extinct (vii). The pair, who have theorised widely on New Travel Writing, identify some of the myths and misconceptions of the female genre, often citing their own encounters with androcentrism in the industry. “We have found that even when people are confronted by a real, live woman travel writer, they still get us wrong. In the time allowed for questions after a lecture, we are regularly asked, ‘Was that before you sailed around the world or after?’ even though neither of us has ever done any such thing” (xvii). The obvious bias in such a comment is an archaic view of what qualifies as “good” travel and a preservation of the stereotypes surrounding women’s intentions in leaving home. As Birkett and Wheeler explain, “the inference here is that to qualify as travel writers women must achieve astonishing and record-breaking feats. Either that, or we’re trying to get our hands down some man’s trousers. One of us was once asked by the president of a distinguished geographical institution, ‘What made you go to Chile? Was it a guy?’” (xviii). In light of such comments, there remain traceable difficulties for contemporary female travel. As travel itself is inherently gendered, its practice has often been “defined by men according to the dictates of their experience” (Holland and Huggan 11). As a result, its discourse has traditionally reinforced male prerogatives to wander and female obligations to wait. Even the travel trade itself, an industry that often makes its profits out of preying on fear, continues to shape the way women move through the world. While the female traveller then may no longer preface her work with an explicit apology, there are still signs she is carrying some historical baggage. It is from this site of trouble that new patterns of female travel will continue to emerge, distinguishably and defiantly, towards a much more colourful vista of general misrule. References Bassnett, Susan. “Travel Writing and Gender.” The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, eds. Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. 225-40. Berger, Arthur Asa. Deconstructing Travel: Cultural Perspectives on Tourism. Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press, 2004. Bird, Isabella. The Englishwoman in America. London: John Murray, 1856. Birkett, Dea, and Sara Wheeler, eds. Amazonian: The Penguin Book of New Women’s Travel Writing. London: Penguin, 1998. Callahan, Maureen. “Eat, Pray, Loathe: Latest Self-Help Bestseller Proves Faith is Blind.” New York Post 23 Dec. 2007. Carter, Angela. “The Company of Wolves.” Burning Your Boats: The Collected Short Stories. London: Vintage, 1995. 212-20. Dahl, Roald. Revolting Rhymes. London: Puffin Books, 1982. Davidson, Robyn. Tracks. London: Jonathan Cape, 1980. Fortunati, Vita, Rita Monticelli, and Maurizio Ascari, eds. Travel Writing and the Female Imaginary. Bologna: Patron Editore, 2001. Freud, Sigmund. “A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XXII. New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis and Other Works, 1936. 237-48. Gilbert, Elizabeth. Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia. New Jersey: Penguin, 2007. Grimm, Jacob, and Wilhelm Grimm. “Little Red Riding Hood.” Grimms’ Fairy Tales, London: Jonathan Cape, 1962. 144-9. Hahn, Nicolas. “Too Dumb to Know Better: Cacogenic Family Studies and the Criminology of Women.” Criminology 18.1 (1980): 3-25. Hard Candy. Dir. David Slade. Lionsgate. 2005. Holland, Patrick, and Graham Huggan. Tourists with Typewriters: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Travel Writing. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2003. Howells, Elizabeth. “Apologizing for Authority: The Rhetoric of the Prefaces of Eliza Cook, Isabelle Bird, and Hannah More.” Professing Rhetoric: Selected Papers from the 2000 Rhetoric Society of America Conference, eds. F.J. Antczak, C. Coggins, and G.D. Klinger. London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2002. 131-7. Hyland, Paul. The Black Heart: A Voyage into Central Africa. New York: Paragon House, 1988. Kingsley, Mary. Travels in West Africa. Middlesex: The Echo Library, 2008. Kolodny, Annette. The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters. USA: U of North Carolina P, 1975. Lawrence, Karen. Penelope Voyages: Women and Travel in the British Literary Tradition. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1994. Morris, Mary. Maiden Voyages: Writings of Women Travellers. New York: Vintage Books, 1993. Perrault, Charles. Perrault’s Complete Fairytales. Trans. A.E. Johnson and others. London: Constable & Company, 1961. Red Riding Hood. Dir. Catherine Hardwicke. Warner Bros. 2011. Sanders, Joshunda, and Diana Barnes-Brown. “Eat, Pray, Spend: Priv-Lit and the New, Enlightened American Dream” Bitch Magazine 47 (2010). 10 May, 2011 < http://bitchmagazine.org/article/eat-pray-spend >. Siegel, Kristi. Ed. Gender, Genre, and Identity in Women’s Travel Writing. New York: Peter Lang, 2004. Slettedahl Macpherson, Heidi. “Women’s Travel Writing and the Politics of Location: Somewhere In-Between.” Gender, Genre, and Identity in Women’s Travel Writing, ed. Kristi Siegel. New York: Peter Lang, 2004. 194-207. Swan, Sheila, and Peter Laufer. Safety and Security for Women who Travel. 2nd ed. San Francisco: Travelers’ Tales, 2004. Woolf, Virginia. Women and Writing. London: The Women’s Press, 1979.

Der Stadtrat der Landeshauptstadt Dresden hat bereits im Juli 2008 beschlossen, den städtischen Kulturpalast zu sanieren und nach einem neuen Nutzungskonzept umzubauen. Bisher bietet dieser mit seinem Mehrzwecksaal sowohl der Dresdner Philharmonie (mit erlebbar und anerkannt schlechten akustischen Bedingungen) als auch diversen Veranstaltern der „heiteren Muse“ ein Zuhause. Das neue Konzept sieht eine Konzentration der musikalischen Nutzung auf die Philharmonie vor sowie eine gleichzeitige Funktionserweiterung durch den Einzug der Zentralbibliothek der Städtischen Bibliotheken Dresden und des Kabaretts „Die Herkuleskeule“. Politisch heftig diskutiert, findet das Projekt die Zustimmung einer knappen Mehrheit der Dresdner. Laut verschiedener Umfragen der ortsansässigen Tageszeitungen wird der Umbau von knapp 60% der Dresdner Bürger unterstützt.

Seit Anfang der 1990er Jahre fordern sowohl Bürgerschaft und Kommunalpolitik als auch fortschrittliche Kräfte in den Verwaltungen selbst eine gründliche Reform der Aufbau- und Ablaufstrukturen. Ziel war und ist es, mit einem Neuen Steuerungsmodell (NSM) auch im öffentlichen Sektor wirtschaftliche Denk- und Handlungsweisen einzuführen und nach internationalen Vorbildern Abschied zu nehmen von Kameralistik und traditionellen Verwaltungsmentalitäten.

Shao, die Mondfee, schwebt durch den Raum, um den Ninja-Kämpfer Naruto zu treffen. Zwei unzertrennliche Katzendamen umschmeicheln Emma, das zarte Dienstmädchen aus viktorianischer Zeit. Unter den wachsamen Augen einer Krankenschwester im Minikleid versucht der Vampir vergeblich, sich zwischen Bücherregalen zu verstecken... In eine so eigenwillige wie faszinierende Szenerie kann man nicht nur auf der Buchmesse geraten. Seit November 2008 begegnen sich diese Charaktere auch ab und zu in der medien@age. Die Manga-Lounge, ein neu gestalteter Teilbereich der Dresdner Jugendbibliothek, ist zum Magneten für Fans japanischer, koreanischer und chinesischer Comic- Serien geworden.

Die Berücksichtigung der sozialen Aspekte in der Arbeit der Städtischen Bibliotheken Dresden hat bereits über Jahrzehnte Tradition. Die Erfüllung dieser Aufgaben durch hauptamtlich eingesetztes Fachpersonal konnte nur mit der Unterstützung Freiwilliger in ihrer ganzen Bandbreite gewährleistet werden. Immer wieder fanden sich Menschen, die mit ihrem ehrenamtlichen Engagement einen wichtigen Beitrag dazu geleistet haben, dass auch Mitbürger eine Bibliothek nutzen können, denen es aus unterschiedlichen Gründen nicht möglich ist, aus eigener Kraft eine öffentliche Bibliothek aufzusuchen.

Bewegung bestimmt im Allgemeinen leider zu wenig unseren Alltag, obwohl sie gerade für unsere Gesundheit von elementarer Bedeutung ist. Nur wer auch körperlich fit ist, kann den Herausforderungen unserer Zeit gerecht werden, den Berufsalltag meistern und ein selbstbestimmtes Leben führen. Wer sich von Büchern bewegen lässt, vergisst dabei oft, sich selbst körperlich zu betätigen. Die Kampagne empfiehlt daher „Jeden Tag 3.000 Schritte extra“. Buchhandlungen und Bibliotheken in ganz Deutschland waren aufgefordert, diese Empfehlung aufzugreifen und ihre Kundinnen und Kunden sowie Besucherinnen und Besucher auf ihre Weise durch besondere Aktionen zu einem gesundheitsbewussten Umgang mit dem eigenen Körper zu motivieren.

Der Einsatz der Ehrenamtlichen in den Städtischen Bibliotheken ist in verschiedenen Projekten möglich, je nach Interesse, Fähigkeiten und natürlich nach dem aktuellen Bedarf innerhalb der Projekte. So können sich Interessierte in den Projekten Bibliotheksgeschichte, Soziale Bibliotheksarbeit/Bücherhausdienst, Medienpflege/Hilfsarbeiten oder als Vorlesepate engagieren. Außerdem gibt es seit 2010 in einer Stadtteilbibliothek einen ehrenamtlich geleiteten Lesezirkel.

Die Musikbibliothek der Städtischen Bibliotheken Dresden verfügt über ein historisch gewachsenes und umfassendes Angebot an Noten, Musikliteratur und Tonträgern. Bis zur Fusion mit der Hauptbibliothek 1997 enthielt die Musikbibliothek nur Platten klassischer Musik. Unterhaltungsmusik dagegen wurde nur in der Hauptbibliothek und den Zweigstellen angeboten. Nach dem Umzug bietet die Musikbibliothek nun alle Genres der Musik an.

Lesepaten stehen bundesweit hoch im Kurs. Ob in der nachmittäglichen Einzelförderung im Rahmen von Ganztagsangeboten, ob in kleinen Gruppen im Familientreff oder, wie im „Lesestark!“ Projekt der Städtischen Bibliotheken Dresden praktiziert, in der systematischen Leseförderung von Fünf- bis Achtjährigen im unmittelbaren pädagogischen Alltag von Kindertagesstätten und Grundschulen. Doch was zeichnet einen Lesepaten aus? Welche Ansprüche werden von Seiten der Erzieher oder Lehrer gestellt? Welchen Platz haben sie als Ehrenamtliche in der pädagogischen Praxis der Einrichtungen? Und schlussendlich: In welcher Rolle sehen sich die Lesepaten selbst?

Seit drei Jahren sind wir im Projekt „Lesestark!“, einem Gemeinschaftsprojekt der Städtischen Bibliotheken Dresden, der Bürgerstiftung und der Drosos Stiftung Zürich, als ehrenamtliche Lesepaten tätig. Wir hatten vor allem zwei Gründe, uns zu engagieren: Zum einen unser beruflich- bzw. individuell vorgeprägtes Interesse an Literatur, insbesondere an Kinderliteratur, sowie die Überzeugung von der Bedeutung der Literatur für die Persönlichkeitsentwicklung eines jeden Menschen und der Lese- und Sprachförderung für Kinder im besonderen.