Phyllis Mander-Jones
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Phyllis Mander-Jones’ papers, in which been immersing myself, make it clear that she was fascinated by Australasian waters and lands during the first part of the twentieth century. Occasionally, she booked passage on a Pacific cruise ship.
At other times, her travels were intellectual and professional, a process of finding answers for other researchers or acquiring the manuscripts of colonial naturalist Sir Joseph Banks for the State Library of NSW collection. Evidence of her travels endures at the Library today in her extensive collection of watercolour paintings, sketch maps, photographs, ephemera, lino prints and journals.
Mander-Jones journey as a record-keeper and curator began in the early twentieth century. Her early education at Abbotsleigh, a private school for girls on Sydney’s upper North Shore, instilled a lifelong love of drawing, literature, languages, history and community. I was amused, though, to find that as a child she didn’t see the value of keeping a journal.
A 1909 attempt at a diary, when she was 11, reveals her attitude:
It was just as I was finishing practising [the piano] this evening that it took hold of me it was a pity I hadn’t written more in this book. The fact is I have a violent prejudice against diaries, some of course are interesting but I was sure mine would be one of the milk and water kind in which the author solemnly writes down that on such and such a date she went to a party and on such and such
a date went away for a holiday — facts not at all interesting for future reference.
A decade later, that youthful distaste for record keeping disappeared when Mander-Jones started her library career. She joined the Public Library of NSW (now the State Library) in 1925, soon after graduating from the University of Sydney with a Bachelor of Arts. It is likely that the Mitchell Library, founded in 1910 to specialise in Australian content, was a great attraction for her.
Mander-Jones explained in a 1983 interview with Baiba Berzins that the principal librarian, Henry Anderson, chose to employ many women in the early days of the Mitchell Library. The library culture fostered intellectual brilliance — according to Sylvia Martin, biographer of Mander-Jones’ colleague Ida Leeson — as several female staff members came from upper-class families so had received a university education. As a member of the prominent David Jones and William Arnott families, and a passionate intellectual, Mander-Jones fitted this description.
At the Library she was trained to assist readers with research, curate a reading collection and create exhibitions. The Library’s annual reports for the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries show that the collection was acquired through ‘valuable exchanges and donations from foreign [European] countries’.
Materials concerning explorers, surveyors, philosophy and literature formed the foundation of the collection. Further acquisitions and donations established a collection focused on Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand and the Pacific Islands by the time Mander-Jones occupied the role of qualified librarian in 1932.
Around this time, family connections took this Sydney librarian to Mailu, a Papuan island more than 2500 kilometres, as the crow flies, to the north. Letters from Mander-Jones to her mother, and from her aunt Annie, show that a family friend, missionary William Saville, arranged for her to holiday in Papua. Saville was a London Missionary Society member who had arrived in Mailu in March 1901. There is no indication that Mander-Jones was an active member of the Missionary Society, but Saville welcomed her regardless. ‘Bring your sketching things, camera and good supply of films and Nepera glossy gas-light paper,’ he wrote in a letter dated 18 February 1932. ‘We can develop here and print at night by lamp light. I do hope dear girl you will have a thundering good holiday.’
Mander-Jones’ attempts to document her stay in Mailu were not always successful. She tells her mother in a letter on 22 April 1932 that she and Saville tried to develop a film, but ‘it is a failure. [A]ll blistered by the heat. We are going to try again at night when the land breeze has cooled down the air.’ Perhaps this is why only a few photographs from this time appear in the collection.
She had more luck with a traditional, paper-based approach. On 7 April 1932, when she departed from Walsh Bay, Papua, aboard the Macdhui, she started keeping a journal of her experiences. Soon after her arrival in Port Moresby, she described a typical workday and observed local fashions. Papuans were, she said:
employed in the town both in clerical and manual work and are continually passing through the hot glaring streets. Groups of native girls and children sit about in patches of shade … The girls wear grass petticoats and both they and the boys are fond of decorating their hair and arm bands with flowers — brilliant red oleander, hibiscus — yellow and orange flowers.
Mander-Jones fulfilled her intention to ‘record with care the gentle people of Mailu’. Among three months of almost daily journal entries are lino prints and a sketch map bound into the volume. These illustrations by Mander-Jones show Mailu people — including many women — at work, hunting, creating pots and caring for children. Even the children of the mission had daily tasks. She writes:
A boy cooks [for] the boys and a girl the girls. Everything is boiled in the Mailu fashion … Then the food is dished onto individual plates and they set round on the grass to eat. The chief item is rice — but they have plenty of sago, sweet potato, yam and Taro and everything is flavoured with cocoa nut.
These mundane descriptions were countered by the inclusion of beautiful embroidery and paintings. Even the journal’s grey cover is embroidered with yellow and red thread to create a striking pattern representing local winds. The inside pages, lightweight and transparent, contain typed descriptions and comments. The content is split into two distinct sections. The first is an account that blends ethnography with personal experiences.
The second half is a more lighthearted account of a tropical getaway full of games and afternoon teas. This is where she includes observations of white settlers like the Territory administrator Hubert Murray. After travelling to the mainland, Mander-Jones wrote about being charmed by Papuans:
Mr. Saville went over to Isuleilei in the morning so was not at hand when the students came up led by the Samoan teacher, with presents for the guests of the college. There were fowls and vegetables and fruit, and some of the women brought native string bags and one a grass petticoat dyed in the Port Moresby fashion. It was a wonderful reception.
These bound pages lack the battered, stained look you might expect from a well-travelled journal exposed to Papua’s humidity as its writer toured along the south-eastern coast. This suggests, perhaps, she wrote a rough diary while travelling and then transcribed her reflections into this presentation format. Given Mander-Jones’ devotion to sending letters to family and friends while travelling, and the inconsistent postal service in Papua, the journal was probably created as a vibrant, informative record to be shared.
After returning to the Library she continued her training in research and modern librarianship. When the Second World War started in 1939, she again became involved with Papua. Prompted by the requirements of war strategists, in 1942 Ida Leeson, the Mitchell Librarian and a mentor of Mander-Jones, was directed by the Allied Geographical Section to provide, according to biographer Sylvia Martin, ‘all essential facts regarding books, journals, maps, charts’ about Australasia. This included gathering information about the London Missionary Society in Papua, as its missions were believed to be in the pathway of pending Japanese invasion.
This engagement with Papua was an experience that also brought Mander-Jones closer to the war. In a Daily Telegraph article ten years later, she described receiving ‘orders to collect everything we could lay hands on about certain areas in the Pacific region. We knew this meant an attack on certain islands, or plans for bigger things, suc as the invasion of South-east Asian mainland.’ Supervised by Leeson, she ‘dug up photos which showed the coastline, descriptions of islands, maps, charts, and books on every aspect of the Pacific’. Involvement with the war effort reinforced the librarians’ awareness that they needed to locate and preserve Pacific records as much as Australian materials.
After she was appointed Mitchell Librarian in November 1946, Mander-Jones’ continued to draw on her earlier experiences. She became a guide to the Pacific for Australian researchers, as her letters to her mother and sister Mildred show. She toured Pacific islands such as Tahiti to acquire material for the people of NSW and also travelled to South America and the United States. There she attended diplomatic posts including the Australian Embassy in Washington, and the shared British Embassy–Australian Consulate in Santiago, Chile, where she was granted access to collections in the Biblioteca Nacional and the Archivo Nacional.
She wrote to her mother and sister that she had found ‘all the documents of Pacific interest which I could trace through the catalogues are copies of originals in Spain’. When considering further research opportunities, she explained that gaining records about the Pacific for Australian researchers was an ongoing job because:
[t]here will be other material in the US to copy. E.g. some missionary records at Harvard. I do not know if it has been decided that there should be cooperation between M.L [Mitchell Library] and National Library in copying here. I thought it advisable, however, to make enquiries while I was here.
Phyllis Mander-Jones’ legacy is often thought to be her 1972 publication Manuscripts of the British Isles Relating to Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific. This is certainly a long-lasting and much-appreciated gift to researchers. Looking at her papers in the Library, however, it has become clear to me that her engagement with the Pacific was much more than a catalogue of archival records. It was, for her, a place of curiosity and artistic development.
Dr Deborah Lee-Talbot is the Library’s 2023 CH Currey Fellow.
This story appears in Openbook summer 2023.
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