ABSTRACT
C ERTAIN stories in the history of Australian reading, some of them apocryphal, reflect ironically on one of the governing narratives of print culture studies and postcolonial studies: the narrative of print’s ‘mastery over the whole world’ (Febvre and Martin 11). One such story goes that an iron box full of books sank to the bottom of the Port River near Adelaide in 1836 - a victim of the notorious ‘Port Misery’, which had no proper wharf in the early days of South Australian settlement.1 Another story, much better known, concerns the library at Borroloola, a remote settlement forty-five miles down the Macarthur River at the bottom end of the Gulf of Carpentaria in the Northern Territory. The story was apparently started by Ernestine Hill, who arrived there in the middle of the Wet some time in the early 1930s, and found four white men and ‘a library of 3000 books’:
Volumes from the Macarthur River Institute were loaned to itinerant bushmen, read by inmates of the lock-up, and passionately debated by the old-timers who sat around on the banks of the river, but all the time the contents of the old courthouse were being slowly eaten away by termites. All that remains of the library, apart from the legend, are some of the old catalogues. They reveal it to have been, in fact, a fairly typical government-subsidised and subscriptionsupported library of the late 1890s and early 1900s, in which a selection of classics and contemporary literature was included along with a much larger number of mass-market popular novels (see Jose 116-19).
