The Mitchell Library and its collections have been much written about and celebrated in various publications issued over the years, mostly by the State Library of New South Wales itself and nearly all of them the work of members of the Library’s own staff. As valuable as those works have been, they have usually been partial treatments of their subject, summary overviews of the collection and its history, and accounts of representative holdings or of selected treasures. Issued late in 2007, the centenary year of Mitchell’s death, this new publication by the Sydney historian Professor Brian H. Fletcher promises more. It is the first extensive scholarly history of the Mitchell Library to be published. It traces the Library’s story from the life and times of David Scott Mitchell himself to, if not quite the present day, then at least the beginning of the new millennium. Central to this new account is a view of the Mitchell Library conceived in human rather than institutional terms. Fletcher pays high tribute to the members of the Library’s staff who over the years worked to enrich the Mitchell bequest and to interpret and adapt the needs of the Library to changing circumstances. He rates the best of the staff – including Hugh Wright, Ida Leeson, Phyllis Mander-Jones, Suzanne Mourot, Baiba Berzins, Margy Burn, Alan Ventress, and the present incumbent Elizabeth Ellis – as no mere servants of their institution. In Fletcher’s account, the Mitchell Library story revolves around a staff and a readership composed largely of men and women who valued learning and were drawn together by a shared interest in Australia and, to a lesser extent, the Pacific. Over the years, the efforts of both the staff and an extraordinary who’s who of readers have given the Mitchell a prominent place among the forces that have shaped a sense of Australian identity.

Across Fletcher’s crowded canvas, certain themes demand attention. Not the least of these is the remarkable imperial ism of the Mitchell Library’s approach to collecting in its formative years. Enriched by a substantial cash endowment and with no serious rivals in libraries in the other Australian states or, later, in the young Commonwealth, the Mitchell aspired initially to collect on a national scale and to be recognized as the de facto National Library of the young Australian federation. For many years, the Mitchell unapologetically pursued its collecting of original materials well beyond the borders of New South Wales. Fletcher silently defends these ambitions, barely pausing to consider the implications for states such as Victoria, Queensland, and Tasmania, where a heritage of precious cultural materials was alienated to a distant location. Gradually these ambitions were scaled back as stronger collecting programmes emerged elsewhere in the country and as the National Library of Australia in Canberra began to exercise its responsibilities as a national repository. But for too long the Mitchell looked askance at such developments as challenges to what it saw as its natural hegemony. Other libraries were viewed anxiously as rivals to be ignored, fobbed off, or outmanoeuvred. A particular ire and disdain was reserved for the National Library which was seen from Sydney as a kind of Johnny-come-lately. One senses in Fletcher an underlying sympathy for this view. It is a weakness of his book that an understanding of the broader dimensions, complexities, and imperatives of Australian librarianship forged within a federation of states is obscured by the long shadow cast by the Mitchell monolith.

An interesting tension arises in this history over the status of the Mitchell Library in relation to its parent body, the eventual State Library of New South Wales. For the lay public at least, the Mitchell Library was, and probably remains, the superior entity. In some under standings, there was no comprehension that the State Library existed at all or that the Mitchell in fact functioned as an internal department. This question of identity and of relationships has been a perennial one in the years since 1907. While it has largely been resolved today, Fletcher reminds us that much effort was expended by senior officials and executives of the State Library in the refinement of arrangements that might see the Mitchell honoured for the asset it was while nevertheless reducing its status and that of its senior staff within the hierarchy of the larger institution. That it took the better part of a century to resolve this issue in a series of administrative restructurings and a programme of corporate engineering is a testimony to the singular and enduring importance of the Mitchell Library itself.

If Fletcher’s history is generally suave and fluent, it is also densely packed with facts and an accumulation of minor detail gleaned from annual reports and the prosaically named Administrative Notes, issued internally at the State Library. He also makes much use of personnel data of the many individual staff members who played a greater or lesser role in the evolving life of the Mitchell Library. Except in the instances of a few of the major figures, Fletcher generally fails to convey a strong sense of individual character or personality. Instead, he draws on such sources as the Library Staff Notes (1953–73) to record the details of an individual’s previous employment history as a means to advance the claims made for those appointed to key positions within the Mitchell Library. I wonder if we really need to know that X once worked ‘at the Hawkesbury Agricultural College and Burwood Film Libraries’ or that Y served for six months as acting librarian of the Department of Public Health before appointment to the Mitchell? This resort to minutiae is a habitual failing of institutional histories, and it is one, as in the present instance, that limits their readability and more general appeal.

Since 1910 the Mitchell Library has built a considerable style and mystique of its own, based in no small part on its difference and its special status. As in so many other ways, history has found the ways to modify and adapt that style to changed and changing needs and circumstance. Fletcher is generally good on the processes of change that have seen a gradual relaxation in the manners and the demeanour of a library that once had a reputation for élitism. Patrick White, no slouch himself as a scold, once confessed that the Mitchell had scared him stiff on his visits to its sacred precincts; in his novel The Solid Mandala (1966), he wrote of the Library’s ‘discreet, the hallowed atmosphere’.

Even in our own more relaxed and democratic times, something of that endures. Not least it survives in abundance in Brian Fletcher’s history of the Mitchell Library, where much that is good is decently excavated but where – even in cases of conspicuous unfairness to individuals and of blatant gender inequality – the story is airbrushed and burnished to a glowing sheen, and where the atmosphere throughout is muted and enduringly polite.