The Athenaeum ...

 A couple of weeks ago I tooted that I was starting back with the National Trust documenting the contents of Lake View House in Chiltern

Well, that's still happening, but due to a totally unforeseen event, the start of the project has had to be delayed until May, by which time it'll be working in thermals and fingerless gloves if the house is anything like as cold as Dow's pharmacy over winter.

In the meantime I've got another gig at Stanley Athenaeum, which comes under the Mechanics Institute of Victoria, documenting stuff that hasn't been previously documented - for example I'm currently working on the records of an anti logging protest group from the early Nineteen nineties just before the internet became a thing - so we've got faxes instead of emails and voluminous printouts of meeting papers rather than piles of word documents.

It's not all papers though, the Athenaeum has a remarkable book collection dating back to the 1860s, including an 1861 edition of Darwin's Origin of the Species, and other more practical publications such as Victorian guides to chicken husbandry, and neatly showcasing both the Victorian desire for self improvement, but also the need for people to learn new skills in a strange land ...

Mechanics Institutes are themselves quite interesting. In Australia Mechanics Institutes were often a more middle class thing and as well as self improvement provided a forum for people to meet and discuss ideas, which is why some were described as Athenaeums, such as in Chiltern and Yackandandah, or as a School of the Arts as in Wahgunyah, to give some local examples.

In some places in time they became public libraries with the buildings repurposed - Stanley is relatively unique in that, while it did serve as a library for the community the collection was never broken up or absorbed into a larger collection.