Menzies established two inquiries that directly affected the decision on where and when to build a new National Library. It was overflowing, scattered in fifteen buildings that radiated from its inadequate Kings Avenue building. The existing National Library had been established as part of the Parliamentary Library at Federation in 1901, and was modelled on the US Library of Congress. The concept of the building as a national monument had long preoccupied Menzies, whose role in the decision-making was pivotal. Through the library’s collections, “we learning from the past, we learning from each other, we helping to instruct and inform the future this is the most tremendous process in the human mind.” Menzies extolled the library as a “source of light for scholars, for thinkers… it will have a great international significance,” the corollary of governmental efforts to forge research and scholarship in the nation. Perhaps in a gibe at those who relied on mere statistics about the size of the collection – a way of measuring its value to which “we must not succumb” – he asserted that it was “the use that is made of, the value that is attached to them, the quality that they exude which will in the long run determine the character and status of the library concerned.” National Library of Australia, nla.obj-136760604 The foundation stone celebrations in the unfinished foyer, 31 March 1966. These were the “great interpreters of the past to the present… the present to the present… and the present to the future.”
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Rather, its true quality and international stature lay in the collections contained within the building. In a remarkable speech that he wrote himself and typically delivered only from notes, Menzies asserted with considerable force that the real value of the library lay not in the monumental building, despite its symbolic beauty, grandeur and classical dimensions.
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Yet it was Menzies’s conviction and authority that carried the day with his cabinet colleagues, shaped and overrode the decisions of the National Capital Development Commission, or NCDC, and conveyed the vision of why a great National Library mattered. As he said in his speech, the legislation establishing the Library and the associated Australian Advisory Council on Bibliographical Services was a “statesman-like act” of national cooperation. For that, he acknowledged Harold White and Sir Archibald Grenfell Price as tenacious leaders among many cumulative forces. Menzies never claimed the vision of the National Library as his own – neither the Library’s independent governance nor the building. The Canberra Times headline captured it that day: “Dream Library Takes Shape.” It was a celebratory and fitting finale for Menzies, for his vision and leadership underlies the backstory of the approval, timing, design and construction of this monumental building on its remarkable lakeside site.
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So why did Menzies lay the stone, overturning the protocol appropriate to Holt’s office? It’s true that both the new and the old prime minister appeared with their wives on stage, alongside interior minister Doug Anthony and the chair of the Library Council, Sir Archibald Grenfell Price, but it was Menzies who retained the starring role. Yet the words “prime minister” do not appear on the stone, because Sir Robert, aged seventy-one, had resigned his office and handed over to Harold Holt two months earlier, a fact that required an unexpected rewording of its text. If celebrations that day in 1966 belonged principally to the national librarian, Harold White, the foundation stone ceremony represented a pinnacle for Menzies. Modest, that is, compared with the plaque that marked the grand opening of the building by prime minister John Gorton on 15 August 1968. To the left of the National Library of Australia’s main entrance steps you will discover the modest foundation stone laid by Sir Robert Menzies fifty years ago, on 31 March 1966, when the library building was still a five-storey steel shell.