Lynda Achren, on behalf of the Maldon Athenaeum Library, Tarrangower Times

Behind closed doors on Monday mornings, a team of Athenaeum Library volunteers is busy archiving our historic documents. For the past six months, with input from an experienced archivist, we’ve been meeting to sort, organise and catalogue such things as old (sometimes mundane, more often fascinating and occasionally hilarious) correspondence, newspaper articles, borrowing ledgers and financial records.

About 15 years ago, three volunteers embarked on a similar project which was sadly abandoned, but not before they stored, somewhat randomly, many documents in an antique mahogany cabinet we have on permanent loan from the former Royal Mint in Melbourne when it closed in 1968. A previous Library President, Joy Leneaux-Gale and Treasurer, Winsome Strickland, significantly contributed to this when they photocopied historic correspondence between the Maldon Athenaeum and the former Department of Lands and Survey held in the archives of what is now the Department of Energy, Environment and Climate Action. More recently, a former library volunteer, intrigued by some photographs on the library’s walls, began looking into their history and in so doing found old minute books and other documents stored in one of our sheds.

Thanks to their work, our current team inherited a treasure trove, albeit a jumbled one much in need of attention. We’re still collating a mountain of correspondence, we’re still sorting through financial records, but we have an almost complete set of minutes dating back to 1863 stored in two drawers of the old Royal Mint cabinet. Another drawer holds chronologically-ordered Athenaeum-related newspaper clippings dating back to 1926 (it took weeks to read through all the old newspapers that had been kept, to determine whether or not they contained anything about us). Then there’s a drawer for the handwritten records of books borrowed by members before the days of computerisation.

When we’ve finished, this will be a permanent archive as well looked after as our book collections because, like our books, the historical records will be catalogued so that everyone, volunteers and interested researchers alike, will know where to find them.

But the driver behind this archiving project is its sister history-writing project for which our archives are an invaluable source of information not available elsewhere. Again, this is not the first time there have been attempts to write a history of the Maldon Athenaeum (the first we know of was in 1969). But for various reasons, apart from a short and incomplete history written to give volunteers an overview, previous attempts have foundered.

So what makes us confident we will succeed this time? Firstly, we now have access to technology not available before ? so, rather than a hard copy publication, we will publish the history on our website in the form of a series of short evocative vignettes. Not only is this much cheaper than printing hard copies, but it means the history will be accessible to a wider audience.

Secondly, we are fortunate to have within our current membership a good combination of skills to pull it off: we have people with backgrounds in research, writing for publication and editing; we have people who are adept at managing our website and uploading finished vignettes.

So far we have written and uploaded more than a dozen vignettes, each contributing to a chronological history or paying tribute to the Library’s connections to the local and wider community. Titles include Getting Established: trials and triumphs, Mrs Beale and the First Lending Library, The Billiard Room; Borrowers: a snapshot in time, Popular Girl Competition, The First Minute Book and Artworks and Photos: a guided tour. More are in the pipeline.

We aim to launch the history pages on our website later in the year. In itself, it will be an historic event! Watch this space.

This article appeared in the Tarrangower Times, 21 February 2025.