‘To do things for the good of others’: library philanthropy, William Walker, and the establishment of the Australiana collection at the Tasmanian Public Library in the 1920s and 1930s

Abstract

Recent international library historiography has demonstrated the need to move away from isolated narrative accounts of individual philanthropic acts, and instead evaluate how public library development fitted into a normative social culture of philanthropy. This paper employs this paradigm to contextualise the philanthropy of William Walker to the Tasmanian Public Library (now the State Library of Tasmania) in the early twentieth century. It explores Walker’s donation of Australiana in the context of Tasmanian social philanthropy and influential examples of library benefaction. Walker’s ideological and moral motivations, arising from received notions of ‘duty’ and idealist philosophy, are also considered. The paper describes ways in which the Tasmanian Public Library used Walker’s donation to encourage further acts of philanthropy.