History

The Maldon Athenaeum archives are housed in a magnificent eight-drawer Victorian cedar cabinet topped by a glass-fronted bookcase. The cabinet and bookcase combination is on permanent loan from the Old Mint, courtesy of Heritage Victoria, who facilitated the loan in 2001 and also paid for the cabinet’s restoration by a local craftsman.

The idea of establishing an archive was first suggested in 1995 by historian Brian Rhule when he was renting a room in the Athenaeum. The idea gained traction in 1998 after a volunteer, Neil Amor, read Henry Handel Richardson’s autobiography ‘Myself When Young’ in which she talks about taking dinners cooked by her mother to the caretaker of the Athenaeum Library. This sparked Amor’s interest in researching the Athenaeum’s history.

Two years later, in August 2000, Neil Amor was appointed official library archivist. When the Old Mint cabinet arrived in 2001, Amor was quick to see its potential for storing the ‘fascinating items from the past’ he was finding.

Committee meeting minutes record that he had begun by ‘delving into’ copies of the Tarrangower Times from 1934, and had found ‘some interesting accounts of the opening of the present building erected after being destroyed by fire.’ He also reported that he had not as yet been able to find the date of the fire that destroyed the original wooden building. This entry in the minutes reminds us that Amor had no access to the digitised newspapers now available on the National Library of Australia’s TROVE website – a resource so useful to researchers today.

Other volunteers also contributed to the archive. For example, in 2003 Winsome Strickland and Joy Lennaeux-Gale searched the archives of the Department of Sustainability and Environment (as the government department responsible for the Crown Land allocated to the Maldon Athenaeum was then known). Their search found correspondence between the Department of Lands and Survey (a DSE predecessor) and the Athenaeum dating back to its earliest days, copies of which are now in our archives.

Amor never wrote a history, and his archiving project was sadly abandoned but not before he, and other volunteers, collected and stored a treasure trove of historically significant (but unsorted) documents in the Old Mint cabinet.

In 2024 a new team turned its attention to this jumble of documents to facilitate the research of volunteers who were about to write a web-based history of the Maldon Athenaeum (launched in May 2025). This archiving team spent many months painstakingly sifting, sorting, categorising and cataloguing the inherited disorder in the Old Mint cabinet. As they did so, the archive collection continued to grow as Athenaeum members came forward with documents stored ‘for safe-keeping’ in their homes.

Two of the eight cabinet drawers now hold an almost complete record of committee meetings dating from 1863 to the present day, although unfortunately there are a few gaps. We have minutes recording the first 26 years of committee meetings until 1889, but after that until 1946 the minute books were either destroyed or otherwise mislaid. Nevertheless, the minutes are an invaluable source of historical information and form the core of our archives. Previously scattered throughout the cabinet, and some found in boxes in the shed, they are now grouped and catalogued.

Similarly, other drawers are allocated to the previously scattered and disordered correspondence from 1863 onward; newspapers – many unavailable on TROVE – dating from 1926; financial documents dating from the 1940s; and handwritten borrowing registers from before the days of computerisation – all now in chronological order. There is also a designated ‘ephemera’ drawer containing the flyers, tickets, postcards and photos that provide evocative reminders of events and times.

The archives provide not only a wealth of easily accessible historical information about the Athenaeum, but also insights into how the wider society thought in earlier times. When the minutes tell us that the men on the committee appointed the recently widowed Mrs Beale as the Athenaeum’s live-in caretaker in 1871, we glimpse how early Victorian communities looked after their own in times long before the introduction of government social services. The mutually beneficial arrangement of a caretaker and cleaner in exchange for a roof over her head and basic necessities is an early example of a community providing for someone who would otherwise have been destitute after her husband died.

The archives have been a key source for those researching and writing the Maldon Athenaeum’s history. For example, the vignette ‘The First Minute book’ draws on a range of archives to trace the hazardous journey of this irreplaceable early document to its final place of safety in the State Library Victoria. From a local newspaper the researchers learned that the book was found in a deceased estate in 1945 and returned to the library, leading them to surmise that this may have been how it survived the fires that probably destroyed the other minute books. Correspondence pasted into a somewhat quirky scrapbook compiled by local resident Albert Williams, informed researchers that the first minute book was later found by a former president under a pile of old papers – a snippet which suggested to the researchers that the book’s historical value was not then recognised, and surely also tells us, the readers, that the Athenaeum was not always the orderly place it is today.

Williams’ scrapbook, entitled Picturesque Maldon, is one of the more unusual items ‘unearthed’ by the archiving team. It contains many newspaper clippings from the Maldon Times (as the local newspaper was then called) of articles about local history written by Williams under the pseudonym ‘Maldonian’. Another interesting ‘find’ by the archiving team was a well-preserved, intricately embellished insurance document dated 1903 showing that that the wooden building and its contents were insured for £200 – a considerable sum for a cash-strapped community organisation. A dog-eared cash book reveals that electricity was installed in 1939 at the cost of £25/12/6. Perhaps the most curious item discovered was an $80 cheque in an envelope taped to the back of a framed certificate awarded to the Athenaeum by the Mechanics’ Institute of Victoria for being the winner of the best event – A Great Scone Bake and Devonshire Tea Pop-Up Café – staged at a mechanics’ institute conference in 2018. Unfortunately, by the time the cheque was found, seven years had passed and it was no longer able to be cashed.

Lynda Achren 2025

References

Financial documents held in the Maldon Athenaeum Archive Collection. For use within the library only.

Library minutes held in the Maldon Athenaeum Archive Collection. For use within the library only.

Newspaper articles held in the Maldon Athenaeum Archive Collection. For use within the library only:

The Tarrangower Times, January 30, 1945.
The Tarrangower Times, 21 February 2025.
The Tarrangower Times, 30 May 2025.
The Tarrangower Times, 29 August 2025.

Williams, Albert (1965) Picturesque Maldon. Manuscript held in the Maldon Athenaeum Archive Collection. For use within the library only.