Ultima Thule Restored. Henry Handel Richardson Comes Home.

On March the 3^rd 1945 the Battle of Manila ended in Allied victory and the Germans launched Operation Gisela, an aerial strategy against RAF bombers that ended in failure a day later. On a more mundane note, ‘Ultima Thule’ by Henry Handel Richardson was due to be returned to the Carmelite Library in Port Melbourne. An impressive red stamp inside the back page warned: 

Any member who fails to return

this book after the date mentioned

will be fined 3d for first

week and 1d per day thereafter. 

On February the 23^rd 2023, a visitor to the Carmelite Library in Middle Park returned the book, which he said he had bought for two dollars in January from the Vinnies Op Shop in his home town of Warragul. ‘Ultima Thule’ has been unavailable for almost 78 years. This totals 28,490 days, so if 240 pence are in a pound (pre-1966 decimalisation) the borrower owes the Carmelite Library about 118 pounds. This figure in 1945, converted into Australian currency today and allowing for inflation over time means the borrower owes the Library $9,554, give or take a few bob. We could round it out to the nearest thousand, but the unknown reader of ‘the Third Part of the Chronicle of the Fortunes of Richard Mahony’ will be relieved to read that today the Carmelite Library does not issue fines. 

One encounters stories of overdue books returning to libraries decades or even centuries later, but never expects it to happen in one’s own life. The book in hand is the March impression of the 1929 first edition. The book must have been selling like the proverbial, because the flyleaf tells us there had already been a January and February impression. Impressions count for a lot, which is why our copy will go direct into the rare books collection. 

The big question being, what was the Carmelite Library of Port Melbourne? The oval red library stamp of ownership is unfamiliar. I’m not sure I have ever seen one before. The visitor to the Library, Andrew Wrathall, a book lover, devotee of the book industry, and currently manager of Wrathall Books online, conjectured that this copy of ‘Ultima Thule’ may have been part of the Carmelite house established in Beaconsfield Parade in 1886. While the book was plainly part of a library in a Carmelite house, it remains an open question if it belonged in that one. While not impossible, the Order at some time gave the house into the hands of the Brigidine Order, where a school was founded. Too, the house was in Albert Park. 

The book may have spent time at Beaconsfield Parade, but it is more likely to have been part of a parish library for the use of the parishioners of St Joseph’s, Port Melbourne, especially when the Depression took hold and locals relied on free reading materials. I say this because the Carmelites had just such a library in the Carmelite Hall of their other Melbourne parish, Our Lady of Mount Carmel in Middle Park. Many titles survive from that collection, replete with bookplates to that effect, resting quietly in the present-day Carmelite Library, a collection transferred from the Province’s monastery in Donvale in 2002.    

This leaves us with concrete evidence that the Order was managing several libraries of different kinds from at least the 1940s, if not earlier. The HHR in hand is dated 1929 and carries the number inked into the oval of ownership: 1243. If we assume, and with some confidence, that this is its accession number, then the Port Melbourne library was one of respectable size for the purpose, with quality reading in mind, and a diversity of holdings.

-- Philip Harvey