Tropical Island Treasure: article in National Library of Australia News
The only real writing I’ve managed all year is this article on the National Library of Australia’s Mauritius Collection, for the monthly journal National Library of Australia News. It’s wonderful to see the Library’s beautiful painting of a dodo gracing the July issue’s cover, highlighting the rich holdings relating to Mauritius in their collection. I used the collection during research for Blue Mauritius.
Download a pdf of the article from the Library’s website here. A slightly extended version, fully footnoted and with an appendix documenting all the rare book holdings in the Collection will appear later this year in the Journal of Mauritian Studies. The article begins:
‘Mauritius is but a name to most people in England unless they collect stamps’. Thus begins a treatise on colonial cooking published in the then British colony in 1954. This book, in ‘English and in French with a glossary in Hindustani’, is one of some 4500 items that make up the National Library of Australia’s Mauritius Collection – an outstanding resource revealing the Indian Ocean island to be much more than the sum of the philatelic, tropical and ornithological parts on which its fame rests.
I thoroughly enjoyed researching and writing this. I must find the time to get writing again…