But if it is hard to discern in Mitchell himself the source of his passion for collecting and of his particular commitment to Australiana (he once wrote modestly that he thought ‘anything like a complete collection of Australian books will be curious’), it is in the keepers and users of his legacy – librarians and curators, scholars and writers – that we can discern an intense commitment to the complex task of documenting and interpreting our Australian past and present, making it available and preserving it for a distant posterity. As Richard Neville, the present Mitchell Librarian, reminds us, right from the start the Library’s collections ‘have mixed the completely astonishing with the everyday; the biggest names in Australian history with the smallest; the big ideas with the commonplace – a panorama of life itself’. Neville reflects that it is ‘this unpredictable panoply of things that draws people into the Library’s orbit and won’t let them go’.

The centrepiece of the Mitchell Library celebrations mounted in this centenary year by the State Library of New South Wales is a major exhibition. Appropriately called One Hundred, it comes with a publication that is both a catalogue and the vehicle for a splendid meditation on ‘The Mitchell’ by journalist and author David Marr, famous for his biography of Patrick White, whose Nobel Prize for Literature gold medallion is a library treasure and one of the exhibition’s prized exhibits. Marr reflects that as schoolboy and man he’s been a user of the Mitchell ‘intermittently for nearly half its life’. In a memory that encapsulates the experience of scholars, not just in the Mitchell but in libraries around the world, Marr writes with feeling of what he calls the ‘Eureka moments’ of discovery when an elusive fact is finally tracked to its source and when ‘weeks of tedium are wiped away in a few moments of discovery’. It is the accumulation of those ‘Eureka moments’ that informs the stream of books that have drawn so abundantly on the great resources of the Mitchell Library. Marr names some of them: Hazel Rowley’s Christina Stead: A Biography (1993), David Day’s John Curtin: A Life (1999) and Chifley: A Life (2001), Brian Matthews’s Louisa (1987), Manning Clark’s A History of Australia (1962–87) and M.H. Ellis’s Lachlan Macquarie: His Life, Adventures and Times (1947). To this list he might have added Jill Roe’s magisterial life of Miles Franklin – some twenty years in the making – whose diaries and papers form part of the Mitchell Library’s formidable array of holdings, which document the emergence and consolidation of our country’s national literature.

Marr also writes of David Scott Mitchell’s personal bookplate, designed in 1900 not long before his death and pasted into many of the books he owned. While he pokes fun at the ‘rather bogus’ wreaths, helmets and shields that decorate this bookplate, Marr celebrates the single word of the motto: Eureka. This was chosen to honour Mitchell’s Scott family line and to suggest the possibilities of discovery that lay in the books and other documentary riches of the great collection that was soon to pass into public ownership.

If in this sense Eureka – as Marr observes – is the motto ‘readers, researchers and collectors all live by’, it also provides the unifying theme of the State Library’s centenary exhibition. Here, the Library gives us a tapestry of one hundred items great and small chosen to reflect – as Neville puts it – the power of objects to say things about the past and the present. Some may object to the frank eclecticism of this exhibition, the apparent random selection of disparate objects and of different materials across time and geographic space: a Book of Hours from northern France (late fifteenth century); Josiah Wedgwood’s Sydney Cove Medallion (1789); Lachlan Macquarie’s collector’s chest with natural specimens (c.1818); Joseph Backler’s gloomy portrait of Sarah Cobcroft (1856); the first of a handful of issues of The Australian Abo Call: The Voice of the Aborigines (1938); the first edition (and the author’s own copy) of Donald Horne’s The Lucky Country (1964); and a collection of unsolicited mail received at one Australian home on the northern beaches of Sydney (2007), to select a few at random.

But as curator Paul Brunton has remarked, the Library was looking for the way in which it might fully represent the range and diversity of the Mitchell collection: its chronological and geographic span; the sheer variety of materials; the emphasis on collecting records of contemporary life, as well as those of the past; and the determination to document all aspects of the Australian experience, not just the lives of the famous and notorious.

Against these benchmarks, the exhibition tells an entertaining and absorbing story. It offers up some of the great and familiar treasures and introduces some new and unexpected ones; and it asks its audience to engage with the modern-day successors of David Scott Mitchell, to think about the ways in which Australian life and experience is recorded, collected and understood. Like Marr’s ‘Eureka moment’ in the reading room, this exhibition is about discovery. Democratic in its reach, in each of the individual exhibits and stories, this celebratory survey exhibition presents a rich and lively succession of ‘Eureka moments’, which are also handsomely illustrated in this delightful catalogue.