In 1923 Kenneth Binns was in charge of the Australian collections; he played a key role in the acquisition of the Cook journal. Born in Scotland, the son of a Congregational minister, Binns grew up in inner Sydney and attended the University of Sydney. He worked with John Le Gay Brereton at the Fisher Library, before moving to Melbourne in 1911. Starting as a cataloguer, he soon came to relish collection building. His collecting interests extended from early Australiana to wartime pamphlets and ephemera, and later to manuscripts, papers of Federation leaders, paintings, photographs, films and government archives. After the Library moved to Canberra in 1927, Binns became the Parliamentary Librarian, a position he held until his retirement in 1947. They were difficult years, with few staff, limited acquisition funds, and the collections dispersed around the small town. Even so, Binns continued to devote much of his time to collection work and to wooing private collectors. The splendid library of the ornithologist Gregory Mathews was donated in 1939, and Binns took the first steps to acquire the extraordinary collections of John Ferguson and Rex Nan Kivell.

Harold White was twenty-three years younger than Binns and rather different in his background and personality. He grew up on a farm in northern Victoria and attended Wesley College and the University of Melbourne, as did his later political masters, Robert Menzies and Harold Holt. White spent his entire career in the National Library, becoming Binns’s deputy in 1928 and succeeding him in 1947. He gained the august title of National Librarian in 1960, while continuing to be the Parliamentary Librarian for several more years. He retired in 1970, shortly after the triumphal opening of the Library building. Under White’s leadership, the Library became the largest one in Australia, in terms of staff and the breadth of its collections. It had also set up several national services, such as the published national bibliography and the forerunners of the multifarious online services that exist today.

Binns and White shared a common ambition and a common devotion to the Library and the Parliament. White supported Binns in his collecting; in particular, he sought the papers of notable Australians, such as Alfred Deakin and Henry Handel Richardson. Ultimately, he became one of the greatest collection-builders. He brought to the task exceptional energy, a broad general knowledge, stubbornness and a thick skin. He had a huge range of contacts – politicians, public servants, academics, writers, business leaders, journalists, collectors – and was a shrewd networker. White was also very lucky. Binns had led the Library through the Depression and World War II, while White benefited from the prosperity of the 1950s and 1960s, the growth of Canberra, the expansion of the universities, and the support of Menzies and various federal treasurers. A library building gradually became a reality, researchers increasingly used the collections and assisted with acquisitions, and funds were provided for the acquisition of great collections, both in Australia and overseas.

White rightly gave priority to the Australian collections, and the purchase of the Nan Kivell Collection (1959) and the Ferguson Collection (1970) were the culmination of years of persuasion and negotiation. In 1953 he bought in England an outstanding rare book collection, the Kashnor Collection, followed later by the Nichol Smith and Clifford collections. As National Librarian, he spent more and more time overseas. As crates of books, manuscripts and microfilms arrived in Canberra, cataloguers despaired. White cared little about cataloguing backlogs; he was intent on creating a great collection for future researchers. As it turned out, after 1970 opportunities and resources for collecting on such a global scale dwindled and the cataloguers eventually caught up.

In 1984 the Council of the National Library set up a Fellowship Scheme to assist researchers and writers to come to Canberra and spend time working on the collections. A year later, they were named the Harold White Fellowships, in recognition of White’s vision, determination and labour in assembling those collections. White always valued scholarship and in his last years he took a keen interest in the Fellowships. Every year, from three to six Fellows have come to the Library. Most have been Australians, but others have come from Britain, Ireland, Germany, Canada, New Zealand, China and Japan. They have included historians, political scientists, geologists, literary scholars, anthropologists, musicologists and novelists. In late April a three-day conference was held in the Library to mark twenty-one years of Harold White Fellowships. The papers by past Fellows reflected the diversity of both the fellowships and the great collection that was built up by Kenneth Binns, Harold White and their associates at the Library.