Lydia Wevers has now brought Brancepeth farm and its library back to life, drawing upon the farm’s extensive surviving records, as well as upon the books themselves, to recreate the farm’s social world and to open a window onto the intellectual and emotional lives of those involved in the library’s establishment, maintenance, and use. The book interweaves chapters on the Beethams, their clerk and librarian, John Vaughan Miller, and the library’s many readers. Last but not least, indeed the heroes of Wevers’s narrative, are the books themselves, especially the three hundred or so ‘loved-to-death’ novels, tattered favourites revealing a social history of reading. The arduous lives of these books can be seen in their dirty, broken bindings, their stained covers, and in their soiled and torn pages. Some have even been dropped into a fire or bath; many are scribbled over.

Wevers, herself a ‘compulsive reader’, vividly evokes the presence of these books within the daily life of the station, circulating around the farm and outstations together with other objects such as clothes, curry powder, slippers, towels, and pipes. These books tell many stories. They tell us about reading tastes across the empire of  ‘Greater Britain’. They also tell us about the lives of their various readers – from the genteel Beethams to the learned librarian, the shepherds, rabbit poisoners, cooks, maids, wine-makers, farm workers, and outstation gang members, many of whom were engaged in hard physical labour but who clearly carried the books around with them and took pleasure in reading.

Wevers recreates Brancepeth as a world unto itself, with its grand turreted homestead (modelled on a Scottish hunting lodge), its library, various stores, cookhouse, sleeping whares, and schoolhouse down the road. Somewhat unusually, instead of being dedicated to literacy and self-improvement, the library was brimful with the latest British novels. Reading on the farm was clearly for pleasure, not instruction. To this end, there were travel romances and racy narratives of the colonial frontier adventure, many telling stories of economic and social betterment, all of which (Wevers speculates) fuelled the station workers’ restless optimism. There were also historical and sensation novels, as well as the latest New Woman novels of the 1890s. Although so far from ‘home’, the Beetham family was clearly keen to keep up to date, subscribing as well to a host of English and Scottish newspapers, illustrated journals, reviews, and periodicals.

Like the farm itself, the library was predominantly a social space for men, a type of club, which occasionally hosted special events. That we know so much about the characters in this male world is due to John Vaughan Miller, a learned man who had once known better days but whose own colonial adventure had ended disappointingly as an overworked and underpaid factotum. Highly educated, prickly, fastidious, and a great reader, he was also an inveterate scribbler and copious record-keeper, creating ‘an abundant, exuberant text’ through his diary, his letters, his extensive marginalia, and his essays and letters to local newspapers. In marked contrast to Willie Beetham’s lackadaisical diary, Miller wrote ‘as if his life depended on it’, his diary presenting us with a hybrid genre of public record, private ruminations, and self-portraiture.

From Wevers’ perspective, Miller’s many writings stand as ‘a vivid and unruly companion to the dog-eared novels on the library shelves’. Conservative, alert to the nuances of manners and behaviour, he had a sardonic sense of humour, castigating the latest fashions, be they New Woman novels or the latest art. Impressionist pictures are so called, he wrote, ‘because the painter (do not call him an artist) is under the impression that he has painted a picture’. He also revelled in puns and learned scholia in the books he was reading. In terms of the day-to-day record, we learn from his diary that the farm posted forty thousand letters in 1903, and that in 1896, during the Depression, 925 swaggies were given a bed and at least two meals, while many also received ‘clothes, boots, tobacco, or medicines’. A few were even given money, with special care taken of the old men. In addition to the genuine cases, there were the colourful shifters, vagrants, jailbirds, fraudsters, con men, and impostors. In his office at the rear of the homestead, Miller was an ever-vigilant gatekeeper, noting and supervising everyone’s comings and goings.

Although Miller was central to the farm’s operations, his class position was equivocal within Brancepeth’s ‘almost manorial style’. Social distinctions operated across the farm’s varied spheres of influence, power, and expertise. Keenly attentive to hierarchy, Miller was sensitive to his own uncertain social standing. In many respects, he resembled the governess of so many Victorian novels, unhappily situated between the servants and employers. Although at first he dined regularly in the house, he did not belong to that privileged, more leisurely world, and some of his anonymous, journalistic pieces included bitter reflections on farm life and the sometimes-miserable lives of employees. The book makes for compelling reading and is generously illustrated, with photographs old and new of Brancepeth, William Beetham’s controversial 1850s portrait of two Maori chiefs, and the books themselves, in all their much-loved glory.