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This article investigates Departmental representations of allies and enemies, especially in the Pacific Ocean, during the Great War. The first section provides an overview of the Department’s principal instruments “the School Paper and Education Gazette” in communicating representations as well as expected views and behaviours with regard to Empire, allies and enemies. The second section explores the Department’s positioning of Germany in the Pacific Ocean and in relation to Australia; the third looks at France; and both focus on children’s responses to the reporting. The final section investigates representations of New Zealand including those within the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps legend that the Department chose to acknowledge.

MANY and various are the problems both of finance and administration, but usually the more pressing of finance, connected with the establishment and maintenance of Branch libraries. It is the more surprising that the subject has been very little discussed or written about. If not looking too far ahead, I would suggest to the Council of the Library Association, and more especially the Publications Committee, that the topic be taken up at the next but one Annual Meeting, and that two whole days might very well be devoted to its consideration.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the complex and shifting relationship between the Anglo American Corporation (Anglo) and the South African State (“the State”) as reflected in Anglo’s annual reports.

This paper builds on research on the role of annual reports in ideological conflict. To examine the ongoing relationship between Anglo and the State, the authors read all the annual reports published by Anglo American from 1917 to 1975, looking for instances in which the corporation appeared to be attempting to address, criticise, compliment, or implore the State.

During the period under study, despite the apparent struggles between the South African State and Anglo American, the relationship between the two was primarily symbiotic. The symbolic confrontation engaged in by these two behemoths perpetuated the real, physical violence perpetrated on the oppressed workers. By appearing to be a liberal opponent of apartheid, Anglo was able to ensure continued investment in South Africa.

The examination of decades’ worth of annual reports provides an example of how these supposedly neutral instruments were used to contest and sustain power. Thereby, Anglo could continue to exploit workers, reap enormous profits, and maintain a fiction of opposition to the oppressive State. The State also benefited from its support of Anglo, which provided a plurality of tax revenue and economic expansion during the period.

This paper provides insights into the ways the State and other institutions sustain each other in the pursuit of economic and political power in the face of visible and widely condemned injustices. Although they frequently contested each other’s primacy, both benefited while black South African miners suffered.

There exists no detailed account of the 40 Australian women teachers employed within the “concentration camps” established by British forces in the Orange River and Transvaal colonies during the Boer War. The purpose of this paper is to critically respond to this dearth in historiography.

A large corpus of newspaper accounts represents the richest, most accessible and relatively idiosyncratic source of data concerning this contingent of women. The research paper therefore interprets concomitant print-based media reports of the period as a resource for educational and historiographical data.

Towards the end of the Boer War in South Africa (1899-1902) a total of 40 Australian female teachers – four from Queensland, six from South Australia, 14 from Victoria and 16 from New South Wales – successfully answered the imperial call conscripting educators for schools within “concentration camps” established by British forces in the Orange River and Transvaal colonies. Women’s exclusive participation in this initiative, while ostensibly to teach the Boer children detained within these camps, also exerted an influential effect on the popular consciousness in reimagining cultural ideals about female teachers’ professionalism in ideological terms.

One limitation of the study relates to the dearth in official records about Australian women teachers in concentration camps given that; not only are Boer War-related records generally difficult to source; but also that even the existent data is incomplete with many chapters missing completely from record. Therefore, while the data about these women is far from complete, the account in terms of newspaper reports relies on the existent accounts of them typically in cases where their school and community observe their contributions to this military campaign and thus credit them with media publicity.

The paper’s originality lies in recovering the involvement of a previously underrepresented contingent of Australian women teachers while simultaneously offering a primary reading of the ideological work this involvement played in influencing the political narrative of Australia’s educational involvement in the Boer War.

The purpose of this paper is to assess whether any meaningful lessons can be learned from South Africa's early twentieth century experience of White poverty and to what extent such lessons can be applied in order to combat Black poverty today.

This paper uses quantitative measures to assert the scale of poverty for both White and Black poverty in the two periods. An extensive discussion of the causes of poverty in both periods concludes with specific policy implications for today. Because of the unique characteristics and history of South Africa, this paper provides a unique dimension to poverty analysis.

The paper suggests that three key policy lessons can be learned from the twentieth‐century effort to combat White poverty and applied to Black poverty as it exists in South Africa today: an improvement in the quality of education, an improvement in the property right ownership of the poor, and policies to eliminate the constraints on economic growth, by investment, for example, in infrastructure and new technological industries.

Caution is advised when comparing past eras with the present; in comparing two periods that differ widely, only tentative recommendations is possible.

Since many areas of the world are faced with the difficult task of eradicating poverty, attempts that, to any extent, are successful are of interest and contribute positively to the development of the available knowledge base. The time‐span and design of this paper offers a unique perspective on poverty eradication efforts.

Information and communication in times of war is an area that has been much written about, but one which has not often been treated as a topic in its own right from an information science perspective. The national liberation struggles of the second half of the 20th century offer possibilities for the development of an information and communication model, incorporating data on a range of covert and overt information and communication activities by both sides in the conflict. The model takes account of such activities as scouting, secret communication, propaganda, misinformation campaigns, censorship, intelligence gathering and collating, and other aspects of information‐related activity. It offers a capacity to structure this knowledge, indicates gaps and concentrations in activity, and permits audit and assessment of information‐related activity in the struggle. It is intended to be capable of providing perspectives on information warfare in other contexts, although this aspect is not explored here.

After the Mandela government took power in 1994 in South Africa, one of its highest priorities was providing power to the impoverished rural areas, and particularly the infrastructure‐poor black “townships.” In addition to a scarcity of resources, multiple stake‐holders with very different agendas were integrally a part of the decision‐making process. To this extent, what happened with the electricity industry is a metaphor for the multiple issues—social, economic, and political—which had to be negotiated by the new society. The multiple stake‐holders were brought together in a “Forum,” a non‐regulatory advisory body which was designed to specifically include all relevant interested parties in an open (“transparent”) problem‐solving process. This forum system was extensively used in the 18–24 months immediately before and after the 1994 elections to deal with a host of issues. The National Electricity Forum (NELF) was one of the earliest and most successful of these forums. This case reviews the build‐up to the 1994 elections, describes how the forum process worked, and outlines its structure.

GUEST editor of this South African issue of THE LIBRARY WORLD is Hendrik M. Robinson, Director of Library Services, Transvaal Provincial Administration, Pretoria.