WHEN Kevin Bradley retired as an assistant director-general from the National Library of Australia on August 20, he could look back on a staggering career of nearly 39 years at the same place.

Bradley, also a very well-known member of the Canberra arts community, is husband to Julie Bradley, the 2020 “CityNews” Artist of the Year and father to Jacqueline (Jac) Bradley, sculptor, fiddler and art lecturer.

Kevin himself is no slouch in the music area and plays a mean fiddle, slide guitar and mandolin. On weekends he’s been teaching Jac how to make mandolins from spruce, myrtle and maple and wants to make more guitars as well as pursue his research into the cultures that have long obsessed him.

Originally a technical trainee with Amalgamated Wireless Australasia (AWA) he followed Julie, his high-school girlfriend (and later wife), to Canberra when she got a job lecturing in art. 

He got a job at the National Library, where they needed technical expertise in the sound division, well before the formation of the National Film and Sound Archive.

“The library always gave me a new challenge,” he tells me. 

“I changed jobs many times without changing the organisation.”

Once in Canberra, the National Library job attracted him because he thought he might be able to research the collection of John Meredith and the music of legendary Aboriginal musician Dougie Young, from Wilcannia. But they weren’t part of the sound-recording collection or his job as sound archivist.

When the opportunity came to transfer to the NFSA he decided to stay on – a good decision, he says – and work on his interests in Young and Meredith. 

It took him a good 10 years to track down the recordings of Young, but in the meantime, he’s met Grace Koch and Jeremy Beckett at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies and the three of them, under the aegis of AIATSIS and the NLA, put out “The Songs of Dougie Young” on CD and cassette, with good sales in western NSW. 

Over the early years, perhaps the biggest influence on him, Kevin says, was folklorist Edgar Waters, a consultant to the NLA.

“We became great friends and I realised that to be a student of anthropology would be the best way to study as he got me thinking about society and its relationship to vernacular music.” 

He enrolled at the ANU part-time and fitted in units in ethnomusicology at the School of Music and a course in museum studies and curatorship.

He even published an academic paper on Aboriginal gumleaf music while still an undergraduate and his honours thesis, “The Weight of Sound”, about a genre of Maltese folk music, won him a First and two ANU prizes.

Sounds obscure? Not really, for as Kevin had found, it was Maltese music in Australia that kept Maltese music in Malta going, and that fitted his notion that “all music in society undergoes change”, further confirmed when he got interested in popular Rajasthan desert music.

By now managing the National Library of Australia’s sound and audio-preservation initiative and overseeing its 15-year, sound-preservation plan, the big issue was how to deal with degraded tapes and other recording devices, a subject on which he became an international expert. He travelled extensively locally and globally, then worked as sustainability adviser on the Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories at ANU while still employed by the library.

In 2006, when Mark Cranfield retired as head of oral history at the NLA, he took over as curator, Oral History and Folklore, and director, Sound and Audiovisual Preservation, for which he was awarded a Public Service Medal.

On the urging of then director-general Jan Fullerton, in 2013 he reluctantly agreed to become senior curator of Pictures, Manuscripts and Digital Archives, but ended up enjoying the job, which he says allowed him to look broadly across other collections.

As Kevin climbed up the pole, he became assistant director-general, National Collections Access, with oversight of Trove; assistant director-general Australian Collections and Reader Services, and, finally, assistant director-general, Collection.

In his increasingly scarce spare time he was playing music, researching, building ovens and travelling, sometimes for the library, when he couldn’t take the family, sometimes with Julie and Jac when he was attending UNESCO committees and sometimes, as in 2019 when Julie got a residency in Ireland, as a handbag.

Now in the early weeks of his retirement he says he’d like to travel more, play everything from electric guitar to acoustic strings, but also to research Australian folklore collections and think about what they mean.

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