The Library That Made Me

Welcome to the Library That Made Me Podcast.

I’m Phillipa McGuiness from the State Library of NSW.

On this podcast, we ask some of Australia’s most loved writers, historians, thinkers and performers to share stories about the libraries that shaped them.

Today you will hear from Markus Zusak, recorded live at the State Library of NSW in 2022. 

Markus Zusak is the author of seven books, including the The Book Thief — a New York Times bestseller which has been adapted into film, and into theatre productions around the world. His latest book is the memoir Three Wild Dogs (and the Truth).

This is the library that made me.

My mum wasn’t screwing around when it came to school projects. We could have walked up the street to Engadine Library, which would have been easier, but as she always said — in her Australian-German accent:

‘For this, you need Sutterland.’

(She meant Sutherland.)

As the youngest of four kids, I was the last link in a long chain of homework and school assignments — usually completed in those giant sideways project books. Whether it was satellite dishes or Africa, geology or Albert Einstein, we drove to that bigger library of our youth, or better (since it was the 80s), our neighbourhood flux-capacitor. We needed answers of space and time.

Not far from the railway line, hunched with a small gathering of other council-brown buildings, was the old Sutherland Library.

We arrived as a small tribe; we had assignments simultaneously. I’d be looking through those beautiful, now-antiquated card catalogue drawers while my eldest sister researched the Peloponnesian War. (My brother, true to form, would be fart-arsing around in the picture book section, avoiding work.). That was our life growing up

Some of the books we borrowed.

Some — from the reference section — we made copies. We put coins into the photocopy machine, praying the words wouldn’t trip down the side of the page …

Last of all, it’s likely we went to Sutherland because it was open till 9 pm. In that long-gone world where the shops shut at five on weekdays, and were fully closed on Sundays, that was pretty wild.

Us Zusaks knew where the work party was.

Fast-forward to the new millennium, 2003. At some point, I’d gone down to the old library site and found it abandoned, following directions then to the new Sutherland Library, on Belmont Street.

A cream-coloured building.

Modern furnishings.

Automatic doors!

The future was an extravaganza.

By 2003, I’d started writing what would be my fifth novel. It was supposed to be a novella — maybe a hundred pages — but it was steadily growing beneath me. It was called The Book Thief, and after a year of false starts, I found myself, quite suddenly, alive at the time of writing. What I mean is that mostly you’re working on a book and it isn’t taking flight. In my case, I was writing and researching, side by side. I would ride my bike from my home in Gymea to the library. I’d return with a backpack full of books and a head full of new ideas which is almost the greatest thing about any library — sometimes you only need to be there. You’re putting yourself in a place of ideas, so your mind is open to almost anything. And that’s exactly what happened.

I was researching Nazi Germany and Hitler and everything in between. In my book, I had children playing football on the snowy streets, and I wanted them to imitate their heroes. These days, the first thing a writer might do is google ‘Famous European footballers of the 1930s’, but back then, I didn’t even see the internet as a real resource. My first port of call was the library — it still is, actually — though I wasn’t expecting a result.

On a hot January morning, I rode my bike to the library and entered its modern-yet- hallowed doors. There was a young boy in my novel called Rudy Steiner, and he was becoming my favourite character. He was also my footballer-in-chief. In my visions, he would commentate himself as he played, pretending he was one of the greats.

When I walked into the library that morning, I was vaguely contemplating the search. I entered the concourse, and it hit me — for there, facing outwards in the Sport section, was an almanac of the modern Olympics. There were several former champions on the cover, and among them was Jesse Owens.

I stopped walking.

I knew instantly that I didn’t need famous footballers from that time — I had one of the great icons of the 20th century. In a matter of seconds, I saw Rudy Steiner running alone one night at the local athletics field, imitating the great Jesse Owens. I saw how it would continue as a plot point throughout the novel — culminating hundreds of pages later in the final chapters of the book. I fell in love with Rudy, at that exact moment, completely …

In terms of a library that made me, I don’t want to be flippant now, or untrue. My time spent in both iterations of Sutherland Library has been a lasting part of my life. It’s embedded in my school assignments. It changed the course of my life’s work.

For me, Sutherland Library is every library — a place that has awakened me time and time again. It’s always the place to start looking for what’s hardest to find:

To be alive at the time of writing.

Thank you for listening to the Library That Made Me. This podcast was produced on Gadigal land by the State Library of NSW.

Welcome to the Library That Made Me Podcast.

I’m Phillipa McGuiness from the State Library of NSW.

On this podcast, we ask some of Australia’s most loved writers, historians, thinkers and performers to share stories about the libraries that shaped them.

You’re about to hear from David Gaunt. David Gaunt is co-owner of Gleebooks with Roger Mackell, a partnership they formed in 1978. Gleebooks has been one of Sydney’s best independent bookshops — and a cornerstone of the city’s reading culture — ever since.

I’m David Gaunt and this is the library that made me.

I’m a blessed (and cursed) creature, a boomer baby. Not only that, I’m one born in 1951, the post-war apex year for births. But while many of the advantages of that serendipitous birth timing are well documented (and yes, that included Oslo school lunches of a cheese and salad sandwich, cup of milk and apple that the school provided, school bursaries, free universities, the advent of Medicare, no-fault divorce … need I go on), we were hard done by in other ways. The worst bland food diet, ancient playground equipment, few public swimming pools, primitive public transport (at least in my bit of southern Sydney) and seriously overcrowded schools. My own, Peakhurst Public, housed 240 students in my year alone, all strictly gender-separated, in unairconditioned portable classrooms. And no municipal library in our municipality in the early years.

My family were readers (no TV till I was 12) so my earliest library memories are twofold. The canny teacher librarian at school aroused our competitive instincts to read at least a book a week. And, simply responding to that instinct, I did. This led to a situation where, at age 11, an unhealthily large amount of my understanding of Australian history came from the writings of Ion L. Idriess. The school library had dozens of his books, and I devoured them all, to the delight of the librarian.

Other books were out there, but how to find them? Certainly, the need for my older brother and me to catch two buses to access the ‘local’ library at Rockdale, almost ten kilometres away, tested our enthusiasm. But that not-so-local library did house a viewable copy of the Stanley Gibbons Stamp Catalogue, an invaluable information source and strong incentive for nerdy junior stamp collectors. 

The breakthrough in the story of the library that made me, however, came with the long overdue opening of the new Hurstville Municipal Civic Centre in 1962. I remember feeling civic pride in the beautiful new library inside the civic centre, and its sparkling selection of new books stretching out of sight. But imagine my disappointment to find that the children’s section was all but irrelevant to me. I had read too voraciously.

My mother, to her everlasting credit, would confront any obstacle to the furthering of her children’s reading. I remain amazed that this shy and retiring woman negotiated the ‘parentally approved’ usage of her adult borrower’s card for me at age 12 (adult borrowers’ cards were for those 14 years and over), and thereby opened up what looked and felt like an unlimited world of words to me. I am forever grateful to her (and not just for that!) and to those enlightened rule-bending librarians, persuaded by my eager desire to read through the dozens of P.G. Wodehouse books I’d spied. They stood in a long row of handsome, new, uniform hardcover editions. And in devouring dozens of them, more than once, over the next few years, I discovered a feast of (gloriously irrelevant) details about England and its caste system, its idle rich, country estates, meddlesome aunts and petty criminals, golf, and romance — for Wodehouse was nothing if not a romance writer. Crucially, though, I discovered the essence of good writing from one of the world’s most accomplished wordsmiths. 

I also bent those adult borrower’s card age rules to get my hands on spicy Ian Fleming spy novels, historical fiction and any sporting biographies I could find. And I spent many happy high school hours in the reference room, on projects and study. Yet it’s that serendipitous Wodehouse moment on my first visit to Hurstville Library that stands out.

Of course, other libraries have featured in my life. The Charles Kingsford Smith Memorial Library at my high school was decidedly uninviting … but then again, we young adolescents wrestling with set texts by Joseph Conrad, H.G. Wells, G.K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc and Vance Palmer (for local content) had precious little time for extracurricular browsing in the library. Then a longish stint at the University of Sydney meant I all but lived at Fisher Library, with necessary excursions to the reading room at the Mitchell Library, within the State Library of NSW, to breathe in the lived history of a classical library.

I fell into a bookselling life at Gleebooks almost 50 years ago, and am well overdue to extricate myself. But the upside has always been the chance to discover and indulge in whatever I want to read, whenever I want to read. Our bookshops, like so many libraries, are deeply engaged with the writing and reading communities they serve. For me, there’s been a lifelong joy in books — thanks to those libraries that lit the fuse, and sustained the flame.

Thank you for listening to the Library That Made Me. This podcast was produced on Gadigal land by the State Library of NSW.

Welcome to the Library That Made Me Podcast.

I’m Phillipa McGuiness from the State Library of NSW.

On this podcast, we ask some of Australia’s most loved writers, historians, thinkers and performers to share stories about the libraries that shaped them.

Today you will hear from Michelle Arrow. Michelle Arrow is an award-winning author, professor of History at Macquarie University, and was the president of the Australian association between 2024 and 2026. 

I’m Michelle Arrow and this is the library that made me.

It’s 1993. I’m sitting on the warm sandstone steps of the Mitchell Library with a group of students from my Australian Cultural History class. Normally we would have our classes in our lecturer Richard White’s office, which was in the Main Quad at Sydney University, but today we have an excursion. 

Richard begins the class, not by taking us into the library, but by pointing out the large statue incongruously placed between the lanes of the Eastern Distributor: the Shakespeare Memorial, where the man himself, pen in hand, is surrounded by Romeo and Juliet, Falstaff, Othello, and Portia. Richard then takes out a book and reads to us, his accent suddenly broad and clear above the whirr of traffic:

‘Wot’s in a name?’ she sez… An’ then she sighs,

An’ clasps ‘er little ‘ands, an’ rolls ‘er eyes.

‘A rose,’ she sez, ‘be any other name’

Would smell the same.

Oh, w’erefore art you Romeo, young sir?

Chuck yer ole pot, an’ change yer moniker!’

We laughed in delight at the shock of it, the audacity of claiming the library steps as our seminar room. The poem is ‘The Play’, part of CJ Dennis’s The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke, published in 1917. The Shakespeare Memorial arrived in Sydney just a few years later, in 1926. Both Dennis’s poem and the memorial told us something about Australia’s transplanted Britishness and the meanings of the cityscape. Richard nudged us to see Sydney as a text whose meanings changed over time. And this idea hung in the air as we moved inside the library.

I’d moved to Sydney for uni a couple of years earlier, a nerdy and shy kid from the country who spent a lot of time in Sydney University’s Fisher Library as I slowly learned the mysterious social codes of my new world. Surrounded by books, high up in the stacks, it all seemed less overwhelming. Spending time in the library was also an essential part of student life then. You couldn’t conjure up your weekly readings with a few mouse clicks: you had to go to the library and search for them. I gradually became acculturated to Fisher’s systems. I learned to think in Dewey Decimal (the classification system libraries use to organise items by subject). My generation was among the last to receive this kind of analog education, where books were singular, treasured objects, scooped up greedily for three-hour loans, or hidden in the stacks for unimpeded access.

Our city excursion was my first visit to the Mitchell Reading Room. We were a long way from the lino floors and dim corridors of Fisher Stack. Everything, from the curved wooden chairs, the walls of books, the enveloping silence, spoke to the continuity and authority of this elegant, calm space.

The card catalogue, held in dozens of small timber drawers, was a revelation. These small handwritten cards guided you to things you would never have found otherwise. They were a reminder that the library’s collection and catalogue was crafted slowly and steadily, by human hands.

Over the next few years, the Mitchell Library taught me the importance of patience. As a PhD student I spent months, even years there. My thesis was about the history of Australian women playwrights who wrote for stage and radio between the 1930s and 1960s. Without any large manuscript collections to rely on, this was a history of fragments and scraps, many of which were found in the Mitchell Library’s collections. I was lucky enough to be allowed into the Mitchell’s underground stacks to read through the massive collection of the Sydney New Theatre.

I slowly and methodically worked my way through the library’s entire run of the magazine ABC Weekly, scouring it for any mention of women radio writers or broadcasts of their plays. It took me weeks. I felt myself becoming part of the furniture of the place. 

Now, the ABC Weekly is on Trove: I could probably find everything I was looking for ina few days. But the slow accretion of context and texture that I gained from my slow reading was the sort of incidental knowledge that you lose in the speed of online searching. You develop a deep familiarity with your sources, and with an aspect of the past. It helps you feel like a historian.

The Mitchell Library taught me the importance of paying attention. As a full-time academic, I fear that these days I probably spend more time on emails than I do in libraries. But libraries are still the only places where I can sit down to work and the world falls away. I don’t think I’ll ever tire of that feeling.

Thank you for listening to the Library That Made Me. This podcast was produced on Gadigal land by the State Library of NSW.

Welcome to the Library That Made Me Podcast. 

I’m Phillipa McGuiness from the State Library of NSW. 

On this podcast, we ask some of Australia’s most loved writers, historians, thinkers and performers to share stories about the libraries that shaped them. 

You’re about to hear from Shankari Chandran. Shankari Chandran is the author of five novels including Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens, which won the 2023 Miles Franklin Literary Award. Her most recent book is Unfinished Business. 

I’m Shankari Chandran and this is the library that made me.  

My footsteps slow when I pass a library. Any library. I am pulled inwards, to its endless stories and the possibilities they hold.  

The public library of a country houses that nation’s stories, even the contested ones. It is a monument to the storytelling we call history. The political history of Sri Lanka is especially contested. Which race arrived on the island first, which warring faction committed the most atrocities, how many people died and how many remain missing. These are the narratives we still fight over. New ones have emerged — how corrupt was the previous regime, how many billions did they steal, how much do we owe China and how many children will starve as a result of it. 

Libraries hold stories, but for me, one library also began a story. My novel, Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens, was inspired by the burning of the Jaffna Public Library. It uses this act of cultural erasure to explore racism in my ancestral homeland, Sri Lanka, and my chosen homeland, Australia. 

The Jaffna Public Library sits in Jaffna (Yalpanam), the ancestral capital of the Tamil people of Sri Lanka. It was constructed between 1953 and 1959, and its domed ceilings and gleaming white stucco walls stood proudly over the city, more like a palace than a library. It stored one of the largest archives of Tamil culture in the world — at its height, the collection contained 100,000 books, ancient manuscripts and historical records about Tamil civilisation in Sri Lanka.  

It is — or was — a place of almost mythical cultural significance to the Tamil people.  

In 1981, the Jaffna Public Library was burned to the ground by Sri Lankan government security forces. Two thousand years of Tamil culture, history and language were destroyed. Some texts were the only copies in existence and have been lost forever.  

The Jaffna Public Library told a story about the place of the Tamil people in Sri Lanka. The political authorities of that time wanted to suppress this narrative; burning the archive was a quick and conclusive way to do it. For many Tamils, this biblioclasm was the culmination of decades of laws that disempowered the Tamil people. And it foreshadowed the civil war that was to come, two years later. 

That war led to the forced migration of Tamil people to many parts of the world, and for my family, to Australia. It also led to the internal displacement of hundreds of thousands of Tamil people. 

I was born and raised in the Tamil diaspora. For decades, my parents were afraid to return to Sri Lanka because of my father’s political activism. We moved to London and then Australia (where I was raised) in 1977, a few years after the end of the White Australia Policy.  

I call Australia my chosen home because I have left many times and I always long to return. I am deeply happy and connected to both people and place here. From the strength and safety of Australia, I use fiction to interrogate the injustices that drove my family from one home and challenged them to create another.  

Fiction allows me to assert myself in the present, and to understand how that present has been shaped by the past. At a recent literary panel, someone asked me if I felt my fiction was constrained by my ethnicity and our history. This was my answer: I stride into the future with stories, and it is vital to me that I take my history with me. I am uplifted, not burdened, by it. (At the same panel, a reader told me that my latest novel’s assertion of racism in Australia was deeply offensive. I smiled politely and said I find racism deeply offensive and destructive. I wanted to add — but didn’t — ‘Your local library will have a copy of White Fragility’.) 

When the Jaffna Public Library was burned, I became bereft of a history, an archive of the past that helped anchor my place in the present. It is a moment in time that I have memorialised in all my writing. 

As a writer and storyteller, all my work returns to the burning of books and stories. I cannot let go of the burning of books, the burning of the bodies and the burning of truth that followed. 

Through fictional stories about Sri Lanka, I have tried to record our path to war and the terrible mistakes made by both sides. Through fiction, I’ve tried to understand how so many were killed and why there will not be justice for the living or the dead. 

On my last trip to Sri Lanka in January 2019, I returned with three generations of my family. We went to our ancestral villages and saw the continuing effects of the war. My parents took their children and grandchildren to all the places they had loved and left behind. We saw how much had been erased by genocide, how much of our history had been erased by the post-war ‘rebuilding’ of the north. 

We took our children to the new Jaffna Public Library, built on the ruins of the old one. It is a stately building, its architecture an homage to the original design, but its archive will never be the same. We assembled the Chandran grandchildren in front of the library and took a photograph of them with their grandparents, recounting some of the stories that had been destroyed. We whispered the words, because although we were in the Tamil heartland, history had taught us to be afraid. We choked on the words because we felt the grief rise up through our bodies and threaten to overwhelm us. Finally, we pressed and we kissed the words into our children because the stories of their ancestors will help them write their own. 

Standing outside the new Jaffna Public Library, on the hard, red earth of our ancestral homeland, I felt completely at home, while completely dispossessed of home. And I felt the yearning I always feel to return home to Australia and begin a new story. 

Thank you for listening to the Library That Made Me. This podcast was produced on Gadigal land by the State Library of NSW. 

Welcome to the Library That Made Me Podcast.

I’m Phillipa McGuiness from the State Library of NSW.

On this podcast, we ask some of Australia’s most loved writers, historians, thinkers and performers to share stories about the libraries that shaped them.

You’re about to hear from Shankari Chandran. Shankari Chandran is the author of five novels including Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens, which won the 2023 Miles Franklin Literary Award. Her most recent book is Unfinished Business.

I’m Shankari Chandran and this is the library that made me.

My footsteps slow when I pass a library. Any library. I am pulled inwards, to its endless stories and the possibilities they hold. 

The public library of a country houses that nation’s stories, even the contested ones. It is a monument to the storytelling we call history. The political history of Sri Lanka is especially contested. Which race arrived on the island first, which warring faction committed the most atrocities, how many people died and how many remain missing. These are the narratives we still fight over. New ones have emerged — how corrupt was the previous regime, how many billions did they steal, how much do we owe China and how many children will starve as a result of it.

Libraries hold stories, but for me, one library also began a story. My novel, Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens, was inspired by the burning of the Jaffna Public Library. It uses this act of cultural erasure to explore racism in my ancestral homeland, Sri Lanka, and my chosen homeland, Australia.

The Jaffna Public Library sits in Jaffna (Yalpanam), the ancestral capital of the Tamil people of Sri Lanka. It was constructed between 1953 and 1959, and its domed ceilings and gleaming white stucco walls stood proudly over the city, more like a palace than a library. It stored one of the largest archives of Tamil culture in the world — at its height, the collection contained 100,000 books, ancient manuscripts and historical records about Tamil civilisation in Sri Lanka. 

It is — or was — a place of almost mythical cultural significance to the Tamil people. 

In 1981, the Jaffna Public Library was burned to the ground by Sri Lankan government security forces. Two thousand years of Tamil culture, history and language were destroyed. Some texts were the only copies in existence and have been lost forever. 

The Jaffna Public Library told a story about the place of the Tamil people in Sri Lanka. The political authorities of that time wanted to suppress this narrative; burning the archive was a quick and conclusive way to do it. For many Tamils, this biblioclasm was the culmination of decades of laws that disempowered the Tamil people. And it foreshadowed the civil war that was to come, two years later.

That war led to the forced migration of Tamil people to many parts of the world, and for my family, to Australia. It also led to the internal displacement of hundreds of thousands of Tamil people.

I was born and raised in the Tamil diaspora. For decades, my parents were afraid to return to Sri Lanka because of my father’s political activism. We moved to London and then Australia (where I was raised) in 1977, a few years after the end of the White Australia Policy. 

I call Australia my chosen home because I have left many times and I always long to return. I am deeply happy and connected to both people and place here. From the strength and safety of Australia, I use fiction to interrogate the injustices that drove my family from one home and challenged them to create another. 

Fiction allows me to assert myself in the present, and to understand how that present has been shaped by the past. At a recent literary panel, someone asked me if I felt my fiction was constrained by my ethnicity and our history. This was my answer: I stride into the future with stories, and it is vital to me that I take my history with me. I am uplifted, not burdened, by it. (At the same panel, a reader told me that my latest novel’s assertion of racism in Australia was deeply offensive. I smiled politely and said I find racism deeply offensive and destructive. I wanted to add — but didn’t — ‘Your local library will have a copy of White Fragility’.)

When the Jaffna Public Library was burned, I became bereft of a history, an archive of the past that helped anchor my place in the present. It is a moment in time that I have memorialised in all my writing.

As a writer and storyteller, all my work returns to the burning of books and stories. I cannot let go of the burning of books, the burning of the bodies and the burning of truth that followed.

Through fictional stories about Sri Lanka, I have tried to record our path to war and the terrible mistakes made by both sides. Through fiction, I’ve tried to understand how so many were killed and why there will not be justice for the living or the dead.

On my last trip to Sri Lanka in January 2019, I returned with three generations of my family. We went to our ancestral villages and saw the continuing effects of the war. My parents took their children and grandchildren to all the places they had loved and left behind. We saw how much had been erased by genocide, how much of our history had been erased by the post-war ‘rebuilding’ of the north.

We took our children to the new Jaffna Public Library, built on the ruins of the old one. It is a stately building, its architecture an homage to the original design, but its archive will never be the same. We assembled the Chandran grandchildren in front of the library and took a photograph of them with their grandparents, recounting some of the stories that had been destroyed. We whispered the words, because although we were in the Tamil heartland, history had taught us to be afraid. We choked on the words because we felt the grief rise up through our bodies and threaten to overwhelm us. Finally, we pressed and we kissed the words into our children because the stories of their ancestors will help them write their own.

Standing outside the new Jaffna Public Library, on the hard, red earth of our ancestral homeland, I felt completely at home, while completely dispossessed of home. And I felt the yearning I always feel to return home to Australia and begin a new story.

Thank you for listening to the Library That Made Me. This podcast was produced on Gadigal land by the State Library of NSW.

Welcome to the Library That Made Me Podcast. 

I’m Phillipa McGuinness from the State Library of NSW. 

On this podcast, we ask some of Australia’s most loved writers, historians, thinkers and performers to share stories about the libraries that shaped them.   

Today you will hear from Grace Karskens. Grace Karskens is emeritus professor of history in the school of humanities and languages at the University of NSW. She is the author of multi-award-winning books including The Rocks, Life in Early Sydney, The Colony, A History of Early Sydney and People of the River: lost worlds of Early Australia. In 2026 she joined the Library Council of NSW  

I’m Grace Karskens and this is the library that made me.

Opposite our school on Windsor Road at Baulkham Hills, in north-west Sydney, there stood an old weatherboard School of Arts building. Inside, it was dim and cool, and the roar of the traffic muffled and faded. Down some creaking wooden steps was a library — just one room, lined floor to ceiling with books, and filled with their comfortable musty smell. Dust danced in the shafts of sunlight pouring through the old sash windows.

Baulkham Hills in the 1960s was exploding. Thousands of new houses were rising on old farmlands, narrow roads were choked with fumy traffic, schools were filled to bursting with children, new buildings of unrelenting dreariness were appearing on every corner. We spent our lives waiting for lumbering buses, which were always late and always packed. I remember that first library in the old School of Arts as a kind of sanctuary, like stepping back momentarily to an earlier time.

But best of all, it had books by Enid Blyton.

We had lots of books in our house. Mostly they were heavy, dark tomes with incomprehensible Dutch titles. They were like dignified old relatives, kindly, but imparting a certain gravitas to our raw, new, brick-veneer home. In my bedroom, carefully lined up on top of the wardrobe, was a set of Enid Blyton books, about 11 volumes, all hardbacks with deep red covers. I’d been gifted them by a family my mother knew. I loved those books, read them again and again. I was proud to be the owner of my own little library.

Then in 1968 we got our very own library at Baulkham Hills! I was thrilled. It was a modest, single-level blond-brick building with a flat roof, big glass doors, scratchy industrial strength carpet and fluorescent lighting. Every Friday I borrowed three books (the maximum), read them over the weekend and returned them on Monday. The children’s section had lots of good books, but there was no Enid Blyton. It was very puzzling. I desperately wanted to read more of her books. I wondered if our library was perhaps too small and unimportant to have them.

So, one day I decided to make my way to the big city: Parramatta. With its substantial buildings and smart department stores, Parramatta was the bustling centre around which still forming satellite places like Baulkham Hills orbited. A trip to Parramatta was an outing, an event. The library there was sure to have Enid Blyton! I caught the bus after school, found the library, marched up the stairs (stairs!) and through the heavy swinging doors. It was huge. Where were the children’s books? I spied a librarian behind a desk, made a beeline for her and, mustering my most grown-up voice, asked confidently: ‘Do you have Enid Blyton books?’  

The librarian paused, leaned over the desk and over me, fixing me with a severely disapproving glare.’ Certainly NOT!’ she barked crossly. I can’t recall what else she said because my world was crashing around me. Dying of shock and embarrassment, I picked up my globate school case and fled.

It must have been about a year later that my Dad took me into the State Library of NSW in Sydney. Sydney! That fabled, faraway place, with its cool, shaded streets between the canyons of glamorous tall buildings, the gracious, tended parks and gardens, and everywhere glimpses of glinting water. Dad was doing a metallurgy course at TAFE and needed the library to study. Walking with him into the magnificent, airy reading room, I gasped: it was a grand palace of books, like nothing I’d ever seen. There were books on every side, lining the walls on three levels. Light poured in from a vaulted glass ceiling and from rows of stained-glass windows. Elegant metal stairs led up to narrow balconies where you could wander and browse among books to your heart’s content. There were proper big desks where you could read, and an air of hushed reverence.

Dazed and happy, I wandered and browsed until eventually I spotted a book of Hans Christian Andersen stories. I pulled it out carefully and carried it down the steps. I must have recovered from my encounter with the librarian at Parramatta, because before I sat down to read, I ventured up to the desk and asked the librarian if the library had any children’s books. She nodded kindly, checked in a drawer of cards and wrote down the title on a piece of paper for me. As I read it, a wave of wonder, a sense of the uncanny, of magic, whirled over me. For it was the very same book of stories by Hans Christian Andersen that I had in my hands. Miracles Didn’t happen to kids from Baulkham Hills, and yet, among all those thousands of books, I had somehow found the only book for children.

I returned to the State and Mitchell Libraries as a university student, then as a freelance consultant and later as a historian. When the Mitchell Library moved from its sequestered wing into what had previously been the Reference Library Reading Room, where I had found the Hans Christian Andersen book all those years ago, I rejoiced. Over the past five decades, the wonder of that first encounter has only grown with each astonishing discovery I have made in that place, each recovery of lost stories, places and truths. The Mitchell Library is our knowledge-holding place, our labyrinthine memory palace, our mysterious trove of discovery and learning. I was right about the magic. I know it as our sacred space. 

Thank you for listening to the Library That Made Me. This podcast was produced on Gadigal land by the State Library of NSW.

Welcome to the Library That Made Me Podcast.

I’m Phillipa McGuinness from the State Library of NSW. 

On this podcast, we ask some of Australia’s most loved writers, historians, thinkers and performers to reflect on the libraries that have shaped them.    

Today you’ll hear from Jonty Claypole. Jonty Claypole is CEO of Red Room Poetry and co-host with Sophie Gee of the popular podcast Secret Life of Books. 

Jonty Claypole

Despite what you might imagine, libraries and obsessive-compulsive disorder don’t go well together. Sure, there’s the cataloguing, the quietness, the shushing and firm finger-wagging, but the presence of other people remains a problem. Far from being quiet, they fidget, pick their noses, scratch their balls, giggle with their friends and flirt. While I have loved some libraries, I harbour unChristian feelings about the people I share them with.

Then there’s the books themselves. Stained, dog-eared, dirty and well thumbed. Some even have laminated covers, smudged with oily fingerprints like the windows of suburban trains. Libraries, like public transport, require frequent handwashing. The obsessive-compulsive’s favourite library is their private one. There alone, books can be controlled like citizens of a totalitarian state, through advanced strategies of population control. They can be regimented alphabetically, by genre, or according to colour (although police checks should be mandatory for those who practise the latter).

My library was formally established in 1995, when I unpacked two cardboard boxes in my narrow room on the ground floor of Peckwater Quad in Christ Church college at the University of Oxford. Less than 50 books in total. Half pilfered from my parents, without their permission, and therefore of dubious provenance. The other half legitimately purchased as part of the reading requirements before term began.

A new friend lent me his copy of Ian McEwan’s Black Dogs. His name was rubber-stamped inside the cover, with the legend ‘ex libris’ (Latin for ‘from the library of ‘) above, suggesting a vast room in the English countryside with south-facing windows, ornate shelves carved by Grinling Gibbons (the Michelangelo of woodwork), and books bound in the skin of unborn animals. Rather more modest than Virginia Woolf, I dreamed only of a rubber stamp of my own, through which to engineer the apotheosis of my paltry collection of paperbacks into a heavenly libris.

Oxford was full of bookstores. Brash, modern chains, like Waterstones, as well as down-at-heel second-hand stores like Mr Charrington’s shop in Nineteen Eighty-Four. The proprietors were dishevelled men in cardigans with an air of failed academia, multiple cat ownership and pornography.  

I dislike second-hand books for the same reason I dislike library books, but life on a student grant has its own compulsions. I acquired outdated editions of the classics. Dostoevsky and Tolstoy translated into Edwardian English (“It’s jolly cold, today,” said Raskolnikov). Zola with all the dirty bits excised. I was morbidly fond of an anthology of English poetry called Other Men’s Flowers, compiled by Field Marshal Archibald Wavell, whose authority in the field of poetry seemed to lie solely in the fact he defeated the Italian Army in Libya during World War II.  

My thirties were the golden years. Working for the BBC in London, I had a decent salary and no dependents. I could stop at Daunt Books near Broadcasting House in Marylebone and buy whatever I liked. First-hand, mind. I was done with other men’s flowers.

The glory days were short-lived. I fell in love and moved in with my girlfriend. Constance frowned as my best friend Roly and I carried in box after box of books, bickering and banging walls as we went. The Laurel and Hardy of intellectual colonisation. I put several boxes into the attic as a gesture of good will and assembled new bookcases in the spare room and on the upstairs landing to accommodate the rest.  

Then there was the question that Hamlet almost, but didn’t ask: to blend or not to blend? This was a proxy for deeper anxieties about cohabitation. Were we ready to fuse our personalities together? Biographies and exhibition catalogues were fair game, but there remained a metaphysical angst about novels and poetry. If her poetry mixed with my poetry, did we still exist as separate entities?

Over the years, these reservations fell away. The rate of acquisition doubled. Arranging our bookshelves was like three-dimensional Tetris, with micro-units of books laid horizontally across others or stuffed in behind. 

When our second child was born, we moved to a four-storey house near Hackney Marshes, in East London. This would be our forever home, where the kids would spend their childhood. We installed shelves in every room. Every book found its place. Our library was complete. Some cursory research revealed that customised rubber stamps weren’t even that expensive. Ex libris Jonty Claypole, motherfuckers!

A few months after moving in, we came to Sydney to see my mother, sister and wider family, who all live here. On a whim, we missed the flight home. Worried that our resolve would waver if we returned to put our affairs in order, we asked a friend to oversee the boxing and transport of all our belongings to that invisible country, the Republic of Storage (in this case, an old stable in Sussex). Four years on, we still have no space in our little Inner West rental to justify the shipping costs.

I check on my worldly goods whenever we visit the UK. Opening the hefty wooden doors of my father-in-law’s stable, I see box after box of clothing, knick-knacks, kitchenware, but most of all books, gradually succumbing to mould and damp. My ex libris.

We don’t have many books in our home in Forest Lodge. We buy from Sappho Books, a second-hand bookshop nearby, and borrow from Glebe Library. When I need to dig up something rare, I go to the State Library. Needless to say, I wash my hands a lot. 

Thank you for listening to the Library That Made Me. This podcast was produced on Gadigal land by the State Library of NSW. 

Welcome to the Library That Made Me Podcast. 

I’m Phillipa McGuinness from the State Library of NSW. 

On this podcast, we ask some of Australia’s most loved writers, historians, thinkers and performers to reflect on the libraries that have shaped them.    

You’re about to hear from Yumna Kassab. Yumna Kassab is a writer based in Western Sydney and was the inaugural Parramatta Laureate in Literature. She is the author of The House of Youssef, Australiana, The Lovers, Politica, The Theory of Everything and most recently, Goodbye My Love.  

I’m Yumna Kassab and this is the library that made me.

Where was I at the start of 2020?

I had just returned from a big trip to South America, and a few months earlier my first book — The House of Youssef — had been released. My intention was to work in Tamworth for the duration of the school year and with this mind, I thought I should finally check out Dixson Library at the University of New England.  

My lifelong conundrum has been how to source the books I want to read without going broke in the process. It’s a dilemma that I’ve solved by immediately visiting the library in any place I’ve been, but access to a university library is a glorious thing, especially when it’s free to join for members of the local community.

I still remember that drive north from Tamworth to Armidale in the middle of February. It’s a peculiar mechanism of memory that most details fade and only some are committed to memory.

That was a particular drive: I was listening to Spanish songs and wondering how to explore the thread of Latin America that had opened up in my life. It also was the aftermath of the bushfires that had started burning in the September of the year before.

I had a mental goal as I arrived at the university. It was to fill out the application form to get my library card and then to find books relating to Latin America as per my reading list.

Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges was a long-ago discovery, and I’d read one book by Roberto Bolaño (Monsieur Pain) and one by Clarice Lispector (Água Viva). I hoped that this library trip would supplement the limited books already in my personal collection.

So I was issued a library card by security and I still remember the chat about the nutri­tional benefits of olive oil with a staff member at the front desk. Why is this the detail that remains and the rest have been wiped as if they never happened?  

Memory tends to hinge on the act of routine that is repeated, but this would be my first and last trip to the library, and what was to come has painted this day even more vivid in my memory.

I don’t remember the layout of the library but I know I made a beeline for the shelf where I would find Borges. My reasoning was he would have other Latin American authors on either side. That is how I ended up with the interviews compiled by Magdalena García Pinto in Women Writers of Latin America and The Total Library by Borges. I also borrowed Poet in New York by Federico García Lorca in a bilingual Penguin edition with a photo of the poet himself on the front.

My intention was to borrow these books and to return them at the end of the loan period. That is how life operates in a normal world: you make a plan and then take actions to see through the plan, but I did not end up returning those books in March as I originally intended. Instead, I ended up living in them across all of 2020, to the point where I would dream about Poet in New York and I could quote from that book of interviews.  

These were not my books and I felt entrusted with ensuring their safe return, but I was also grateful to have them during a time when bookstores were shut and libraries as well, as the world began to veer from a path of the predictable and normal. In the years ahead, there would be the pandemic with its lockdowns, there would be the death of two close friends, and the unbearable destruction of Gaza, and the realisation that I no longer knew what was meant by the word normal.

I play this trick at times, a writer’s sort of trick. I write a different return for those books. Rather than asking a friend heading to Armidale to return them for me at the end of 2020, I wind the clock back to March, and Yumna — with her borrowed books — is able to step into the library again as she intended. Had this happened, the world would have reset itself and I would have emerged once more to normality.

Of course this is ridiculous but it’s useful for carefully marking a line in my life.

There’s February 2020, the line, and then there’s this world that is exploding and crumbling at the same time. What existed before has been left behind and all I can hope is that at some point, a normal world will do its best to re-form and finally emerge. 

Thank you for listening to the Library That Made Me. This podcast was produced on Gadigal land by the State Library of NSW. 

Welcome to the Library That Made Me Podcast. 

I’m Phillippa McGuinness from the State Library of NSW. 

On this podcast, we ask some of Australia’s most loved writers, historians, thinkers and performers to tell us about the libraries that shaped them.  

Today you will hear from Anna Funder. Anna Funder is one of Australia’s most acclaimed writers. Her book Stasiland and All That I Am are prize winning international best sellers that have been translated into many languages. Her latest book Wifedom has been widely praised. Anna is professor of practice in creative writing at the University of Sydney.  

Anna Funder 

My first experience of a library was at seven, when we moved back to Melbourne from Paris. Standing among unpacked boxes and cases, my mother said, ‘Let’s leave all this. I’m taking you kids on a walk. To a surprise.’ My brothers and I followed Mum, walking what seemed like a long way — I know it’s only a few blocks now — to the local library, in Carlton. In the entry there was a box of kittens being given away — Mum had seen a flyer. We chose a sweet black one and called him Minou (puss), and we children whispered secrets in his ear all his life. He kept them.

We probably took home books as well. Books too, contained all kinds of secrets between the covers, ones that were shared between you and the writer, ones that the world didn’t tell you out loud. I have marvelled at, and in, libraries all my life. The hum of intense reading that thickens the air. The idea that whatever local library you’re in, a kind, soft-shoed librarian will, after only a few quiet words, bespoke fit you with the book you need. More, they will find any book from anywhere on the planet and call it in, by mail or bus or train or plane, just for you. It’s as if, in their capable hands, every aspect of the world, past or present, can be sifted and sorted, all Dewey-numbered and delivered — for free.

It shocks me that libraries haven’t always been like this everywhere, for everyone, as a right. Of course I know that long ago barely anyone could read, that knowledge was locked up like powerful drugs, contraband or spells, in monasteries. But it’s so relatively recent — only from the late 1800s — that the campaigns for free universal education, and free libraries, have led us to where we are now.

One of the most beautiful libraries I’ve ever seen was one of the earliest of these, the Staatliche Bibliothek at Neuburg an der Donau, in Bavaria. The collection started during the ‘secularisation’ period in Germany from the early 1800s, when books from monasteries and convents were taken and made available to the people. It is housed in a magnificent, double-height baroque oval room, with a walkway all around the rim of the first floor. The ceiling is gilded and gold angels watch over everything, as if to bless knowledge, imagination, incunabula.

As a student in West Berlin in the 1980s, I worked at the breathtaking Staatsbibliothek in Berlin, a 1960s Hans Scharoun–designed building erected in the lee of the Berlin Wall. Inside, the spaces are open, airy, as if to leave room for thought to soar. The feeling I had in there seems, in retrospect, to be the essential feeling I get in all libraries, old or new, local or grand, and it is defined, again, by an angel. Not in gilded wood this time but in the shape of a real man, actor Bruno Ganz — liquid brown eyes, hangdog handsome — in an overcoat. In Wim Wenders’ film Wings of Desire, Ganz’s angel haunts this library. Invisible to the people studying or reading at the desks, he approaches them and listens in on their thoughts, worries, hopes. He is the essence of attention and compassion.

Back at university in Melbourne, I got one of the best jobs of my student days in the English Department Library. It sounds prehistoric now, but I sat at the front desk, typing out index cards for new acquisitions or requests from staff for books or journals — anything from the latest novel, to psychoanalysis, poetry or medieval studies. I read things that had nothing to do with my studies: a smorgasbord of serendipity. Despite my time there, I have never understood the Dewey decimal system: how can numbers tell you what a book is, to a decimal point?

But the library that most made me was the Baillieu Library, at Melbourne University. A multistorey building, the Baillieu had every book you could want and many more, and carrels where everyone studied, piles of books and notebooks next to them. My most profound memories are not of finding what Dewey told me I was looking for, but the excitement of finding what was next to it: things you’d never discover if you followed only reason, or numbers, or an algorithm. Almost 40 years later I see that I have been fruitfully sidetracked my whole life.

The best thing I came across in there I wasn’t looking for either. He was in another carrel, reading architecture books. Utterly unclassifiable, I have had him out ever since, on long-term loan. 

Thank you for listening to the Library That Made Me. This podcast was produced on Gadigal land by the State Library of NSW.

Welcome to the Library That Made Me Podcast. 

I’m Phillipa McGuinness from the State Library of NSW. 

On this podcast, we ask some of Australia’s most loved writers, historians, thinkers and performers to share stories about the libraries that shaped them. 

First up, you’ll hear from Kate Evans. Dr Kate Evans is a radio producer, presenter and critic. She is also co-host of The Bookshelf on ABC’s Radio National. I’m Kate Evans and this is the library that made me.

Dr Kate Evans

Dapto Public Library see also Fisher Library see also Mitchell Library Reading Room. See also card catalogues. See also finding new — or maybe an old — world. 

I have started this reflection in three different ways, in three different libraries, trying to work out what it is I’m trying to pin down when thinking about what libraries have done to me, and for me. It’s made me re-open boxes of research papers, do online catalogue searches, try to find photographs of buildings since demolished; it has forced me to look through folders of copied papers and photographs, to find handwritten notebooks and to notice marginalia (‘tell Jane, Royal Tour menu’; ‘show Ian, Great Fleet pics’, not to mention phone numbers of people whose names I don’t recognise at all). What am I looking for? Is it a memory, is it an argument, is it a way of experiencing the world?

I’ve decided to ditch the obvious catalogue card, the one with the origin story: Library see Dapto Public Library see also Dapto Primary School library see also story of tiny woman in floral shift with large pile of books.  

Despite the satisfaction of the old working-class-kid-gets-to-university narrative, I decided that card was one we’d all seen before too: University see Fisher Library see View over a park see New Life see also What Next?  

Because really, it’s a combination of wide desks in a beautiful space and a particular set of catalogue drawers that shaped me as a thinker and a researcher, and they’re all in the reading room at the Mitchell Library. This is the library that not only changed me, it remains my image of what a library is and can be.

It’s also probably why, as I read books to deadlines every week in my job as a broadcaster/reviewer/arts journalist, my preferred method is to sit at a wide table in the rather vain hope of evoking a calm space in the midst of work and domestic chaos. My haphazard piles of books and paper lean precariously towards the ordered shelves I long for, the basement levels that really would make life a lot easier, if only they could be tunnelled out.

Because early in my research life (a Masters in Public History, a PhD, work as an academic researcher and later a TV researcher for a big history project), I discovered the delight of the card catalogue at the Mitchell, preserved as part of its bequest, but preserving too the work of individual librarians. Both ordered and surprising, constrained yet able to open up entire worlds of ideas.  

I used to investigate any new area by taking out entire drawers, sitting at a table, and reading through every entry under that subject, because what it revealed was a changing world, new (or helpfully, old) taxonomies of knowledge, and highly specific references. It brought me into the sphere of librarians whose handwriting I came to recognise, even if I never knew who was who and which one really was Ida Leeson (who I’d read about, whose hands were all over those cards).  

Photograph, see photographer, see photographs, see photography, see Photo – engraving. See also chalk-plate process.

So, Something Something Something see also Inebriates Home. I wish I could remember what took me there. I do remember that I was chasing various institutions at one point for histories of the homeless and destitute, or those in quarantine, when I found the card that said, ‘See also Inebriates Home’. Just think of the historical and cultural work that phrase offers.

For years, I was working on the history of journalism and then on the history of press photographers in Australia. I remember reading the papers of one journalist, from the late 19th century. There were four boxes of papers of his life and work, covering the years 1888–1908.* I knew when Queen Victoria had died in 1901 because suddenly letters were edged in black — a reminder of how tactile and physical is the work of research. The materiality of it, the press of a pen into paper from a century before. But this one stays with me because in the midst of tracking a career and trying to understand ‘press workers’, I was caught up in letters from his sisters, in stories of an affair, abortion, the legitimacy (or not) of his daughter, a divorce scandal and the oddity of the fact his wife was hardly ever referred to by name, but instead was called ‘Baby’ by the family.

What’s the point of that anecdote? It has stayed with me: it haunts me in the same way that, looking at historical photographs, I came to always notice the characters at the side, the figures in the crowd who’d seen the camera, the kid with no shoes climbing a pole, the men in street scenes with toddlers on their hip. The woman with the defiant jawline. All that detail that helps animate the past. But also, all that material, all those stories that are inside these libraries that have made me.  

It’s that mix of order — catalogued, listed, indexed, put into reading and research guides — and the wildly eclectic, surprising, personal, contradictory, wilful, astounding stories that can be found there, that shows me some small part of what libraries can do. What they have done for me. 

Thank you for listening to the Library That Made Me. This podcast was produced on Gadigal land by the State Library of NSW.