Rockdale and Sans Souci (Eggs)

Sitting on a square grey pouffe in between racks of Chinese DVDs, I looked out over the people working at the desks at Rockdale library. A man doing serious religious study with books such as “Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church”, a man reading an Arabic newspaper, a tall man wearing an ugly jumper with a coin pouch clipped to his belt getting up to look at the science magazines, and an old man getting a computer lesson at the “Seniors PC” – he was being taught how to use the “bold” function in Word by a young female librarian, the only woman, besides me. Most of the men had glasses, and one man reading a newspaper even had a magnifying glass as well, which he held up to the text and squinted through.

I had been too nervous to sit down at any of the desks. They were small and square, with four chairs around them, although it would be a tight squeeze to fit four people at them. To take any space would be to cut into the space of one of the men, and I didn’t feel ready to do that. Instead I put my things on the pouffe and went to look at the magazines alongside the money pouch man. As he reached for Scientific American I picked up the latest issue of Rolling Stone with Lady Gaga on the front and the promise of 7 days with Lady Gaga inside.

It has been a long time since I read a Rolling Stone, but upon opening it, I felt a familiar feeling, approaching deja vu but a little more knowing. As a teenager I was an ardent, obsessive music fan, and coveted music magazines. Last year I found in an op shop a particular Rolling Stone from the 1990s with Courtney Love on the cover that I must have read with particular scrutiny, as much of the content, even some of the phrases in the articles, were instantly familiar to me as soon as I opened the magazine.

Rolling Stone still looks the same on the inside, and still has the same long format stories and full page portraits of stars. I opened the magazine up at random and was confronted by a large photo of Kevin Smith in bed, clutching a porno novel to his chest with one hand, and tissues in the other. Who on earth would want themselves photographed like that? I flipped onwards until I found the Gaga article and settled it on my knees. Behind the men a parade of mums with strollers was now going to and from the kids’ area at the back of the library: a section with a space themed mural around its entrance, and a noisy, chirruping atmosphere inside as kids ran wild in bookland. I put my head down and started to read.

For someone who hasn’t tried to know anything about Lady Gaga, I know an awful lot about her. I don’t resent this knowledge, although the way it has come to me, as if in the air around me, makes me wonder if that is the essence of fame: people can’t help but know about you. On a plane a few years ago I realised I had never actually heard a Lady Gaga song and so I listened to the album that was available on the inflight entertainment console. It was the kind of slick pop that slithers into your ears but, for me, is like eating fairy floss. The interesting thing is her style.

The Lady Gaga article has surprisingly few photographs – usually a staple of any LG article. The main image was a full page portrait of her in a field of yellow flowers. I look deeply into it, at her face, before reading the article. It started with how she was watching Rocky films, which she describes to the writer as she sits with a unicorn toy with a light up horn, which she calls the Gagacorn. She lights up the horn for emphasis during the interview. My favourite part of the interview was a mention of her getting home and ordering an egg sandwich from a deli. The things I find most interesting about celebrities is the thought of them doing everyday stuff. Not the kind of “celebrities without makeup” stuff that’s in New Weekly, but the kinds of things that all of us do because we are humans, like eat sandwiches at home. I skim read the rest of the article, closed the magazine and pondered Lady Gaga and her egg sandwich.

I put the magazine back on the plinth reserved for it with a label and got up to explore the shelves. On the new books stand was “The Complete Guide to Vegan Food Substitutions”, the long subtitle to which started with “Veganize it!”. As a once vegan, I often go the other way now and de-veganise recipes, and every time I enjoy saying de-veganise, as my fingers close around an egg, for example. I am not, however, thinking it with malice. I, like Lady Gaga, just have a bit of an obsession with eggs.

As I passed a woman who had her arms full of books, she lost hold of them and half the pile fell to the floor. They were trade paperbacks, popular fiction. She wobbled with the rest of the pile as she stooped to pick them up and I swooped down like a fairy, saying “I can help you”, and picked them up again. This small action left me feeling very pleased with myself. Yes, I thought, I am the kind of nice person who picks things up for people who drop things.

Rockdale library is housed in the town hall, and is the central library, rather than a branch library. It’s the first such library that I’ve visited in this project so far, and the first that’s in an building built before the 1960s. Correspondingly it has a different shape and feeling to it, with many nooks rather than being to an open plan. Most of the general collection is shelved in a section of parallel bookcases, just high enough for me to poke my head up over the top to look out over the rest of the library.

I browsed over the non fiction section with no particular plan. The first book that I choose to look at was the SMH Good Suburbs Guide. After visiting Rockdale I planned to go to Sans Souci, an enticingly named suburb that I’ve never been to before. Not wanting a Panania-type surprise (where I felt scared of the chicken shop louts) I decided to do some research first. I looked it up in the index but was dismayed to find that most of the St George and Sutherland Shire section had been removed. I cursed library vandals – was this paying me back for stealing a poster of Charlie Sheen from a Smash Hits back in the late 1980s?

How dangerous could a place with the name Sans Souci be? I continued to browse the shelves, finding a huge section of sheet music. At a party a little while ago, I was telling people about my library project when someone told me that public libraries used to have a particular focus for their collections. In this way, Australia-wide, there would be a library that had a large collection of books on a particular subject. The woman who told me about this said she’d asked her local library what their speciality was, only to be told that libraries didn’t do this any more. Librarians, is this all true?

Rockdale library’s speciality must have been sheet music, and books about music in general. Are you looking for the sheet music to Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness? Here is where you will find it.

I looked through the music biographies for a while, becoming obsessed with finding baby pictures of the various performers. There are particular types of books that will have such photos: the very serious kind of thick, hardback biography, that brings the performers whole life into focus (even as a child, they had latent genius), or the kind of cheap, unauthorised biography that has used every possible available photo they can, even if it relates little to what the subject would eventually become. For example, who is this?

I will send a prize to anyone who guesses correctly: a certificate and a zine. Hit the comments and good luck!

I wouldn’t normally look at a biography of Bette Midler, but I enjoyed her yearbook picture from when she was a little girl. She looks the same! Later that day, however, I asked Simon who it was, and he couldn’t guess. By coincidence, as I was leafing through the Mx newspaper on my way home I found a link between Lady Gaga and Bette Midler. Via twitter, Bette Midler had send Lady Gage a message: “Dear @ladygaga – I’ve been doing singing mermaid in a wheelchair since 1980 – You can keep the meat dress and the firecracker tits – mermaid’s mine.” Never comfortable with the world I now live in, I feel voyeuristic when I read the tweets of celebrities, but I did check on Bette’s twitter to see if there were any further developments – she now suggests that she and LG “drink this over at the Emmys in September”. Dressed as mermaids and in wheelchairs, I hope.

This library report has become quite sidetracked. It’s inevitable, I suppose, when writing about a place that is full of so much information. It’s the nature of browsing, whether you do it in a library or in a store, or online. You find yourself looking at a biography of Bette Midler/examining culinary blowtorches/watching Youtube videos of capybaras, and at this point you have a moment where you wake up, as if from a spell, and think about how you got there. Then you either retreat or go in deeper.

I take a few books back to one of the tables with me. I’m brave enough now to put my things down on a desk at which a man reading law books is studying. He had just stretched out his long legs under the table when I claimed the opposite end of it. I felt bad as he retracted them, but wasn’t my research as important? On the top of his pile was a book about “Torts”. The mere word makes me realise just how much there is to being a lawyer that I will never know. I have asked friends studying law what Torts is a number of times, something about common law and people sueing one another? Law students never seem to enjoy studying Torts, anyway.

In my pile of books was: “Why People Believe Weird Things” by Michael Shermer, which was not as exciting as I expected it to be, being a sober discussion of scepticism, drawing on philosophy and psychology; “Whatever Happened to… The Ultimate Pop and Rock ‘Where are they now?’”, which had information such as “The Pogues are still chart contenders, entering the UK Top 40 as recently as December 1997″; and “Rock and Roll Babylon”, which, like the Hollywood Babylon books, had news clippings from celebrities behaving badly, long before the days of Twitter. This photo of the destruction wreaked by Rod Stewart and friends on an international flight was particularly interesting to me, for some reason:

People used to have such a wild time on planes. If you tried that nowadays, you’d probably be Tasered after the first smear of jam.

The Tort man’s foot was encroaching on my territory under the table. It was a big foot in a worn brown leather sandal, the toes poking out the end. It was hard not to stare at it from behind “Rock and Roll Babylon”. As he read, he shook his foot, perhaps with every particularly exciting tort. I knew that soon, his foot would make contact with my leg and I wasn’t eager for that to happen. I got up and put my books back on the shelves, sliding them back in the gaps from which I’d taken them, and made a final round of the library.

One of the rooms had walls painted pink and a sheet music themed painting on the wall, this was the CD room. It had a kind of parlour feel to it, cosy, the pink walls like the inside of a shell. From here I could peek out into the rest of the library, at the desks of studying men, the kids being wheeled up and back from their space at the end of the library, the librarians reshelving. All of this was a well ordered world, and I was observing it. I felt almost invisible, until the Torts guy looked up and saw me peeking, my face half hidden by CD racks. Embarrassed I ducked down and out of sight.

Rockdale library is part of the town hall, and as you walk out there is a table of books for sale and then big honour rolls, gold names on wooden panels, on the opposite wall. There’s a lounge area and posters for the Rockdale Opera company, as well as framed, sepia toned photographs of previous Rockdale citizens doing good and creative works.

Outside I passed the big blue book return box, wondering how many people enclose AV material in padded postal bags, as suggested. I would, having a big stack of them in my kitchen near the plastic bags, but would “people”? The box, I decided showed great trust in the people of Rockdale. Other libraries either don’t have them or they have the kind where you have to scan the book’s barcode for the flap to open.

Before making my way to Sans Souci I sat on a bench in the square, eating a salad roll from the bakery that I could now see, from across the road, was called Le Meilleur Gout Bakery. I had no idea it had such a fancy name, though I believe it means something like “Best Taste”. My library visits seem to involve salad rolls, although eating them in public is always a bit embarrassing. I remember as a teenager reading a magazine article that seriously listed all the best and worst Date Foods. That is, food to eat on a date. Spaghetti, for example, was not a good date food, too hard to eat and too messy. Salad rolls would not be a good date food. You are snowed with flakes of crust from the roll, the bottom of the paper bag the roll is in gets soggy and, if you don’t roll it up, can break altogether and drip its mixture of margarine, soy sauce and lettuce juice all over your lap, and you have to bite into it inelegantly. Luckily I was not on a date, and the elderly of Rockdale paid my eating performance no mind. The two women beside me were busy discussing meat trays.

One of my work colleagues, the inestimable Ray, described to Simon and I the opening scene of a movie he’d seen many decades ago, and had not been able to find since. It opened with a voiceover: “Sans Souci – place without care”, and then cuts to a shot of a well, with a man’s voice issuing from it, “Hellooooo!” Simon made it his personal mission to discover this movie for Ray, and did indeed find it, the 1950 film This Side of the Law.

It was with Ray’s voice imitating the voiceover in my head that I boarded the bus to Dolls Point, on my way to Sans Souci. I’d looked it up on a map and saw that it, like other mysterious (to me) suburbs such as Ramsgate and Brighton-le-Sands, it lay on the edge of Botany Bay, close to the Sutherland Shire in the south. My attraction to the place was the name, imagining a time in which people peppered their conversation with French phrases in order to sound more sophisticated, and even called their suburbs things like Sans Souci. It was obviously named in a time free of economic rationalism; any new Sydney suburb now wouldn’t have such a relaxed, frivolous name. In case you are wondering, according to Google “The Ponds” is Sydney’s Newest Suburb. I’d click that link only if you’re feeling strong enough to cope with scenes of nauseating “Australian” wholesomeness. The Ponds to me is a name which suggests a murder scene, but I’m not the kind of person wanted in The Ponds.

The bus looped past Rockdale Plaza, through Kogarah, then on down Rocky Point Road, past the pebblecrete Darrel Lea factory, the address of which I have read on numerous blocks of Rocky Road over the years  (a coincidence, apparently). Travelling without a map or smartphone, the dangerous and exciting way to travel, I got off the bus when I saw signs for Sans Souci on shop awnings, and soon came by Russell St, where the library was located. On the corner of this street, just past the petrol station, was a perplexing building with the name in silvery letters. I got up close and tried to work out what it was. A brick fortress with no giveaway details, I downgraded my guess as to what it was from luxury chocolatier to brothel.

Actually, it is sells, or makes, “fashion jewellery”, I find out now.

I walked down the wide, flat road, past lawn after manicured lawn. The residents of Sans Souci obviously had spent all Sunday gardening, and now, on Monday their gardens were pristine. The few gardens that had grass of over 4 centimetres long I regarded with censure: what had these lazy people been doing all weekend? There were lawns, gardens and neat brick houses, but few people. In the ten minute walk the only sign of life was the enraged voice of a mum from inside a house: “WHAT ARE YOU DOING?” I imagined scenes of great household devastation behind the brick walls. My favourite house was a fibro with stickers stuck on the front window. The backs of the stickers were adhered to the glass of course, so I could see only the white shapes of all the different sea creatures in the undersea sticker world. I would have taken a photo of it but I thought how I would feel if I had kids and some weirdo was photographing the outside of my house. Things would be Avec Souci!

As I was about to cross the road to the library, a small building on the corner of Russell and John streets, I looked down to the unencouraging sign on the road beneath me:

What kind of godless place was I about to enter?

Stepping into Sans Souci library was like stepping back in time. I could successfully imagine I was in the mid 20th century as I entered, a combination of the suburb itself, which displayed the kind of peaceful suburbia that was the dream of the 1950s, the building, and a general mood. It’s a small library, where one librarian worked quietly behind the desk, and a  man sat in the lounge area, reading the Sydney Morning Herald with his legs crossed and the paper spread out in front of him. He read the paper so thoroughly over the hour or so I was at the library that I wondered if he had read every word, even the Tenders and Death Notices.

I looked around for a place to sit down. I’d brought some editing work with me, although I’d been too distracted in Rockdale library to settle into it. Like many teenagers, I couldn’t do my work because Lady Gaga was too distracting. I had trouble selecting a place to sit, because all the tables, old blue laminate ones, were grimy with fingerprints and food smears. Now I’m no hygiene freak, and am far from uptight where grime is concern, but these tables needed a good going over with some Spray and Wipe. I selected what I thought was a not too grimy spot and looked around for the suggestion box which is always on the counter in a library. I wrote a note:

Pictured here with smears and some matter which seemed rather like a grimy feather.

My next problem was how to deliver the note. I didn’t want to put it in while the librarian was working at the desk, not wanting to be observed and have my note read the second I left the library, or even (horrors) before. I ripped the page out of my notepad and folded it in half, waiting for a suitable time to deposit it in the box. As I waited, a woman came in with a trolley full of books to return. She was obviously returning books for her whole family, as there was a cookbook, novels, a book called “Neo Noir” about film, and other incongruous titles. She had so many books that, once processing them, the librarian loaded them into a trolley and wheeled it over to the shelves to put them back. I took advantage of the moment and popped my suggestion into the box with a sly, shoplifting kind of feeling. I imagined them reading it and taking action, and felt the self righteousness of the citizen who speaks up (anonymously). At my university library when I was a student there was be a pinboard with people’s suggestion cards in the foyer, to which the librarians would reply. I enjoyed reading them, the more petty the better, though I felt like writing the replies could have been a fun job, if you weren’t the type, like me, to take it personally.

Although, according to a sign on the wall, Sans Souci library is on Facebook, it does not have free wireless, like the other libraries I’ve been to. In fact you had to pay even to use one of their internet PCs, two of which were sitting idling next to the photocopier. Most of the people who came in seemed interested in the more classic functions of the library, the books. People were regularly coming in to borrow and return, many of them mums with their kids in strollers. I look up to see a drool-faced baby stared at me from his stroller, which has mini boxing gloves hanging off the side. Why would you hope your child would be a boxer? His sister was sitting up on the bench and getting a stamp from the librarian. “Do you want a monkey on your hand as well? he asks another kid nearby, thus answering my question as to what the stamp was of.

The kids went on their way with their stamps and Strawberry Shortcake DVDs, and the librarian man continued to work, his own hands now stamped with monkeys, as he’d done a test stamp to show the girl what the picture was. I worked a little before going to look at the books, picking up a copy of “Lost for Words” by Hugh Lunn, which had sayings from the 1940s – 1960s in it. This is the language of Sans Souci, I thought. I took it back to the grimy table and made a list of my favourites:

WHS (Wandering Hands Society)

Sex Wreck

Passion Pet

Dunderklumpen

Bumbleton

You stupid galoot

Cripey Crows!
Double Bunger (eating at home and the turning up at someone else’s house for dinner)

Crazy Tea Set: “this was perhaps the limit of zaniness in 1950s suburbia”

I’m so hungry I could eat a horse and chase the rider.

She had me on toast.

A lot of the expressions I recognised, although I saw the author’s point, that they were declining in use, as we live in a world where housewives no longer work hard to perfect the “blowaway sponge” – the lightest possible sponge cake.  I try to imagine myself as a 50s housewife, trying to make this sponge but all I could imagine was a scene of great disaster, with me employing many of the expressions from the swearwords section, all of which are mild compared to the arsenal of dirty words we have to choose from today.

For an almanac of those, I reckoned I could have asked the shady looking individual who had just entered the library. A skinny teenage boy in a tracksuit and cap, he had the kind of sharp, ratty expression that made him seem instantly suspicious. Imagine having that face and being anything but a troublemaker, I thought. He asked the librarian if he could book two computers for 1:50pm. It was for him and his friend, who was currently at the chicken shop (not chicken shop tough guys again! I didn’t realise it was such a problem). “Does it have Youtube?” he asked, to which the librarian said he supposed so.

The boy went over and sat at one of the computers, and I wondered what he was so eager to look up. I couldn’t guess, but I had my suspicions it wasn’t going to be kittens. Soon his friend came in, sat beside him, and they started looking things up. They weren’t noisy, but they weren’t quiet, either. I could sense their purpose and excitement from their whisperings. I waited for a few minutes before going to reshelve my book, and in the process look over their shoulders. I couldn’t quite tell what it was from the images, but when I stepped closer I saw that the boy who’d come in second was watching something called “Angel of Mine by Monica with lyrics”- nothing too awful there. But the boy in the cap who’d made the booking was watching “2 Greyhounds Suffer Fatal Injuries at Florida Racetrack”.

I had not suspected he was an animal cruelty fan, and the discovery was quite shocking. He then went on to watch “Greyhound disaster” and jab his friend in the ribs every time a particularly interesting part popped up. His friend didn’t seem that interested, to his credit. I left them watching videos and packed up my things, leaving to step out into the sunny afternoon. I held the door open for an old lady wearing a stylish pale pink pantsuit, and tried not to think about the Youtube boy. He was the kind who would torture kittens, I was sure.

I bought a can of Diet Coke and continued walking down Russell St, drinking it through a straw. I was curious to see if there was a beach at Sans Souci, as the tall Norfolk pines at the end of the street suggested. I walked down past more houses, then apartments, a park, and then, finally, the beach. It was a flat bay beach, but a beach nonetheless. It had been a while since I’d stepped out onto sand. I walked over it and sat down on the harder sand nearer the waterline. Across the bay I could see planes coming in to land at the airport, so small-looking from this distance away that it was hard to believe they were full of people.

I wasn’t the only person on the beach, a woman was standing by the water’s edge while her sons frolicked, nude, in the water. Now they were only about 5 and 7 but it was a surprise to see nude kids on a winter’s day. I guess some kids just like being nude, hell, what do I know about kids? (Less than most.) When one of them started weeing in the water, however, I looked away and didn’t look back.

Apart from this, did I feel sans souci? Yes, in fact I did. Bodies of water are soothing like that. I’d been depressed, a combination of the cold weather and one of my regular existential crises, but here, looking out over the flat water of the bay to the far-off city skyline, I felt pretty normal, content to be there, with little girls collecting shells and a teenage girl going past on red and white rollerskates, clinging to the walkway railing for balance. In a few years I could tell she would be a cool, tough, Rollerderby girl, already I could see the inchoate signs of it, but for now she was too young to have a fixed identity. All she was concentrating on was staying upright, and moving forward.

Padstow and Panania (potplants)

Upon stepping into the Padstow library, eager to read the announcements on the community noticeboard that faced the entrance, I was accosted by a woman. She had a newspaper folded under her arm, and was on her way to the toilet cubicle that lay to the right of the entrance. Throughout our conversation she went as if to go into the cubicle, but then would come back with another question.

She was interested in my clothes, my stockings in particular.

“Grass green stockings! They’re a real grass green. Have you been rolling in the grass?” she asked.

I looked down. I would have called my stockings sickly olive, rather than grass, but she marvelled over their colour so much I thought it wise to agree.

“No, but they are grassy.”

“Where did you get them from?”
“An op shop, ” I said, wondering if this answer would disappoint her.

“Were they new?” she asked.

“They were still in the packet, but they were from the 80s judging by the packet design.”

“Oh yes, I understand. They look great with those shoes,” she said, indicating my black Mary Janes, “Where are they from?”

“Melbourne.”

“I’m a Melbourne girl – though I’ve lived here for 30 years. Where in Melbourne?”

“Collingwood.” I wondered how specific this was going to get.

She started to sing what I imagine must be the theme song of the Collingwood Magpies before breaking off to say “actually, I’m from Carlton”.

She goes on to review my outfit from the feet up.

“I don’t like the skirt.”

“It’s a dress,” I said, “so there’s more of it to hate.”

“It would be better with a black skirt – or shorts – and a black turtleneck, The sunglasses are good too, where are they from?”

“Japan,” I said, feeling awful, like one of those people whose trendy outfits get dissected in magazines. I was a cliche just like them, with my mixture of things from op shops, things from boutiques (though it was just the shoes, I never buy clothes new) and something I bought in another country.

“Yes,” she said, “I saw you straight away, if you wear all black with the grass green stockings, it will be a great outfit. A real grass green,” she continued to wonder, as she finally went into the bathroom with her newspaper.

I turned to enter the library to the stares of the people using the computers nearby. Having never been to Padstow library before, I hadn’t realised that my conversation would have been loud and distracting to anyone inside the small library, just metres away.

Suitably embarrassed, I quickly sat at one of the study tables and got out my books and my computer, ready to do some work.

I had been to Padstow once before, out of curiousity, seeing it on the front of a bus on a day when I was out op shopping. In search of the library I’d gone over to the side of the station where the op shops are (or were, one had gone, leaving only the little old Red Cross store, which was empty apart from the voices of the women in the back room, talking about nursing homes) thinking the library was there. Actually, it was on the other side of the station, in a park, beside a little Early Childhood centre, many of which must have been built in the 1950s – 1970s, in the same drive towards civic architecture which produced many of Sydney’s branch libraries.

The Padstow library is a pale brick building, with big mirrored windows that reflect the street. From the inside, though, you can look out at the cars and people going past through these windows, as you sit at one of the study desks.

Sitting in front of me was a boy with geometrical designs on his hoodie, studying maths, and in front of him, a girl studying Chinese history. She was established at her table, a constellation of useful objects – books, pencils, water bottle, hairbands, stationery – surrounded her. I had work to do also, but any work I did was interspersed with close study of the library and its atmosphere.

Padstow library has a lot of indoor plants, which makes the library feel comfortable, like a living room. The plants are in pots on top of the shelves, among the announcements for things like the Seniors screening of Sweeney Todd. At the end of some of the shelves of books were collages promoting Fantasy books, with reading mermaids and flying books.

I watched a girl with a long long plait browse the fiction shelves, a copy of The Arrival under her arm. Another woman was looking at the New Age section, pulling out a book called “Mythology of the Incas” and staring at the cover for a long time, before selecting a book about women’s empowerment by Louise Hay. Louise Hay, queen of affirmations, comes up in our house sometimes, as I recall particular parts of her most well known book, You Can Heal Your Life, where she talks to herself in the mirror every day with loving affirmations, and, if she does get angry, takes it out on a pillow. I think Miranda July has read some Louise Hay books, they weirdly remind me of each other although one is a self help guru and the other is an artist.

Outside the library, two teenage girls were walking past. They were wearing matching outfits: cut off shorts and singlets, with big collared shirts over it all. One girl had a packet of Twisties in her hand, and a half eaten Twistie in the other. I wondered where they must be going, but they were just wandering, as a few minutes later they walked back across, stopping to preen in the mirrored surface of the library’s window, unable to see me staring out at them from behind it.

It was school holidays and kids were everywhere. On the train, as I travelled along the East Hills line (the train line of Sydney I’ve had least experience with), I watched two kids clinging to a wire fence that separated the train tracks from a playground. I had wanted them to wave, and was ready to wave back, but they were caught up in their own private world, the fence the boundary to some game. Then I felt afraid of school holidays, and wondered whether this would impact on the libraries and their peacefulness.

No, it turns out. Apart from the two teenagers in front of me, there was one other girl, studying at the opposite end of the library. She looked as if she were suffering, every few seconds lifting her head from her page and sighing, casting looks of despair out to the rest of the room. A number of times I caught her eye and quickly looked away, in case I was afflicted with her lassitude. It had been a while since I’d seen such pure boredom, although some of my students come close sometimes. Occasionally one of mine will even fall asleep though, which I guess is the apex of boredom.

By contrast, I was very busy. I typed away at my computer, working for a while before packing up and going to inspect the shelves. Like many public libraries, the books had stickers on their spines to show their genre. I particularly liked the Mills and Boon section. This library also had a vast Large Print section, revealing, perhaps, the demographic who borrow most.

The shelves that lined the walls were illuminated by lights, above which were the subject you could find on that particular shelf. The Animals section was larger than I thought it would be, although having looked in one of Sydney airport’s bookshop a few weeks earlier, I had been surprised by the size of its animal section – there are a lot of books written about animals. The only books I have read about animals are Alex and Me by Irene Pepperberg (about the genius African Grey parrot) and Tarka the Otter by Henry Williamson. If I ever want to look into the topic further however, there are plenty more. The most common animal books seem to be about dogs, cats, lions and monkeys. Perhaps there is an opening for me to write a book about the bond between me and the rabbit here.

I tore my eyes away from Bonobo Handshake by Vanessa Woods and went to set up a position at the other end of the library, near the bored girl. Here, rather than the small, windowside individual study tables, were large tables that could seat a number of people. There were also red baskets, with the sign “Customer Baskets, for your convenience”, which made me think of the supermarket. This library did have a number of things on sale, including library bags and bookmarks, but the baskets were for books. No one who I saw enter picked up one of these baskets.

From this position I could see the screen of the man who was sitting at one of the computers. He was going through the practise driver knowledge test that you have to do prior to getting your learner driver’s license. Having done one of these myself not so long ago (I have done this test a number of times, and passed it every time, got a learners license, then failed to learn to drive). This man didn’t look like someone who needed to learn to drive. He was a tanned, stocky man in his forties, with a thick neck and tribal tattoos on his arms, but maybe people look at me and think I look like I know how to drive too – what does a driver look like?

I watched him for a while: the clunky graphics of this test, the kind that makes you feel stupid because the buttons you have to click on are so large, was easy to read from across the room. The whole time I’d been in the library, a woman had been bustling around, straightening the shelves and putting back books. For an hour she had done nothing but this, although the library was already in impeccable order. The room resounded with the clop – clop sound of books being rearranged on shelves from her manic shelf-straightening.

The other staff were in the rooms behind the counter, access to which was through a doorway with a KEEP READING sticker on the lintel. Painted on the glass panel above this were the words Fuel Your Mind (fuelling, freeing, the library is a busy place for the mind).

I looked down at the book of Japanese cookery open on the table in front of me. Having been in Japan and eaten all sorts of delicious and curious things, I was eager to try to cook some of these things on my own. This book was big and heavy with large colour photos of each dish. In general I prefer cookbooks without photographs, so what you are cooking remains somewhat a mystery, but these are harder to find. I chose one recipe that seemed appealing and thought about transcribing it, until I read:

This sticky rice dish, sekihan, is cooked for special occasions and takes 8 hours to prepare.

Eight hours! As I marvelled over this, the man on the computer got a call on his phone. His ringtone was a wild, funky explosion of music and he took his time in answering.

“I’m in the library practising my test… I’m kicking bum… What happened over the road with the coppers?”

I listened avidly, but there was no clue in his next comment as to what the coppers had been doing.

I’d been wondering how he was going on his driving test – it was good to know he was kicking bum. He’d been working his way through it slowly, reading every word on the screen carefully. I decided that I would stay in the library until he finished it, before I moved on.

It was 1:50pm, the time that seems to come in every library (although the actual time is different in different libraries) when the men come to the library. “Man Time”, I call it. Old men, in caps and bright cable knit jumpers. Young men, wanting computer access. Men who know the librarians personally and are after books about coin collecting.

I stopped gawking at everyone in the library and concentrated on the book I’d picked out from the shelf, “365 Everyday Games and Pastimes” by Martin and Simon Toseland. I like looking through such books, although in actual fact I hate playing games. Word games are the worst, compounded by the fact that, because I’m a writer, people expect me to enjoy them. This is not an unreasonable assumption, but my trouble with them is that they make my mind freeze up, like sometimes when I have to spell words aloud. Added to my lack of competitiveness – oh, so you want to win this game of snakes and ladders? go right ahead – I’m a sourpuss when it comes games time.

I don’t want to be like this, somewhere in my fantasies is the image of a smoky night in the 1930s, where a version of myself and my fantastic friends drink brandy, smoke, and play party games to our hearts content. In the book I read about the word game called “Buried Names”. In this game, you bury a name of a famous person in a sentence. The example given was:

One DAy I was watching a VIDeo when I was BECKoned into the kitchen by my mum, who asked if I wanted a cheese or HAM sandwich.

You read this sentence out and people have to guess whose name is buried in the sentence. On paper, I found this interesting, but it would drive me crazy if I were to be asked to play this, especially if liquor was involved. All I ever want to do when drinking is talk on and on, and listen to records.

Another book I investigated was a collection of quotes about books. I looked in the index to see what kind of quotes there were about libraries.

As I scanned over these topics a girl came through the door, smiling in my direction. She wasn’t after me, though, she was on her way to her friend, the painfully bored girl sitting behind me. I could feel the relief as they greeted each other, and the sound of books being shut and being packed into her bag was a sound of great happiness, even for me. I hate seeing people bored.

They headed out the door together, off into the sunny, cold afternoon. It was a particularly nice winter’s day, and the sunny view outside tugged at me, as the peace of the library tugged at me to stay. How was he going with his driver’s test?

He was still clicking through the screens, in the portion of the test where your comprehension of roadsigns is tested. This is the easiest part of the test, in my opinion. How can you mistake a big red sign with STOP on it? The man was having no trouble answering these questions, and I knew it would be time for me to leave soon.

One of the books I had picked out was a tiny copy of Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg. I’d read this book before, but I was intrigued by its pocket size – it was the full book, shrunk down so it could fit in the palm of my hand. This book had been much read, its pages weathered and stained.  On the front page was a stamp which gave the details of when the book was acquired. Some library books have this stamp, and I always pay it attention. I am the kind of person who takes time reading all the extra information in a book – the acknowledgements, the bio, the pages of quotes, the copyright information, in addition to the text itself, so it is natural I would enjoy knowing when the library acquired their books. This led me to another thought – you can’t fully enjoy a library unless you are the kind of person who appreciates details.

Perhaps my favourite detail in Padstow library, apart from the plants, was sign instructing patrons to look after the library books. I’d never seen such an explicit plea to be careful, and keep the books away from water, food, coffee – all the things that muck them up.

The man at the computer leaned back and stretched his arms forward, releasing the tension in his shoulders now that he had passed his test. I could see the green text on the screen announcing his success. He sat forward again, and clicked on the screen to do another practise test. No way was I sitting through that again! I left the library, pausing to take a photo of myself in the reflective windows the teenage girls had used as a mirror.

Note the grass green stockings.

I had ten minutes to wait for a train, so went on a quick search for a jam tart. Every project I do has some kind of signature food; for this project, it’s jam tarts. I am surprised, though, by the number of bakeries that don’t make them. The Padstow Bakehouse didn’t, although it did have a pleasingly faded sign and window display. Outside the bank next door, a little boy stood holding two shiny silver fake guns, pointed at the door as if about to hold it up. I looked around for someone to laugh about this with, but no one else had noticed.

When planning which library to visit, I had decided on Padstow by a kind of automatic process, where the name just floated into my consciousness. Padstow is part of the Bankstown library family, which also includes Panania. I’d never been to Panania, and thought today would be a good day to do so. It is a few stops further on, from Padstow. What would I find there?

The rat-tail thugs outside the chicken shop made me nervous as I walked past them up towards Panania library. I didn’t know anything about Panania, and felt a sudden spark of worry that it was a “dangerous” place. Although I am wary of stereotypes and judgements of places based on their socio economic profile, the thing about Panania was that I didn’t know anything at all about it. For the people on the streets around me it was home, the centre of their universe. This is one of the things I like about exploring different places. I am an outsider in the centre of others’ universes.

The universe of Panania is one of multiple bread and fruit shops, old ladies sitting talking on park benches, council rangers with dogs on leads, the Panania Treasure Mart and its 50% off sale, and kids running wild in their front gardens, which, fenceless, overlap with the footpath. Further down the street, an old man in a tartan cap pushed a creaky petrol mower over the grass on the nature strip. He paused as I passed by, and I went to smile at him but he averted his eyes.

At one of Panania’s bakeries I found my jam tarts and strolled up to the Salvos, eating them. I have a strong op shop radar, which enables me to find them even in places I have never been to before. It was very busy in the Salvos. As I looked through the bric a brac a girl near me asked her mum if she could have the metal coin bank patterned with a $20 note she held in her hands, since her sister had one. “No,” her mum said. The girl wasn’t disappointed. “Oh well, I’m getting a book and a wig!”

Some women were standing near the counter, gossiping about a couple who’d married during a siege somewhere in the world. “He’s a good man but…” one trailed off, “not bright,” said her friend, stepping in to help.

I thought of this poor, not bright chap as I bought my Dolly Parton record from the grumpy woman behind the counter. She didn’t offer me a bag and I spend the rest of the day walking around with Dolly Parton’s Greatest Hits under my arm, feeling self conscious.

After op shopping, I went back to the library. Panania library must have been built around the time as Padstow, and in fact both of the other libraries I have been to so far – all the buildings date from around the 1960s. I peeked through the windows, and saw no one inside. Perhaps the library was closed?

When I approached the doors, though, they opened, and I stepped inside. There were people there once I looked, they appeared slowly from their bookish camouflage. Overall, though, the library had a feeling of desertion. Perhaps it was the sunny afternoon, or the lure of hanging out in front of the chicken shop, or buying wigs, but I felt sad that so few people were in Panania’s library.

It was a big library, well stocked with books, and different study areas:

Exam Style

Grandma’s House

The Desk – note baskets, potplants, high windows…

Despite the lack of patrons the staff were busy, and when I looked into the back room I saw a librarian seriously considering a construction paper cutout of a chicken. I settled down in one of the study areas with a couple of books: The True History of the Hula Hoop by Judith Lanigan (though I dislike fiction books with non-fiction titles) and Making Things Move: DIY Mechanisms for Inventors, Hobbyists and Artists by Dustyn Roberts. I like thinking about inventors, hobbyists and artists tinkering with DIY mechanisms!

I browsed these books for a while, watching a woman waiting at the counter, wallet in hand, trying to get the attention of the librarians in the back room. It took a surprisingly long time for such a quiet library. When someone did come out, they said “You have to stand by the gold rope! Otherwise we can’t see you.” There were two gold posts, a rope strung between them, mid way along the counter, near the fishtank where a black, bobble-eyed fish busily swam back and forth.

I could see the trees swaying in the wind through the inevitable strip of high windows, and felt a yearning to be outside. Two libraries in one day and the details start to become overwhelming. I flicked through the grubby books in the Book Sale area, before stepping out past the Nurse Schwarzel Memorial Fountain and the desert island reading mural, and headed towards the station.

“Izit Saint Patrick’s Day?” asked one of the chicken shop thugs as I walked past.

It’s best to make some acknowledgement to this kind of thing, rather than ignore it. It shows you are not afraid.

I looked at the pimply boy  in the track suit and shook my head. “Nah,” I said, as if he had no hope of ever knowing the secrets I knew, and continued on my way.

Stanmore Library (Thumbtacks)

During the many years I lived in Petersham, I’d ride my bike along the path past the back of Stanmore Library. Painted on the back was a graffiti mural, which I must have looked at in passing hundreds of times. Today, when I came to Stanmore library, I found the whole building painted over a dull green, the mural included. Despite the many times I’d seen it, I couldn’t remember exactly what was on it besides a figure of a girl in a short skirt with purple hair. It was one of those council sanctioned graffiti murals, perhaps with a don’t do drugs message, the kind that’s meant to be as exciting as actual graffiti. Now as I stood looking at the blank green wall, I imagined the figures in the mural buried underneath.

Stanmore library is one of the smallest Sydney libraries I have visited, although it looks smaller on the outside than it does on the inside. The building is one long rectangular shed, situated in the park beside the train station. This has always seemed to me a good place to have a library, in a space that has some kind of civic importance. Another civic object, to be found alongside the library, is this drinking fountain, presented to the citizens of Stanmore in 1949.

Although I like drinking fountains as civic objects, I can’t help but recall one time seeing a large, slobbery St Bernhard with its paws up on the side of one, while his owner turned on the water for the dog to drink. The dog’s big tongue slurped over the spout, which would then be later used by some thirsty passerby.

It was 11am on a rainy Wednesday when I arrived at the library. I’d caught the 412 bus to Stanmore with a number of small old Greek ladies. I was waiting at the bus stop with one of these women, and watched as she unwrapped a packet of cigarettes she’d just bought from the grocery across the street. She lit up a cigarette and I stood up to move upwind of her, reflecting how it was perhaps meant to be the other way around: wasn’t I meant to be the one smoking, being (although I’m not sure this word quite applies anymore) young? She and her cohorts stayed on the bus, going, perhaps, to the hospital further along the bus route.

The library had changed its colour scheme since I was last there, many years ago now. It used to have bright green chairs like big green apples. Now the colour scheme is beige and the purple of Marrickville Council. I looked around for somewhere to sit. It was man hour in the library, besides the two librarians, everyone else there was male. I went down to the round wooden table in the young adult fiction area, and sat in a position from which I could see the whole library in front of me.

Like Dural Library, Stanmore library has windows lining the two long walls of the building, up high. Through these I saw the trains rushing by on the train lines above. Every few minutes one would whoosh past. Planes came over as well, screaming down on their path to Sydney airport. The planes always come that way when it is overcast, something I know well from my Petersham years. Despite these sounds, the library was a place of great calm.

A man sat on one of the couches, reading a week’s worth of Sydney Morning Heralds. He was an old man in a beanie, the kind who has sockless, skinny ankles poking out from under the hem of his trousers. I watched him struggle with the large broadsheet, getting it into the best position for reading. On the other side of the room, two men used the internet. Both had notebooks with lists of things to look up, and both occasionally swore at the screen. I didn’t pry too much, but I peeked over the shoulder of the man nearest me, to see he was looking up different kinds of locks.

The table I was sitting at was near the Graphic Novels and the “Board Books”, a genre I hadn’t come across before. It means the thick cardboard books for children, the thick cardboard which readily gets damp and germy from being chewed on. I looked away from them. The table surface beneath me had a pleasing patina, the varnish wearing off a little. The bookshelves that lined the walls were the same colour wood. There were other desks, more modern melamine ones, in the centre of the room. A man was sitting there studying, bent over his notebooks.

A man in an orange safety vest entered and delivered a poster to the librarians. The librarians then debated for a long time where to put it up. Eventually they took it, and a jar of drawing pins, into the corner where the noticeboards were, with posters for events like National Simultaneous Storytime and Reading Challenge 2011. The new poster was for Refugee Week, although first I read the slogan and read Freedom from Fear and thought it was about anxiety. An older poster was taken down and this new one put in its place. Something I particularly enjoy is pinning up posters on boards, removing the out of date ones to make room for mine. I pinned up a flyer for the zine fair I’m helping organise on my work noticeboard last week and did exactly this.

I went to browse the non fiction collection, which was on the wooden shelves lining the walls at the other end of the library. The good thing about a small library is that you can look at all the books, and don’t have to pick a particular section to work your way through. One section I will be focussing on in particular during this project is the books about books, which is the very start of the Dewey decimal numbers. I picked out a book from the 002s, “The Book of Lost Books” by Stuart Kelly. “The incomplete history of all the great books you will never read” was its subtitle. In general I find these kinds of list books very boring, especially ones that suggest I ought to do all the things inside before I die. I look at the book and think Oh my God I’m going to die? Rather than rushing to book holidays, buy books, listen to albums or whatever other essential experience is listed within.

This book, however, appealed to me as it was about things that no longer existed. These books had existed at some point in time but were lost or destroyed somewhere along the way. I took this book back to my desk and examined it further. The two entries I read first – the book is structured chronologically, according to author – were Nikolai Gogol and Sylvia Plath, both stories I already know. Gogol burnt the second half of his novel Dead Souls in a crazed fervour, and Plath’s second novel, Double Exposure, “disappeared” sometime after her death. The author notes how chilling the word “disappeared” is in its vagueness. There were no contemporary examples. There is more of a trend for works in progress to be published in whatever state they are in after an author’s death, such as The Original of Laura by Vladimir Nabokov (which he explicitly didn’t want to have published) and The Pale King by every angsty boy’s favourite writer, David Foster Wallace. Instead, contemporary lost books are the countless books that people have written and never had published. These are the “novels in the drawer” of people who would never be referred to by their last name in a literary context.

As I sat pondering this, my thoughts were interrupted by a careful voice reading out “I do not like them Sam I am” from the children’s area behind me. A little girl and her grandmother had come in and settled there. The girl had immediately gone for the open jar of thumbtacks, in that precise way children have for locating the most dangerous or precious thing in a room. A librarian came to the rescue, saying “Don’t touch, very sharp”, putting them out of reach.

I moved on to the next book I’d picked out, this one from the 300s, which was “A Dictionary of Old Trades, Title and Occupations”. I was hoping for some clues for a new job for me. I was not looking for a new job, but I believe it’s important to have a back up plan. So if being an Associate Lecturer falls through, I can try my hand at being an:

Amanuensis – a secretary or recorder of transactions.

Chickweed Seller

Chronologist – a documenter of events

Dragon’s Blood Dealer – dealer in resins and gums

Mouldiwarp Catcher – a mole catcher

Wart Curer

These occupations, many from 19th century England, were notable in their specificity. If only all I had to do was sell chickweed!

It was peaceful in the library, with the men busy working and me looking through books in the corner. The librarians kept up a low, steady conversation about library related problems, someone’s timesheet not filled in correctly, where to find a JP on a Wednesday… I felt almost as if I was in someone’s house, it was so cosy in there. A couple with a baby came in a return some books, Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood, a Kathy Lette book. The baby, parked near the entrance, while its parents looked around, was zipped up in a rainproof pouch inside a stroller, with only its head showing. It stared out uncomprehendingly, as if stunned by the strangeness of everything around it.

The final book in my pile was from the biographies section, a book about Joan Jett. It was a big square book with lots of photos inside, which seemed to be a kind of autobiography, although it was hard to tell exactly. The majority of it was photographs. The introduction was by Kathleen Hanna and there were some slightly blurry photos of the two of them posing together. The first page of text was, perplexingly, the letters W.W.J.J.D? What Would Joan Jett do? That’s a question to ask yourself next time you are in a moral quandary. My favourite pictures in the book were of Joan Jett on the phone. Did I ever expect photos of people on clunky, curly cord phones to be retro?

In one photo she’s lying on a bed, her shoes still on, a small soft toy elephant on one beside table and a tape recorder on the one on the other side, leaning against a wall that’s patterned with bamboo and big yellow flowers. The room is 70s domestic but she’s in black jeans and a t-shirt, of course. The other photo is in a kitchen, and she’s wearing a tuxedo t-shirt and staring at the camera while she’s on the phone. On the kitchen bench is a box of Hostess Suzy Q’s, mini boxes of Corn Flakes and a box for a kind of candy called 8 Stripes. Suzy Q’s are a chocolate cake sandwich with cream in the middle (and I see you can buy them on Amazon…but would you?) I like photos of famous people in domestic situations, especially if they have a style that looks out of place around packets of Corn Flakes and 70s wallpaper. (here for those who don’t trust word descriptions)

I photocopied these pictures of Joan Jett on the phone, noticing the photocopier had a sign on it warning me to use coins.

I was happy to – I dislike control cards, especially the ones that you have to set a pin for. Do you really need a pin for a photocopy card? I put my 40c coins into the machine and copied the pictures. Over this side of the library was another appealing desk, this one beside a big indoor plant. I decided to relocate here. This desk wasn’t wooden but it was a wood patterned laminate. The accompanying black vinyl 80s armchair with wooden armrests are not so good, however, it was were the kind of chair you feel you might never get up from. Even if you are strong and healthy you get a taste of what it must be like to be elderly and have trouble getting up. I hauled myself up out of it and chose one of the beige desk chairs instead.

From my position here, half hidden by the plant, I continued to observe the library. The plant was like a kind of camouflage – here I was, peeking out at library users in their natural habitat. A man in a track suit with stringy long grey hair borrowing books about depression; a woman with a huge noisy bunch of keys who was wearing a stick on label with KAREN written on it, and sunglasses even though she was inside, and had some urgent business at the counter. In quieter moments the librarians discuss how they need a bucket or an umbrella stand during wet weather and the popularity of their Premier’s Literary Awards display, which had been set up that morning and already been borrowed from.

From this desk I noticed that the bookends are the same green that I remember the lounges being. The longer you inhabit a place, the more details you notice. I can now see the snowflakes cut out of coloured construction paper stuck to the windows, the other side of which is sprayed with an angry silver graffiti tag.

One of my tasks at the library was to find a novel to read while I’m on holidays. While I looked I took note of the books I can’t imagine anyone borrowing from a library:

How many times would you have to renew it?

I haven’t felt very excited about fiction for a while now, but forced myself to pick Utopian Man by Lisa Lang from the display rack. The novel won the Vogel Literary Award in 2009 and I remember reading about it in the newspaper. I also remember thinking, while reading the article, “I am never going to win the Vogel Literary Award”. This was not me lacking self esteem, this was a kind of acceptance that I’m not going to write a novel. For a long time I thought, as is the general perception, that a novel is the height of literary achievement and I would naturally write one. I might have one in my drawer from a long time ago, but I don’t think it’s going to have any siblings in the near future.

Utopian Man is about Edward William Cole, who was the Cole behind the Coles Book Arcade, and Coles Funny Picture book, the first port of call should you ever need a picture of a monkey in a hurry. Opening up the novel, I saw that it has a lot of dialogue, which made me wary: I get sick of reading dialogue and hearing their voices in my head. I hold the book and struggle with my own head-voice: it just needs to be the kind of book you can read on the plane, Vanessa, just borrow it.

Which brings me to another question: is it a good idea to travel with library books? I’ve taken them on holidays quite a few times, sometimes over the other side of the world if it’s only for a short period of time. I enjoy returning them, thinking that I’ve taken them on such a journey, which will forever remain a secret.

One of the things I love about library books is that they’ve been in other people’s houses, in their bags, read while in bed, in the bath, on buses, who knows? Sometimes the crumbs and hairs caught inside give me clues to their previous journeys. What I’d like is a register in the back of the book where people could write notes on their reading of the book. Places where the book kept them company, or strange things that happened while they were reading the book, rather than the kind of book club musings or Amazon reviews that would, of course, be the most likely things people would think to write there. I will keep you up to date with what happens while I read Utopian Man, to test this idea.

With all this talk of borrowing, it’s obvious that I’m a member of this library. The Stanmore library is one of the branch libraries of Marrickville: the others being St Peters (currently closed for refurbishment) and Dulwich Hill. I like how libraries exist in families, with the big main library and its smaller siblings. In my extensive readings of the local papers over the years I’ve read debates about whether to retain branch libraries, and remember reading one about plans to close down the Stanmore branch, which attracted irate letters to the editor.

Although there are plans to built a new central Marrickville library in the old Marrickville Hospital site, I see no plans to close the branch libraries. But who knows, what with the death of books and all.

Having heard and read plenty of things in the last week about the death of the book, I am starting to feel like I am a dreadful conservative. Maybe I am. I hope to die before the day comes when I can surf the internet in my own mind and see webpages on my retinas. All I will say about the debate this time is that my opposition to arguments for making libraries less the books and more about social space is that I’m one of the people who goes there for the books. And whose business is it for anyone to tell me if I should still read books or not?

For now I’m a woman wearing a red jumper, borrowing a book from a library. I go up to the desk and hand the librarian the book with my card on the top, she scans my card, hands it back, scans the book, prints out a borrowing receipt and tucks it inside the pages. I put it into my bag and go out into the overcast afternoon, as another plane roars overhead and I walk through the underpass and out towards Enmore, happy to be out in the streets again after a few hours of library peace.

Dural Library, or Ancient Egypt

On the Hills Bus, with 2CH blaring loudly from the speakers above every second seat, I look out the window at the national park. The M2 cuts through it, a long pale scar. I’ve never been on a Hills bus before, although I’ve seen people queuing for them at peak hour, lined up neatly in single file along the pavement outside the QVB. I’ve also seen the buses travelling over the Harbour Bridge, packed with commuters, and wondered what it would be like to have to stand in the aisle all the way to Dural.

Dural is one of those suburbs that unless you have lived in the Hills District, you probably haven’t heard of. When I say “Dural”, I might as be saying Dubrovnik. It’s possible that I too would be unsure of its location had I not lived in the area as a child.

“You Light up my Life” wails from the radio as the bus turns into Old Northern Road. We pass the Koala Park, with tour buses out the front and a couple of Japanese girls taking peace sign photographs in front of the entrance. Simon used to live across the road from the koala park. He tells me that strange shrieks would come from the park at night, rumoured to be the sound of the koalas’ frantic coupling.

The bus turns off and makes its way through suburban streets. All the houses are McMansions of various sizes. Cars with P plates in the driveways, everything neat. I’ve never been on these streets before and when the bus comes out the other side of the estate onto New Line Road, I realise why: all these houses were built in the years since I left the Hills District. They were in the area that, when we’d drive through it on the way to and from the city, used to be fields. I’d look across it, counting the cows dotted on the hills.

It’s a novelty to be in a bus on a road I’ve only ever been on as a passenger in a car. Not being a driver gives me a different perspective on travelling around Sydney. I sit and let it slide by the windows. For residents of this area, though, it would be impossible to rely on the bus service, which is designed only for commuters to and from the city.

The bus terminates at Round Corner, the central village area of Dural. As a child I enjoyed what I felt was the strangeness of “Round Corner” as a name. The corner itself is a dogleg where Kenthurst Road comes off Old Northern Road. In the corner is Dural Mall. The Mall isn’t a multi-storey Westfield kind of mall, it’s an L-shaped court lined with shops. Built in 1979, it is a compromise between the old way, of on-street shops, and the new way of enclosed shopping centres. The covered walkways give Dural Mall the visual appearance of a maze or a computer game.

Since I lived there the mall has been built upon, but its general shape has been retained. I follow the only other passenger who had stayed on the bus to the end, a young guy with long ratty hair and puffy sneakers, down into the end of the Mall. As I do this I catch sight of an old sign on the wall, in a gap between where the Mall used to end and a new building beside it. The signboard lists all the shops in as they used to be when I remembered it, all of which (besides the post office and fruit shop) are no longer there.

I regard this as a good omen for my project. I slip into the gap in between the buildings and examine the sign. The dark green, the signature colour of Dural Mall, triggers something in my memory, as do the shop names, La Pomme Bakery, The Shoe Tree. I like that it must have been left on the wall because no one thought it important enough to remove, and that it hides in a gap, tucked away, like it is the Mall’s own memory.

I love these details that remain through neglect, I have an eye for things that are weathered, old, almost hidden. When I visited Dural Mall as a child it was with great excitement. I liked the dank Franklins with high shelves (now an Aldi) and the gift shop from which I’d think about stealing pewter ornaments (now a butchery). When I got a bit older I was interested in the hippy clothes in the Recycled Clothing store, and I’d buy my first copies of Smash Hits from the newsagency. The old sign was on the wall of the once newsagency, now bottle shop.

I walked into the Mall and went to the Daily Delicious Bakery to gather my thoughts. Not the Bakers Delight or the Michel’s Patisserie (hell is a string of chain stores) but the former La Pomme. I was sad it was no longer La Pomme, with the big green apple on the sign. Apart from the location it was completely different, although it did have a fantastic sign out the front picturing everything they sell. I ordered a salad roll and a jam tart (I’d been thinking about a jam tart for weeks) and sat in the corner, reading the Hills Shire Times.

 

Having read all about Granny Plankers and the proposed Hills district train line from Epping to Rouse Hill, and listened to tradespeople ordering large amounts of pies, it was time to head over to the library.

Walking through the carpark, a version of me at eight years old walked alongside, with my sister and my mum, on our way back to the blue Telstar to load groceries into the boot. We would have stopped at La Pomme for our favourite treats: a Neenish tart for Fiona, a Vanilla Slice for me.

I’m in a stage of my life when I feel sad when I think about my childhood. Not because of any inherent sadness from that time, or wish that I was back there, but something to do with its distance. I’m living in a future that back then didn’t exist: the year 2000 was as far as my imagination stretched. I calculated the impossibly adult sounding age that I would be in 2000, hardly believing it would ever come. Now I am living on the other side of it, in the unknown.

The library is much smaller than I have remembered it. I feel like laughing as I walk along the path through the tall Ironbarks that surround the library, because it looks almost toy size, compared to the one in my imagination. My memories of it have merged the library building and the taller building adjacent to it, a gym which I have never entered. This feeling of smallness is a strange one. I feel like a giant girl, big legs in black stockings, wearing a red dress, my black hair a cloak, on a secret mission.

The first thing I realise is that the library is the perfect place to take notes. I’ve been the recipient of plenty of odd looks in the past when I’ve been taking notes in unexpected places, but here there is nothing more normal than to sit at a desk, get out my Spirax and my pencil and start to write.

The “angled ceiling” of my memory below is incorrect, but I remembered the exposed bricks of the interior correctly. Although refurbished in 1998, according to a plaque near the entrance, the library building retains its 70s design. High windows stretch the lengths of the two long walls, giving the library the feeling of being a kind of treehouse, as the windows look into the branches of the trees outside. As a child this had seemed magical to me.

Dural Library is peaceful. As I sit at one of the desks in the Adult non-fiction section, I watch people entering and leaving. No one’s doing work at the desks besides me, perhaps because this is a part of Sydney where most people have enough space to work at home. The Hills District is of course famous for its vast McMansions, although the Dural/Kenthurst area still has a lot of older houses, built in the 60s or 70s, on five acre blocks of land. We lived on one of these 5 acre blocks, in a long, thin house built in the 1970s. This house, a castle in my imagination, has the same toy appearance to me the few times my mother and I have driven out to see “what they’ve done to it”. The library and this house must have been built at around the same time.

As I sit writing, a little girl wearing a silver puffy jacket, her hair in a pineapple ponytail on top of her head, approaches the loans desk.

“Do you have a book about how to build the pyramids?”

The librarian, a woman with a rich accent I can’t identify, though I can tell it is European, enjoys this request. She takes the girl over to the Ancient History section, near where I am sitting. She gets out a number of different books that have information about the pyramids and spreads them out on the nearby desk.

“I don’t know if it explains how they are made,” she says, pointing at one of the open pages, “it’s something to do with these blocks. It would be easier to say how to make an igloo…”
The girl’s family have come to join her, her mum, a couple of sisters, and a brother, who is wearing a primary coloured cap with a propeller on the top, still slowly turning from his latest movements. All of them look seriously at the books the librarian has selected. The girl chooses a couple of the books to borrow and the family soon leave, on their way home to build a pyramid.

The library gets quiet again. I can hear the hush of the air conditioning unit and the conversations of the librarians behind the desk. The librarian who was so happy to help the little girl is not impressed with the man who has forgotten his card and then forgotten his password to log on to the computer. She clicks her tongue and sighs at him. Librarian disapproval is powerful; he looks chastened.

He is hoping to use one of the computers that are lined up in a row along one wall. I go exploring this section of the library and look over the shoulder of the man who is searching through a woman’s photos on Facebook, happy pictures of a group of people camping. Smiling faces fill the screen and I look away. The happy snaps of strangers make me feel miserable. I resist trying to imagine what he is thinking as he looks at them.

In the corner is a lounge area with a magazine rack, in roughly the same spot it was in my memory story. I sit here for a while, copying down a cake recipe from a Woman’s Weekly book of baking. The cake has whole pears embedded in it, their stalks poking out the top, which strikes me as weird enough to consider making. It is like they are entombed in there, or growing in there, depending on your perspective. Next to me is a coffee machine, a fixture I have noticed in Marrickville Library also, although I’ve never seen anyone use it. I look at the options but none re very appealing. I imagine the crunching noise of the machine filling the quiet library, and imagine how self conscious I would feel, hoping that my cringing would serve to muffle the sound of it. I would have bought one, though, if I was more of a coffee drinker. One of the things that people complain about concerning the changes in libraries, especially university libraries, is the getting rid of books to put in more computers and cafes. The vestiges of that were here, with the coffee machine and the computers, but from all the evidence I saw, people were still interested in books.

A woman at the counter, one of the many older women who have been coming in with their empty canvas bags ready to load up on novels, asks the librarian to look up some books for her. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time? On loan. The Poisonwood Bible? On loan. Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow” On loan. I want to tell her she needs to go for something more obscure. Finally one of the books on her list is on the shelf, and the librarian goes in search of it.

I’ve browsed all the sections in the library, the green spines of the gardening section, the ring bound volumes in the local history folder, the bright, sparkly young adult books. The children’s section is different to what I remember: I borrowed classics there but these days it’s mostly the current YA and children’s fiction. Across from the children’s shelves there’s a mural of a tree with native birds in it. A couple of little girls are sitting below it, gossiping. The older girl cries out “I can see your nappy!” to clinch the argument she is having with her sister. Their mum, a harried woman with a white jumpsuited baby strapped to her front, shushes them.

I sit down at my desk again and listen to the librarians talking. “Yesterday,” one of them says, “I came home to find a parcel on my doorstep”. I imagine her walking up the path to her door in the dark and seeing it there, an unexpected shape. Of course I pictured it being a book, but I was wrong.

“She sends me yams, they’re not commercially available in Australia.” Apparently they are good, very good, either steamed or roasted.

The yam discussion is interrupted by two teenagers, a boy and a girl, entering the library. They walk in and wander around the shelves, looking for something. The girl receives a lot of messages, the iPhone ding-ding keeps ringing out like someone very impatient is waiting to be served.

What could they be looking for?

The boy approaches the counter.
“Do you have any books on Ancient Egypt?” he asks.

“You’re not going to build a pyramid?” the librarian asks. The boy looks confused but takes it in good humour. The librarian waits a moment before explaining about the little girl’s request an hour earlier.

She returns to the Ancient Egypt section with the couple in tow. I feel proud that I have chosen to situate myself in such an important area of the library. The boy and girl look through the books for whatever particular information they’re after, slipping between talking about this and carrying on a conversation about their friends, the kind that is cryptic to any outsider, peppered with the kind of nicknames that make you picture the worst.

They choose the most useful book and negotiate sharing of it: she’ll have it until the weekend, and then he’ll take it. I try hard to overhear it, but can’t determine which aspect of Ancient Egypt they are interested in.

I’ve been in the library for almost two hours now. If I wanted to I could stay there all day. This is one of the things I love about libraries, that no matter who you are you can come and spend as much time as you want in there, and no one will tell you to leave until closing time. You don’t have to have any money or even be doing anything particular besides keeping quiet. During my hours in there I got up and browsed the books, moved between the desks and the lounges, and never once was the focus of any particular attention. Me, ever the observer, likes this kind of quiet place where I’m under no particular scrutiny.

Back at the couches I flip through today’s Sydney Morning Herald, reading the obituary for Bob Gould, who died a few weeks ago. Goulds, his huge and chaotic bookstore on King Street, is a type of library in itself, in fact it’s probably more of a library than a lot of public ones, in the sense of a library being a collection of books. Public libraries weed their collections regularly, but the only way a book leaves Goulds is if you buy it, or maybe steal it, as I’m sure many are tempted to. (But really, would you?)

I felt sad about his death because he was such a Sydney character, although I will never forget my anger at him telling me I was a “lovely plump girl” during my very brief stint working at Pulp Books, my friend’s bookstore which was across the road from Goulds. This perhaps was my only real interaction with the man, apart from buying the odd book from him.

As I think through all this, I notice a man enter the library. I get the feeling he isn’t the kind of person who frequents libraries. It isn’t anything about his appearance, his monogrammed shirt, work trousers and no nonsense haircut, but more his behaviour. He steps inside, looks around and goes over to the computer area where the man had been doing the facebook stalking. He stares intently at the computers for about ten seconds. Then he turns around and walks back outside. I watched him get into a red Barina and reverse out of the parking spot, and then drive away. I know how he feels – sometimes you really don’t feel like asking how something works.

I can hear blasts of the whistle from the gym next door, adjudicating a basketball game. It cuts through the ever present hum of the air conditioning. The librarians are straightening the cookbooks, a display of which they have set up on a tiered shelf near the DVD section. Perhaps rather than cookery they should do an Ancient Egypt display. I get up and fiddle with the computer catalogue, trying to decide what to look up. It’s a clunky catalogue with overly big square icons on the screen for each menu item. You have to press the F buttons to access the different types of searches. I’ve always been a bit wary of the F buttons, they do things I don’t quite understand.

The last time I came here there was a card catalogue and books were checked out at the desk, the date due stamped on the slip on the back page. I wonder if any of the books that were in the library then are still on the shelf – no by the looks of things. These days you check out books at a tall grey machine, although many people still choose to go to the desk. I can hear the barcode scanning blips every now and again, a noise that’s now so commonplace that it’s barely noticeable. But, have you ever stood in the supermarket and just listened?

The afternoon turns sunny and I decide it is time to leave the library. I leave as unnoticed as I had arrived. The librarian at the desk fiddles with a small guillotine, and doesn’t look up as I pass. Outside I pause and look around. A few hundred metres from where I stand, on the other side of a fence, a new McMansion is being constructed. Workmen swarm all over the construction, putting in the windows.

I start back along the path to the bus stop on Old Northern Road. I am early and sit waiting as the schoolgirl beside me spritzes her neck with vanilla perfume and reapplies black eyeliner. A bank of dark clouds moves across the sky. Although it is still sunny, fat raindrops fall and explode against the surface of the road. I watch them, in love with the feeling of being deep within the suburbs, in the kind of place that no one would call special, unless you are there in that moment, with the sun and the rain and the sickly smell of vanilla, living both in the memory of it and how it is now.

Dural Library, Then

I read this story at Surry Hills library for a live version of All the Best back at the start of May. I like the story but reading it made me feel vulnerable, I guess because it’s about being a shy, bookish child. The shy bookish child in me would have been horrified to stand up in front of a room of people and read a story confessing my unpopularity. I felt like my story was the most shy and bookish one out of all of them. For stories about libraries, there was more sexual content than I expected among the stories that were read that night.

Before I going back to Dural Library I thought it would be good to reflect upon my memories of that time, and this is the story that appeared:

There are some people who obviously should have been born in another time, and I felt like one of them. But as much as I tried to convince myself otherwise, the reality of it was that I was a kid in the 1980s. Later, as a teenager, while stuffing my Cabbage Patch Kid in a bag to take to the op shop I thought of the oath I had recited upon “adopting” it back in 1985:

I promise to love my Cabbage Patch Kid with all my heart. I promise to be a good and kind parent. I will always remember how special my Cabbage Patch Kid is to me.

 I didn’t feel guilty. I’d never been very fond of the doll, with its piggy eyes and chubby cheeks which resembled a face after a wisdom teeth extraction. I’d convinced my parents to buy me one for Christmas for no reason other than succumbing to peer pressure. It watched over me in my room, occasionally whispering: You Must Conform.

The world I would have rather been living in was about a hundred years earlier and my main way of accessing this was through the Dural Public Library. Here I gravitated to the hardback classics, like the Water Babies or the Secret Garden. I liked the smell of the books, which had soft pages like blotting paper, and colour plates for the illustrations, which I examined with great attention. I’d take them up to the counter and watch as the librarian crunched the stamp down on the due date page. What I would have given for a go of that stamp! Once stamped, the books were mine and I had an armful of different worlds to disappear into.

The Dural library was my favourite, although of all the places at my school it was the library where I felt most comfortable: that and the gates when I was leaving through them at the end of the day. The librarian, who saw in me the kind of gentle, easily trampled soul who takes refuge in books, eventually entrusted me with the job of checking books out at the desk. The  small plastic stamp was no match for the public library one, but I used it proudly.

One day in the school library I spied some of the mean girls who usually held court in the playground grouped into a corner, examining something. Seeing these bullies on my turf I felt nervous, but was too scared to go over and investigate. I lurked behind the shelves nearby for a while, listening to them giggle. Then I thought of something: the check out desk was located on a level above the library itself, with a good view over it. So I climbed the stairs and peered down. Directly below me, in between the bowed heads of the girls, I could see what  they were looking at: a copy of Where did I come from?

I knew very well where they came from, big North Shore houses with pools and tennis courts, the kind of places with confidence pumping out through the air conditioning.

Where I came from, I was less sure. I’d read my children’s classics from the library and imagine myself as an orphan, a gypsy or a girl detective. Although they were library books, and I knew they had been read by others (traces of whom, in the crumbs and finger marks on the pages, were still apparent) I knew that I was the true recipient of this knowledge. I had many secret identities.

Visiting the library on Saturday was the highlight of my week. In Dural Mall, as I trailed around after my mum in the Franklins, I tried my best not to become impatient. There were some distractions: my sister and I were obsessed with the plastic egg machines at the entrance to the supermarket. One of these dispensed bouncy balls and we had a growing collection of these at home, stored in Itty Bitty bins.

The shopping done, I felt great anticipation as my mum’s car pulled into the library carpark. The library was surrounded by gum trees like a magic house in a wood. It was a 1970s building with an angled roof and expose brick interior, a style of architecture I found comforting.

Once Monday rolled around again I was back at school. Despite my loner in the library tendencies, I did have a few friends. Although I felt like we were from different planets, I was grateful to them for putting up with me. Then things started changing. There was increasing pressure to be interested in boys. It was an all girls school and up until this point boys, apart from brothers, had no particular importance.  Now Debbie, the leader of our group, had a crush on a boy and expected us to follow suit. If we didn’t have a real boy, a crush on a movie star was permissible. Everyone but me eventually came up with someone, and I knew that my excuses wouldn’t hold up much longer.

My kind of boys rode horses, wore waistcoats and could converse with animals and the only pictures I had of them were in the colour plates of hardcover books. How I wished I could bring one to life!
That weekend I again visited the library. It was such a holy place for me that I imagined that any problem I had could be solved within its doors. In the children’s section was an area with beanbags, for kids to sit reading. I’d never paid much attention to this area before but today I noticed the magazine rack. If I ever read a magazine it was selected from the newsagency when my parents bought the weekend papers. They were about horses or the were kinds of magazines where kids would send in their art and fiction to be published. I’d managed to live my life as free from engagement with popular culture as possible up to this point, but I knew that the time had come.

At the magazine rack I picked out a Smash Hits and flipped through it. A dastardly plan bloomed as I noted the posters of pop stars and movie stars inside. I looked over to the desk and saw that the librarians were busy stamping. I chose one of the full page posters and ripped it out slowly, so the noise wouldn’t be heard. I stuffed it in my pocket and went to borrow the Wolves of Willoughby Chase by Joan Aiken, in which a pair of girls escape their evil governess with the help of a boy who lived in a cave in the nearby woods.

The poster was of Charlie Sheen. I thought he looked rather weasely, but he became my alibi. I could profess how cute I thought he was, and how my perfect man would be just like him. Little was I to know the monster he would become! Yet now when I read about his latest ravings I think about that poster. If my friends came to visit I’d stick up on my wall, right above the spot where the Cabbage Patch Kid sat, the evidence that I was a normal girl, just like everyone else.