Shushing the Board

GH on the protest at the State Library of Victoria

The steps and slopes of the forecourt of the State Library of Victoria have become a favoured place of protest in Melbourne. They have never, to my knowledge, hosted a protest against the actual library, or at at least its board and management, as they were yesterday. It was tempting to say that we parked our tanks on their lawn, except that we had no tanks, and it was, as taxpayers, our lawn. It sure felt good to seize it back from the cocktail party clique who’ve sought to make a plaything of the world’s oldest public library.

The meeting was hosted by my very old friend Kaz Cooke, who in her tribute to the institution came up with a line I wish I’d thought of and may well borrow: ‘I didn’t go to university. I went to the State Library.’ Sir Redmond, the back of whose statue you can see, would have nodded benificently: that’s exactly the use to which he imagined the library would be put. I was among the speakers, with former collections head Shane Carmody, historian Judith Brett and the YA author Laura Carroll, following a lengthy address by Community and Public Sector Union organiser Jordie Gilmour. The CPSU have been pretty lacklustre in their representations of workers at the State Library during the last decade of turmoil; I’m glad to say they seem on the case now. I was also glad to give a shout out to Michael Togias and his wife Maria, whose incomparable warm and friendly cafe Mr Tulk has been turfed by management in favour of the purveyors of this dreary shite. He’s taken his case to the Ombudsman, and I’m wearing the T-shirt now.

As Et Al reported on Friday, our protest has already achieved certain of our ends, prompting the withdrawal of management’s ludicrous Strategic Reorganisation Change Proposal, with its pie-eyed embrace of ‘Compelling Digital Experiences’ at the expense of actual research and collections expertise, turning it from a library into a space. But here are what those vertical arms in the photo relate to: two resolutions, unanimously supported.

1. We, the assembled, respect the expertise and specialisations of the staff of the State Library of Victoria. We acknowledge that Library staff have been forced out, disrespected, and unable to speak publicly. We support the current Library staff trying to ensure that services survive.

2. We, the assembled, call on the Colin Brooks, the Victorian Minister for Arts Industries, and the Executive of the State Library, to arrange and attend a Public Meeting early in 2026 at which the Executive can advocate for its management decisions over recent years and its proposed staff and service cuts, and will answer questions.

As regards these ‘management decisions over recent years’, can I commend this back stage pass to the shambles that managerialism and corporate interests, personified by board president Christine Christian and her minions, have made of the library. It was published by The Saturday Paper by Carolyn Fraser. She is the brilliant curator who did something not even Steve Smith could do - she brought the Ashes to Australia in 2019, as part of the Velvet, Iron, Ashes exhibition. Carolyn joined the exodus of expertise from the library two years ago. One story will suffice, of the day that Lachlan Murdoch gave the Keith Murdoch oration on, mirabile dictu, ‘press freedom’.

Approaching the library that morning, I walked up the front steps through the glory that was artist Linda Tegg’s installation Grasslands. A commission for the Melbourne International Festival, the work consisted of more than 10,000 native grasses and plants in planters that covered large parts of the library steps and forecourt. Trees had been dug into the lawn. These were the plants that would have grown on the site prior to colonisation. It was beautiful.

On this day, two cars were parked on a blue carpet that had been extended across the forecourt. Part of Grasslands had been roughly moved and plants crushed under electrical cables. Concrete blocks were squeezed between the planters to support a lighting rig for the car display. A giant “BMW MELBOURNE” banner was stretched in front of the library’s entrance. The forecourt had been turned into a car dealership.

On my lunchbreak, I witnessed a library patron screaming in disgust at the BMW sales reps. She said they shouldn’t be there, that the forecourt was public space, that it shouldn’t be used for commercial gain. As I watched the scene – the outraged patron, the unhappy SLV staff, all the men taking photos of the two cutting-edge electric BMWs, the groups of baffled schoolkids, an entomologist from RMIT blithely sweeping a butterfly net back and forth over the grasses, collecting specimens of insects not seen in the city in more than a century, the library’s head of security menacing the entomologist who, admittedly, presented as an oddity, if not a security threat, with the rubber tube in his mouth he was using to suck specimens into a plastic cannister mounted on his back – I knew I was witnessing something significant.

The day only became more bizarre. It turned out that Brendan Beirne’s photograph of James Packer attempting to fight David Gyngell, titled Bondi Biffo, was taken off display for the duration of the event. Packer is a close friend of Murdoch’s. Press freedom, remember. The caterers responsible for the dessert, sponsored by Bank of Melbourne, stacked wet plates on a priceless piece of furniture that had once belonged to colonist John Pascoe Fawkner, causing damage that required expensive conservation treatment. The hundred or more wooden chairs in the La Trobe Reading Room were moved and not returned at the end of the night, and the computer that controls all the computers in the room was disconnected and hidden away. People were pissed off. In its unintended, chaotic way, the day was a microcosm of all the forces working against the institution I loved, its desecration on full display.

I got a laugh yesterday by referring to Christian as ‘Melbourne’s Marie Antoinette’: ‘Let them eat “Compelling Digital Experiences”.’ But I won’t be satisfied until her head is in the tumbril.