‘Libraries made us authors of our fate’

The lives of author Thomas Keneally and former judge Michael Kirby have followed vastly different paths but both men share a burning, lifetime passion – public libraries.

Thomas Keneally at the State Library of NSW to celebrate the 30th birthday of Friends of Libraries Australia.

One man is the great patriarch of Australian literature, globally renowned yet still the embodiment of the common man; the other is the nation’s longest serving judge, international jurist, academic and global human rights advocate.

The lives of Thomas Keneally and Michael Kirby have followed vastly different paths but both men share a burning, lifetime passion – public libraries.

Last month the two met at the State Library of NSW to celebrate the 30th birthday of Friends of Libraries Australia, the national non-profit that advocates for the 13 million or so Australians, almost half the population, who are members of their local public libraries.

The two eminent patrons were joined by FOLA founder and executive director Daniel Ferguson, FOLA president Jack Goodman and NSW State Librarian Caroline Butler-Bowdon, who spoke of the huge influx of HSC students currently studying in the grand old reading room.

Naomi Radford, a librarian at Narrabri, in NSW’s North West Slopes, talked about bringing books to children in remote communities and the mobile service – using a four-wheel drive van – set up and helped by a FOLA grant.

For author Keneally, 89, who was accompanied by his grandson Rory, libraries were places of wonder where childhood imaginations could soar, full of treasures and reposi­tories of myriad untold stories for researchers and budding writers.

“As a kid I was relieved from the tedium of asthma in libraries and I travelled with Marco Polo, I flew with Biggles … libraries are places where you can find any text … OK, maybe not Lady Chatterley’s when you’re really young,” he said, laughing and excusing an uncharacteristic lisp due to a missing bottom denture.

“They’re places where, as a schoolkid, you didn’t have to be a brilliant opening Test batsman but where you could be a writer in your own time, in your own place.

“Why shouldn’t a kid in Oodnadatta interested in a history of the Romanovs find and read it … libraries are for kids who think above themselves.”

Keneally, the first Australian to win a Booker prize (for Schindler’s Ark in 1982), said libraries were the places he found ideas and inspiration for a great many of his books, where he fell upon and delved into great gems of Australian history.

These ranged from the “wonderfully stroppy” Miles Franklin’s experiences of her time as an orderly behind the Serbian lines in World War I to the life of Charles Dickens’s youngest son, Edward “Plorn” Dickens, sent to a remote Wilcannia station to work as a stockman – a story Keneally retold in The Dickens Boy (2022). He described his wonder at finding a ser­ies of “extraordinary” photo­graphic plates of Indigenous men, women and children recorded by the station’s owner, Frederic Bonney, in the mid-1860s.

Kirby, 85, FOLA’s founding patron, said his love of libraries began as a child at school and he could still remember the names of each librarian, starting at Summer Hill and North Strathfield Public and, later, Fort Street High.

At the University of Sydney, where Kirby began his law studies, he recalled the old law school library, then in Phillip Street, was so overheated and the ladders needed to reach the upper shelves were so high that he gave up and ventured off into the “beautiful old State Library of NSW” and never looked back.

“Public libraries have always played a big part in my life but also in the life of my family,” Kirby said.

“My father, who had all his marbles when he died at nearly 96 and was a most faithful user of the Concord, later Canada Bay, library, he was constantly photocopying articles from books and forever talking of the attentive, imaginative and painstaking service that he received at his local public library.”

Michael Kirby at the State Library of NSW.

As a Court of Appeal and later High Court judge, Kirby also was a member of the Library Council of NSW, National Book Council president and founding FOLA patron: “Being a judge meant we were very well looked after … which is what led me to delay my entry into the electronic generation. However, when I retired from the High Court – no commonwealth car and no special service in the court libraries – I went straight back to public libraries, supplemented by the miraculous new world of the internet.”

Kirby said his work in human rights, particularly in North Korea, showed him how vital access to information was to individual freedom and how it was the lifeblood of democracy and civil society. Reading widely, opening the mind to new ideas and pushing reading beyond a personal comfort zone was imperative for all, young and old.

“Libraries are citadels of idea,” Kirby said. “These are the reasons why I love public libraries and why we should support and fund them generously … the mind they expand could be your own … Today, the challenge for librarians is to fight against those that want to take some books off the shelves.”

More than 100 guests attended the celebrations, many of them long-term volunteer advocates for public libraries instrumental to FOLA expanding its remit through the years from delivering support to local friends groups, but also working with the LBW Trust to raise funds for some of Australia’s most disadvantaged country public libraries.