Richard Neville

It's okay.

They're actually, in many ways, public libraries are a surprisingly recent kind of idea.

The first library in Australia was probably 1825 or so.

They tended to be religious tracts.

There were things called circulating libraries, so blokes would bring out huge...

containers, if you like, of books and then they'd open them up and you could pay a subscription and take some books out, tended to be novels.

This library was established in 1869 because they tended to be controlled by middle class people and the idea of a public library was that these were resources for the workers to educate themselves.

So there was quite a kind of didactic purpose behind libraries.

And when this library opened in 1869, it took over the subscription library and it got rid of the fiction collection.

because that was dangerous to morals.

All those ideas.

All those ideas.

And in fact, apparently visitation dropped by 12% because they got rid of the fiction.

But it's really only in the 1930s, the public libraries that we know and all love began to kind of spring up.

So there were only really before 1839 or so in New South Wales, only two public libraries.

There were mechanic schools, libraries, parliamentary libraries, circulating libraries, all sorts of other libraries.

But in terms of libraries that were supported by the state or by local governments and the state, they really came on after.

And then obviously there was a Library Act in 1939.

But post Second World War is when the major public library boom came on.

Yeah, it's not the world's most cheery book, but it's a Holocaust, but it starts in Germany and in Berlin and with a