Canberra prides itself on being Australia’s most highly educated city — yet its public library holdings are shallower and narrower than they were a generation ago.
Public libraries, in city and government services minister Tara Cheyne’s words today, are now seen as “more than books and other items”; they are “about connection, learning, and community”.
“More than books and other items” — but if not books and other items, what, precisely, are libraries for?
Libraries ACT’s collection has more than 2.5 million physical items (including books, DVDs, audiobooks, magazines, and music) — but there are some astonishing gaps.
Writers who should be fundamental to a library collection are absent.
Libraries ACT do not hold any of George Bernard Shaw’s plays in print. (There are audiobooks of two productions, one set of study notes, and a Canberra Rep program.) There are two audiobooks of Noël Coward plays and a recent biography. For Brecht: a 1979 edition of The Threepenny Opera and an audiobook of The Life of Galileo. There are no plays by Ben Jonson, Racine, Molière, Sheridan, Strindberg, Lorca, J. B. Priestley, or Tom Stoppard, and neither Chekhov nor Pirandello in English.
Poetry is likewise a wasteland: Shelley only on audiobook, and no volumes of Byron, Tennyson, or Browning.
No copies of Fielding’s Tom Jones, nor Tristram Shandy.
Terrance Dicks’s Doctor Who novelisations, which helped introduce a generation of boys to reading, are now entirely on audio.
Popular twentieth-century writers have been culled. Reginald Hill’s literary crime novels (the last of which appeared in 2010) are only held as audiobooks or DVDs, not in print. There are nearly 30 Ruth Rendells on audio — and five in print (including a book about cats). There are a dozen Simenons — four in large print, two in Italian, and four audiobooks. There are none of George Macdonald Fraser’s Flashman books, and Tom Sharpe is not represented at all. Yet there should be print copies of all these; there used to be.
Libraries ACT, in fact, no longer seems to centre a reading culture.
They once held works and editions going back to the 1940s and 1950s, an irreplaceable collection accumulated over half a century, freely available for anyone to borrow. In the late 1990s, as a teenager, I could read my way through the corpus (or corpses) of mid-century detective fiction. That would be impossible for a teenager today. At the turn of the millennium, Libraries ACT closed its stack collection and disposed of hundreds, if not thousands, of books.
In place of depth and continuity, libraries have become community facilities with dance and yoga spaces, recording studios, kitchens, and meeting rooms.
Libraries, it seems, are now justified by social outcomes — not by the preservation and transmission of written culture.
But libraries’ most important social outcomes are literacy, knowledge, culture, curiosity, imagination. Their purpose is for ordinary people to read deeply and widely, not just the popular writers of the day but to develop their own taste, and to educate themselves far beyond the syllabus, using public resources.
The collapse of Canberra’s second-hand bookshop ecosystem has also been a blow. Once they abounded: in Mawson, Hawker, Curtin, Ainslie, Chifley, Kingston, Civic, and Fyshwick. But Gaslight, Beyond Q, Winch Books, Barry’s Books, Miriam Brown’s, Beaky’s, and Kanga Books (to name but a few) have all closed and disappeared.
This month, the ANU became a university campus without a bookshop when Harry Hartog closed there. Since Alexander Fax Booksellers shut their Mawson shop to move online last month, the number of second-hand bookshops in Canberra can now be counted on the fingers of one hand: Canty’s in Fyshwick, Book Lore in Lyneham, Lifeline’s Book Lovers Lane, and a sprinkling of op shops.
We have seen the impact of that absence.
Canberra school students’ literacy levels are worse than they were two decades ago, the ABC reported in 2023: a third of 15-year-olds fell below the national proficient standard for reading.
And yet this is Canberra, the nation’s education capital, the city with Australia’s highest proportion of graduates.
If we are to be an educated city, then public libraries with rich collections are a fundamental civic good — a legacy handed down over generations.
As Roger Chao wrote in an AIMN article this month: “The mission is to hold and share our cumulative inheritance of knowledge and imagination in a way that is as generous, as democratic, as truthful and as humane as we can make it. … [A library] is a place where the dead speak, where the living listen and answer back, and where the not-yet-born are quietly being equipped, whether they know it or not, to join the conversation.”
