In praise of libraries

Some of the most important moments of my life have happened in buildings most people drive past without noticing.

Not parliaments. Not universities. Not courts. Libraries.

If you drew a map of my life, the twists in my thinking, the sudden expansions in what I thought possible, it wouldn’t be a map of countries visited or jobs held. It would be a map of reading rooms, local branches, and state libraries. The places where I first realised that I didn’t have to live my life as a perpetual beginner.

As a kid growing up in suburban Australia, I couldn’t have explained it this way. I just knew that there was this small brick building with automatic doors and faded posters where the world seemed to open up. You walked in from the heat or the rain, and suddenly you weren’t confined to your own little life anymore. You were in a space thick with other minds. Shelves upon shelves of evidence that people had been here before you, thinking, failing, dreaming, arguing.

Later, when I began trying to think in a more systematic way about what libraries mean, I realised that this very thing is what sets us apart as a species.

Other animals learn. Some of them learn impressively. A bird refines the way it builds a nest. A dolphin discovers a new trick for cornering fish. An ape figures out how to pry open a difficult nut with a rock. That knowledge can spread to a few others, through imitation, play, and shared habits, and in some species, it can even persist as a local tradition across generations. But it rarely piles up the way human knowledge does. It doesn’t become an inheritance that a stranger, born in a different place centuries later, can just pick up and use.

We did something different.

At some point in our deep past, human beings became dissatisfied with watching hard-won wisdom disappear every time someone died. So, we developed this strange habit of leaving durable traces for people we would never meet. First in the form of stories told around fires, then images painted on rock, then marks on clay, then ink on skins and paper, then sound recordings and videos and now data arrays whirring away in anonymous server farms. We found ways to fix knowledge outside the nervous system so it could survive the death of the individual brain that produced it.

That’s an extraordinary trick if you think about it. It means each of us is born into a world already full of answers that someone else bled for. We don’t have to re-discover the laws of thermodynamics personally. We don’t have to independently stumble upon agriculture or calculus or the germ theory of disease. We step into an already moving stream.

Through stories, drawings, language, books and digital archives, we pass on our discoveries, our insights, our failures, and our triumphs. Each generation doesn’t start from nothing; we start, as the cliché goes, on the shoulders of those who came before. That’s why science progresses instead of going in circles. It’s why art doesn’t just repeat itself forever, but evolves, mutates, loops back, pushes outwards. It’s why philosophy can revisit the same questions in new ways, deepening rather than merely recycling.

The sum of human knowledge expands, layer upon layer, across centuries, not smoothly, not fairly, but undeniably.

The ability to preserve knowledge isn’t the sole engine of civilisation, but it is the gearbox that lets effort compound. Take it away and societies don’t suddenly forget how to make fire; they pay a permanent tax in repeated mistakes and stalled improvements. Medicines have to be rediscovered because trial data vanished, bridges fail because lessons from earlier collapses were never written down, towns flood again because no one kept the old maps of where the river once ran. A species that can’t keep its own notes isn’t condemned to total ignorance, but it is condemned to waste its genius relearning what it already knew.

Because we record, preserve and share, we’re able to move forward. What one mind dreams, another can refine. What one generation painfully learns, another can treat as a starting point. What one community suffers through, another can, in theory, learn from without repeating every mistake in full.

In this sense, books, libraries and archives are not luxuries. They’re not cultural icing. They are the infrastructure of human progress. They’re the plumbing and wiring of our collective intelligence. They are what allow us to transcend the limits of our individual lifespans and participate in a larger conversation that stretches far beyond us.

And that’s why, for me, the defence of libraries is an argument about what it means to be human.

Because it is precisely this collective memory, this chain of recorded thought, that makes us uniquely ourselves. Other species live brilliantly within their moment. We, through our capacity to preserve knowledge, live in three tenses at once, in the present, but also in dialogue with the past and in anticipation of the future. Institutions like libraries are the mechanism for that time travel. They are the guardians of humanity’s memory and the guarantors that the work of one generation won’t vanish with it, but can continue to illuminate the path for those to come.

That’s the grand, civilisational view.

In my own very ordinary life, it has looked like this, being a bewildered twelve-year-old who found a book about philosophy in the wrong section of a small suburban library, reading it at the bus stop, and realising that the questions that kept me awake at night had names, and had been asked before. It has looked like sitting in the State Library of Victoria with my heart pounding at the sight of a vast reading room full of people voluntarily doing the least glamorous thing in contemporary culture, thinking quietly. It has looked like spending long days in regional libraries, watching the stream of people who come and go, and understanding, slowly, that these places are not just about books. They are about who gets to be part of the future.

To live in Australia is to live in a country where questions of memory are especially charged. We are a young nation in one sense and an ancient one in another. Our constitutions and parliaments and bureaucracies are recent creations. But the ground under those shiny buildings is saturated with stories that have been told, sung and danced for tens of thousands of years.

Our public libraries sit on that ground. Whether they acknowledge it or not, they are built on Country, amidst the ongoing storylines of hundreds of First Nations. It matters what stories you choose to house, and how.

One of the most moving shifts I’ve seen in libraries over the past couple of decades has been the increasing presence of Indigenous knowledge on the shelves and in the catalogues, language revitalisation materials, oral histories, collections of song and story, records of resistance and survival. Not collected about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, from the outside, but collected with and by them.

I’ve watched Aboriginal kids see their own language on a book spine, sometimes for the first time, and reach out for it with a curiosity and pride that’s hard to describe without lapsing into cliché. To find your own words, your own place names, your own histories in an institution that once held mostly stories about you, often inaccurate or hostile ones, is no small thing.

Those scenes have taught me something fundamental, libraries are not neutral. The decisions about what to collect, how to catalogue, whose stories to prioritise, what access conditions to honour, these are political and moral decisions. They can either reinforce the silences of the past or begin to repair them. They can either replicate the colonial pattern of taking and classifying, or they can support community-controlled initiatives that treat knowledge as living, relational, and governed by cultural law.

When libraries work in genuine partnership with First Nations communities, they become much more than repositories of books. They become sites of truth-telling. Places where sanitised versions of Australian history are quietly, steadily challenged by the presence of documents, testimonies and languages that refuse to fit the old myths.

That’s one dimension of their social importance. Another is far more prosaic and just as vital, libraries in contemporary Australia are some of the last truly public indoor spaces we have left.

We don’t talk about this enough. A lot of our social life has migrated into spaces where you are, fundamentally, a customer, shopping centres, cafés, gyms. You can linger, but only as long as you’re buying something or at least looking like you might. If you are broke, if you are homeless, if you are simply tired and wanting to be somewhere that doesn’t demand a transaction, your options are surprisingly few.

The library is an exception. You can walk in off the street, sit down, and stay. You don’t have to justify your presence. You don’t have to order anything. You don’t have to buy a ticket. On a hot summer day, it is one of the few air-conditioned spaces where a person on a low income can be both cool and treated with basic dignity. During bushfire smoke events and heatwaves, I’ve seen libraries function, unofficially, as refuges, kids sprawled asleep in the children’s section because it’s cooler than the flat at home; older people sitting in the newspaper area long after they’ve finished reading, reluctant to go back out.

If you want to see the social importance of libraries in contemporary Australia, don’t start by looking at the shelves. Look at the people.

I think of the single mum who uses the library as a safe, free place for her kids on a Saturday afternoon. She’s exhausted, worried about money, doing ten things at once. The library gives her a couple of hours where her children are occupied by something other than a screen or a shopping centre, where they are in contact with stories that don’t come packaged with advertising.

I think of the pensioner who can’t afford home internet but can afford a bus fare. For them, the library is how they access their MyGov account, check their bank balance, email their grandchildren. Without it, the much-vaunted “digital transformation” of government services would simply mean being locked out.

I think of the newly arrived migrant, or the refugee from a war zone, quietly sounding out English words in a corner, working through a language workbook that a librarian has recommended, using a computer to write a CV for a job. Sometimes you see them weeks later at a conversation class in a meeting room at the back, practising small talk with volunteers and other newcomers. The library is not solving every problem in their life. But it is a stable place in a bewildering new environment, a place where they can gather themselves.

I think of the university student whose parents never finished school, hunched over a laptop at a public library because their share house is too noisy and the campus is too far away. They’re writing a thesis on a topic nobody in their family has ever heard of, reading books nobody at their dinner table has ever discussed. The library quietly supplies them with the materials that make that leap possible.

And then there are the people whose lives don’t fit neatly into policy categories, the man who comes in every day and sits in the same chair, reading the same newspaper from front to back; the teenager who drifts in after school because home is not a safe place; the woman who charges her phone discreetly in a corner because she’s sleeping rough and there’s nowhere else to plug in.

These are not “users” in an abstract sense. They are the raw material of our future. How they are treated in these spaces, whether they are welcomed, tolerated, ignored, or pushed out, is a quiet test of who we are as a society.

And at the heart of all this are the librarians.

As a child, I thought of librarians as slightly intimidating figures who shushed you if you were too loud and knew where everything was. They had an aura of authority, they could, with a few keystrokes, find the book you needed, which made them seem almost magical.

As an adult, my admiration has only grown, but for different reasons. I’ve seen librarians doing work that looks, on the surface, like customer service but is really a kind of everyday social care. They help people fill out complex forms for government services they barely understand themselves because the frameworks change so often. They sit beside older Australians and guide their trembling fingers through the process of setting up an email account, so they’re not cut off from their grandchildren. They show jobseekers how to craft a CV and navigate online application portals that seem designed to break your spirit. They guide nervous teenagers towards books that might make them feel less alone in their questions about gender, sexuality, identity.

And in an era of conspiracies, misinformation and manufactured outrage, librarians have become, again, often without recognition, frontline workers in the defence of reason. They teach media literacy without calling it that. They help people distinguish between a crank site and a reputable source. They construct reading lists that give citizens a fighting chance of understanding the issues on which they’re about to vote.

It’s fashionable to talk about “fighting misinformation” in terms of tech companies and fact-checkers. We forget the quiet power of someone at a reference desk saying, “If you’re interested in that topic, you might want to start here,” and sliding across a carefully chosen book, or walking someone through a database instead of leaving them alone with a search engine tuned for engagement, not truth.

Of course, none of this happens for free. Maintaining a library, let alone building a new one, costs money. It requires rates and taxes to be collected and then spent on something that won’t deliver a dividend in the usual sense. When budgets are tight, the line item labelled “culture” or “library services” is often the first to be questioned.

Do we really need this many branches? Can’t we cut weekend hours? Do we have to stock all those obscure books nobody borrows anymore? In a digital age, surely a couple of computers in a community centre can do much the same job?

I have sat in rooms where this line of reasoning is advanced with practised reasonableness. It sounds efficient. It sounds modern. It sounds like common sense.

Every time I hear it, I think of that younger version of myself wandering, a bit lost, into a local library and finding a world that knew nothing of my background and yet still welcomed me. I think of the kids in regional towns where the closure of a library branch is not an inconvenience but a genuine loss of one of the only free, structured, hopeful places in their lives. I think of the person leaving prison who walks into a library to print a form, and finds, unexpectedly, a librarian who treats them with the same politeness as everyone else.

When we reduce libraries to “book-lending services” or “places with computers”, we miss almost everything that matters about them. They are social infrastructure in the deepest sense, the networks of spaces and relationships that let a community actually function as a community, not just a collection of individuals sharing a postcode.

Social infrastructure is what holds us up when other systems fail. When the housing market leaves people in cars and tents, the library is where they go during the day to be indoors and human. When the education system fails to engage a kid, the library is often where a quiet, bookish child discovers a different way of learning. When digital government assumes everyone has a laptop, smartphone and calm place to use it, the library supplies the missing hardware and the missing calm.

We don’t ask roads to justify themselves in terms of immediate profit. We don’t close hospitals because the patients are poor. We recognise these things as basic infrastructure for a decent society. I believe we should think about libraries in much the same way. Not as optional niceties for book-lovers, but as fundamental to the project of living together with any measure of dignity and intelligence.

Of course, libraries have to evolve. They have always evolved. The transition from scrolls to codices, from manuscript to print, from print to digital catalogues, none of this was smooth. Librarians and archivists have been quietly wrestling with technological change for centuries. Today’s challenges around licensing, paywalled journals, streaming media, and digital preservation are just the latest chapter.

What worries me is not that libraries will fail to adapt technologically. They are, in my experience, remarkably good at adopting new tools while keeping faith with their core mission. What worries me is that we will, collectively, forget what that mission is.

The mission is not to be trendy makerspaces, although 3D printers and coding clubs have their place. It is not to compete with cafés, although I have enjoyed many an illicit coffee over a library book. 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.

The person a I am today rests very simply on the fact that other people built libraries before I was born and decided that a kid like me could walk into them without paying, without proving anything, without being turned away because of where I came from.

They believed, perhaps without ever putting it into words, that the future deserved the best of what the past had discovered, and that the inheritance of our species should be available to more than just the already privileged.

I owe them. And I owe the librarians who, in small acts of everyday hospitality, brought me into that inheritance. The ones who helped me track down a book I knew the story of but had forgotten its name. The ones who turned a blind eye when I overstayed closing time.

So, when I argue for libraries, I’m speaking out of gratitude and out of something like fear. Gratitude, because I know what these places have done for me and for countless others. Fear, because I can see how easily they can be hollowed out without anyone quite noticing until it’s too late.

A library rarely dies in a single dramatic moment. It dies by a thousand cuts. A staff position not replaced here. A reduction in acquisitions there. Weekend hours trimmed. Outreach programs cancelled. Roof repairs postponed. A creeping sense that the building is shabby, the shelves stagnant, the staff stretched thin. And then, when usage finally drops, as it inevitably will if you make a place less welcoming and less useful, someone points to the numbers and says, “See? People don’t really want libraries anymore.”

I don’t accept that story. I’ve seen too much evidence to the contrary, in city branches overflowing with students and in tiny regional libraries that function as de facto community centres. People vote with their feet when you give them a well-resourced, well-run library. Even in an age of smartphones and streaming, they come, not despite the screens in their pockets, but partly because they need a counterweight to them.

When I walk into a library now, I try to pay attention. Not just to the shelves, but to the whiteboards listing upcoming events, free legal advice sessions, tax-time help, story time in multiple languages, book clubs, homework clubs, mental health information sessions. I look at the faces behind the desks and the faces bent over screens. I remind myself that this is what democracy looks like when it’s not giving speeches or holding elections, a room full of people, of all ages and backgrounds, quietly exercising their right to know, to learn, to imagine.

Libraries, at their best, are where we practice being the kind of society we say we are, open, fair, curious, committed to truth, willing to face our history, unwilling to abandon our vulnerable. They are far from perfect. They carry the scars and blind spots of the cultures that create them. They can be stuffy, exclusionary, slow to change. But they can also change, and they have been changing, especially in Australia, in ways that give me hope.

I sometimes think that if you want a quick, non-theoretical measure of a country’s health, you could do worse than this, walk into its public libraries. Are they open? Are they busy? Do they feel welcoming to a single mum, an Elder, a teenager in a hoodie, a newly arrived refugee, a person sleeping rough, a kid with a head full of questions? Are there books in the languages people actually speak? Are there stories from the people whose land you’re on? Is there a sense, however faint, that the future is being quietly prepared for here?

My attachment to libraries is about a concrete, stubborn belief that we should not throw away the one thing that has allowed us, as a species, to inch our way out of ignorance, our cumulative memory, made accessible to more and more people, in more and more places.

To walk into a library is to walk into the physical embodiment of that belief. A modest building in a shopping strip or a grand sandstone edifice in a capital city, both are, in their different ways, declarations, we will remember; we will share; we will give those who come after us the chance to start somewhere better than zero.

For me, that is what makes a library sacred, in the only sense of that word I really understand. It 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.

We can choose to fund that conversation, to house it, to open the doors wide, especially for those who have been most persistently left outside. Or we can let it wither. I know which choice made me who I am. And I know which choice I want us, as a country, to make.