The Benjamin Andrew Footpath Library
This is one library where you won't be told to ssshhhhh!
Sometimes you hear about ideas, which whilst so simple are yet so smart that you think to yourself why hasn't someone done this before? The Benjamin Andrew Footpath Library is one such idea.
Its primary purpose is to give Sydney's homeless and disadvantaged access to books that are distributed to hostels, shelters and halfway houses across the city. However, the charity takes its name, in part, from the wonderful ‘library' it opens once a week on a Woolloomooloo sidewalk opposite the Just Enough Food vans. Books donated by publishing companies, good corporate citizens and ordinary people like you and me are unceremoniously laid out on the footpath and the homeless help themselves. No bookshelves, no Dewey system, no librarians, no return dates, in fact no returns at all. Simply take any book that takes your fancy and do with it what you will.
The noise levels are somewhat different to your traditional library too, with some ‘members' enjoying a bit of a chat about the books they've been reading. Some keep to themselves while studiously avoiding eye contact and occasionally someone, having forgotten their medication and enjoyed one shandy too many, will be happy to give you all the eye contact you want while verbally tearing you a new rear passage.
It's their library and their rules.
The Footpath Library was founded by Sarah Garnett following the tragic death of a young friend of hers by the name of Benjamin Andrew. At a loss following his death, Sarah had started helping feeding the homeless at the Just Enough Faith food vans. One night she noticed a homeless person reading a book under a streetlight that he'd picked out from a rubbish bin. The following week she brought him along one of her own books and, as great ideas tend to do, it snowballed from their thanks to a lot of hard work from Sarah, her husband Shane and a number of volunteers.
The final words, however, I'll leave to one of the library's members, Michael, a superb artist, wonderful human being and homeless:
"The footpath library has been a saving grace. Apart from being down and out in Sydney I've been down and out in Paris and London with George Orwell, read about the homeless in Victorian London in Peter Ackroyd's "London: A Biography"', discovered Proust in the Edward Eager Lodge, hung around seedy ports in the South Pacific with Conrad's Lord Jim & reread one of my favourite books; Joyce Cary's "The Horses Mouth" with its patron saint of destitute artists Gully Jimson. I read a book on the Lives of the Saints & felt both inspired & humbled. I wandered through Europe in the 50's through the eyes of Lloyd Rees & his wonderful drawings and was glad I was sober after reading a biography of Charles Bukowski. Patrick Whites "Tree Of Man" made my troubles look pretty small & I learnt a little humility from reading the life of the Australian poet John Shaw Neilson."
For further information please visit http://www.footpathlibrary.org/
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David Westgate works in advertising (hey everybody has to make a living!) and has been working with the Footpath Library and as a volunteer for the Just Enough Faith food fans at Woolloomooloo since early 2008.
