Library in Bloom: the disintegration and regeneration of a book collection

I count nine book bays. Seven shelves each. From floor to ceiling with not a bit of wall to spare. There are brimming boxes under a table which takes up much of the floor space; will I get to them? We’ll see. At least three other alcoves elsewhere in the building sprout volumes: one with discards in the recess near the entrance, and one in each of the two residency rooms – Connie called these the reference collections. Actually, make that four: there’s a trolley of books in one corner of the library itself; part of somebody’s work in progress, Rowena told me at my induction.

Here, in what looks like the living room of a house on a suburban thoroughfare in Marrickville NSW, is the deaccessioned, salvaged, reconfigured library formerly attached to Australia’s national arts funding body, the Australia Council for the Arts.

Eighty shelves all up (or more, or slightly less), as arrayed as planting rows. I remember the first time I encountered the concept of a relocated garden. My friend, preparing to move from the rental property she and her love had shared, announced she was taking the garden they had grown together with her – it wasn’t so many years ago. Hearing her describe her plans was a powerful revelation for me, a moment when something counterintuitive interrupts reality as the new reality: a garden isn’t necessarily rooted where it grows. And this bookstock, assembled federally, is now here in this place:

Frontyard is a Not-Only-Artist Run Initiative that currently takes the form of a pro-active, flexible space for practical skills-sharing, community cultural engagement and critical research. Entirely community-funded, our aim is to challenge, facilitate and nurture collaborations between passionate people and to build a more resilient and sustainable creative community for the future. Frontyard has a composite nature of critical, practical and analytical tools from film making, journalism, agriculture, music making, sound making, publishing, art and design, activism, accounting and teaching, to name a few.

I am at Frontyard – 228 Illawarra Road, land of the Cadigal Wangal people of the Eora nation – to chronicle its library using the library itself, drawing on the books to evoke, contemplate and complicate the story of the collection. But the diverse ethos quoted here (from Frontyard’s book Conversation Piece: A Frontyard Primer; uncatalogued) alerts me to sources in addition to the textual. What can I find in the infrastructural, interpersonal, digital and horticultural domains of this place that will augment the narrative of this transplanted, re-planted collection? On arriving I write a list of how I might begin, and its range is directly inspired by the kind of expansive, holistic philosophy encountered when one experiences Frontyard in any of its manifestations (in my case, online first of all):

• Start with the collection?
• Sample Frontyard marginalia?
• Muck in for cataloguing?
• Social media post?
• A cup of tea?

‘Frontyard marginalia’? The place teems with it:

With its lustily employed blackboards and whiteboards, its post-it notes and scribbled provocations on walls, windows and doors, Frontyard seems to have translated the concept of a ‘brainstorm’ into the form of a house. The Frontyard community and visiting artistic and research residents have certainly left their mark. In another book in its library (Attiwill, VA 709.945 MAK), I read the proposition that for an Artist Run Initiative (ARI) space itself is ‘an outcome of production, or practice’.

Frontyard has fashioned itself as ‘Not-Only’ an ARI, but it certainly shares the ‘active engagement in the production of space’ which ‘forms the grit’ of the activities of ARIs. Frontyard has a worm farm, kitchen and workshop; facilities which afford the ‘continual negotiation’ with place that is characteristic of ARIs in Attiwill’s account. There is an actual garden, site of working bees and source of produce for open house dinners or residents’ lunch (when I was there the sweet potato leaves were the business). There is a hammock grove.

the phrase ‘the silence of the world’ stills
you like the breeze of a hammock slow
and quiet, a cool white feather across
your sweaty neck, or the fluff of a dandelion
floating past an orifice or two

Throughout joanne burns’ poem ‘footnotes of a hammock’ (821 BUR) language permeates the world, or fails to; a phrase like ‘the silence of the world’ visits the mind to blaze the consciousness with affect or remain powerless and inert. In the stanza from which I’ve just quoted, the first, it placates: ‘you could lose your temper / but something gives you one last chance’. I never used the hammocks while I was at Frontyard, in June. I’m a Sydneysider now, through and through, and Boyd’s The Australian Ugliness (720.994 BOY) pulls no punches as to the shrillness of our seasonal temperaments:

Sydney is a summer city, tensed for action round an outdoor life. Every year, when the thermometer drops, winter comes as a bitter unexpected turn of fate.

The Primer again. Throughout my time on site Connie dropped by a couple of times with her dog, to build a desk by the library window. Frontyard has a very active arts residency program, and like other residents I took the garbage out on Tuesdays. Later a group of us came together to select books for a book exchange with Enjoy Public Art Gallery in New Zealand, and someone bought biscuits, prepared to their mother’s trusty Women’s Weekly recipe. Other resources that supported participants throughout the day were recognised and itemised in the Memorandum of Understanding drawn up for the NZ art space: Frontyard grown and harvested pumpkins, sage tea, haggling, a long list, a short list, scales and a stamp. Frontyard doesn’t have board members – it has ‘janitors’, a reflection of a choice not to direct activity, but rather act in service of. I quickly realised I would do well to consider the hammocks with greater attention to the sense of integration their presence conveys. During my two weeks in Marrickville and subsequently, words which had never borne any relation to one another in my mind paired and bloomed like a series of soft depth charges: disruption and domesticity, innovative and communitarian, fierce and folky. It is to this place the disestablished Australia Council library has arrived.

---

In 1978 the Australia Council proclaimed that its collection was ‘regarded as the most comprehensive arts library in the country’, with a key part to play in extending the Council’s role ‘far beyond grant-making’. Since the Council’s establishment in the early 1970s, the library served staff, the arts community and the general public. A 1983 Australia Council directory (026.7002594 DIR) listed its collection areas as arts administration, community arts, Aboriginal arts, architecture and design, crafts, film and video, literature, performing arts, and visual arts. As well as acquiring books and journals and facilitating access to databases, Australia Council annual reports show the library carried exhibition catalogues and the Council’s archival films. It collected and distributed Council publications including reports, research papers, newsletters and brochures. The library produced and updated guides and bibliographies on an array of topics including prizes, arts organisations, multicultural arts and cultural policy, and created and later indexed a daily pressing clipping service of arts news and reviews. It responded to reference queries, and facilitated interlibrary loans for those residing outside of Sydney. In short its life within and beyond the organisation was rich.

The collection has been relocated several times. Over decades the library lodged in North Sydney (168 Walker Street), in Redfern (181 Lawson Street), in Surry Hills (372 Elizabeth Street), moving as the Council moved. It is at its current premises in Marrickville, now decoupled from the Council, that I read Rosemary Creswell (820.8 INN) describe a visit she made as a young woman to a Marrickville granny flat as

probably as far west as we ever travelled during those years.

Is this the farthest west the library has gone? Before it landed west it went south – far south – an almost unimaginably dense freight of paper, spines and board that formed part of a work in Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA)’s 2015 exhibition ‘Technologism’. Artist Benjamin Forster negotiated with the Australia Council to take the library to use in ‘Slow fires’ – an installation of the piled-up library books accompanying e-books generated from excerpts of bestselling iTunes genre fiction. Forster had learned about the decommissioning when he contacted the Council to enquire about undertaking a placement for his postgraduate diploma in information studies.

‘The library at the Australia Council was collapsing and my peer group didn’t know about it, or that it existed’, he tells me. ‘The intention was to stall and broadcast its existence via the exhibition, to then decide what to do with it. Discard it, pass it on, set up a space.’ In particular Forster felt the exhibition presented an opportunity to reflect on the closure: ‘This has happened; is it relevant?’.

There is a perfectly valid sense in which the answer is: maybe not. The Australia Council reportedly decommissioned the library ‘due to very low usage levels over a sustained period’. Curator Charlotte Day characterised ‘Slow fires’ in terms of the ‘changing landscape of book publishing and storage’, but of the print books specifically observed:

The overall impression is of tangibility and peculiarity.

Forster himself describes the use of the library in the installation as ‘basically set dressing’.

But the exhibition did prove to be a useful half-year buffer for Forster to contemplate the possibilities and practicalities of what to do with what was, after all, ‘a fuck load of books’. Day helped ‘massively’ by temporarily storing them. Synergy and providence seem to have been in play when the connection that would secure the books long-term was forged through protests against 2015 Federal government funding cuts to the Australia Council. It was here Forster met Clare Cooper, and both became involved in the establishment of Frontyard with four other co-founders (Connie Anthes, Rei Cheetham, Alexandra Crosby, Jehan Kanga). When Frontyard launched in early 2016, it was with a library in situ.

The new incarnation of the collection as a non-lending library maintained by a small arts organisation and supported by volunteers is a future that would have been hard for anyone connected to the library during its Australia Council days to imagine; when the collection was a different kind of special library to the kind it is now. Special libraries run the gamut from medical libraries to music collections, from parliament to prison. The category encompasses art libraries and the libraries of government agencies, collection types which intersect with the lineage of the Frontyard library. These examples are from Peter Biskup (uncatalogued), and from him I learn that an important characteristic of special libraries is that they

are particularly vulnerable to reduced funding when their parent body runs into financial difficulties.

One of the first volumes I pick up at Frontyard, the 1991 Parliament report ‘Australia as an Information Society’ (021.0094), intimates one mechanism of this vulnerability — something that at least partially accounts for the distance between the giddy heights of the Australia Council’s 1978 proclamation of its collection’s significance, and the finance section of its 2014–15 annual report, which dispassionately records that

The Library was decommissioned in 2015 and has been written off.

That mechanism is neglect. The Parliament report contends that

access to information through the library system is the nub of the information society. It is as important to our development as our port facilities, our transport system, our banking system. With another ten years of neglect it may not be recoverable.

Elsewhere the report identifies a ‘history of neglect’ of Australia’s library system, and suggests that it ‘continues to be a neglected area of national development’. It characterises Gough Whitlam’s inaugural Kenneth Myer Lecture on national collecting institutions as painting ‘a largely sorry tale of neglect and disinterest’. In this context Benjamin Forster’s assessment that the Australia Council library was ‘neglected and then killed through neglect’ is a sobering observation for public goods everywhere. The Australia Council library might be a case study of the end point of the trajectory described in 1991: part of a national tradition of obsolescence wrought through cumulative inattention in the face of other pressures and priorities. ‘As an organisation we are super light’, Forster says of Frontyard, and there is much to contemplate in the fact that it is to such a group – ‘this super-precarious organisation’, in his words – the responsibility of caretaking a former national resource has devolved, and its preservation due.

And so the collection at Frontyard is, in a real sense, waste: it’s a reflection, Forster suggests, of ‘what’s not cared for … or the discards’. Upon deaccession, the Australia Council placed parts of its collection with other libraries, and some books were informally redistributed. What remained came to Marrickville via Melbourne. Increasing the visibility of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander authors in the collection was a priority for Frontyard, and books published or funded by the Council were retained, but to fit into the space available other parts had to peel off: doubles, Who’s Who_s, an entire Dewey point about arts management (‘Hilarious’, Forster says. Think dated manuals on attracting sponsorship and how to run a gallery). Forster has journals and some literature titles stored at his house; he has pulped other books to make paper. It’s impossible not to notice the variations on the theme of _garbage associated with this collection: different intensities and degrees of excess, waste fractals, book compost. The theme is embedded in the very infrastructure of the place: the shelves themselves are a donation from another library, no longer needed because the books which used to sit on them are gone.

So then, ‘trash’. A link to an article posted on one of Frontyard’s Slack channels relates the tale of Turkish garbage collectors who started a public library,

full of books that were originally destined to be put into landfill.

Originally intended for friends and family of the workers, the library is now open to the public, and is reported to be a great success: cyclists drop in during rides, children use it for study, schoolteachers request books. Like Frontyard, the Ankara library has repurposed books within a reassembled book collection — it has intercepted volumes bound for discard and restored them to their original function. Through such an intervention both organisations have realised what I increasingly take to be the most exemplary, indeed radical, capacity of libraries. In Greenhalgh’s (027.441 GRE) words:

Libraries have, since their inception, been bucking the narrow commercial cultural industry trends (i.e. to maximise sell through markets of cultural products) and have benefited from the fact that unlike other products, cultural products are not used up in the process of consumption.

The story of the Turkish library returned often to me after the time I spent in Frontyard —not only because of the commonality of the two institutions, but also because of how they differed. I’d been working through Frontyard’s library shelves one day when I heard voices. When on site at Illawarra Road, residents are invited to put out an ‘Open’ sign if they wish to welcome visitors.

Now a couple with backpacks were murmuring to each other as they surveyed books in the recess by the entrance while I lurked in the hallway like a creep. What were they doing here? Was it the promise of a library that had enticed them on a quiet weekday morning? I didn’t get the chance to ask. They ventured no further and lingered no longer than a few moments. There were no other spontaneous visitors when I put the sign out at other times.

The incident crystallised a disconnect I was starting to perceive between the Frontyard library and that mass of individuals who might be inadequately characterised as the ‘general public’. The context of such a divide is something Benjamin Forster is acutely aware of. I’ve come to realise Forster is not only the library’s custodian and advocate, but also its greatest sceptic, and expert and bravura interpreter. The way libraries involve ‘an aesthetics of wanting to be seen to care for knowledge’ and can be used to signal status, particularly among the middle and upper classes, are matters he has come to reflect on more frequently of late. With this lens the power of a library like Frontyard’s lies in what it represents rather than what it holds or what it is. ‘We could burn the library tomorrow’, Forster says, ‘and people wouldn’t care, or they’d care about the burning of it, not the loss of it’.

In sum my sense is this: while both Frontyard and the Ankara library have salvaged books in service of assembling a new book collection, Frontyard’s library is probably not as amenable for use by the ‘general public’ as the library at Ankara appears to be. A collection thus amenable would be served by regular opening hours; a program of ongoing acquisition which matched the scale and subject specialisation of the original bookstock; consistent classification. Frontyard library’s opening hours change regularly as announced on its website (the opening hours posted for the week in which I write this are Wednesday 6:00-8:00pm), and by appointment or when Frontyard is open to the public for events. Its acquisitions policy focusses on publications produced by, related to, or useful for the Frontyard community. The classification numbers given for individual records on the online catalogue (for example) are

taken from Trove and may not correspond to the number on the book within the collection at Frontyard.

The Dewey numbers I have been citing throughout this essay, moreover, are not necessarily any more useful for determining shelf location than those supplied online. They are the numbers from the stickers of the books themselves, a remnant of what is surely thousands of hours of Australia Council library staff labour, and while the Frontyard collection is organised at the level of 000s, 300s, 900s and so on, this sequencing is rough and books are not consecutive in all instances. All of this is to simply recognise that there are certain impediments to using the Frontyard collection which don’t seem to be present in the case of the Turkish library; which wouldn’t face users of Australian state and local libraries nor indeed the collection in its former life with the Australia Council.

Identifying what the Frontyard collection is or does no longer has the special virtue of being able to newly illuminate the past and the present. For the first the exercise accentuates the labour, expertise and accomplishments of the Australia Council and its library staff, deployed over decades, while the collection was established, managed, and grew. Further, it recognises the resourcing required to develop and sustain a collection that supports a certain level of public access. Second, it creates space to reflect on what is distinct in Frontyard’s custodianship of the library. Up until this point I’ve told the story of the re-planted collection by picking out a way using the words of the books themselves, a garden path in books. But another kind of path is needed going forward: a more agile and glancing itinerary of the activities, inflections, inclinations and commitments which differentiate Frontyard’s stewardship from the Australia Council’s, and shows how Frontyard imagines, frames, and offers the collection anew.

---

There is book making. I’d been aware of the Frontyard publication Removed from Collection before I arrived, looking out for it from day one. Turns out it was easy to find among the aged volumes. It is a beautiful book, spare in design, slick as a snooker ball.

Lithe, glossy and new, Removed from Collection begs to be picked up, paged through, handled. It is not the only gorgeous book Frontyard has made and then acquired for its collection: there is also Conversation Piece, developed out of Conversation Piece: A Frontyard Primer, and Frontyard Bush Telegraph from a project at Cementa 2017. But Removed from Collection is the title that engages in the most intimate interplay with the library. It is a catalogue featuring images of covers from the ephemera collection; ‘spineless works’ or older, miscellaneous, sometimes worn publications that were once or are still stored in boxes under the Frontyard library table. It was created using Book Machine at Volume: Another Art Book Fair at Art Space in Woolloomooloo in October 2017, and in an online journal entry Frontyard janitor Luke Bacon recounts the contributions made by Frontyard participants and Fair attendees, which saw about 80 works captured for Removed from Collection and over 200 works in total processed on the day. So collective cataloguing, as well as book making. (Frontyard continues to convene group cataloguing sessions, and its online catalogue invites contributions.)

Bacon describes a Frontyard strategy which informed its involvement in the Art Book Fair – to ‘prioritise activities that will feed energy in rather than require a big expenditure that feeds some external beneficiary’ – and a tactic for achieving this, which is to ‘focus on something we’d like to do anyway’. Collective cataloguing; book making; and the spirit and practice of sustainability. The title of the volume – Removed from Collection – is derived from the stamp which appears on the cover alongside an Australia Council library barcode. It evokes the Australia Council decommissioning when in fact the book captures works which are in the process of being reintegrated into the Frontyard collection. Critically reflexive (and ironic) library engagements, then.

Frontyard library’s online catalogue draws bibliographic data from Trove. For the most part the catalogue simply transmits information contained in the database, but it translates Trove data on Australian library holdings into a new field, ‘uniqueness’. Critically reflexive library engagements; and critical library praxis. A Trove record that indicates a publication is held by Liverpool City Library, for example, converts this into a piece of metadata in the Frontyard catalogue which reports that the book is held by one other Australian library only. Books collected by multiple libraries are reported accordingly (365 other libraries for the Macquarie Dictionary!). There are caveats – the measure was only calculated once at the time of cataloguing and has not been updated, and it is reliant on how complete Trove data is for any one title. It’s also noted in the Frontyard catalogue that items ‘unique to the Australia Council collection have been offered to the National Library of Australia in Canberra’, but the critical importance of Frontyard’s preservation work, and of the Australia Council before it, is strongly suggested by the 90 or so titles for which an absolute uniqueness value is given: ‘There are 0 copies of this book in other libraries and 0 copies of this specific edition’.

Frontyard’s book exchange with New Zealand’s Enjoy Public Art Gallery is described on Frontyard’s Slack channel as ‘a great opportunity to support Enjoy in bringing attention to the increasing hostility towards libraries and public spaces generally’ – so, critique. Critique; and collaboration; and inter-institutional dialogue. The group which gathered in August last year to select the books for exchange made their choices guided by a dozen rationales. These included ‘representations of New Zealand’, ‘exhibition theory and management’, ‘provocation for anticipated exchange’, and ‘what would be sad to lose - “heartbreak” collection’, but ultimately this assembled minor collection seemed to most saliently act as

a reflection of the time we spent together.

Co-presence; collaboration. The actual criterion for the final selection, however, was resolutely physical:

All Decentred exchanges must be reciprocal,
with the simple requirement that the collection
must equal
20cm shelf space
or a weight of 5kg

Reciprocity; foregrounding the matter and materiality of books. It is part of a Frontyard sensibility which is open to artists and curators using its books as raw material, in the manner of supplies or props; presenting the physical collection itself as a resource for making and for meaning. This manner of materialising books was in evidence in Forster’s ‘Slow fires’, and more recently in the exhibition ‘Do You Know This Feeling?’ curated by Sebastian Henry-Jones at Firstdraft, which included books from the Frontyard library in addition to others suggested by the exhibiting artists. In initial discussions with Frontyard about collaborative possibilities, Henry-Jones writes on Slack:

I’m interested by the history of the library – its decommissioning from the Australia Council, accordingly its fragmented nature and the careful way with which these fragments are being used and revitalised in a community context. The care involved in such initiatives – the exchange with Enjoy in NZ for example – is particularly important to me. The library itself has become a medium through which people come together at Frontyard (the cataloguing initiative being an example of this), and this I find quite radical regardless of the content of many of the books.

Collective cataloguing again, but even more powerful is the articulation Henry-Jones gives to the library as medium; a creative, generative, communal catalyst.

---

In feeling along a path of these activities, inflections, inclinations and commitments – from book-making, to a commitment to sustainability, to a facilitation of collaborative practice – I do not mean to suggest that such orientations were entirely absent when the collection was with the Australia Council, nor absent from the philosophies and practices of other libraries today. Equally it is clear that the Frontyard library is also consulted in a straightforward manner to simply access and utilise the content (to enlist Henry-Jones’ word) of its collection. But cumulatively I think they act to constitute a library which invites more novel kinds of engagement. Rather than focus on how patrons might better extract information from its holdings, the Frontyard library seems to encourage users to dig in different ways. What seeds and cuttings are on offer, and how might you use them? What kind of compost is generated by your activities, and what do you do with it? What role does deterioration play in what you do?

For Benjamin Forster the library is ‘central’ to Frontyard as a whole. ‘It’s the library and the garden’, he says, and it is no surprise that a library in a place like Frontyard aspires to the condition of a garden, looking to

project the collection into life 🌿

This is this pairing I have in mind when I finally understand that one of Frontyard’s alcoves is showing me IRL that, sometimes, life effortlessly and lyrically stages itself for us, without the need for any intervention at all:

There may be no better representation of the animating care that Sebastian Henry-Jones has remarked on than this, a likely incidental storage solution for gardening tools in front of one of the residency room’s reference collections. Throughout its long and storied life this collection has been tended to, thriving on different modalities and, sometimes, degrees of care. In its latest incarnation there has been a proliferation of activity around innovative and meaningful repurposing of waste. And the cycle continues: I’ve recently learned the Britannicas too have had their day, facing imminent disposal as part of ongoing work to decolonise the collection. Trash.

---

And yet treasure.

I hitched and worked my way around Australia for two glorious years, using on the way, a succession of country libraries which were my mental and moral sustenance in that period. I still have the complete poems of Longfellow which I forgot to return to the Singleton Municipal Library in the Hunter Valley. But those libraries made a very deep impression on me.

Thus John Levett (028.0996 BOO) recounts his young adulthood and progression to a career in libraries – and here it is my consciousness which deliciously ignites. For those in thrall to the printed word, its leaves of grass, libraries can close and open luscious, ardent spirals of resonance and signification. Here in Marrickville, NSW, a vision of Singleton Public – my childhood library, my first library – unfolds before my eyes. It is a library never consecrated in print by any book I’ve come across, described from a time before I was born. The words cast a ravishing loop for the essay I am writing now, an arc already augured by a method which respects cycles, as Frontyard’s Primer sets out:

Sample from the real world
Find corollaries in the archive
Add to the archive

In the end it is to do no more than what the cycle compels:

You walk along this winding path. It seems to flow and re-flow incessantly … creating itself as you walk over it.

These words are from a piece by Clara Liosatos (823.01083 WAI) in a book published in 1999 with support from the Australia Council. They describe the course I’ve travelled from the library where I began to this salvaged collection, a way paved with books that belong to all of us.

Nine book bays. Seven shelves each, as arrayed as planting rows. The paths that are forged; the way the leaves fall.

---

Michelle Kelly was a resident at Frontyard Projects in 2018.

---

Bibliography

All printed material quoted in this essay is from Frontyard’s library. The author was given access to Australia Council Annual Reports and Reviews in 2014 through her role as Senior Research Officer and Project Manager for the Australian Research Council Discovery Project ‘Australian Cultural Fields: National and Transnational Dynamics’ (DP140101970).

Suzie Attiwill (2007) ‘Spatial relations’ in Making Space: Artist-Run Initiatives in Victoria, edited by Din Heagney, Victorian Initiatives of Artists Network.

Australia Council / Maddrell, Susan (ed.) (1983) Directory of Arts Libraries and Resource Collections in Australia, Australia Council.

Peter Biskup with the assistance of Doreen M. Goodman (1994) Libraries in Australia, Centre for Information Studies, Charles Sturt University.

Robin Boyd (1963) The Australian Ugliness (revised edition), Penguin.

joanne burns (2004) footnotes of a hammock, Five Islands Press.

Rosemary Creswell (1989) ‘The Sea, the Sea’ in Inner Cities: Australian Women’s Memory of Place, edited by Drusilla Modjeska, Penguin.

Charlotte Day (2015) ‘Notes on Technologism’ in Technologism, Monash University Museum of Art.

Benjamin Forster, interview with author, 10 August 2018.

Benjamin Forster, correspondence with author, 14 and 17 April 2019.

Frontyard (2017) Conversation Piece: A Frontyard Primer, Book Machine (Sydney) II at Volume 2017/Another Art Book Fair.

Frontyard (2017) Frontyard Bush Telegraph (FYBT), Frontyard.

Frontyard (2017) Removed from Collection, Book Machine (Sydney) II at Volume 2017/Another Art Book Fair.

Liz Greenhalgh (1993) ‘The Place of the Library’, Working Paper 2, Griffith University–Comedia.

John Levett (1992) ‘Librarians and Book Reading’ in Books and Reading in Australian Society, edited by Jock Macleod and Pat Buckridge, Griffith University.

Clara Liosatos (1999) ‘The Tunnel’ in Waiting in Space: An Anthology of Australian Writing, edited by Paula Abood, Barry Gamba and Michelle Kotevski, Pluto Press.

Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia (1991) ‘Australia as an Information Society: The Role of Libraries/Information Networks’, Report of the House of Representatives Standing Committee for Long Term Strategies.