Comment

Carolyn Fraser
The trashing of State Library Victoria

My 17-year career at State Library Victoria ended two years ago, after months of white-anting by management and the most miserable time of my working life. When news of the library’s most recent restructure plan appeared in the press, I received a flurry of messages from concerned friends, worried both about the situation and about me.

The SLV Strategic Reorganisation Change Proposal outlined 39 job losses, including a reduction of reference librarian positions from 25 to 10. These are the librarians who answer queries from the public, both onsite and online. A 2019 restructure had already reduced their number from 40. State Library Victoria – the “of” was lost in a rebranding exercise in 2014 – has been described by generations of managers as “the people’s university” but not anymore. SLV is now, according to board chair Christine Christian, a “temple of engagement”.

Staff woke on Friday to news that SLV has withdrawn its reorganisation proposal after widespread comdemnation. How exactly SLV will “refine [their] approach” remains unknown. What is certain is that this is just the latest step in the dismantling of the library’s institutional memory and role as a public good.

In 2019, I was the lead curator for the Victoria Gallery, a new exhibition space that was part of the library’s $88.1 million Vision 2020 redevelopment. I was new in the role and naive. I’d begun my career at the library as a preservation technician, undertaking a range of tasks including making protective housings for books, ephemera and objects. I cared deeply about this work. Later, I moved into a curatorial role because I wanted to champion the collection and share its stories. The permanent exhibitions were housed in the Dome galleries. They still are, in the case of World of the Book, despite Christian’s claim they have been shuttered for decades. It turned out my role was less to advocate for collections, more to provide content for the brand and audience development division, unironically known as BAD.

Our critical install week for the new gallery coincided with the week I was scheduled to do my compulsory “Lean Six Sigma Yellow Belt” training, a requirement of our then recent restructure in which I would learn how to implement “process improvement” in my team’s “quality initiatives”. Surely the best way I could “improve process” would be to participate fully in the install, the culmination of more than two years’ work? No, I was told. The training was essential and urgent.

Thus began a farce in which I had to answer texts from my team under the table and pop out for emergency triage whenever I could. One day, when I returned to the training session, the consultant called me to the front of the room to participate in an exercise that involved peeling a Post-it note from the wall. I failed. My technique was all wrong: I’d missed his crucial lesson about how to remove a Post-it and retain its adhesive function and was scolded at length. In front of my peers, this man took the opportunity to question my commitment to the organisation where, at that time, I had been working for 12 years.

Was this the final straw for me? Or was it any of the other slights and indignities that had become part of my daily life at the library?

Some of the architects of the shift to commercialisation, to constant faddish restructures and, inevitably, a loss of morale and purpose, were people I like and respect. I suspect they were largely pawns in a wider culture of managerialism and inexpert external reviews. When government does not fund our public institutions adequately, the institutions are forced to curry favour with rich people, who, by giving money, minimise or avoid tax and garner leverage by taking seats on boards. We tacitly agree to sugarcoat this situation and call it philanthropy.

Some days at the library you would have to laugh or you’d cry. Then there were days that prompted both. October 23, 2014, for instance, the day of the Keith Murdoch Oration, the library’s major fundraising event, which, that year, was delivered by Lachlan Murdoch on the topic of press freedom.

Approaching the library that morning, I walked up the front steps through the glory that was artist Linda Tegg’s installation Grasslands. A commission for the Melbourne International Festival, the work consisted of more than 10,000 native grasses and plants in planters that covered large parts of the library steps and forecourt. Trees had been dug into the lawn. These were the plants that would have grown on the site prior to colonisation. It was beautiful.

On this day, two cars were parked on a blue carpet that had been extended across the forecourt. Part of Grasslands had been roughly moved and plants crushed under electrical cables. Concrete blocks were squeezed between the planters to support a lighting rig for the car display. A giant “BMW MELBOURNE” banner was stretched in front of the library’s entrance. The forecourt had been turned into a car dealership.

On my lunchbreak, I witnessed a library patron screaming in disgust at the BMW sales reps. She said they shouldn’t be there, that the forecourt was public space, that it shouldn’t be used for commercial gain. As I watched the scene – the outraged patron, the unhappy SLV staff, all the men taking photos of the two cutting-edge electric BMWs, the groups of baffled schoolkids, an entomologist from RMIT blithely sweeping a butterfly net back and forth over the grasses, collecting specimens of insects not seen in the city in more than a century, the library’s head of security menacing the entomologist who, admittedly, presented as an oddity, if not a security threat, with the rubber tube in his mouth he was using to suck specimens into a plastic cannister mounted on his back – I knew I was witnessing something significant.

The day only became more bizarre. It turned out that Brendan Beirne’s photograph of James Packer attempting to fight David Gyngell, titled Bondi Biffo, was taken off display for the duration of the event. Packer is a close friend of Murdoch’s. Press freedom, remember. The caterers responsible for the dessert, sponsored by Bank of Melbourne, stacked wet plates on a priceless piece of furniture that had once belonged to colonist John Pascoe Fawkner, causing damage that required expensive conservation treatment. The hundred or more wooden chairs in the La Trobe Reading Room were moved and not returned at the end of the night, and the computer that controls all the computers in the room was disconnected and hidden away. People were pissed off.

In its unintended, chaotic way, the day was a microcosm of all the forces working against the institution I loved, its desecration on full display. What I now understand as the wholesale corporatisation of our cultural institutions would eventually see me buckle under its pressures, pressures I internalised, understood to be my problems, my inadequacies on show for all to see. I wanted to die and this feeling – which persisted for years and was intransigent despite counselling and therapy and antidepressants – became just another source of shame. I wasn’t good at my job. Then a colleague died by suicide and I finally felt with full force the way this job I once loved wasn’t good to me.

There are intangible treasures that, once lost, cannot be replaced. I am not talking about objects: even the most precious object is only truly lost when the stories and knowledge associated with it are gone. I am talking about knowledge. It is this knowledge that is at stake when you lose librarians to incompetence, to disregard, to suicide.

Librarians are not gatekeepers. They are the opposite, the ones offering you keys. Without these keys, we lose those crucial links to our stories, to our culture. We stop caring. Eventually, we won’t know there’s anything worth caring about.

Please don’t stop caring about libraries. Please don’t stop caring about the people who work within them. What my colleagues are experiencing at SLV, and what I experienced there, is profound moral injury: injury that goes to the core of our identities, of being tasked with, but ultimately unable to protect, something irreplaceable. It is excruciating. Imagine a chorus of Cassandras, doomed to tell the truth and not be heard. We are that chorus.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on December 13, 2025 as "The trashing of the state library".

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