Sydney library cracks open its massive vaults

Special report

'I'm over the idea that this library is one of Australia's best kept secrets," says John Vallance, State Librarian, as he prepares to unveil Macquarie Street's $22 million metamorphosis at its open day on Saturday, October 6.

"We shouldn't be a secret," Vallance continues. "So we're opening up our unique collections to the public, putting them on show without any entrance charge. After all, they belong to the people of NSW."

It's not "a refurbishment or a renovation" of Sydney's State Library, Vallance warns. "It's a transformation!"

Thanks to the generosity of philanthropists (particularly the late industrial entrepreneur Michael Crouch AC, and former newspaper baron John B. Fairfax AO), the heritage-listed Mitchell Building has been reinvented from the inside. Exhibition spaces have been doubled, with barely a cent required from the public purse.

Walk through those enormous sandstone columns facing the Royal Botanic Garden Sydney towards the Mitchell Library Reading Room (one of the most beloved spaces in Australia) and you'll face new choices.

Turn right and you'll see exhibition spaces reborn, stripped to their original architectural splendour, repainted, re-lit and reimagined for the digital age. Turn left and you'll find a new suite of stylish contemporary gallery spaces, carved from a warren of ugly staff offices, previously off-limits to the public.

Staff are installing about 2000 objects – porcelain, glassware, metalwork, curiosities – that form a Collectors' Gallery. Nearby are new children's studios.

Still, the highlight on this 'Domain side' of the library will surely be the UNESCO Six exhibition. When it comes to Sydney's UNESCO pedigree, people immediately think of the Opera House. But our State Library has six gems that qualify for UNESCO listing as "memories of the world" (which means it stands tall in the pantheon of human knowledge). The oldest are 10 eyewitness journals written 230 years ago as the First Fleet (1500 men and women on 11 tiny, wooden ships) sailed halfway around the world to Botany Bay.

Then there's Core of My Heart, a poem penned in rainy London in 1907-08 by a homesick 23 year-old Australian. If you don't recognise the title, you'll know this line by Dorothea Mackellar: 'I love a sunburnt country.'Two of the UNESCO Six are rare photographic glimpses of NSW. Henry Merlin toured gold fields between 1869-1873, capturing a unique visual record of the Australian 'wild west'. Merlin was commissioned by a wealthy German gold miner Bernhardt Holtermann. After Merlin's death, Holtermann and Merlin's assistant, Charles Bayliss, pioneered a way of taking massive glass negatives of Sydney Harbour. The resulting photographs travelled the world to international acclaim.

The final UNESCO pair? Collections of World War I papers, written from very different perspectives. A month after Armistice Day (100 years ago next month) one of John Vallance's predecessors, William Ifould, placed advertisements calling for soldiers, sailors, airmen and nurses from all theatres of war to bring in their "well written" diaries for assessment. Ifould's initiative means the State Library has a priceless collection of intimate diaries written by ordinary Australians.

The library's 'Internee Papers', by contrast, tell a forgotten chapter of Australian history. During WWI, 7000 men and women, mainly Germans, were rounded up as 'enemy aliens' and interned as prisoners of war.

Yet the UNESCO Six is just one aspect of the rebirth of the library. Nowhere is this more evident than in the sheer visual feast of three dramatically coloured Dixson galleries, now packed with paintings in a "salon hang" presenting a kaleidoscopic portrait of NSW since 1788. Until now, these paintings have been stacked in subterranean conservation racks. Though many are by famous artists (Conrad Martens; Joseph Lycett), they weren't chosen for artistic value but because they illustrate the ever-changing character of the state.

"Our mission is to collect works which explain NSW's place in the world," Vallance points out. "That means books, documents and manuscripts, but we also collect maps, photographs, objects – and paintings."

Digital technology is evident everywhere in "the new library". Sydney Elders: Continuing Aboriginal Stories is a multimedia exhibition by Wiradjuri-Kamilaroi artist Jonathan Jones. Four Aboriginal elders, each representing different clans in Sydney, explain how the traditions of the Eora nation survived colonisation – and endure.

Then there's #NewSelfWales, an ever-changing snapshot of contemporary NSW made up of countless submitted digital self-portraits alongside thousands from the library's collection. If you haven't added one, don't worry, there's a booth at the State Library where you upload your image and immediately see yourself in the exhibition.