By Jo Oliver, a Local Studies Specialist at Wollongong City Libraries
After all the activity of Children’s Book Week, it is easy to imagine that there has always been an abundance of books for children. However, history shows this is not the case.
Local nonagenarian Marie Glass remembers: "once in infants’ school, and again in my first year at High School I had been in a class where there was a meagre book box. At high school a room known as the library was filled up with a large table and two ornate glass-fronted bookcases with a few heavy tomes locked away. At home our few books were treasured, given to us as a birthday or Christmas gift – we read them, reread, and reread them."
Marie’s mother was one of a small group of women from a WEA discussion group who decided to do something about the lack of books for children. She recalls, that in the midst of World War II, "this small group of women, all with large families, arranged a letterbox drop around the town and surrounding districts, asking for donations of children’s books".
"Eventually, [in 1944] they opened a delightful Children’s Free Library right in the heart of the Wollongong shopping area, quite central to bus transport. They had acquired the use of a large room in Brights Arcade in Crown Street, approximately where Crown Centre is now. When I saw it in operation, it was lined with good solid shelving filled with books all proficiently processed and catalogued. For others like myself, it was just wonderful.
"Books were arranged by author so we could look for and find books we may have wished for for years. And if it wasn’t on the shelves, there was even a card catalogue that would tell us if this little library actually had it. Bliss! This wonderful group of mothers then continued to run this library for the next couple of years until the War ended. Then they appealed to the Municipal Council to take it over.
"But the Town Council first had to adopt the NSW. Local Government Library Act. A very difficult debate, but eventually the Council Aldermen came to the party and took on the responsibility of providing free library services for children. Having adopted the Act [in 1945], the Council then took over the Wollongong School of Arts Library and so began the Wollongong Library Service."
Marie went on to work in Wollongong Library Service after local councils amalgamated in 1947, extending the municipality to Helensburgh in the north and Dapto in the south.
She was involved in helping prepare a collection for one of the first Branch Libraries at Bulli. "The children though were the most ardent borrowers. They rushed in after school, puffing and panting as though they had run a long way home and back again, for the word had got around and they joined the library in hordes and queued each afternoon, and looked anxiously at each book brought back by other children. As the first weeks went by, and more and more borrowers joined the library, the library shelves became more and more bare of books.
"A couple of years later, the City Council received a grant from the Joint Coal Board to provide a Bookmobile service to the mining communities along the Illawarra escarpment. Initially this was also housed in the garages of the old Bulli Shire Council, and as a result, the library staff at the Bulli Branch provided an assistant each day to go out with the driver.
"At the top of Bald Hill, there is an old house with a little tower. An elderly lady lived there at this time with a very old cockatoo, who had obviously originally been the companion of a sailor. The old lady was quite deaf, so she didn’t appear to hear the raucous swearing that always welcomed us to the house. I always shuddered whenever I saw that poor bird chained to its perch. It had hardly any feathers left on its body.
"Further on past Helensburgh over the top of the escarpment we went into Darkes Forest, where again the little group of residents would be waiting, but here one of the men would come riding up on horseback. Going out in all weather, wasn’t always fun, but driving up the coast on a bright sunny sparkling day in Autumn or Spring was a great bonus."
After five years at Bulli Branch Library, and two years at Wollongong Library, Marie married and moved to Sydney. She later completed a Diploma in Librarianship and a BA degree in Earth Sciences and continued her career as a Science Research Librarian, with Macquarie University. She now has come back to live in her hometown of Wollongong and was interviewed for the library’s oral history website Illawarra Stories where you can hear more of her memories.
Another librarian, Helen Cavenagh (nee Seagrave), remembers working on the bookmobile bringing books to children in bad weather. "Well, the worst part was, in the '60s with Fred Hall, because he delighted in parking on the edge of the cliff. I used to be terrified going up to Helensburgh along the Coast Road and so it was a little old rattly bus and I think it only had one door on it, so you'd hang on as she went along. It was a bit scary. But sometimes in the fog, you couldn't see.
"I remember once Fred asking me to hang out the side as the fog was so thick coming down we couldn't see where the edge of the road was and there were not many guardrails along that area."
You can hear more of Helen’s interview at Illawarra Stories.
The library holds some wonderful images early libraries and of the bookmobiles bringing books to children from the 1960s until the 1980s when new branches were opened and the wide ownership of cars meant children could be driven to their local library. Over subsequent years, more and more children’s books were purchased and there are 82,705 children’s and youth items to be borrowed for free in the Wollongong Library Service, including picture books, fiction, non-fiction, audiobooks, DVDs and magazines. We have come a long way from the locked cabinets of books of previous generations!
Listen to the Marie Glass interview and the Helen Cavenagh interview
