Do you have visitors who are just there every day and have been for years?

Yeah.

Yeah, there are a lot of those.

Some of them we know well.

Um, others just do their own thing.

And in fact, one of them, a man called Neville Halls, who none of us really knew, um, lived in a sort of, not a boarding house, well, probably a boarding house, and just before he unexpectedly died, he changed his will, and he left the library $2.3 million.

And no one can really remember him, but he'd obviously had a lot to do with us.

[laughs] Lump of money.

Mm-hmm.

They were looking for people who could actually come into the library and improve themselves, go out and become better citizens, uh, vote more intelligently-

Right

... uh, not beat their wives.

And so libraries were very down on fiction.

Um, didn't believe that f- popular fiction was appropriate, because it was kind of-Bit like social media, trashy and rot your mind kind of thing.

Maids would read popular fiction-

Okay.

So you had to pay to belong.

There's quite a strong class distinction, and you had to pay five pounds to actually join up, and then it was a two pound annual subscription, which the average worker was probably getting 20 pounds a year, so clearly they weren't going to be able to belong, and they wouldn't have been allowed to belong anyway, 'cause there was also this thing called blackballing.

This was a very typical thing in English clubs, and, uh, they had white balls and black balls, and the current members would sit around and you made a decision whether you thought that person could join, and if you got a certain number of black balls, then you weren't allowed.

Exclusivity is all very nice as long as you're part of the chosen few, but in bread-and-butter terms, it's quite hard to make a go of a subscription business when you've decided to exclude just about everyone.

Look, it, it could never work.

Their first, um, meeting, they, I think they had 95 members signed up.

1829, a lot of those members had dropped away.

And the hair is just one example of the kinds of things the library is trying to hold onto for all of us, even if we don't fully see the value in it ourselves.

Sometimes I feel it's like, well, when you're actually trying to clear out your parents' place, you know, I've been trying to clear out my parents' place, and you kind of, you end up with so much, I want to say a rude word there, but, you know, you just, crap that is a life.

And I suppose we are, in a sense, our nation's life.

Mm

... is what gives it its meaning, because you're not just looking at the best of literature, you're looking at everything that's written and every kind of theory.

I mean, you can't go and chase everyone, and people will...

Obviously, we don't get everything, but, you know, and a gallery or a museum is looking for the best of something, we're just looking for everything.

Let's get to Mitchell and what makes the New South Wales State Library so astonishingly different.

So, David Scott Mitchell, after whom the Mitchell Library is named.

Wealthy bachelor he was often said probably and people have speculated why so he seems to me that he probably had he was gone on a spectrum somewhere he's one of these guys who he he began in the 1880s he was well you know he had a lot of money so he began to collect books his first interest was Elizabethan literature but then as the um centenary of settlement emerged in 1888, centenary of European settlement of Australia, people began to get interested in writing Australian history.

You know, never really been written before, records hadn't been collected, trying to deal with the convict legacy, all that kind of stuff.

So here's Mitchell, gets interested in collecting Australiana, has all the resources he needs.

So he begins to put together an amazing collection of printed material and some manuscripts, some pictures and so on.

No one can compete with him.

Come

Let's get to Mitchell and what makes the New South Wales State Library so

astonishingly different.

So, David Scott Mitchell, after whom the Mitchell Library is named.

Wealthy bachelor he was often said probably and people have speculated why so he seems to me that he probably had he was gone on a spectrum somewhere he's one of these guys who he began in the 1880s you know he had a lot of money so he began to collect books his first interest was Elizabethan literature but then as the centenary of settlement emerged in 1888 centenary of European settlement of Australia People began to get interested in writing Australian history.

You know, it had never really been written before.

Records hadn't been collected trying to do with the convict legacy, all that kind of stuff.

So here's Mitchell, gets interested in collecting Australiana, has all the resources he needs.

what's the most exciting piece of paper that's crossed your desk, say, in the last couple of years? Oh,