History Or Hoarding? With Annabel Crabb
Apr 28, 2026 · 27 min · 18 segments
The grim history behind the NSW State Library's doors. Opened in 1826, exclusively to the rich white men who could pass a secret "blackballing" test, the doors were redesigned during World War II to…
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He works here, and he's helping to organize the library's 200th anniversary celebrations.
Now, Damian's a Palawa man whose ancestors have been knocking around on this continent for millennia, so part of him obviously finds the celebration of 200 years on one level kind of adorable.
Well, I mean, if you l- stack it up against even the conservative odd, you know, estimates of 30,000 years, it's, it's a very, very small blip.
So it's fascinating to me to see how we deal with our own history as a institution that ostensibly deals with everyone else's.
So as part of that, Damian spent a heap of time investigating the library's historic front doors, the giant, heavy bronze doors that adorn the front of Australia's oldest library.
I've walked through them a bunch of times myself, and I've never looked at them.
Um, yeah, so the bronze doors that sit outside the library, um, they're kind of one of those things you stop noticing after a while, and they're always open, so they tend to fade into the background a little.
When they were installed in 1942, the library became the first Australian institution to use images of Aboriginal people in its exterior design.
But today, some think they should be taken down for entirely different reasons.
He works here, and he's helping to organize the library's 200th anniversary celebrations.
Now, Damian's a Palawa man whose ancestors have been knocking around on this continent for millennia, so part of him obviously finds the celebration of 200 years on one level kind of adorable.
Well, I mean, if you l- stack it up against even the conservative odd, you know, estimates of 30,000 years, it's, it's a very, very small blip.
So it's fascinating to me to see how we deal with our own history as a institution that ostensibly deals with everyone else's.
So as part of that, Damian spent a heap of time investigating the library's historic front doors, the giant, heavy bronze doors that adorn the front of Australia's oldest library.
I've walked through them a bunch of times myself, and I've never looked at them.
Um, yeah, so the bronze doors that sit outside the library, um, they're kind of one of those things you stop noticing after a while, and they're always open, so they tend to fade into the background a little.
When they were installed in 1942, the library became the first Australian institution to use images of Aboriginal people in its exterior design.
But today, some think they should be taken down for entirely different reasons.
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