History Or Hoarding? With Annabel Crabb
Jun 9, 2026 · 24 min · 10 segments
Nestled alongside the Library's famous treasures — their First Fleet journals, Shakespeare folios, mementos of writers from Henry Lawson to Charlotte Wood – are millions of seemingly simple objects…
No entities detected.
So ephemera's sort of ephemeral material, um, pamphlets, flyers, menus, data programs, content programs that sort of disappear.
It's all this stuff that's flimsy, trivial, temporary, unremarkable, the stuff that was supposed to fall through the cracks, only the library didn't let it.
The floor that houses the ephemera section, it's just full of these compactus files with big wheelie kind of opening things.
It's like being at sea, isn't it? [laughs] That you wheel like a ship's wheel to slide the compactus shelves apart.
Tiny gray boxes lining from floor to ceiling, and find the stuff that's stacked in them.
So you can see there's, let's see, we've got libraries, invitations, consumer protection.
They have thousands of menus, food you can't order anymore, from restaurants that closed years ago.
They keep shopping tags from clothes because maybe one day shopping tags on clothes will be obsolete, and someone in the future will want to know what they looked like.
One of the librarians here, wanting to get a sense of what it's like to live in today's economy, collected a year's worth of junk mail, 27 kilos.
You know the ones you find on apples? They were collected and sent along by a family in Mona Vale in 2009.
What's the, the goal of having random little things like this that you think people-
It's our history, and it's our social history, and it's a history of what we're eating and what we're reading and where we're going and how we're gathering.
So ephemera's sort of ephemeral material, um, pamphlets, flyers, menus, data programs, content programs that sort of disappear.
It's all this stuff that's flimsy, trivial, temporary, unremarkable, the stuff that was supposed to fall through the cracks, only the library didn't let it.
The floor that houses the ephemera section, it's just full of these compactus files with big wheelie kind of opening things.
It's like being at sea, isn't it? [laughs] That you wheel like a ship's wheel to slide the compactus shelves apart.
Tiny gray boxes lining from floor to ceiling, and find the stuff that's stacked in them.
So you can see there's, let's see, we've got libraries, invitations, consumer protection.
They have thousands of menus, food you can't order anymore, from restaurants that closed years ago.
They keep shopping tags from clothes because maybe one day shopping tags on clothes will be obsolete, and someone in the future will want to know what they looked like.
One of the librarians here, wanting to get a sense of what it's like to live in today's economy, collected a year's worth of junk mail, 27 kilos.
You know the ones you find on apples? They were collected and sent along by a family in Mona Vale in 2009.
What's the, the goal of having random little things like this that you think people-
It's our history, and it's our social history, and it's a history of what we're eating and what we're reading and where we're going and how we're gathering.
The rest of this transcript — segmented and speaker-labeled, so you land on the exact moment something was said
Search every transcript — by keyword, by phrase, or by meaning, across every show Radar indexes
Trends — what is surging across podcasts, measured against its own baseline
Alerts — when a name you follow appears in a newly indexed episode
No account is needed to search Radar.