… The Mitchell is the city’s office of corrections, the place we come to set the record straight. After a few hours I found the few paragraphs I needed in a misdated edition of a defunct magazine and gave the researcher’s inner whoop of triumph. These Eureka moments have a thrill almost impossible to convey. Grey faces in libraries around the world mask inner lives of considerable emotional volatility. We know the ups and downs. Weeks of tedium are wiped away in a few moments of discovery. Research is pure pleasure.

Journalist and author David Marr, 2010

_Footnotes

_{One hundred: a tribute to the Mitchell Library, 2010, p 43}

The Mitchell to this day frightens me stiff … In the State Library and the hallowed Mitchell, the frivolous side of my nature finds itself at variance. I can never concentrate. I am really more interested in people than ideas, so my attention continually strays from my book to the faces around me. Perhaps it’s all to the good in a novelist, but it sometimes makes me feel an impostor sitting amongst so many serious people.

Novelist and Nobel Laureate Patrick White, 1980

^Footnotes

^{One hundred: a tribute to the Mitchell Library, 2010, p 46}

The Library’s reading rooms have changed significantly over time. The original reading room (now the Friend’s Room) was quite formal and could seem unwelcoming. Australian novelist Marjorie Barnard recalls, it ‘was very secluded. Always the same people sitting in the same seats, each surrounded by an invisible palisade’. This exclusive feeling changed with the opening of the new reading space in 1942, which was described as providing ‘restfulness, harmony, spaciousness, lighting, convenience and an easy access to books’.

^Footnotes

^{1. B Fletcher, Magnificent Obsession, 2007, p 207}

^{2. D J Jones, A Source of Inspiration and Delight, 1988, p 104}

The Mitchell Library has been captivating its readers since it opened in March 1910. From the start its collections have mixed the completely astonishing with the everyday; the biggest names in Australian history and literature with the smallest; the big ideas with the commonplace – a panorama of life itself. It is this unpredictable panoply of things that draws people into the Library’s orbit and won’t let them go ....

For me the collections tell us that the past is rarely black or white, but rather shades of grey. Few issues are so settled and definitive that they can resist retelling or reinterpretation. What we choose to take out of the past and move into the future, then, is what makes collections so fascinating. Collections remind us that human nature is constant, and that while methods of expression may change, core emotions do not. The Library is, finally about people and the whole messy business of being alive.

Mitchell librarian Richard Neville, 2010

^Footnotes

^{One hundred: a tribute to the Mitchell Library, 2010, p 43}

When this reading room opened in 1942, praise was not universal. ‘Eve of Sydney’ wrote to Smith’s Weekly: 

‘It ain’t got a bun shop. No eatery. No drinkery. No nothing. You work yourself into a sweat and a thirst by reading and, if you still have more reading to do, you have to clear out down into the Gardens or Macquarie Street somewhere for lunch or light refreshment. To hell with dignity. A small simple coffee-bar somewhere within the Mitchell Library …’

^Footnotes

^{D J Jones, A Source of Inspiration and Delight, 1988, p 101}

Over the years, many celebrities, writers, researchers, scholars, students and members from the general public have passed through the double glass doors to muse over the pages of the books that make up the continually growing collection.