The Year without A Book 1985

I thought I’d made a big mistake.

Leaving a library with only one branch in a single local government would widen my horizons, I thought. So, at the beginning of this year, I applied to be the Children’s Librarian at the Central Highlands Regional Library Service. Based in Ballarat, the library service was made up of 22 branches and two bookmobiles, funded by 14 separate local governments.

It was my first experience of the logistics involved in keeping a network of large and small libraries supplied with fresh bookstock. I was in awe of the regional library staff who continually packed and unpacked boxes for all the families across the region, some of whom were borrowing from a cupboard in a shire office or a shelf in someone’s homestead. My head whirled with trying to calculate whether the budget contributed by the Shire of Lake Bolac was enough for them to have copies of all the shortlisted picture books for that year. And did I mention that there was a City of Ballaarat, and a Shire of Ballarat, and a Shire of Ararat and City of Ararat, as separate funders among the fourteen LGAs.

It was also the first library I worked with a completely manual circulation system, and a card catalogue to guide customers. Cratchit-like, I perched on a stool each morning behind the old-fashioned pine library desk, counting cards from the loans of the day before, and then entering the statistics in a large red ledger. I had learned the theory of the Browne system in library school, and experiencing it now was like having my smartphone (not yet invented) taken away and replaced by two tin cans and a piece of string.

I was lonely, cold most of the time and beset by chilblains, due to my office being in a turret far away from the nearest sputtering gas heater. However I found that I could do the job easily, once my assistant did the working out of the percentages of the book vote; I fitted into the workflow and began getting to know customers and stock. And my view out of the turret window, just visible in the photo above, was of the fabulous Titanic memorial bandstand .

My excellent predecessor Liz had been, like me, inspired by Dorothy Butler and had started monthly Preschool Storytimes, and in preparing for them, I read the many picture books published before 1977 filling the wooden shelves. The daily newspaper was always up for a story, so marketing of any programming was easy. The head of the region staff turned out to be a fantastic puppeteer. Best of all, I met and talked books with the small people and their families who became familiar faces, not just cards.

When I was researching for this blog, I wondered how nothing published in this year still resonated with me. I found out that the Children’s Book Council of Australia made no award in the Picture Book category in 1985, the judges saying:

Although the picture books offered for consideration this year exceeded half the total number of  entries, it was the unanimous decision of the judges that none of these reached the required level of excellence demands of an award winner. Few of the entries approached that balance and integration complemented by a high standard of design and production which is required of the award-winning picture book… With a few exceptions, there was little variety in approach and technique, however some interesting variations in style were noted. In many of the picture books, the illustration suffered from a lack of attention to the text while others displayed an inappropriate or indeed inept handling of colour and design or a lack of technical expertise.

Ouch!

This sign perfectly encapsulates my early days in Ballarat. It’s in a suburban street of that city, 3 km from the main branch in Camp Street. Like most of the photographs for this blog, I took it in the second decade of the 21st century. I have no idea whether the bookmobile stops there anymore and how could I? It will always be the other alternate Monday.

!986 would be a lot better, book-wise – I bought fur-lined boots to cut down on the chilblains and became a TV sensation.