Silence has a purpose, not just in libraries, but in our everyday lives – at least from time to time as this article explains. It’s rare though for the Australian bush to be absolutely silent – up around Kulin away from event-season the noise of flies often seems to reach an industrial scale, and even when they take a break there’s the whispering of wind in the Eucalypts and Casuarinas. Then there’s the intermittent drone of trucks coming down the highway moving the grain harvest to port, and the jets overhead on their way to and from the Eastern States. I think though, the benefit (not mentioned in the article) is – in all that silence – to stop talking for a while. To have a million things to say but to choose NOT to say anything, which gives one more time (sometimes essential time) to think about what’s WORTH saying.
Talking though about noises in libraries, fifty years ago I was visiting the Mitchell Library in Sydney (pictured) and just stepping past the information desk when I heard a earth shattering ‘bang’ behind me. I turned around to see what had happened – it really was one of those completely silent libraries back in those days. On the floor in front of me was a huge book. On the other side of the information desk was a young man with an expression frozen in mortification, still able though to catch my eye as two hunded other pairs of eyes swivelled towards us. I’m not sure if it was a pleading look on his part (except perhaps to wish for some hole to swallow him up) but being a tidy-minded sort of person, I bent over, picked up the book and placed it back on the desk. From that moment on, in the minds of other two hundred people in that vast reading room, I was the noise-hooligan and I – normally indifferent to what other people were feeling – felt the need to scuttle into the newspaper reading room to hide for a while, hoping that the heat would die down. Even so I’m not sure that hours later when I left (and even fifty years later if I ever visited again) I wasn’t and wouldn’t be remembered as that dammed stupid kid that dropped the book in the main reading room of the Mitchell Library.
