Gold and Graffiti: Tales of Melbourne: Fragment of the past

We can thank Sir Redmond Barry for the State Library of Victoria. His statue stands at the front steps of the library welcoming everyone, just as he did in 1856 on the day the library first opened. And, this, after staying up all the previous night helping to shelve some of the 3,800 books that he had ordered for the library that had just arrived by ship the previous day. A librarian had yet to be hired, but someone had to do the work. Which tells you a lot about Sir Redmond Barry.

He was the judge who acquitted thirteen of the Eureka Stockade miners in 1855, but who in 1880, when he sentenced Ned Kelly to death by hanging said, “May God have mercy on your soul”. Only to have Ned Kelly respond that he would see the judge anon in the afterlife. And, as if following a script, just twelve days after Ned’s execution, Sir Redmond Barry died.

Even today, there are many interesting links between the State Library of Victoria and the tale of Ned Kelly. We were lucky enough to arrive at the library in time for a guided walk offered by a volunteer, one of the friends of the library. This went, astonishingly, far longer than 2 hours, though we skipped out after two as we desperately needed a cool drink, but we could easily have gone back and done more the next day as the collections were so interesting. This, we were informed, is a reading library, not a borrowing library, and is heavily used by RMIT students whose lecture rooms are just across the street, and by the general public who throng the building and its various galleries in their hoards.

The building itself has some magnificent parts, particularly the great Domed Reading Room which is vast. Its floor space is spiked with long rows of study desks and tables, filled with patrons while the entire space is canopied by a huge lantern-like glass dome spilling light down from some thirty five feet above ground level. The dome room is encircled by arcaded pavilions, lined with shelved books, and eccentric and interesting exhibitions, some you would not expect to find in a reading library.

One of these being Ned Kelly’s actual suit of armour which Ned made in preparation for his final showdown at Glenrowan. It is pitted with bullet holes and hugely heavy given its plough metal construction which kept Ned the only gang member alive after that last bloody dawn battle. Until, of course, Sir Redmond Barry sentenced him.

Amazing pieces of Australian history are on display. Batman’s ‘agreement’ with the natives for him to occupy land along Port Phillip Bay. Early records of explorers. First editions of some of the rarest books, along with fine botanical drawings. Too much to really absorb in one visit. So, we’re determined to visit gain, and move slowly through the collections of interest to us.

Our passion to do this somewhat soothing, that such a library as the State Library of Victoria is not yet seen as the defunct species suggested in another work of sculpture outside the library, on the corner of Swanston and La Trobe streets, where Petrus Spronk of Holland, created a work slamming carved bluestone deep into the sidewalk like an ominous foreboding. As if what is left of the library is but a fragment of the past that you almost trip over.