"When I was small I thought that books were strangely-constructed magic boxes secreted in odd, below-eye-level places (an old bird-cage, the potato basket) where people under three feet in height could discover them and remove them to the placid silence of under-the-dining-room-table for close consultation.
Thus my artful mother secured her undisturbed afternoons.
Later I would find whole wallfuls of those magic boxes and exactly the same sense of luxurious isolation in the private pools of light in the Reading Room of the State Library of Victoria.
Nowadays my favourite library is the Kew branch of Boorondara : a scatter of computer-yoked adolescents, but mainly old greyheads and wildly bobbing younger ones joyfully pillaging bright shelves, and decamping with armfuls of magic boxes, every one of them holding a world.
Bravo, Boorondara, and happy 150th birthday! "
Dr. Inga Clendinnen (AO) is is an Australian author and historian, anthropologist and academic.
She is a regular borrower from Boroondara Libraries.
