“Libraries provide kids everywhere with a safe space to go”

Hello, hello and following my recent column about scent and memory, thanks to all of you who wrote from around Australia to share your favourite aromas, and the once-familiar places they returned you to.

Here’s a small smattering of olfactory offerings from your (scented) letters: Sunday roasts, Sunlight soap, wattle seeds, line dried sheets, Brigalow trees, bore water, freshly picked mimosa, my mother’s Miss Dior, my father’s Brylcreem, hops and barley from the brewery down the road, calamine lotion on itchy skin, scrubby creek water and wildflower plains, Mr Sheen, the chlorine scented dressing rooms of my local swimming baths, baby powder, and my Polish grandmother’s kitchen and her plump pierogi dumplings bubbling on the stove – thank you again for sharing all of these, and many more.

From favourite scents to favourite places and somewhere that combines the two, my local library. I have always loved libraries – and librarians, the original search engines.

I love the way you can say to a librarian – any librarian, anywhere: “Hello, I’m looking for a book, I can’t remember what it’s called, but it’s about this woman, it’s got a kind of pinky blue cover, and I think there might be some sort of monkey on it, and the librarian will nod, look thoughtful then say: “Do you mean Constance and the Simian?” and then you will both do a little celebratory jig next to Periodicals.

Librarians are, I have found, generally good eggs, and absolutely delighted to foster a love of books any way they can.

As a child I really loved the Swedish author, Astrid Lindgren, and in particular a book of hers called Madicken. It was about a little girl growing up with her sister in some freezing Swedish village somewhere, the two of them forever getting caught in blizzards and skating on ponds to friend’s houses.

Now why I, as a little girl growing up in 40 degree heat in suburban Australia, forever running through the backyard sprinkler in a never-ending quest to cool down, related to that book, I do not know.

But I loved that book so much I took it out every fortnight for months.

That is, until one day I dutifully trotted up to my local library counter to return, then take out Madicken once again, when the librarian looked at me, smiled, handed the book back and said: “It’s all right, Frances, we’ve decided to just give it to you.”

Libraries provide kids everywhere with a safe space to go, a sanctuary away from the demands of the playground, especially for kids who don’t quite understand its many, unspoken and completely bewildering rules.

I spent much of my primary school years saying “I’m sorry, I can’t play Red Rover with you at lunchtime, I have to go play with Simone.”

I did not have to go play with Simone, but I did have a red hot date with Julian, George, Dick, Anne, Timmy the Dog and the rest of the Famous Five. Also my best friend Anne, of Green Gables.

I’m writing this week’s column in my local library too – it’s where I go when I need to turn the sound down, a book-lined cathedral where I can sit quietly among all those authors, all those words, and all those stories, helping me to write my own.