Keep Stanton Free

Abstract

This is a story that can at last be told – a local issue that became a national one. It is a story of a principle that became a civic right, one man's relentless opposition to the North Sydney library service (known as Stanton Library), political manoeuvres, a local government election and referendum and the efforts, sometimes open, sometimes covert, of a group of committed citizens and librarians to ensure that public libraries remained free. The committee formed to achieve this was set up in 1983, but the story begins long before that in 1935 with the Munn-Pitt report. This paper is based on a presentation given at the 11th Library History Forum held at the State Library of New South Wales on 18 and 19 November, 2014.

The Keep Stanton Free Campaign became a national issue in 1983 and an official version was recorded and published shortly after the event. There is another version of the story: I compiled a scrapbook, now in Stanton Library, of all the press clippings, election pamphlets, letters and Council minutes. But they do not represent the whole story because the whole truth could not be told at the time. Many aspects of the campaign were carried out in a covert manner by people who were not authorized to take any part in the campaign, and for that reason, there is little or no documentation of their participation. The library staff of Stanton at the time and their many library colleagues from other libraries all over Sydney were involved. We were the undercover agents.

In January 1935, the Munn-Pitt Report on public libraries in Australia was published. The report didn't mince words. Most of the libraries were seen as lousy, or in the unforgettable prose of the report, ‘the wretched little institutes’ had become ‘cemeteries of old and forgotten books’ (Munn & Pitt, 1935, p. 24). If the report had been written by two Australians it is quite possible that it could have sunk without a trace, but one of the authors, Ralph Munn, was American and accordingly was seen in the Australian society of the day as having more credibility than a home-grown product. Within six months of the publication of the report, a group of 40 people met in the Willoughby School of Arts at Chatswood to form the Free Library Movement. With further campaigning, the Library Act was passed in 1939. However, during the Second World War, the provision of free public libraries took on a low profile, and it was not until the fifties and sixties that library services really started to spring up. To be fair, many of the councils had committed themselves to a public library service before then. For example, back in November 1898, the Borough of North Sydney, as it was known then, proposed to establish a free library in the Borough, but it took until February 1964 before the Council opened its library service. It took the neighbouring Willoughby Council even longer to implement its proposal. The Council moved to have a library in 1876. A hundred and one years later, in 1977, Willoughby was one of the last councils in Sydney to operate a library service under the Act.

School of Arts libraries and circulating libraries, usually operated in conjunction with a business such as dry cleaning, had sprung up all over the country. They charged a small fee for the loan of books and in the case of the School of Arts libraries were staffed by volunteers. I have memories of the School of Arts Library in Chatswood (Sydney) which finally closed its doors in 1976 prior to the opening of the Council's public library service. The worthy volunteer who ran the School of Arts facility was a rose fancier and he filled the building with an impressive array of vases of roses. Even more impressive was the vast collection of ‘nurse and doctor romances’, novels about nurses whose main ambition is to marry doctors, thereby achieving upward social mobility.

Why should libraries be free? Librarians have had this notion instilled in them during their professional education, and free libraries have been around all our lives. But not everyone agrees with librarians. When I recently interviewed my former boss for many years, Ross Kempshall, the former Town Clerk and General Manager of North Sydney and one of my greatest supporters, he told me that in the 1980s he thought it was quite reasonable to consider fees for public libraries, and an erstwhile colleague, who is now the manager of one of the most successful and best used libraries in the country, said that her general manager is always asking if there are any aspects of the service which could be charged for.

Alderman Michael Fitzpatrick

When I became the Chief Librarian of Stanton Library in 1969 I was its third Manager, only five years after it had opened. I soon recognized one of the problems. At my first Council meeting it was obvious that Alderman Michael Fitzpatrick was seriously opposed to the library service. My two predecessors had been men, and now here was ‘a slip of a girl’ in his eyes (I was thirty at the time). It is very likely that he thought I would be easily manipulated by him and his allies in Council. He was wrong!

It was never really clear why Alderman Fitzpatrick hated the library so much. I discussed this with three people who were involved with North Sydney Council during the seventies and eighties. Ted Mack was elected as an alderman in 1974 and was Mayor of North Sydney from 1980 to 1988, and subsequently became an independent politician in state and federal parliaments. Ted's view was that Alderman Fitzpatrick thought that councils should only be involved in ‘roads, rates and rubbish’ as well as encouraging large developments in the community, particularly if the developers could be persuaded to make financial donations to Council. This view was echoed by Ross Kempshall, the Town Clerk of the day. He said that Alderman Fitzpatrick was ‘locked into an idea of local government that had well and truly passed, and he could never accept that libraries, child care or any other form of community services should be the role of local government’. In fact, Fitzpatrick became increasingly angry and irrational when he saw the costs of these services rise as the services became more sophisticated. Tony Salier, a lawyer, who also served as an alderman in the seventies and early eighties and was Mayor for a year, reflected on Fitzpatrick's personality. He said, ‘Once Fitzpatrick's mind was crystallized, he would never change his view. He was absolutely and totally implacable’. Michael Fitzpatrick died some years ago, but if he could speak from the grave, I know exactly what he would say: libraries, like community services, according to Alderman Fitzpatrick, should be financed by the federal government or preferably buried without a trace. People with such obsessive agendas can wreak all sorts of havoc.

Meanwhile, I was determined to make Stanton Library one of the best public libraries in the country. You could say that Alderman Fitzpatrick and I had very different goals and were not reading from the same library book.

‘The library is an octopus round the necks of the ratepayers’

Over and over, almost like a mantra, Fitzpatrick described the Library as ‘an octopus round the necks of the ratepayers’. At Council meetings he opposed anything to do with the Library and voted against every report I wrote. He put forward Notices of Motion to restrict use of the Library by non-residents, to make a policy that there be no branch libraries, to curtail costs, to charge for use of the Library, to include only works of fiction in the collection and even to sell the Library as a going concern. Over many years he harangued the Council and interrogated me at length. As his original Notices of Motion became more extreme, they tended to be watered down in debate by his fellow aldermen before being put to the vote. Regardless of his hostile opposition, the Library flourished during the seventies and was the first, or one of the first, to pioneer many services, activities and opening hours which are taken for granted in most libraries now.

From my observation of working for local government, most aldermen during the sixties and seventies were small businessmen or tradesmen. Professionals had begun to enter the aldermanic ranks, but very few of them worked during the day in large, multi-disciplined businesses and therefore they had no prior personal knowledge of how such organizations operated. Some of them entered local government as a stepping stone to a career in politics, but most of them were motivated by a single issue, such as opposition to high-rise buildings in their neighbourhood. Quite quickly they realized the need to forge alliances with other aldermen in order to make headway with their own hobbyhorses, and sometimes in Council, this produced strange bedfellows. When it came to power games, wheeling and dealing in order to curry favour and to get the numbers for votes for his pet projects, Fitzpatrick was the consummate politician and numbers man, but over the years some of his staunchest allies changed sides when they could no longer support his obdurate and out-of-date views.

By the time he moved a motion that the Library ‘be sold as a going concern’, it was 1981 (North Sydney Council, 17 March 1981). He kept up the pressure for the next two years until Council agreed to hold a referendum in conjunction with local government elections to determine future policies and actions. There were 15 referendum questions altogether, but only one was compulsory – the one relating to the Library. This was the question: ‘Should North Sydney Council revoke the Library Act, 1939, in order that a scale of fees and charges can be levied for the use of the Stanton Library services?’ (North Sydney Council, 26 April 1981).

Like many referendum questions, the wording is questionable. However, the intention was clear. There were all kinds of reasons for Council to agree to hold the Referendum. Most of the aldermen saw political opportunities for themselves; some wanted to increase their power base, others wanted to oust Fitzpatrick from Council. Fitzpatrick himself hoped to bury the Library. Probably only one of the aldermen, the Deputy Mayor and Vice Chairman of the Library Committee, Peter Tranter, was seriously concerned to Keep Stanton Free. This is by no means a criticism of their motivation. As Tony Salier put it, ‘where particular interests of individual aldermen were concerned, the merits of the case were weighed up and considered. In other matters, they were submerged into other political issues and alliances’.

I realized that if this question on the Referendum was passed and Council actually resolved to revoke its implementation of the Library Act it could start an avalanche, with other Councils following suit. I decided to act. My deputy was right behind me, and I spoke to all the staff at a staff meeting. There was unanimous support from them, and they all wanted to help. I stressed that under no circumstances must they be seen to be taking any part in any activities connected with the Referendum.

There were by now two main factions on Council: the ‘welfare’ group led by Ted Mack and the ‘economic hardliners’ headed by Michael Fitzpatrick. Although I had taken the decision to do all I could to promote the continuation of provision of free libraries, this was a difficult path to tread, particularly as I had involved all of the Stanton staff. I was helped by the fact that Ted Mack's group, for various reasons, was prepared and willing to turn a blind eye to what was going on. After all, Fitzpatrick was the ‘welfare’ group's political opponent, and our activities could only help the group's plans.

I remember an early informal meeting with a group of supportive locals who were prepared to pay a small fee for the use of the library if this would keep it operational. Obviously, we needed to educate them about the Free Library Movement before we lost the war with our own troops. It would not be exaggerating to say that some of the anti-library faction of Council saw the charging of fees, initially to non-residents, as a first step towards a total downgrading of the Library and possibly the eventual abolition of the service.

The Keep Stanton Free Committee

I can not quite recall how the Keep Stanton Free Committee was formed, but I think that a few concerned residents came to see me and before long one of them, Peter Bridges, a local architect and historian, took on the official role as chairman. At its first formal meeting on 6 August 1983, just seven weeks prior to the local government elections, the Committee set down its objectives and tactics. A working party was formed to campaign for a NO vote in the Referendum. It was agreed that the campaign should be restricted to the dissemination of relevant factual information and should keep clear of party political issues and personalities. This proved to be easier said than done. The plan was:

• to distribute leaflets at selected public locations in the community explaining the referendum issues in detail. Stands would be set up outside the Library, at markets and at shopping centres;

• to talk at precinct committee meetings and to other community groups;

• to initiate press, radio and TV coverage;

• to distribute leaflets to letter boxes;

• to distribute ‘How to Vote’ leaflets on polling day (Bridges, 1984).

The library staff purchased stationery and other necessary supplies with funds donated by residents and the library staff. The Library's work area became the war office as documents were typed, proofread and duplicated. The two artists on the staff designed posters and drew cartoons to help the cause: this was before the age when computers facilitated the production of professional-looking printed material. (See Figure 1.) Friends and family members were roped in to help.

Figure 1 Keep Stanton Free campaign cartoon.

In the meantime, I made the library world aware of the issue through letters and reports to various library bodies: the Metropolitan Chief Librarians’ Committee, the Library Association of Australia, the Association of Local Government Librarians, the local school librarians, the Library Promotion Committee and the Library Council of NSW. I had the great advantage at the time of being a member of the Library Council of NSW. Its President, Richard Hall, a political adviser, journalist and author, had the ear of the press. He was a great help and ally, and very quick ‘to defend the free public library system against an unhealthy “user pays” ideology’ (Campion, 2003). The support from these bodies and from individual colleagues throughout Sydney was enormous. Many library staff from all over the metropolitan area pledged to hand out pamphlets outside the Library at weekends and at all the electoral booths on election day. Local schools, colleges and church groups also got behind the campaign, writing letters to Council, to politicians and to the press. The Association of Local Government Librarians wrote to all people standing for election asking for their views on the library issue, which had attracted a very large field of 64 candidates (Ross and crew, 1983) for the 15 positions as elected representatives of North Sydney Council. An advertisement was then placed in the local press listing those candidates who had replied, expressing support for a NO vote. At that stage, 36 of the candidates were included (Stanton Library, 1983).

The Library Association of Australia issued press statements and advertised a public meeting in a Saturday edition of The Sydney Morning Herald. The Library Promotion Committee of NSW produced car bumper stickers advocating a NO vote and also printed pamphlets advertising the public meeting, which was to be held at North Sydney Boys’ High School. The School made its premises available free of charge for the meeting. Dulcie Stretton, a formidable activist on behalf of public libraries and the President of the Library Promotion Committee, spoke at the meeting, as did Richard Hall and the internationally known author Tom Keneally. More than 200 people were present. It was intended that the meeting provide a forum for debate, but none of the invited anti-library faction showed up. Perhaps they could see the groundswell of support for the Library, and were considering their own political futures. In the short time since its inception, the Keep Stanton Free Committee had become a force to be reckoned with. Richard Hall, President of the Library Council, contacted the media and appeared several times on radio and television, as did the Mayor, Ted Mack, who was also given good coverage in the media and spoke generally about the 15 referendum questions and specifically about the library question, the only one which was compulsory. One evening the issue was a segment on the evening television news on Channel 2, Channel 7 and Channel 9.

As election day approached, we saw a change of heart from most of the anti-library candidates. Initially, the State Liberal Party had made little comment about the library issue, other than criticisms of ‘extravagance and [the] need for tighter management’ (Libs don't, 1983) based solely on Fitzpatrick's comments. This negative attitude and uninformed statements were quickly countered in the press with factual comment by the Keep Stanton Free Committee. Subsequently, the Liberal Party refused to endorse Michael Fitzpatrick as a Liberal Candidate, as it had in previous elections, and all Liberal candidates supported a NO vote; the local president of the Liberal Party also wrote a personal letter to me confirming this (Stanton Library, 1983).

Then came the letterbox drops to the homes of all residents. This had to coincide, more or less, with the distribution of campaign pamphlets of aspiring candidates. A grid of the local street map was drawn up and volunteers, local residents and members of the library profession from various libraries, working in pairs, were despatched in the dead of night with bundles of leaflets for their assigned streets. The librarians, including my husband who was the Chief Librarian of Willoughby Council at the time and I, took part in this activity. My husband worked with one of the pro-library aldermanic candidates and they discovered, first hand, a tactic employed by the opposition. Michael Fitzpatrick himself was seen emptying letterboxes of other campaign material before replacing his own pamphlet in those same letterboxes. In his pamphlet Fitzpatrick spoke of the ‘misleading’ information being disseminated by the Keep Stanton Free Campaign and he also included inflammatory statements about the Library, such as ‘Thousands of books and tapes have been stolen’ (Stanton Library, 1983). Despite the Committee's intention to avoid any criticism of personalities, a response was obviously necessary, and the Committee quickly compiled a leaflet setting out the true facts and distributed it throughout the ward in which Fitzpatrick was standing as a candidate.

On election day, every polling booth was manned by members of the Keep Stanton Free Committee or other volunteers handing out how to vote material. Almost every candidate by now was advocating a NO vote, either out of conviction or political expediency. Quite a number of electoral candidates in other local government areas within NSW also got on the bandwagon and included a statement on their electoral promotional material about their commitment to keep libraries free.

The Referendum was a resounding success for the principle of free public libraries: 87.75% voted NO to imposing charges (Stanton Library, 1983). As Peter Bridges, the Chairman of the Free Stanton Library Committee, wrote in his official version of the campaign: ‘The referendum's … educative and consolidating effect turned a threat of reactionary repression into a small victory for enlightenment’ (Bridges, 1984). I was now able to work with a council notionally in favour of the Library. By the end of 1983 Council signed an agreement with four other independent councils to share library computer resources in a consortium known as Shorelink. In 1984, I was preparing a brief for an extension to the Library building.

Alderman Fitzpatrick managed to be re-elected to Council one more time (he was a numbers man, after all) but some things were unlikely to change. After the election he was interviewed by the press. He was quoted as saying that the referendum was a ‘farce and a fraud’ and ‘an immoral campaign’ (Schwarz, 1983). He then asked a Question with Notice at a council meeting regarding my involvement in the campaign, but the Town Clerk fully supported me with his response: ‘I personally consider that the Librarian's involvement was in her capacity as a concerned citizen and she did not in any formal sense represent the Council or its views’ (Stanton Library, 1983). I was very lucky indeed to have such an advocate.

The issue of charges for public libraries did not end there. In 1990 a report into local government rating recommended a shift in revenue-raising from rates to direct payment for services, and there have been many other attempts to water down the principle of free public libraries. In September 2014 my brother visited the State Library to see an exhibition and said that he was staggered to see so many people in the Library. Then he added, ‘but I'm not sure it should be free’. Are we in the library profession out-of-date? Many services these days operate on a user-pays basis. Why not libraries?

If, like me, you are committed to the idea of free public libraries, you may need to defend your beliefs in a similar campaign in the future, and you may have to move fast. Your actions may put your job on the line. Your adversary may be one person with an axe to grind, or a group of committee members or politicians who couldn't care less about libraries but whose opposition will be, in the words of Tony Salier, ‘submerged into other political issues and alliances’. If I had my time again, would I involve myself in such a campaign? Well, most public libraries in Australia are still free, and certainly the ones that I use regularly are flourishing, so the risk I took was obviously worth it.

Acknowledgements

In preparing this paper I wish to acknowledge the assistance of Stanton Library staff, in particular the North Sydney Council Historian Dr Ian Hoskins, and the material pertaining to the Keep Stanton Free Campaign, held in Stanton's Heritage Centre.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nora Hinchen

Nora Hinchen is retired from the workforce. Positions held and achievements include Manager, Stanton Library, North Sydney for over 20 years. She pioneered many initiatives and services which are now standard in public libraries and was also an appointed member of the Library Council of the State Library of NSW. Other positions held included Manager, Sydney City Library and Rockdale City Library and Acting Library Manager, Saint Ignatius' College Riverview. Nora is currently a U3A lecturer.