State Library, Mitchell Building
Shakespeare Place, Sydney
Walter Liberty Vernon; centre by Cobden Parkes’s Government Architect’s Branch. 1906 to 1942. Victorian and Federation, Sydney Sandstone.
- Size
- Two main floors on a podium
- Material
- Sandstone, marble mosaic floor, bronze doors
- Status
- State Heritage Register, 1999. A working state library
David Scott Mitchell’s gift of his Australiana collection is the reason this building exists. His condition was that the books be kept in a building of their own. The Public Library had no room, so Vernon’s branch drew a new wing, built from 1906 to 1910. It is one of only two government cultural buildings in this style, the Art Gallery being the other.
It grew by stages, and what you see from Shakespeare Place is mostly its latest part. The Dixson Wing opened in 1929 to hold William Dixson’s paintings. Work on the central section, with its Ionic portico and a marble mosaic copy of Abel Tasman’s map on the vestibule floor, began in 1939. The library came under one roof in June 1942, a notable thing to achieve while other public works were being cut for the war. A last sandstone section went on in 1964.
It can still provoke. In 2014 proposed changes to the Mitchell Library drew a petition from more than 200 writers and academics, joined by more than 9,000 library users. The library responded with a restoration that effectively reversed the proposals.
The stone
From the 1920s, as Pyrmont ran out, stone for the library came from new quarries in the eastern suburbs, so its later parts come from a different place to Vernon’s first wing.
Sources
- State Library of New South Wales, Wikipedia (incorporates NSW State Heritage Inventory text)
- History of the Library, State Library of NSW
- David Scott Mitchell collection, State Library of NSW
- Mitchell Library building, Dictionary of Sydney