A public service announcement
On Saturday 13 December, a crowd gathered in the ‘people’s square’ protesting potential job cuts at the ‘People’s Library’ (State Library Victoria). I was there in my capacity as member of the Professional Historians Association (Vic & Tas), and as a newly minted ‘former’ public servant.
Word of job cuts at the State Library came through to me the day after I concluded a sixteen-year career in the Victorian Public Service. After significant government investment in my skills as a public servant, building on my tertiary education that serviced my work at the Public Records Office Victoria, Heritage Victoria, Regional Development Victoria, and finally Creative Victoria, my position (along with numerous others) was abolished in a major restructure. I had the choice of staying through a competitive application process for alternative positions (if successful) or taking a redundancy package. I took a package.
Clean desk, new beginnings
My days of being technically apolitical are now over, and I’m free to be strictly political. I launched straight into pro bono advocacy work for the Professional Historians Association (Vic & Tas) campaigning against job cuts at the State Library. Professionally, the State Library is a workplace for historians. Personally, over my lifetime, the State Library has consistently been a go-to destination after my home, workplaces and local athletics track. Many happy hours were spent researching there over the years. In the early 2000s I volunteered in the State Library picture collection, and would meet my late mother for lunch when she came to do family history research on the days I was back of house.
***
Despite a mandate to create jobs, the State government is exercising the clauses in the enterprise bargaining agreements (EBA) related to ‘change’ to find savings and cut expenditure. The innocuous weasel word of ‘change’ translates to restructures, ‘redistribution’ of positions (into lower pay grades), and ‘abolishment’ to create ‘efficiencies’. EBA clauses become de facto managerial speak, “clause 11” a synonym for job cuts. In the current cycle (as these are as common as a spring clean) the Community and Public Sector Union (CPSU) reported in October that ‘more than 40 restructures and job cut proposals were already underway’ in the Victorian Public Service.[1] Media reports of the proposed threat against reference librarians and impacts on library users particularly raised the ire of the Victorian people.
***
Once I had moved through the five stages of grief of my own job cut (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance) over the six week consultation process, including submitting an alternative proposal that partially influenced the final organisation structure, I was met with a welcome opportunity. Freedom. Collectively what ensued, however, probably did not result in a welcome change for the organisation, there was a mass exodus of highly skilled and well-connected public servants who walked out the door.
***
On the day before the rally, the State Library Victoria Board released a statement rescinding the reorganisation proposal after originally publishing a statement, ‘correcting the false narrative’. The union declared a victory, but maintained the rally would go ahead.
It was a rousing protest, emceed by writer, Kaz Cooke, with speeches given by CPSU organiser, Jordie Gilmour; former SLV Director, Collections and Access, Shane Carmody; historian of politics, Emeritus Professor Judith Brett AM; journalist, Gideon Haigh; and young adult author, Laura Carroll.
I noted the parallels of those on the steps with their back to the State Library with a clip I had recently seen on social media featuring Julian Assange speaking on the steps of the Ecuadorian Embassy in 2012 where he had been granted asylum for exposing the truth.
‘Everyday ordinary people teach us, that democracy is free speech and dissent. For once, we the people stop speaking out and stop dissenting, once we are distracted or pacified, once we turn away from each other, we are no longer free. For true democracy is the sum, the sum of our resistance.’
Assange counselled,
‘Learn how the world works. Challenge the statements and intentions of those who seek to control us behind the facade of democracy and monarchy. Unite in common purpose and common principle to design, build, document, finance and defend. Learn, challenge, act now.’ [1]
All dissenting State Library speakers were excellent, but it was the speech by former public servant, Shane Carmody that resonated strongly with me, echoing Assange’s call.
‘This library must be defended. This library is a public institution. It was founded as a public trust and it exists because it is owned by you … I will continue to fight for this institution not because I held a position here but because I believe in our democratic right to our public institutions. This is an attack on democracy itself.’
The pithily on point public protest placards also captured what is at stake: ‘combat misinformation ask a librarian’; ‘shush librarians cannot be silenced’; ‘books not bucks’; ‘don’t besmirch the research’.
Kaz Cooke emceeing the protest at State Library
Now however, it seems as though the right to protest itself is under threat. A week after the State Library rally, a horrific massacre occurred at Bondi beach, NSW by two perpetrators murdering 15 people and injuring scores of others. It was labelled an anti-Semitic attack. I saw numerous references to Naomi Klein’s book, The Shock Doctrine that discusses the phenomenon where political and corporate actors exploit the immediate aftermath of a major crisis to control the narrative or implement policies that would never be palatable at any other time.
In the rush to be seen to be doing something and responding to direct accusations of Government culpability, state and federal governments narrowed their sights on protests. Politically charged voices did not call for unity, but directly and absurdly linked the responsibility for the massacre to 300,000 peaceful pro-Palestine protestors who had marched across the Sydney Harbour Bridge on 3 August 2025. The corrosion of civil liberties mistakenly thought to be rusted on now hang in the legislative balance. A broad coalition of Palestinian, Jewish, and civil liberties groups, condemning the NSW Minns Government’s anti-protest laws have launched a legal challenge stating the proposed legislation is unconstitutional. Omar Sakr, a poet who was subject to another State Library Victoria controversy compiled the facts of the Bondi massacre on his Substack, illustrating the narratives that sprung up in the aftermath in a broader context (something sadly missing from mainstream media accounts):
We are now at the end stage of a decades-long bipartisan erosion of our civil liberties. We saw a dramatic uptick of this erosion in recent years when climate protestors began to conduct acts of civil disobedience, and we are seeing it again now: the major political parties are nothing more than stewards of capital, and they will always side with the wealthy and powerful over the people, with profit over ethics and humanity.
Had the Bondi massacre occurred the week before the State Library protest, I imagine the CPSU would have called it off out of respect to the communities in mourning. However, even the mourners sitting shiva were not spared, historian and Executive officer, Dr Max Kaiser from the Jewish Council of Australia had to make statements arguing that protests are a democratic right and not anti-Semitic. As Sakr baldly pointed out in his essay I mentioned above, if the so-called pro-Palestine ‘hate marches’ occurred every week in Melbourne and Sydney for two years, where was the evidence documenting this hate? How was this so-called hate not splashed across every Sunday and Monday broadcast and print run validating these claims? Simply because the evidence and the ‘hate’ does not exist.
***
When I wrote the blog post, Silencing of Politics, I rang the State Library to ask a reference librarian how many times a particular title had been recalled from the stacks. The librarian answered that the book’s full borrowing history is not available as old catalogue data is not typically transferred to new catalogue systems. Valuable context that expands my understanding. This nuanced knowledge is unlikely to be contained in the library’s collection, and if it is, it is buried deep. For example, a reference to the installation of the library’s electronic catalogue in July 1987, can be found in a speech given in 2003 by former Head Librarian, Anne-Marie Schwirtlich.[3] However the metadata (data about data) of the library’s collection (digital and physical) is really best and most efficiently retrieved from the reference librarians.
At the rally I saw many familiar faces, librarians of days gone by from spaces that no longer exist having been redeveloped or moved. It was a visceral reminder of how much time I’ve spent in the library.
***
So what’s next for me you ask? What’s on the cards for 2026?
Since my mother’s death fourteen years ago, I’ve thought a lot about her family history work and legacy. She even appeared to me in a dream in 2011 saying, ‘we must do something’ which echoed something she said to me in real life at my uncle’s funeral just five months before the bell tolled for her. It was always her plan to write the family history.
I shelved the idea of writing the family history then because I didn’t have the time for deep research or the bandwidth needed to write a book length manuscript whilst I was working in the public service. However, in lieu of that idea, I converted my spare time and energy into more accessible short form essays, that are now found on the website. Now that time is at my disposal, perhaps I should revisit that old idea and see what I can produce during this sabbatical. Of course, I will keep writing at whatwillbe.blog and hopefully push out a monthly essay. I have several pieces in the pipeline and I am working on a peer-reviewed journal article based on a lightning paper I gave at the 2025 Professional Historians Australia conference.
Presenting at PHA Hot Histories Conference, Darwin, October 2025
As the state government prepares for the upcoming election in November 2026, it’s likely that my new found freedom will see me spending more time at the State Library researching, reading and writing. It will give me more time to look at government policy through family history, as I did here, interrogating the Morrison Government’s Job Ready Graduates scheme and exorbitant costs for an arts degree. When my brother read Nippers and Heroes, a piece about historical state government investment and public advocacy in the Herald ‘Learn to Swim’ campaign here, he said, ‘very nicely written, Kimberley. You’re wasted in the public service.’ Of course, I don’t always stay in a local context, I’ve zoomed out to a global geo-political events tapping into my Irish ancestry of resistance and advocacy.
So that should keep me busy on my sabbatical, but in all honesty, I quite like the idea of taking a leaf out of Virginia Woolf’s diary entry written on Friday 2 January 1931 [4], that some might argue I am already there:
Here are my resolutions for the next three months; the next lap of the year.
First, to have none. Not to be tied.
Second, to be free & kindly with myself, not goading it to parties; to sit rather privately reading in the studio.
To make a good job of The Waves.
To care nothing for making money…
Further Action advocating for State Library Victoria
Consider adding your name to the following petitions which are still active
– Change Petition Save State Library
– Megaphone Hands off our State Library
Read the Open letter to the Library Board published 3 December 2025
Endnotes
[1] CPSU Campaign Pack October 2025
[2] Julian Assange’s full speech
[3] Anne-Marie Schwirtlich, Changes and challenges at the State Library of Victoria, Don Grant Lecture, Victorian Association of Family History Organisations, speech given in 2003
[4] The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume 4: 1931-1935
