A Dame among domes

Kim Kane is a lawyer, children's author and the mother of twin boys. She wrote some of Pip : the story of Olive in the domed reading room. 

I'd love to say I met my partner in the Library, but I didn't. I'm sure people have though. The moment they painted the dome, transforming it into a glorious light-filled cathedral, school students started flocking to it and it became hard to concentrate for all the scuff-shoed flirtation. In winter, the sky was always dark by the time I arrived, and although the reading room could never be as fuggy as the days when copper sealed out light and air it did feel less summerhouse-like then, and even the most brazen of the eyelash-batterers knuckled down.

I preferred the reading room during its dark days when it was musty and dusty and so gloomy that I always felt I might just meet a hobbit or a flasher between the shelves. I never did, though. I never found a mummified bat either, although I know others have.

I began my first novel, Pip: the story of Olive under the dome.

I was working as a lawyer during the day and studying Professional Writing and Editing across the road at RMIT so it was the perfect place between office and classroom. A place in which I could scrawl assignments without the distraction of other law students, and place in which I felt completely anonymous.

I lived above a second-hand bookshop at the time, and the owner was convinced that my place was the perfect place to write, for words, he claimed, floated lighter than hydrogen. I used to sit at my laptop in the dome imagining the path words might take in the reading room. Whether they'd fling themselves off the balcony, coattail-over-bayonet into the pit below, or swirl around its circumference, whipped by centrifugal force until they landed on my keyboard giddy but as gentle as pollen.

The domed reading room evokes a feeling of elevated spirit. The construction of some buildings has this effect on me; the Taj Mahal, Le Corbusier's Notre Dame du Haut and some more secular buildings such as the Oxford colleges, European railways and - that magnificent homage to consumption - the Galeries Lafayette in Paris.

For me, it's the late Dame Elisabeth Murdoch of buildings: smart, elegant, noble, vital and now a centenarian. Happy birthday, dear dome.