Drawing by dream-light

Barry Dickins is an award-winning Australian author, playwright and artist.

I remember so clearly the first time I came here. It was 1961 and I was 12. Having a picture book in mind, I bought myself a box of these terribly expensive drawing nibs made in Germany – Croquil drawing nibs. I had a matchbox full of those and the pen holders, a box of matches, a good-quality watercolour sketchbook and some really nice watercolour paint.

I came in here to do some drawings with an engraving-quality steel nib and a bottle of Reeves Indian Ink.

I got here about three o’clock in the afternoon; it was a really cold day and I found a tiny corner. There was no sound in the reading room, no sound of any sort. It was all odours to me, and it was the wonder of old wood and leather and the little brass finicky things that you lifted the desk lids with and the strange semicircular swivel chairs and the green lights. The whole thing felt like heaven to me, it was like drawing in heaven.

I was just drawing there, an intricate drawing and I made too much noise at one stage with the nib and the ink on the page of the paper, and I was shushed by the public shusher. I stopped drawing for several seconds and then moved somewhere else to draw, making no sound. I wrote a whole poem, Ode to the Library, a stream of consciousness poem about the reading room that includes some of these anecdotes.

I’ve drawn three picture books in here. One was called My grandmother, published by Penguin Books; that was a tribute to my father’s mother. The drawings probably took a winter to do. I did the drawings of my nan here when she was still alive. When you age, God becomes your comedian and you have all these incredible extras, baggy eyes and jowls and your hands aren’t as handsome as they once were. I did all the drawings for that here. It’s not that easy to draw just anywhere, this is my little studio.

There’s many reasons  I work in the dome, even the sounds I enjoy. I think mostly it is the quality of the light coming from those gorgeous triangular green glass lamps. They seem off the Nautilus or out of HG Wells. To me, they’re the sorts of things that crop up in dreams.