Straining my imagination

Maria Tumarkin is a Melbourne-based writer. She was a Library Creative Fellow in 2005.

In 1990 my family immigrated to Australia from the not-yet-former Soviet Union. Within weeks, I was at the State Library. All those Western books I would have given my right arm for back home – all the Audens, Orwells, Nietzsches and Virginia Woolfs – were there. And they were locked up safely overnight – even better.

Just being in the dome felt consoling and I needed that, because Australia felt like an awful mistake.

The people in the dome, consumed by books, didn’t feel nearly as alien as the ones outside.

I liked the lamps. I liked not being comfortable. The dome felt timeless and placeless. My frenzied sense of dislocation was pacified.

At that time I was about to turn 16. My English was not good enough to read a vacuum cleaner manual, but I just went for it. Fake it till you make it, that’s what I did. I spent almost a year in the dome gorging myself on books, reading my way into a new life. Other libraries didn’t feel the same. They didn’t have the same quality of silence. The same nobility of form. Other libraries were a means to an end; the State Library was an end in itself.

Fifteen years later I became a Creative Fellow to work on my second book, an exploration of children’s diaries across time and cultures. For six months I arrived at my study carrel at the Library and read what I needed to read for my research, and then I read everything else I stumbled on.

WG Sebald likened the way he wrote to a dog running through a field, following the advice of his nose, moving around a patch of land seemingly with no rhyme or reason. Yet the dog 'invariably finds what he is looking for,' Sebald wrote. I moved around the Library sniffing my way around, not sure what it was I was looking for but determined to find it. You connect the dots, Sebald explained, by 'straining your imagination', by asking your mind 'to do something that it hasn’t done before'.

This is how my book on children’s diaries died. The dome is its resting place. The more time I spent reading at the Library, the clearer it became to me that I needed to write a different book. My second book became a book-length essay about courage – it was the book I had to write.

These days I still come to the Library a lot. It is still my place. I cannot get enough of this feeling that at any given moment, completely by chance, I could walk into a book possessing a revelatory, life-changing power – a book that, until this moment, I didn’t know existed.