Openbook online

What’s it like when a novelist becomes a screenwriter? Jock Serong tells all.

Rachel Franks reflects on a landmark year for a program that has produced an incalculable body of research and scholarship

Marginal figures at the centre of historical photographs.

Susan Wyndham writes about the process of compiling a selection of letters between two major novelists.

The Country Cries for Truth, puts Dr Bronwyn Bancroft’s art, life, family and deep connection to Bundjalung Country on display.

A short story.

The library that made me.

Stop to smell the frangipanis in Peter Kingston’s art.

Fifty years of serving multicultural New South Wales with books.

Kate Fullagar reflects on her biography of these two men.

Inside the life and mind of a Sydney writer.

The library that made me.

Matthew Fishburn discovers Surgeon-General John White’s warts-and-all letter.

The Sydney-based artist renowned as one of Australia’s most talented bookplate designers.

Geoff Barker shadows an undercover police photographer.

Adria Castellucci writes about reimagining illustrations from the collection as textile artworks.

The libraries that made me

The incoming State Librarian talks about her new role.

Compiling a book about the Library’s painting collection prompts its editors to take stock.

The Miles Franklin Award– winning writer has a new book.

Explore the extraordinary series of oral history interviews added to the LBGTQI+ collection.

Elizabeth Fortescue on the great artist who has two major exhibitions happening this year.

Caroline Baum thinks about writer Charmian Clift’s legacy on the centenary of her birth.

The libraries that made me.

Inez Baranay reflects on her complicated biographical subject, Sasha Soldatow.

Andrew Trigg explores the Library's referenda-related ephemera.

A new addition to the Library’s world-class collection of Australian ornithological drawings.

Lisa Clifford reflects on donating her late mother June Dally-Watkins’ scrapbooks to the Library.

The centenary of writer Elizabeth Jolley’s birth prompts a literary biographer to revisit her complicated life and work.

The bestselling writer of The Dictionary of Lost Words has a new book.

Architect Nino Sydney gave his adopted city high-end design at an affordable price.

The 1623 volume, Mr William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories & Tragedies, aka the ‘First Folio’, is 400 years old this year. Why is it so special?

The Bard on tour in Bengal and beyond.

A twenty-first century fine binder gains a student.

The devastation of a shipwreck echoes across time.

Elizabeth Fortescue writes about the late artist’s Lavender Bay home, a work of art itself.

Mark Dapin’s wish-list of the most beautiful libraries in the world to visit.

The library that made me.

Singer, performer, toast of the town.

Fifty years ago, a group of women made history on and off the stage.

The library that made me.

Artworks — never before seen — by some of the ‘Dunera boys’ go on display in Orange, the place where many of the works were created.

A novelist brings a marginalised character back to the centre.

A luncheon inspired by the Queen’s 1954 visit.

The Larapinta Trail shifts what a nature writer thought she knew about trees.

A poem.

The library that made me.

Without nature’s alchemists, the world as we know it would not exist. Now we are beginning to understand fungi’s restorative role.

A design feature used by big-name modernist architects appeared first in a handful of houses on Sydney’s lower North Shore.

In the depths of grief, Indira Naidoo turns to the natural world around her for answers.

One of the most important sporting and cultural events on the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander calendar returns.

A short story.

It is 100 years since the famous writer and chronicler of bush life died.

A poem by Thuy On.

Rose de Freycinet, a nineteenth-century French woman, stowaway and diarist, unites a writer and an archivist 200 years later.

Twenty-first-century notions of wellness have a long lineage.

The library that made me.

That curious penguin on the spine of your favourite paperback isn’t there just for decoration.

Children’s picture books reflect the world that makes them, but must try to remake that world too.

As she finalises work for her landmark exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia, Sydney artist Cressida Campbell invites Openbook into her studio.

Alexandra Christie is the new editor of HEAT, an illustrious literary publication in its third incarnation

Fifty years ago, the Beat poet and living symbol of the counterculture toured Australia, during a time of personal, spiritual and political awakening.

We may find it easy to give a book one star, or five, but what do we really mean by the phrase ‘literary merit’?

Boxes filled with artwork, illustrations, posters, photographs and advertisements mark an acclaimed designer's life.

What’s the process for turning words on a page into words in your ear?

Science writer Jackson Ryan travels to Antarctica, via Mars, distant asteroids and tardigrades.

The library that made me.

A poem by Toby Fitch.

What impact do prizes have on Australia’s literary ecosystem?

The library that made me.

Emily Bitto's second novel raises compelling questions about writing and living.

A short story.

A poem by Sarah Holland-Batt.

As an advocate for and chronicler of women's cricket in Australia, Lorna Thomas fitted more than a lifetime into three boxes.

A short story.

While the Pacific has loomed large in Australia’s history, there is a riddle at the heart of our relationship with the region.

A life, as much as a gathering of words, is a story of places. It begins and ends with soil beneath feet, water within heart.

In the days before self-serve checkouts, 24/7 petrol stations and on-demand deliveries, most Aussie families flocked to their nearest corner shop.

Photographs reveal the grand inner-city gardens that were once the glory of Sydney.

Writer and teacher Giacomo Bianchino found himself in need of a library collection and space to work in.

Jamie Marina Lau began her second novel in a dream-like state that belies her intense research.

The opposite of kindness is not cruelty or malice. It is reason.

Has news of the demise of Australian English been greatly exaggerated?

Looking closely at the spine could unlock the mystery of a rare book, or it could raise more questions.

A short story.

A poem by Jane Gibian.

In the Schumacher household it was legendary: The Alarm Clock.

Sydney Writers’ Festival Artistic Director Michael Williams is ready for the challenges of 2021.

A recent online boom in sea shanties is a welcome surprise for longtime converts.

A different kind of travel tale can be found amid the pandemic, if you know where to look.

The theme of friendship and betrayal took this writer and editor from her non-fiction debut to her first novel.

The timeless appeal of shells has seen them preserved in many ways over the centuries.

Darug people share a deeper story of Dyarubbin, the Hawkesbury River.

Peter Kingston couldn’t please everyone in his artist’s book Sheilas, but the result is a special piece of work.

A poem by Eunice Andrada.

Two writers’ search for their mysterious and talented forebear was full of archival riches.

It’s just a bag of peas, she told herself. I can order more online. So why was she crying?

An Aboriginal leader’s assistance to the artists of the Newcastle penal settlement led to an unprecedented visual record of the local Indigenous people.

In the Golden Age of Cartography, the first atlases combined the skills of the mapmaker with the ingenuity of the publisher.

As writers adapt to a vastly altered publishing landscape, how will they remake themselves in a post-pandemic world?

The extraordinary events of the past few months are unprecedented in our lifetimes, but the response to the Covid-19 pandemic contains echoes of the 1918–19 influenza outbreak. The Library is one of many institutions following the lead of our forebears.

Australian nurse Muriel Knox Doherty recorded her experiences and insights after the liberation of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. 

In 1770 the Gweagal people of Kamay (Botany Bay) discovered James Cook and the Endeavour. The Library’s new exhibition explores the eight days that followed.

All thing must pass, and even statues have to know when it’s time to go.

The world of early cartography is irresistible in the Library’s new Map Rooms.

Writer and actor Kate Mulvany defies the neat stories people write about her.

After a person dies, there is the game show.

Of all the Australian stage performers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Nellie Stewart was the best known and most universally loved.

Science and history come together in conserving the swamplands of southern Sydney.

She found fame as a teenage poet, but Grace Perry’s startling later work and her support for fellow poets are barely remembered.

An artist followed in the inspiring footsteps of a botanist rescued from a tragic expedition in 1848. 

A title page has always told readers what the book is about, but sometimes with an artistic flourish.

Street libraries are boxed shelters for books, managed by passionate local ‘librarians’. These tiny vestibules of literary happiness can be enjoyed, refilled and built by anyone.

Fifty years after the first gay rights organisation was founded in NSW, the activism of the 1970s still resonates.

A poem by Maryam Azam.

The Library is the new home of award-winning children’s author and illustrator Pamela Allen’s extensive archive.

The place of religious instruction in public schools has long been controversial. 

The Library’s online diary preserves everyday experiences of Australians during the pandemic. 

A behind the scenes look at the new podcast series exploring the last great influenza pandemic in 1919.

In difficult times, Australian expatriate artist George Lambert challenged himself to paint a distorted reflection. 

Stan didn’t look good at all. I could see him in the garden, through a window. Hunched forward, sucking on a cigarette, mistaking it for a sign of life.

Sydney writer and naturalist Ella McFadyen combined a love of nature, folklore and poetry. 

How can a dialogue between Indigenous ancestors and descendants forge connections to country for all Australians?

A collection of papers traces one family’s escape from the Armenian genocide.

Part of daily life in the mid twentieth century, circulating libraries have left charming traces.

The daughter of a courageous suffragette, Betty Archdale excelled in several fields that rarely admitted women.

Sugar and slavery are intertwined in the hidden story of Australia’s early industry.

The Library holds vast collections on Australian children’s book publishing in the ‘golden age’ of the 1970s and 80s.

A contributor to the Library’s Living Language exhibition reflects on Indigenous resistance, survival, and the New England linguicide.

The well-known conservationist Myles Dunphy’s romantic side is beautifully illustrated in a new acquisition.

After four years of war, ‘normal life’ ceased again in early 1919 as an influenza epidemic spread through the country.

A vital public institution.

An eye-catching poster got the message out for an emerging Sydney band in 1980.

A list of Aboriginal placenames was a trigger for seeking the ‘real secret river’.

Intimate letters from 100 years ago paint a detailed self-portrait of a young Australian woman.

The madness of a free settler and a convict found expression on the outskirts of the new colony.

Established in 1820, this cemetery became the final resting place for many Sydney-siders throughout the 19th century. The land was finally cleared in 1901 to make way for Sydney's new Central Station.

A feminist newspaper from the early 1980s brings back memories of lively co-op meetings, nutritious sandwiches and high ideals.

A major exhibition opening in July at the Library will celebrate UNESCO’s International Year of Indigenous Languages.

Looking through Vietnamese art posters collected in the 1950s elicits complicated feelings all these years later.

Bold plans to transform the Cooks River in Sydney are reflected in the Library's collection.

To mark the centenary of the peace year, 1919, we take an intimate look at the lives of children during the ‘war to end all wars’.

Hundreds of delightful and intriguing endpapers can be found in the State Library of NSW collection.

The histories of people with disability in Australia can be found if you read ‘against the grain’.

In October 1918 Angus & Robertson published what would become one of Australia’s best known children’s stories: The Magic Pudding.

We’ve almost doubled our gallery space to show more of the Library’s collection and give exhibition visitors a chance to make their own connections.

Donald Horne’s unlikely editorship of the mass-market Weekend magazine was a crucial stage in the Lucky Country author’s development as a public intellectual.

The optimism of a city imagining its future is captured in photographs, plans and sketches.

A compelling portrait of a young colonial woman has been given new life. 

An 1802 portrait of a young Eora man, by French artist Nicolas-Martin Petit, is remarkable for its attention to detail.

A historian shares her delight in the recently acquired Fairfax Media Business Archive.

In the current era of instant digital communication, letters between long-distance lovers have a particular poignancy.

An eccentric French nobleman, a letter about Cook’s Endeavour voyage and an enduring bibliographic mystery come together in the Library’s Banks collection. 

Among the papers of the Scott brothers, who settled in the Hunter Valley in the 1820s, is a manual for frontier living.

The continuing boom in family history research is having a far-reaching impact on how people understand themselves and the world. 

Max Dupain’s Sunbaker has inspired an exhibition of contemporary and thought-provoking artworks. 

Merging history and science, a Library fellowship tracked 80 years of fishing off the east coast of Australia.

The Australian Red Cross NSW Division archive spans over 100 years of humanitarian aid.

Outstanding gardens are revealed by leading photographers in a new exhibition.

The quirky and obscure Hallams slide collection is a curator’s dream, revealing ordinary Australian gardens in the 1960s and 70s.

Buried deep down in the cool darkness of the Library’s framed picture store hangs a beautiful portrait of the young Mrs F O’Brien. It was painted in mid-1841 by naval surgeon-turned artist Maurice Felton from a death mask.

The Gurindji’s struggle sparked a national network of support organisations and became a symbol of the land rights movement.

Bushwalker, feminist and pacifist Marie Byles helped to shape Buddhism in Australia.

Sifting through the ‘glorious clutter’ of the Thompson family papers offers a sense of early Sydney life and insights into several significant local families.

The Library’s collection offers glimpses into Sydney signwriting and decorating firm Althouse & Geiger that once boasted, 'We tell the world everything it wants to know'.

A surprise bestseller in 1886, Fergus Hume’s The Mystery of a Hansom Cab continues to intrigue.

Eric Thompson’s career as an architect, artist and filmmaker highlights the close connection between architecture and design in the development of the film industry.

Thoroughly modern Miss Emily Chambers of Burwood, NSW, was always eager to try the latest fad.

First hand accounts of the ANZAC landing at Gallipoli on 25 April 1915.

Peace activism in Australia has a rich and complex history.

In 25 years at the State Library, our Curator of Photographs has seen four people cry.

Portrait of Gumbaynggirr and Bundjalung people from the 1870s show how photography shaped race relationships in the nineteenth century. 

Members of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities are advised that this story contains names and images of deceased people.

A Library fellowship uncovered an archive of emotion in the correspondence of Henry Parkes and Thomas Woolner.

Charles Dickens saw Australia as a utopia for the working class — and his wayward sons.

Australia played an important role in Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution.

Sydney’s colonial gentry built mansions, held lavish parties and amassed fortunes beyond the imagination of their English relations.