Blockhouse Bay has an impressively torrid library history, writes Janet McAllister. Photo: Jay Farnworth
The local Janets love Avondale Library. Acclaimed artist Janet Lilo (whose CV activities are "making art and raising good, solid, feminist men") once declared the library "a lovely lively place, with librarians reminding the youngsters they can't eat pies at the computers".
Acclaimed poet Janet Charman ("a feminist poet chronicling
life in the suburbs in all its banal and joyous detail" — Auckland University Press) has been writing letters to the local paper, protesting "the short-sighted cost-cutting plans some have floated" to sell the library's land and move the library, presumably somewhere smaller.
Poets rock. (Sidenote: in her poem laundry, Charman uses a lovely bibliophile detail — "it has to go back/ it's a library book" — to demonstrate the inevitability of minor annoyances and also mortality).
The visiting Janet — to refer to myself as the third feminist Janet — also enjoyed her visit to Avondale Library. It's a tongue-twister: a beige, brick, bunker block, opened in 1973 by Mayor Dove-Myer Robinson. Before then, the library had been housed "temporarily" since 1931 at the Avondale Public Hall, now celebrating its sesquicentennial.
The current one-storey slab is spacious, colourful and attractive enough inside, and the beige outside is broken up by a sweet little garden of green things growing in painted tyres. Go tomorrow, at 2pm, to plant sunflowers and witness the new scarecrow.
