Librarian Katherine Mitchell‘s experience at Parramatta Library from 1960s as a library staff member. Interview was recorded in 2015.
Hi Katherine again, welcome back. A couple of things I wanted to mention. As you can see the library building is you know pretty much a very old fashioned 1960s building in pebblecrete, even though it's had an extra level added. But what I think is significant is the signage. Now I was involved in that, probably the early 2000s. Libraries were always very you know low key and they didn't really want to advertise themselves, so we decided that we would put a nice big library sign up. And you can see that is a really outsized library sign so that you know people knew that the library was here. And the other significant thing about the signage, or the decoration above the signage, is that Danny Eastwood a local Indigenous artist was commissioned to, actually his artwork was to be used on a lot of the library’s sort of stationary, and there's a sort of…, but anyway if you want to have a look at it it's a kind of picture of the eels tail and head to tail, and I think that’s significant because you know it sort of points out that Parramatta began to think about Indigenous people and the fact that this was the land of the Dharug people. And that kind of consciousness was raised which I think was a really important thing for Parramatta to do.
Neera Sahni, Research Services Leader, Parramatta Heritage Centre, City of Parramatta, 2021