@ExhibitExplorer

I'm interested in libraries, and descriptions or pictures of lost libraries always pique my curiosity.

I'd love to know what the books are. Although I've enlarged the picture, the titles remain illegible. Who chose the books? What happened to them? Some of them have probably been destroyed, but I like to think that at least one of them is still "alive", sitting on a shelf somewhere.

I also like to picture some of those voyaging between Australia and New Zealand coming here to pass the time by flicking through a periodical, engross themselves in a novel, reflect after reading a poem...perhaps some, after some encounter here with either a text or a fellow trans-Tasman voyager, changed their lives.

For Brits, it's easy to imagine Australia and New Zealand as being next door neighbours, like Britain and Ireland - easy but wrong. In fact, Hobart in Tasmania is a little bit more distant from Wellington in New Zealand than is London, England, from Lviv, Ukraine. The voyage across the Tasman Sea could take more than three weeks.