This page features computer generated text of the source audio. It may contain errors or omissions, so always listen back to the original media to confirm content. You can search the text using Ctrl-F, and you can also play the audio by clicking on a desired timestamp.
Tuesday the 17th, this coming week, is the 30th anniversary of the day we first opened for business. And this room is our fifth home. We're nomads, except we've been here since January 2013. But this is our best room. It's got a solid wall along there and those bookshelf uprights are bolted to the wall, So, in the next Kaikoura earthquake the bookshelves won't [00:00:30] fall over, just a few books will fly off, but stay away from that end if it's the Wellington fault line. I can't remember the previous four, I mean Janet Campbell's was one. Janet Campbell was first, Janet Campbell second, the church, the Buddhist Centre and then here. Anyway, before we opened, of course, there was many, many months of planning, preparation and fundraising. But the plot to create a lesbian library seems to have been hatched [00:01:00] by Linda Evans and Glenda Gale, who both worked in the National Library, so I think it was down in the coffee bar they came up with the idea, and Linda was co presenting the lesbian radio program each week with Alison Laurie, and so she gave a notice saying that the room had been booked in the YWCA for a meeting to discuss whether or not we should have a lesbian library in Wellington. And so lots of women turned out, about half of whom were librarians. And we voted yes. This, [00:01:30] this um, happened, yes, the first meeting of a steering committee of volunteers was held on the 2nd of November, 93. So this was back in 1993. And we decided we wanted it to be a lending library with archives and information. And on February the 8th, the meeting, we decided we need a name. And Janet Campbell wanted LILAC. And this dweeb, numpkin, in the next three minutes turned LILAC into an acronym. [00:02:00] My day job was working with acronyms on steroids. But the main topics we discussed at our meetings and the projects we worked on included fundraising. For example, at the Gay and Lesbian Fair in March 94, we had a great big white elephant stall with a table of second hand books and raised over 1, 100, which in today's terms would be about 2,400. {In the days we were admitted to [00:02:30] the lesbian fair}. Well, this was, this was the gay and lesbian fair, and we had a big place for it, and op shops weren't doing bric a brac then, they were just doing clothes, so we did very well. Students equipped their flat kitchens. Um, premises, we knew we just couldn't afford rents around the town. But Janet came up with what she thought was a temporary solution. Because she was setting up a counselling room in, uh, in a building on The Terrace. And [00:03:00] she said, well, we could set up our bookshelves against the walls and cover them with curtains when we weren't open. And she was using it as a counselling room. And we drafted a constitution and registered it as an incorporated society, opened a bank account, decided on membership criteria. Set subs at 10, 20, 30 dollars. They've only risen twice, about twice since then. Books, of course, we needed books to open. We got lots of donated books. We [00:03:30] shopped in all the second hand bookshops on Cuba Street and and on Courtenay Place and in Newtown. And Linda Evans visited a secondhand bookshop or two in San Francisco and sent back a mailbag packed with books. And Kathleen Johnson bought some books in London and sent them back. And then Muggins catalogued the books. Having been recruited by Glenda Gale from the Breathing Space Group. You'll [00:04:00] catalogue the lesbian library, won't you Ellen? Yes. We scrounged for book processing supplies. Book issue cards in the book pockets and the loan slips. We bought the plastic sheet for covering. Our libraries around the town were of course all automated and didn't need to issue books manually anymore so they were rooted out of back cupboards and brought to LILAC. We bought second hand library shelving. [00:04:30] And, for publicity, Lesbian Radio and the Wellington Lesbian Newsletter, of course, which had about three or four pages of notices in it each month, and until we opened it was a notice, if you are interested, contact them, the phone number. But, once we did open, we couldn't publicise the address because Janet Campbell was using it for counselling. Didn't want the address known. So women had to [00:05:00] phone Lesbian Line. Anyone remember Lesbian Line? These young things here won't know what a Lesbian Line is. There was Lesbian Lines up and down the country. They're all listed in the Wellington Lesbian Newsletters. So we opened on the 17th of September with about 400 books. One of the other curly things, of course, is that we were open after office hours, and it was an office building, so the street door had to be locked. So we had to have a volunteer sitting behind the door when we were open, [00:05:30] to open it for when likely looking women came along, and, uh, until Janet got a bell, a button to push to ring a bell up in the room. But we had, according to the, uh, something I found in the first minute book. About 51 women joined up on the first day. They poured in. And they could only borrow two books at a time because we only had 400. But for the young ones here, something of [00:06:00] the flavour of the times, the social milieu. Minutes were photocopied and posted out snail mail. No one had a personal email account. Some of us had work email accounts. Landlines not cell phones. And if you were phoning someone, you had to hope they had an answer machine that you could leave a message on. And the worldwide web was in its infancy. Social media was a nightmare to come, but there were chat rooms. I found a chat where called chat room [00:06:30] called nz.soc.queer, which was nicknamed socwear. {So what was that again?} nz.soc.queer - all you could do was post text messages The internet was travelling down copper wires and it was all very slow But we persisted! And we did it!
This page features computer generated text of the source audio. It may contain errors or omissions, so always listen back to the original media to confirm content.
Tags