If there’s one thing that makes the community news business worthwhile it’s going into bat for locals and helping them win a fight. We did that with the fight to keep the Milton Library, so it’s mightily gratifying to see the service – once slated for extinction – more vigorous than ever.
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The community was rightly outraged in 2014 when Shoalhaven City Council indicated it was prepared to shut the library down. Residents marched in the street, enlisted the help of South Coast MP Shelley Hancock and demanded this important community asset be retained.
The fight made the news not just here but in Nowra and as far afield as Young, where the local paper also ran the story. The fight was emblematic of community spirit standing up to remote bureaucratic number crunching. The dollars-and-cents argument mounted by council made no sense to real people who knew how important it was to have a local library.
Where council saw an asset that could be sold, the community saw a hub where locals could gather, drawn by a shared love of books.
The case against keeping the library was grounded in the fact a new one was operating in Ulladulla. Try telling that to an elderly or very young Milton resident living seven kilometres away with limited access to public transport.
Happily, council did eventually listen to the community and the library was retained.
More than two years later and the library is thriving, to the point where its hours are to be extended. And there’s even better news. Volunteers who put their hand up to be trained to operate it will have their service recognised by Centrelink.
There’s the opportunity to support a local asset while gaining new skills at the same time. For many, there could hardly be a better way to spend time than being in the warm embrace of books and literature.
The library saga tells us a few things.
One, a community that is prepared to put in the hours fighting for itself has every chance of being heard.
Two, despite being swamped by screens and smartphones, there is plenty of life left in the good, old-fashioned book. Even sales of gizmos such as e-readers have tapered right off. Despite calamitous predictions a few years ago that book stores would go the way of the dodo, many are still flourishing, especially in regional communities.
We say, long live the book and the library.