Greg Sheridan on the Library

The Library featured in an article in the Weekend Australian Review by Greg Sheridan on the address of the Minister of Health, Mr. Tony Abbott, to the Catholic Media Group. As the host of the event, Mr. Sheridan had this to say about the Library:

The Caroline Chisholm Library itself is worth the price of admission. It was founded in the 1920s by an Irish Jesuit who had been chaplain to IRA leader Michael Collins; he was brought to Australia by Cardinal Mannix. Collins, who secured Irish independence but was killed at the end of the Irish civil war, was one of the most compelling figures of the 20th century. His biography, by Tim Pat Coogan, is a glorious work and pretty good film of it was made starring Liam Neeson. But I digress.
Caroline Chisholm used to grace our $5 note but was replaced by the Queen, a move bitterly fought and delayed for a year in a magnificent but doomed guerrilla action by Mark Ryan, a staffer in Paul Keating's office when he was treasurer. This eclipse of Chisholm outrages every republican bone in my body. It is a wonderful thing that she is remembered still in this magnificent little library of some 30,000 volumes. At its peak it was a great public library and was part of the church's dedication to educating the Catholic population. Books were once expensive and prized, and people would travel in from Melbourne's suburbs to visit the library. All kinds of activist groups, from the Campion Society to the Catholic Worker newspaper, met there.
It fell into decline in the '60s and '70s and the church finally decided to get rid of it in the mid '90s. But its users, 500 paid-up subscribers, kept it going with volunteer labour and tender devotion. To walk through it now is to re-enter the lost world of high Catholic cosmopolitanism and popular intellectualism.
Today, in the age of the Internet, libraries may seem anachronistic. But you find in them two things you encounter only in an attenuated form on the net, people and books.
The books in the Caroline Chisholm Library are mostly too old to be on the net.
The ubiquity of the net means, paradoxically, that I now enter a cluster of old books with as much excitement as I enter a huge Borders store bulging with new books. Because, among the old books, I know there will be real treasurers of the exotic, ideas that were thought through before the present time. They will be free of the stultifying conformity of the present moment, and its vanities and misconceptions.

NB The Irish Jesut in question was Fr. William Hackett SJ and Dr. Mannix was Archbishop of Melbourne but never a Cardinal.