THE MAKING OF A LIBRARY

 

As the Wooden Boat Association of Cairns has grown over the years we have gathered together a wealth of literature, hard-back and softcover books, magazines from overseas and from here in Australia, boat plans, charts, manuals for machinery and equipment, Navy seamanship Manuals, documentaries on CD’s, and a great deal more.

The subjects of each book cover a huge wealth of topics including navigation, boatbuilding and repairs, biographies, history, and…well, you can guess that the list is long and amazingly varied.

Where did it all come from? Members’ own collections – including many from one our founding members, one Lennie Foxcroft who cast off all lines years back on his final journey. Lennie gained almost 90 orbits around the sun and spent the vast majority of that time on our oceans, including serving as a young hand aboard a square-rigger.

Other large collections of boating magazines accrued by Cairns’ locals over a lifetime have been gifted to us by remaining families of the Father or Grandfather who bought each issue, each month, each year for decades. They gave them to us in perpetuity in the hope that their Dad or Grandad’s possessions would gain a safe haven amongst a group of like-minded people. And we at WBAC are extremely proud to boast that that trust has been honoured, so read on.

As we gathered our collection, and as we grew as an association it became very obvious that the ever-expanding pile of boxes, cases, and bulging shelves full of books and magazines and folders and more books needed to be sorted out and set up properly but we had no-one that had a clue as to what to do and how (as an aside, we have plenty of members without a clue which is why we get on so well together).

Then, a few years back, an unassuming bloke from the tablelands named Dermot ventured through our door with a membership form, and the planets aligned.

No, the Earth didn’t move but it soon became obvious we had an organiser on our hands as he very willingly launched himself into sorting out the hundreds of kilos of stainless yacht & boat fittings, bolts, nuts, myriad fastenings, sailing attachments, marine instruments and other unimaginable ‘stuff’ also collected over a couple of decades. AND he kept at it until it was done! You can understand why we weren’t letting this bloke get away.

After all that was done, Dermot then cast his gaze over the mound of boxes of books and stuff sitting forlornly hither and yon and suggested he sort that out as well. Fortunately, neither Dermot nor anyone else was injured in the rush to accept his proposal, and it all blossomed from that point on.

First, he engineered the setting up of shelving suitable to house all the collection and then established the library computer program, populating it as the sorting continued for weeks that became moths and has now become a couple of years of dedicated passion in setting up our library.

Of course, as the setting up progressed it has become obvious that the small corner of our world dedicated to all things literary was just inefficient and insufficient for it’s needs, and something needed to be done.

And now we’ve started. The clubhouse interior is being stripped out, old shelves and cabinetry removed, and the rear wall will be re-sheeted with plasterboard to give a fitting backdrop to the full-wall bookshelves planned. An updated kitchenette will form part of it all, and extra bookshelves will be added on the side wall between the dual doors. A 3D architectural model is shown on the projects" page.  More photographs will follow as construction continues.