In Praise of Going Astray: David Walsh’s Library Beneath the Earth.

Every great library is, in some sense, a portrait of its creator.

Not the polished public version, but the stranger self concealed beneath professional biographies and carefully rehearsed narratives. The self revealed by marginal fascinations, improbable connections and questions pursued long after practical people have moved on to more useful concerns.

If that proposition holds true, then Phrontisterion, the newly unveiled library at Hobart’s Museum of Old and New Art, may be the most revealing thing David Walsh has ever built.

Hidden beneath Mona’s celebrated sandstone headland, connected to the museum by tunnels and buried below Anselm Kiefer’s monumental Elektra amphitheatre, the project arrives as neither an adjunct nor an amenity. It feels more like an excavation of the intellectual bedrock upon which the entire Mona experiment has rested for decades.

There are, certainly, enough treasures to satisfy the bibliophile’s appetite for rarity. Shakespeare’s First Folio resides here. So too Newton’s Opticks, Darwin’s final lifetime edition of On the Origin of Species, books signed by Umberto Eco, J.G. Ballard and Hunter S. Thompson, alongside manuscripts touched by Einstein, Whitman, Balzac, Bowie and Bell.

Yet to focus solely on these artefacts would be to misunderstand the enterprise.

Rare books are plentiful in the world’s great collections. What is rare is a collection that feels so unapologetically human.

The title itself offers a clue. Borrowed from Aristophanes’ Clouds, Phrontisterion translates loosely as a “thinkery” - a place where ideas are generated, tested and occasionally ridiculed. In Aristophanes’ play, intellectual vanity is gently dismantled, exposing the perilous certainty of those who confuse the possession of knowledge with the deeper, more elusive art of understanding. More than two millennia later, the joke still lands.

This is not a library devoted to certainty.

It is a library devoted to curiosity.

The distinction matters.

Somewhere beneath Hobart, a door has opened into one of Australia’s strangest collections. We took the bait. You probably will too.

For centuries, libraries have presented themselves as monuments to order. Classification systems, catalogues and indexes promised that knowledge could be organised into stable categories and retrieved with sufficient discipline. The ambition was noble, but increasingly at odds with the way discovery actually occurs.

Most meaningful intellectual breakthroughs begin not with answers but with accidents.

A footnote. A digression. A book found on the wrong shelf.

The Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges understood this better than most. His fictional libraries were not repositories of information but landscapes of possibility, places where wandering became a method of inquiry. Reading Borges, one often senses that the shortest distance between two ideas is rarely a straight line.

Walsh appears to share the sentiment.

Books on Antarctic exploration sit alongside volumes on brewing, casinos, winter rituals, science fiction, sex, heavy metal pollution and charcuterie. Subjects collide with one another in ways that would horrify a conventional cataloguer and delight anyone interested in how ideas actually travel.

The library’s organisational philosophy extends this impulse. Developed with Art Processors, the system allows books to be located without being permanently anchored to a prescribed classification structure.

In philosophical terms, it represents a quiet rebellion.

The twentieth century was shaped by institutions determined to categorise the world. The twenty-first increasingly delegates that task to algorithms. We have become accustomed to recommendation engines that predict our interests, refine our preferences and shield us from intellectual surprise.

Everything is optimised.

Everything is relevant.

Everything arrives before we know we want it.

The consequence is subtle but profound. We encounter fewer accidents.

Phrontisterion feels designed to restore them.

There is an unexpected resonance here with the German cultural historian Aby Warburg, whose extraordinary library was organised according to what he called “the law of the good neighbour”. Books were placed beside one another not because they belonged to the same discipline but because they had something interesting to say to each other. Scholarship became an exercise in productive trespassing.

One suspects Walsh would approve.

The experience of moving through the collection is less like consulting a database than entering a conversation already in progress. The shelves seem to suggest that brewing might illuminate anthropology, that gambling might reveal something about theology, that science fiction might occasionally explain the present more clearly than history.

Knowledge becomes less hierarchical and more ecological.

Ideas cross-pollinate.

Connections proliferate.

Even the architecture participates in this act of intellectual destabilisation. Descending through sandstone passages into the library feels curiously archaeological, as though one were travelling not deeper into the earth but deeper into the workings of a particular mind.

The children’s library captures this spirit beautifully. Conceived as a cave-like environment filled with curiosities from the collections of Walsh’s daughters Grace and Sunday, complete with hidden corners and an Ames illusion room, it introduces younger visitors to a lesson that many adults spend their lives resisting: Perception is unreliable, certainty is overrated and wonder is a serious business.

The artworks distributed throughout the space reinforce the point. Works by Matthew Barney, Julian Charrière, Joshua Yeldham and others do not function as decoration. They serve as interruptions, provocations and companion pieces to the books that surround them.

Reading and looking become part of the same activity.

Perhaps that is what makes Phrontisterion so compelling.

It arrives at a moment when information has never been more abundant and genuine curiosity often feels endangered.

We know more than any generation before us. We search faster, retrieve faster and consume faster. Yet the conditions that nurture deep fascination - slowness, ambiguity, serendipity and the freedom to follow an unexpected trail - are increasingly difficult to preserve.

Walsh’s library is, among many other things, an argument for those conditions.

Not nostalgia for a pre-digital age, but a reminder that discovery has always depended upon uncertainty.

David Walsh once described his childhood library card as “the great leveller”, a passport into worlds that would otherwise have remained inaccessible. The phrase carries particular weight here. For all its rarities and curiosities, Phrontisterion is ultimately animated by the same democratic impulse that has sustained libraries for centuries: the belief that ideas should remain available to anyone willing to pursue them.

But it adds something else.

A defence of intellectual wandering.

A faith in the value of the digression.

A conviction that some of life’s most important discoveries occur when we stop looking for them.

Beneath the sandstone, beneath the museum, beneath the noise of a culture obsessed with efficiency, David Walsh has built a monument to the possibility that getting lost is not a failure of navigation.

It is where the real journey begins.

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Words by AW.

Photo courtesy of The Museum of Old and New Art.