WHEN I ENTER Sydney’s Mitchell Library, I find myself in an ornate vestibule, standing on a marble and brass version of the Tasman Map. Pausing somewhere between Mauritius and Batavia, I read the enormous Thomas Carlyle quote etched into the sandstone wall above the library’s front desk:

In books lies the soul of the whole past time, the articulate audible voice of the past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream.