If a crow were to fly diagonally from here, it would meet the phantom branches of our backyard plum tree, long since cut down. It would bypass the housing built on the tennis court and the post office with its chain-link fence.
I measure the wall in front of me: five bricks high, in line with my kneecap. It’s darker than I remember; lichen age spots adorn its weathered bricks. I have returned here after catching myself craning as I rode the new Mariyung train through Kingswood Station, hoping to catch a glimpse of my imaginary library on Bringelly Road.
When I was younger, I believed that Kingswood was in Poland. Everyone I knew spoke in accents. The local church delivered Mass in Polish. We shopped in Polish stores, visited Polish friends, and ate Polish food. I had no reason to doubt my geography. Polish was what mattered — the squishy kissy language of food, gossip, debate, tenderness. English existed at the periphery. In Kingswood, I understood which language held authority.
The library visit was part of my daily routine — a ritual of borrowing and returning weightlessness that my grandparents understood and encouraged. My library became somewhere that held two worlds — the one of school forms and correct English, and the one of kitchen talk, gesture and Polish. It was a way of making sense of embodied history and collective knowledge that existed outside official record.
No one else I knew had a plum tree that stretched itself from the centre of the backyard to its corners; only my grandparents. Its branches grew outwards, laden with dark fruit, a site of nourishment and abundance. The cool tones of the fruit matched the quality of shade it offered. It seemed natural that plums existed to make kompot or powidła, a blend of bittersweet flavours that my Australian mother could never reconcile. My Babcia made these preparations in her kitchen: a sanctuary of lace-curtained windows and doorway. In late summer, the plums were delivered fresh to the park, sustaining our play until the call for our afternoon walk.
Our afternoons followed a predictable rhythm of unhurried ritual that allowed slow bodily observation. Nestled between lunch and my Babcia’s soap operas — her “stories” — we walked a steady route. Once we left the soft pile at our front gate, passing the staff carpark next door, the footpath guided us. I remember the perpetual sun. Heat rose from bitumen, concrete and brick, mingling with the tchip tchip of noisy mynas and reverberating cicadas, forming layers of sensation that made the air feel thicker.
Following our block’s geometry, my grandparents and I made our way around a rectangular boundary — towards the train station, along the Great Western Highway, past the hospital. Our footsteps overlaid official infrastructure with our own foundation. The walk structured time in ways that made imagination possible. We wrote an alternative map filled with shortcuts, patient pauses and steadying hands.
Straightening onto Bringelly Road, my library would reveal itself through the warp of rising air, its bricks sturdy, pockmarked and staggered. Its form adjusted to the hill’s rise, shorter at one end and climbing higher at the other. At first, it was a wall I balanced upon, red sandals on red bricks, wavering between private property and public street. A tightrope between theirs and ours. My body fell on different sides, depending on the day, before it morphed into a secret library only a select few knew. My feet acted like fingers on a pin pad, unlocking the wall into eight distinct book bays. Long and low, they had no need to reach skyward like the council library, out of reach and requiring a ladder. My imaginary library expressed itself through latitude — generous and inexhaustible.
Standing here now, I notice the air still feels dense, a weighted blanket that nods me back to childhood. The sun covers my back, pressing warmth through my shirt and settling between my shoulder blades. Treetops are taller, visible above expanding roofscapes, their peeling skin shed onto paths below. My skin registers a breeze, imperceptible but for the quivering tips of yet-to-be-mown grass which brush against the wall like my hand used to.
Selecting a book was never childhood theatre, but ritual. Purposeful and requiring deliberate consideration. The heat of rough bricks held by finger-raked mortar would seep into my spongy fingertips as they thrummed over invisible spines. Sometimes I closed my eyes, reading through touch, the way I’d seen Babcia navigate familiar surfaces. The wall’s texture would become text, holding books that were always upright, a mixture of heights and thicknesses but always proud; modelled on gold-embossed encyclopaedias, beaten board books and worn paperbacks.
I would open them and trace illustrations with my mind, hearing echoes of languages I knew as feeling rather than definition. A melding of worlds which honoured the imagery I conjured when Dziadek spoke of earlier years. His stories morphed between card games and barely achieved escapes; bluff saturating his recollections. I would follow the contours of his life and fill in its detail with familiar forms from my own. When he spoke of raising his hand and claiming to know how to ride a horse and where to go — lying to get out of the shoulder-to-shoulder line — I pictured my own hand moving upwards against a backdrop of dust and eucalyptus. I didn’t have to trust the muscle memory of an unknown horse as he did, but in my uncategorised library, I still stamped the inside cover of its books. Even in make-believe, I needed to mark presence — I witnessed this, and this matters.
My library could hold what was difficult to say aloud. In it, I could always find what I wanted. Stories accommodated different reading experiences, and I was safe from prying eyes. Each book could generate different words each opening, grangerised and ever-shifting as reader and author merged. Its magic was multiplicity, no hard line between correct and incorrect. It held what official libraries couldn’t: languages as fragments, histories contradicting official records, knowledge that had no author and required no card.
Down the road, the park’s corner is now held by the gesture of a fence, corralling a trio of street libraries into order. Adhered to their front doors are signs declaring 24 Hour Surveillance. Visiting earlier, I hesitated to browse, warmth replaced with the eyes of clinical cameras. Free exchange was conditional, a reminder that what can be seen can be monitored. My library had no such terms.
I was always aware of loss in my family — the Polish alphabet has 32 letters, English 26. Names and sounds altered through translations and bureaucratic efficiencies. Diacritics disappeared, and with them the bodily gestures that enunciated them — the way a mouth must reshape itself around ł or ą, movements that have no equivalent in English. These were the edits accumulating via official record, the absences my library was designed to hold. The judgments of others stopped my father speaking to us in Polish, afraid he wasn’t good enough for either language. He needed a place that could accommodate his shame, hold space for partial Polish, and honour embarrassment without requiring fluency.
My Babcia needed it differently. Her education ended early, and she’d lost her sight from war injuries she never elaborated on. She navigated her everyday with fierce independence. She could not have read the spines of my imaginary books if they were physical letters on cardboard, but she still would have asked what each was about, offering annotations through conversation, like the stories she listened to from Days of Our Lives.
Occasionally, Babcia and Dziadek would join me, selecting their own books, pulling from their own hopes and needs. Other days they would help sort, returning whatever needed to remain unopened. Most often they held their tanned arms out, ready to hold my books. Palms upward, silver clasps of watches facing the glaring sky. No one held their arms out like they did — a willingness to be seen holding something others couldn’t grasp, unashamed of illegibility.
Open arms were our family’s hallmark. Relatives creaked through the side gate, greeted with outstretched arms, breathless hugs and Polish sounds accentuating their high cheekbones and fleshy pouts. My library was an extension of this — of our dining table where we shared contradictions and common ground, a work in progress atop brick foundations.
As a child, people spoke above me, context flying over my head. Between the low brick wall and grown-up mouths existed a concertina architecture. A place for conversation, expanding and compressing between Polish and English, sounds folded through layers the way air moves through pleats. It occupied the gap between, operating not at adult height where institutional knowledge lives, but low enough for children, for those learning new languages, for those whose literacy exists in forms beyond text. This lowness created depth and protection where histories could be held without resolution, knowledge accumulating in folds rather than shelves.
Books in my library bore no weight, but required carrying anyway. This weightlessness was itself protection — no paper trail, loved and encouraged by my grandparents precisely because it could not be policed. They knew there was more to the world than the status quo.
This is what libraries can be when they refuse singular authority, when they accommodate what official systems exclude, when they honour multiple literacies and operate collectively across generations, outside institutional permission. This is how marginalised communities survive — through parallel worlds, through rituals anchoring even when imagined, through stories that require presence, not literacy. My library taught me to imagine outside what was materially present, to think beyond existing structures. It is now more sunken, relaxed into the place where we once stood together, arms outstretched.
***
Marnie Tomczyk is an artist and writer living and working on Dharug and Gundungurra land in the Blue Mountains. She is completing a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Printmaking) at the National Art School, where her practice employs strategic incompleteness and the interstitial as feminist methodology. Working across printmaking, performance, and text, she explores how bodies resist and reshape the systems that try to define them. In 2025, she won the Rosey Ravelston Art Award (Open) and the Artscene Printmaking Prize. She is one-third of the intergenerational collective White Cross Zines.