Author Andrea Goldsmith helped us celebrate the reopening of the newly renovated Readings Carlton last week by sharing a few words about what the Readings community has meant to her. Thank you Andrea for your generosity and kindness!

Here is a transcript of her speech from the night.

Ah Readings, where would we be without you?

Lovers and partners come and go, children grow up and leave home, friends betray, politicians disappoint, a narcissistic failed business-man has taken a hold of the free world, and the so-called improvements to Hoddle Street have had no noticeable effect whatsoever. Amid all the uncertainties of life Readings has been a bedrock, and, as you can see, it is now a more beautiful, more spacious, more accessible bedrock.

But before you are overwhelmed by these shiny new surroundings, let me take you back. It’s 1969 and we’re across the road. Readings, has just been established by Dot and Ross Reading with Peter Reid, while up the street, Mark Rubbo is pitching the latest music at Professor Longhairs’ Music Shop. There are some here who remember both places.

In 1976, Mark, together with Greg Young and Steve Smith bought Readings, and in 1983 they moved to larger premises – though still across the road. Readings Music was up the street, managed by the extraordinary Ruth who taught me most of what I learned about contemporary pop post the Beatles.

So we’re still across the road, and it’s the early 90s. There’s a section on sociology, and another on feminism. Personal growth and development, if it exists at all at Readings, is up the back of the shop – along with cooking. Poetry is on a stand about halfway down the shop. One day, I notice a young woman crouched in front of the poetry shelves. I’d met her a couple of months earlier at a party, and here she was reading Rilke in Readings – the wrong translation as far as I was concerned – I’d bought the Stephen Mitchell translation from Readings some time earlier. So we talk, and it seems her boyfriend is in a bad state and HE’S reading Rilke. She reasons that if she reads Rilke she’ll be in a better position to understand him. I want to suggest that if she reads Rilke she’ll be in a better position to understand herself – but she’s in extremis, and I have to be sympathetic. So there we are in Readings discussing not the boyfriend, but the merits of various translations, while people brush past us intent on their own business. To my delight she settles on the Stephen Mitchell in the end.

(A few months later I heard about the bust-up between her and her boyfriend. But she’d got Rilke out of it and that was quite something, and in a great translation, discovered, of course, in Readings.)

Even back then, you met people you knew in Readings. And you saw people you’d like to meet. Readings also boasted its famous accommodation board. You needed to move, you went to Readings. Readings was a place to meet, to talk – and yes, Mark, to buy books.

Then in 1998, Readings moved across the road. What a celebration. I was there. Many of you were there. Kim Beasley was there. The Commonwealth Bank had fled up the street leaving only its vault. We loved the old Readings, but this new shop was so much better – the glorious shelves from floor to high ceiling, the alcoves and little passages. I loved it. And now there was music and videos, all under the same roof. And the space for accommodation wanted and available had trebled in size.

In its new premises Readings was first and foremost about books but it was also a social hub. You met friends there, you avoided enemies, you shied away from old lovers. You would see couples hanging out in sequestered corners; sometimes they were couples that you’d not realised were couples. Oh yes, there were trysts going on these hallowed spaces. High intellectual work as well.

It was because Readings was more than a book shop that so many of us were furious and affronted when Borders opened across the road. We took it very personally. They were trespassing, that’s what it felt like. I remember how, during those first months, so many of us made a point of going to Readings even more often than before – and spending more money than before too.

For writers, Readings has always had another function: to display and sell our books. When a new book was released I was not the only writer to check out the Readings window and take a photo when the book appeared – or better a row of your books. And then there were the shelves inside. I did (and still do) rearrange the shelf where my books are so they are displayed outwards. Once when I did this, I bumped into Mark. He was actually heading to the Australian fiction shelves and so I confessed. He told me that what I’d done was nothing when compared with Henry Rosenbloom, publisher at Scribe (and now my new publisher incidentally). Henry was blatant with his rearrangements, even asking for a ladder when required.

Readings has moved with the times. The Kids shop next door and the first Readings in a shopping mall – at Doncaster – were opened just this past year. But for me, and for many of you here, OUR Readings is Readings Carlton. And now we have these gorgeous updated premises.

Thank you Mark and Readings Carlton for the past 40 years. And here’s to you Joe, and the next 40 wonderful years in these splendid surroundings.

Andrea Goldsmith is the author of seven novels including The Memory Trap, which won the Melbourne Prize Best Writing Award in 2015.