What if a library wasn’t just a place to borrow books - but a living archive, a sacred space, a machine for bending time?

This is the concept behind Palimpsest - a collaboration between Story Factory and State Library of New South Wales. It served as a pilot program in September 2025 for a larger-scale project that will commemorate the Library’s bicentenary in 2026. In the pilot, we invited Stage 4 students from under-resourced Western Sydney schools to view the State Library as a time machine—an archive of the past, a reflection of the present, and a canvas for future-making.

We delivered the pilot program in two stages. First, we took students on an excursion day to the State Library, to take part in an interactive poetry workshop where we explored historical archives and objects. Second, we delivered two in-school writing workshops to help students develop and refine their poetry.

The State Library gave students access to foundational national documents, like the original Australian Constitution draft, empowering them to remix, subvert, and reclaim those texts. The sacred object poetry and imagined-object vignettes allowed them to insert their own stories into the narrative of the nation.

All of this led to a publication with student work, photography, and visual poetry. To launch it, we hosted an event at the school, where we set up a gallery of the students’ poetry and they read their pieces out to each other. It was a true celebration of their voices and their reimaginings of Australia’s cultural past, present, and future.



Prose poem responding to a photograph of the first Aboriginal person to purchase a film ticket in Walgett, NSW in 1965.
By Tina, Year 10

Like the sky and sea think themselves different shades of the same colour, so does the queue of midday moviegoers. What happens when you are bound by blood, separated by skin? … When the movie that spans your lifetime starts to sound like the culmination of a singular register ‘ding’, and century long enduring murmurs mixing into one, when the warm buttery air starts to mingle with the cold tingle of hanging suspense, looming like a cloud, when the small smooth ticket starts to feel like a sweaty palmed handshake, does everything change? You wait to watch the same movies, hear the same songs, eat the same food. But the ticket has never felt another colour, and your darkened reflection never yet seen itself where you stand… At the line where both sky and sea meet, at the line where both blood and skin wait, at the line where we all move forward.



Photography supplied by State Library of New South Wales.