State Library of Western Australia

The State Library of Western Australia occupies two very different buildings in Perth's Cultural Centre: the 1913 Hackett Hall — a Federation Gothic edifice that served as the city's original public library — and the main library building completed in 1985, designed by Perth architects Cameron Chisholm Nicol in association with the Building Management Authority. The 1985 building is the architecturally significant one: a substantial late-Brutalist concrete structure that anchors the northern edge of the Cultural Centre precinct. Its massing is bold and unapologetic — projecting bays, deep-set windows, rough-cast concrete surfaces — designed in an era when public libraries were conceived as monumental civic institutions. The building reads as a confident counterpoint to the lighter commercial architecture surrounding the precinct, and has aged better than many buildings of its type and period. Inside, the library holds Western Australia's largest research and reference collection: rare manuscripts, historical maps, photographs, newspapers, and government records documenting the state from European settlement to the present. The Battye Library, housed within, is the primary archive for WA's documentary heritage. Both collections are freely accessible to the public. Worth visiting as part of an afternoon in Perth's Cultural Centre — alongside the WA Museum Boola Bardip immediately adjacent, the Art Gallery of WA, and PICA — rather than as a standalone destination. The architecture rewards attention; the collections reward hours.