David Pope is onto something with his vivid blue Tardis landing smack bang in the middle of the main reading room of the National Library of Australia.
The part of his TinTin-inspired Centenary Collection illustration I love the most is the looks on everyone's faces - mildly surprised and curious at this blue machine parked in the aisles of desks, under the soaring coffered ceilings.
Were this picture - which introduces Canberra's designers the Griffins to the modern day via a Dr Who Tardis - to suddenly spring to life, I can guarantee those onlookers would simply shrug and get back to their work - their own adventures.
After all, they're already in the Tardis, deep in their own journeys. To step into the library's reading rooms is to step outside of daily life, and into an almost infinite number of other worlds.
There are no grand domes or ornate balustrades in this library - the place is pure chic, mid-century Canberra, and I love it. It's one of my favourite places in the whole world. I've spent countless hours inside those walls and under those glorious ceilings, watching the light bounce on the floors of the marble entry from the stained glass windows, daydreaming, reading, researching and wondering.
From stints as a high schooler, cramming for tests with groups of friends, to later finding my way as a researcher, I have walked the parquet floors, lounged on the slate terrace and pored over files for hours. And while those reading rooms are lovely to hang out in, I know that beyond the public spaces, the place is all business - files and boxes and steel compactus shelves, filled with stuff.
There are books, of course, millions of them, and manuscripts, objects, keepsakes - many, many things you wouldn't expect.
The library is legally obligated to collect "all printed material about Australia or Australians", but it has, over 65 years, taken this well beyond the call of duty.
With more than 7.7 million items spanning roughly 300 linear kilometres of physical shelf space, not to mention the digitised glory of Trove, it's Australia's biggest treasure chest.
In my career, both as a journalist and a researcher, I've been privileged to glance in on some of these worlds, including the top-security "strongroom", in which treasures ranging from the country's first pound note to Patrick White's glasses are kept. I can report that on the face of it, it's a narrow and disappointing space, all grey steel compactuses and fluorescent lighting. But, peruse the shelves, and have a gloved curator open a box, and boom! You're in the Tardis again.
I've seen former prime minister Billy Hughes' false teeth - they were among his papers - and a morbid little leather-bound book of middling poems that, on closer inspection, is actually bound in human skin.
Things like this are the weird and wonderful detritus of great and good lives, and some might rest on those colourless shelves for decades before anyone chances upon them.
There are pieces of my own story in there too: my grandfather's papers are in the library's collections, as are my father's entire collection of Canberra Times cartoons amassed over a 30-year career.
The many hundreds of people using the library at any given time have found their own portals, and most will understand the meaning of "emotions in the archives" - it's an occupational hazard, or pleasure, when you're deep in a research project.
I experienced it myself during one of my long research stints, opening a box, and pulling out precisely the file I had been searching for for months.
Angels wept and I squealed - inwardly, of course, as I was in the hallowed Petherick Reading Room, surrounded by people who were similarly absorbed in their own journeys.
The file was an ageing manila folder tied with pink twine. It meant nothing to anyone else in the room, just as I was uninterested in any of their boxes or files or piles of books.
But anyone who heard me squealing instantly understood what had happened to me, just like the figures in Pope's illustration. I had merely found another portal, a Tardis, and would likely be gone for some time.
