Is the National Library a morgue?

A reader copies me into a letter to the Minister:

Dear Minister of Internal Affairs Van Velden,

The National library has announced that there will be a closure today of the Molesworth Street library ground floor, from 11:30am to 3pm on Friday 1 August for a private event.

I understand that the closure is because the coffin, complete with body, of a recently deceased deputy chief executive of the Department of Internal Affairs is, on the orders of the Chief Executive, to be put on display in the foyer of the National Library in front of the He Tohu exhibition.

The exhibition is hence closed to the public, who pay for it and who own it, for a private event at short notice during business hours. I do not regard such a  closure – an arbitrary privatisation of public space – as a legitimate use of public resources.

Additionally, our national library is not, in my view, a space appropriately used as a temporary necropolis or morgue for the purposes of expressing private grief. It’s our nation’s public library, for books and exhibitions, for god’s sake! 

Equally, library staff are required to be at work as part of their employment agreements and some – many? – may not feel comfortable or appropriate to share part of their working space with a corpse. Yet they are being given no choice in the matter.

As a society, we have funerals and tangi as appropriate fora for expressions of grief and sadness and churches, halls, private homes and marae as appropriate places for dead people to temporarily be for those social purposes. Again appropriately, staff have the employment right, paid for by the public, to chose to attend such events on the death of a colleague and express their grief for their death in those shared private spaces. Not the National Library!

Could you please respond regarding whether you support or not the decision taken by your Chief Executive to close the library and temporarily install a corpse? (I understand that the short-notice decision from the top has created considerable internal disquiet at all levels within the library)? 

If you do indeed support the decision of your departmental Chief Executive to unilaterally make parts of our public library into a temporary private necropolis at his whim, could you please further indicate who now amongst the staff of our library possesses the posthumous right to to use it as such? 

This is astonishing. Totally inappropriate to turn a workplace into a morgue, let alone the National Library.

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