Melissa Jackson, 60, and her colleague and “bestie” Ronald Briggs, 58, are senior Indigenous librarians and collection curators at the State Library of NSW. Their boss calls them The Giggle Twins.
Melissa Jackson and Ronald Briggs: “We’ve said that, one day, we might live together and become little, old, librarian cat ladies,” Melissa says. Sam Mooy Melissa: We met on December 9, 1991, in the human resources room at the library. He was a country boy in the big smoke for the first time. I thought he was a very handsome man; I had no idea he was gay. I quickly found out when we began eyeing off the same men.
We started hanging out from day one. I said to him, “You’re going to be my best friend” and he said, “All right, then.” Our first jobs were collecting books and putting them on shelves; we were the only Aboriginal librarians in the library.
Damien, our boss, calls us The Giggle Twins because we laugh all the time and we’re loud. We had a mentor named Janice. She’d hear us coming a mile away; we’d yarn away next to her. One day, Janice said, “Please. I sit here, too. I can’t concentrate.” We were literally shushed by a librarian!
There was a door that led up to the lib
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