Commentary

For a timber of such beauty and usefulness, red cedar has had a somewhat perverse history. Recognised for its domestic potential in the first few years of European settlement in New South Wales, it wasn’t long before supplies were so depleted around Sydney that government attempted, unsuccessfully, to regulate its logging. By the end of the century, it was all but cut out of accessible land from Sydney to north Queensland, leaving in its wake large tracts of denuded rainforest and sometimes dislocated Aboriginal communities.

‘The public are starting to say why don’t they just leave Laws and Jones alone? Why are they highlighting these two?’ said John Laws on 3 August 2000, at the height of ‘cash for comment 1’. He hasn’t been complaining about too much publicity in the current cash for comment controversy. Indeed, Laws has been courting it since 28 April 2004, two days after Media Watch revealed a glowing letter Professor David Flint had written to Alan Jones on Australian Broadcasting Authority letterhead shortly before Flint was to chair an inquiry into Jones’s sponsorship arrangements, and the morning after Flint, during an interview on the 7.30 Report, had acknowledged exchanging several letters with Jones.

In November 2003, while giving a speech at the new Bibliotecha Alexandrina, Umberto Eco considered the role of libraries. ‘Libraries, over the centuries,’ he said, ‘have been the most important way of keeping our collective wisdom. They were and still are a sort of universal brain where we can retrieve what we have forgotten and what we still do not know.’

The idea of the library both as a storehouse and as a living organism, a ‘brain’, holds particular relevance for the National Library of Australia. Here, we store Australia’s collective wisdom – the documentary heritage of Australia and its people – recording the things we have forgotten, the things perhaps most of us never knew, the slivers of information that help us to understand who we are, who we once were and who we would like to become. But, as our current exhibition Future Memory: National Library Recent Acquisitions demonstrates, the National Library’s Collection continues to grow and change.

Fourteen Nobel Literature Laureates – along with Vaclav Havel, former President of the Czech Republic and renowned playwright, and Jiri Grusa, acclaimed Czech writer and President of International PEN – have urged Senior General Than Shwe of the Burmese Military Junta to release Nobel Peace Laureate Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and other imprisoned Burmese writers. These include 74-year-old editor U Win Tin, who is serving twenty years’ hard labour, and poet and journalist U Aung Myint, who was condemned to twenty-one years’ imprisonment. In a letter delivered to Burmese embassies in Bangkok, Berlin, London, New Delhi, Tokyo, Washington DC and other cities on April 13, Havel and the Laureates wrote:

Drew Forsythe chasing chooks was not enough. I vividly remembered those moments at the Parade Theatre in 1972. To anchor a scene in rural Australia, the director had given two lordly roosters a brief strut on stage, and Drew was only just managing to keep their strut to the desired brevity. I needed, however, to remember more. The play was The Taming of the Shrew, and the setting, quite radically for the time, was Padua via Mudgee. Hence the chooks. John Bell, if memory served me correctly, did the taming, and Drew certainly did the chasing, but was Robin Lovejoy the director? The taxi was rapidly nearing the Mosman home of Lovejoy’s widow, Patricia, who had offered his paintings, photographs and papers to the National Library. Graeme Powell, the National Library’s Manuscript Librarian, and I were to assess the collection, and at such moments context is important. I had consulted the Library’s biography files and found information on Lovejoy’s career as one of Australia’s leading directors of theatre and opera from the 1950s to the 1970s, but had not found any mention of a production of the Shrew.

On-air banter. It’s a staple of radio and television shows seeking to project a friendly, accessible image. Think of the chats between Steve and Tracy on Today, and Mel and Kochie (and, increasingly, their viewers) on Sunrise. Chats between news, sports and weather presenters are routine. It helps if the weather presenter is gorgeous, zany or eccentric, such as Tim Bailey on Channel Ten’s 5 p.m. news in Sydney or the semi-retired Willard Scott on the NBC Today show. (There was never any evident warmth or banter between Channel Nine’s Brian Henderson and Alan Wilkie, one of the few actual meteorologists on air.) The presenters are meant to seem ‘just like us’ as they yarn about their weekends, their birthdays and their children. Some of the chats, particularly between radio hosts, are designed to personalise and promote interest in what’s coming up on the next programme.

In a much-quoted passage at the end of the General Theory of Employment Interest and Money (1936), John Maynard Keynes remarked, with some whimsy, on the power of policy intellectuals like himself:

The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves exempt from any influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared to the gradual encroachment of ideas.

The city of Aveiro is compact yet important, with wealthy foundations in the industries of fisheries and salt. The bright white cobblestones of the town’s historical centre evoke its economic history: rock salt crystals with darker cobbled nautical motifs (anchors, rope, fishes). Tiled walls in blue (azulejos) are both practical in the salty air and signal sea. Broad salt pans nearby bless the air with a refreshing sea breeze, the Portuguese equivalent of the ‘Fremantle doctor’. The bright, white light is almost Western Australian in quality.