The Age has good news from the state budget:
‘TWO of Victoria’s main institutions, the Arts Centre and the State Library, are big winners in the budget announced yesterday.
More than $25 million will be spent to improve online access to the State Library’s collection and to other major lending institutions overseas connected to it.
Arts Minister Mary [...]

I have a mortgage with the Bendigo & District Group of Co-operative Housing Societies, for a wee house on the central plains occupied by people near and dear to me.
I’ve just had a letter from The Society which has filled me with dismay, because it points to the almost unnoticed end of a valuable [...]

“Extroverts therefore dominate public life. This is a pity. If we introverts ran the world, it would no doubt be a calmer, saner, more peaceful sort of place. As Coolidge is supposed to have said, “Don’t you know that four fifths of all our troubles in this life would disappear if we would just sit [...]

I lost it but I knew I would find it again. Sarsparilla is a group blog which collects some of my favourite people in the same place.
When I was a child in Darwin, we drank Sarsparilla incessantly. When Coke finally arrived, as an exotic symbol of international modernity, it drove sars out completely.
Looking for [...]

From Monday to Wednesday, the papers picked over the Mark Scott story, grew bored, and moved on.
No journalists went back into the files of their newspaper for the details of the NSW education department imbroglio.
Once more our amnesiac media covered the issue in the grey Blanket of Forgetting. But we are talking about more than [...]

I am not sure whether to post this or not. Just wandering sideways across the London Times, I found the story of a family after their daughter was killed by a train.
Like everyone who has lived a while, I have known grief, and I live with it still, in some ways. But not like [...]

I don’t think ‘Goodnight Moon’ and Margaret Wise Brown ever really made it in Australia.
But the life, death and strangely entropic will of this children’s book writer makes an extraordinary story.
A good introduction to her work and impact here ends with a story of hers, called The Important Book
” The important thing [...]

Kazakhstan is a poor country, littered apparently with the debris of the Russian space program. So the locals are selling the bits for scrap. They have to contend with “flaming spaceship wrecks several times a month … Apart from the fear of having a spaceship crash through their roofs, residents in the area complain of [...]

Brutal, and brutally apposite. The child is perfect; the era is nearly right.
It comes from a wonderful sub-site at the US Library of Congress, the Work Projects Administration Poster Collection covering some 900 posters. It is date stamped December 1st, 1937. You could download a 31 meg TIFF version, perhaps for a [...]

behold, the new king ascends
Mark Scott, managing editor of Fairfax metropolitan newspapers, was today anointed as the next managing director of the ABC.
Like many people, I immediately thought this was a lot better than some other possibilities, and that the ABC will benefit from his background in journalism. It could be particularly useful if he [...]