Commentary

It was the last day of the Giorgione exhibition in Vienna. The Kunsthistorisches Museum had organised a colloquium to coincide with it. Art historians – in this case the Giorgione brotherhood or amici in studi giorgioneschi. – had arrived for a final interrogation. Confrontations between individual work. of art, hanging adjacent to one another in the context of an exhibition, allowed for unique comparisons of some paintings by Giorgione, some attributed to him, some inspired by him. All were connected to the most enigmatic artist in the history of art.

Defamation is easy. Australia has any number of good defamation lawyers who will ‘legal’ a manuscript if you pay them enough. But if your manuscript threatens to transgress the National Secrets Act, you are on much shakier ground. Axis of Deceit, Andrew Wilkie’s ‘story of the intelligence officer who risked all to tell the truth about WMD and Iraq’, was always going to be hot. Our investigations didn’t turn up a single Melbourne lawyer who could advise us if we had crossed the line, so we asked David Wright-Neville, a Monash academic and ex-spook (like Wilkie, he had been an analyst at the Office of National Assessments, Australia’s peak intelligence agency), to check the manuscript. He read it thoughtfully and suggested chopping a dozen or so offending passages, which was acceptable to both Wilkie and Black Inc.

Visiting Shirley Hazzard in Italy is like entering a Hazzard novel. She lives in an apartment within the grounds of a splendid villa at Posillipo. The rooms are cool against the summer sun, and when you step onto her terrace the vista and the light are dazzling. Scarlet bougainvillea falls in twisted festoons. From the terrace, she surveys the breathtaking scope of the Bay of Naples. To the left, the shadowy silhouette of Vesuvius. The long cluttered arch of the Neapolitan littoral holds the blue bay in its stretch. The Sorrentine peninsula seals off the southern edge, and out on the fringe, a blue punctuation, the island of Capri, where Hazzard also maintains a house.

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.