The horses are back, or, Why I never get anything done

Today is an absolutely beautiful, perfect, blue-and-gold Adelaide day, much to the pleasure and relief, I'm sure, of everyone involved in the Royal Adelaide Show, which is currently on, and is the reason why it took me at least fifteen minutes longer than it usually does to get home from morning coffee. Last year's had a huge hole in it: the outbreak of equine flu meant massive quarantining, and that meant no horses at the Show at all.

This year, they're back. And as someone freshly reminded by the Olympic equestrian events of how much I love these beautiful animals and what a solemnly horse-mad little kid I was, I am going to make time to trundle down to Wayville next week and watch some of the gorgeous beasts in action.

What's made me think of this is the Saturday arvo task I've just been doing, a fifteen-minute module (the only way I can bear it) of cleaning up the great mass of paper and other junk in the study, which included coming across one of the more maverick choices of book for review that I've been sent over the last few years: Wild Horse Diaries by Lizzie Spender.

Ripping out all the yellow Post-Its as a prelude to putting it in the Red Cross shop box, I came across a passage I'd marked that made me think again of the recent Olympics events. Both the precision and delicacy of the dressage and the combination of control and recklessness required by the showjumping and (especially) the cross-country showed up how crucial the relationship between horse and rider really is. It's like watching couples ice-dancing: one small wrong move, one tiny moment of miscommunication, and you are stuffed, if not savagely maimed. 'A horse is no household pet,' says Spender,

their size alone can imbue an edge of danger, and so there is the challenge of reaching an understanding with an animal that is powerful enough to trample you to death. Dogs are privy to every facet of home life and give unconditional love, while horses are infinitely less available. They don't sit in your lap, lie on your bed, or jump up and down when you suggest a walk; nor are they as independent or capable of disdain as a cat, and they never sharpen their claws on your furniture.

Horses are wonderfully attentive, even when putting on a show of bad behaviour they always remain somehow connected. [This bit in particular spoke to me; remember the several horses in Beijing that got spooked and carried on like pork chops when planes went over? You could just see them communicating protest and displeasure to their riders and the crowd.] It's as if they enjoy hanging out with people -- sometimes I get the distinct impression that we amuse them. It's a sincere, strong connection of the senses, centred around touch and constant interpretation of each other's body language. ... Horses have a sense of fun which I will not even attempt to describe, but anyone who has spent time with them will know what I mean. There are horses that seem to be always smiling.

Naturally, writing this post has made me wonder what I actually said about the book in the review, and since it's no longer online I went looking for it in my records. For those of you who may be wondering who Lizzie Spender is, here's the first paragraph:

Privilege is a weird commodity, stemming sometimes from things other than wealth. There are one or two moments in this book that make you want to ask Lizzie Spender who she thinks she is, but you already know what the answer would be: she is the daughter of Sir Stephen Spender, god-daughter of Sir Laurens van der Post, childhood friend of Anjelica Huston and wife of Barry Humphries, and furthermore she is a gorgeous half-Russian five-foot-ten blonde, so yah boo sucks to you.

Halloween

Here on the Eve of All Hallows I am reminded by the Weatherpixie's pumpkin, which I probably wouldn't have noticed (being too focused on the lovely lovely rain) if Elsewhere hadn't mentioned that her own Weatherpixie is also accompanied by a big orange veg of the gourd persuasion, that I am likely to be constantly interrupted watching House and Criminal Minds tonight by local children and, alas, mid-teenagers (if the last few years are anything to go by) out bashing on the neighbourhood doors demanding chocolate with menaces.

I'm a bit torn about this. I have gone so far as to buy a couple of supermarket bags of so-called 'fun size' Mars Bars and things to distribute to such small ghosts and witches and skeletons as may happen by at dusk, but anyone who knocks on my door after 8.15 pm will be told that if they're old enough to be out cruising the streets after dark then they're too old to be bludging chocolate from strangers. I might even seriously torture them by giving them a lecture on the evils of cultural imperialism and the details of the original Samhain.

The Show with No Horses

This year's Royal Adelaide Show was hamstrung by the enforced ban on horses in the wake of the equine-influenza outbreak. No blacksmithery and farrier displays; no horses in the Grand Parade; none of the obsessive, cult-like manifestations of the subculture that is show jumping.

Show jumping is something I knew a great deal about when I was a little kid and devoured all available pony-club and show-jumping books (I was never allowed to have a pony on the farm, partly because my father had and still occasionally does have nightmares about being expected to lead his uncle Ross's prizewinning Clydesdales


around backwards when he was a very small child and has stayed well away from horses ever since).

Even my own adoration of these beautiful, powerful, graceful and intelligent animals took a bit of a beating in 1988 when one particularly unprepossessing specimen executed a tricky simultaneous gait-changing and direction-changing manoeuvre at a canter through a steep creek bed somewhere hilly north of Melbourne and dumped me on some rocks, but I'm still very sad there weren't any at the Show. The alpacas nearly made up for them, but not quite.


This little black alpaca was knackered.

Other animals I would have liked photos of: the gigantic bulls, peacefully lying in the straw with their hooves tucked under their chests like cats and the farmer's little kids climbing all over them. (Camera out of batteries by then.) The racing and diving pigs (didn't have enough energy left to wait, much less walk, around for another 20 minutes till the next race). The strange-looking people trotting their dogs around the dog-showing ring, straight out of Best in Show (batteries again).



This was supposed to be a photo of the upside-down roaring tigers, but it seems to have turned into one of those pictures of festively primary colours that look like children's doona designs.



Again with the violent colours. I liked all this raffish sideshow dazzle and noise with the soft colours and contours and the stillness of the Adelaide Hills in the distance.



This hi-tech ferris wheel is definitely not the same one I remember breaking down in 1963 with me and my sisters and my Scottish grandma up at the very top of the ride.



Meanwhile, in the handcraft hall and bakery section, someone named Susan Rabbitt had won first prize for these fabulous-looking passionfruit and lemon butters.



Shrek wedding cake, considerably more tasteful than some of the wedding cakes I've seen.



Fascinators are back, if they ever went away.



Young Elyse (this is the Primary School division) definitely deserved this blue ribbon: these are the best Chocolate Crackles on display by a very long way. No icing, coloured sprinkles or cutesy printed paper patty case thingies, just lots of chocolate and no mucking about.

And the thing I'm saddest I didn't get a photo of? Legendary Adelaide broadcaster and columnist Peter Goers, whose OTT-quirky gift for radio I have never heard equalled, striding along the path to the ABC tent clutching a gigantic Dagwood Dog dripping in sauce.

Festival of Ideas: You cannot be serious! The boundary between reality and satire

I got all Festivalled out for a while there and also had to meet my Wednesday deadline, but there are two more sessions I want to write about before I move on. This satire discussion and the one the previous day on whistle-blowing were my picks for the two best sessions I went to. In the case of the whistle-blowing session it was partly about the calibre of every speaker and partly about the gripping nature and the grave seriousness of the content, more of which, as they used to say, in my next.

What made the satire session so extraordinary was something quite different: the stellar quality of Phillip Adams' moderation. My admiration for Adams has always been heartfelt but heavily qualified and the one direct encounter I've had with him, a brief spot on LNL chatting about a book I'd edited, did not endear him to me (I don't think it endeared me to him, either), but I'd never seen him onstage moderating a discussion before, and the job he did keeping the quality of discussion high and lively and the three potentially self-indulgent, not to say feral, speakers on some kind of interesting track was really quite remarkable.

The three other people on the stage were two of the Chaser boys, Julian Morrow and Charles Firth, plus Private Eye deputy editor and Karl Marx biographer Francis Wheen, an old-school Brit wit and sort of a sober Christopher Hitchens (for whom my admiration has also always been heartfelt but only became heavily qualified when he Turned) without the gravitas, the spleen or the contrarian-conservative politics, if you can imagine such a thing. Which I doubt. You had to be there.

There were no individual presentations; rather, via gentle steering and occasional quiet interventions, Adams orchestrated and conducted a conversation that stayed, as I think it was meant to, mostly fairly light-hearted and very funny but, thanks to Adams, was repeatedly elevated to another plane about what satire is, where it comes from, what it's for, and where (if anywhere) its lines are, or ought to be, drawn. The next time I find myself in one of those onstage chairing situations at a conference or festival I am going to remember and draw on as much as I can of what I saw Adams do, and copy it as well as I can.

The content itself, however, consisted mostly of funny stories and one-liners, beginning with a hilarious story told by Francis Wheen. Wheen is (or appears to be, when sitting down) a man slightly below middle height, with a cherubic face topped by the kind of baldness that involves bare pink skin on top and a couple of thick white tufts of hair like koala ears sprouting from the sides of his head. He had been walking down to North Terrace earlier in the week, he said, when while crossing at the lights he became aware that a truck driver stopped at the lights was shouting at him in a violent and hostile manner. 'It took me a while to work out what he was saying,' said Wheen, 'but I finally realised that he had mistaken me for your Prime Minister.'

A swell of laughter grew as we looked at him and it dawned on us that this was not only entirely credible but all too likely. Then he very slowly and deliberately took his glasses out of his breast pocket and put them on. The resemblance sharpened. The audience roared. Then he started doing things with his eyebrows and his teeth and the audience howled. It was slapstick, not satire, but it was an excellent start.

Since it was a real conversation and therefore meandered and digressed all over the place like Fair Isle knitting, the best way to report it is probably just to quote the lines I thought were good enough to write down. So here they are.

ON SATIRE:

Julian Morrow: 'Observers of satire tend to project onto it a lot more power than it actually has.'


ON TECHNOLOGY

Phillip Adams: ' I've got a new audience of much younger people because of the [podcasting] technology.'

Charles Firth: 'Capitalism doesn't reform itself just because technology changes the way they all do the same thing.'


ON VARIOUS FAMOUS PEOPLE:

Julian Morrow on Gerard Henderson: 'You can't win, with Gerard. But you can't lose, because it's Gerard.'

Francis Wheen on Margaret Thatcher and Edna Everage: 'I think Edna is now more Thatcher-like than Thatcher herself -- who's now a bit of a busted flush, poor girl.'

Julian Morrow on Paul Keating: 'If you're going to be put down by Paul Keating, you want it to be gloriously eviscerating.'

Francis Wheen on Rupert Murdoch: 'Murdoch never rises to it. One of the thousands of things that are irritating about Rupert Murdoch is that he doesn't give a toss.'

Julian Morrow on Kevin Rudd and Paul Keating: 'There'd be a role in Rudd: The Musical for a former PM, where he comes in just before the election and f*cks everything up.'

Festival of Ideas -- What to Eat: Personal Responsibility vs Social Responsibility

The Saturday afternoon session featuring nutritionist Professor Marion Nestle -- one of her more singular titles is '2004 Time Obesity Warrior', and indeed she is a mere slip of a thing herself, a practised public speaker with those lovely soft American good manners -- began very well when I recognised the man stepping up to the mic to introduce her: SA Minister for Health, John Hill. This is a bit of a feature of living in Adelaide; the SA pollies get out and about in non-ministerial mode quite a lot, so you'll often see Education Minister Jane Lomax-Smith at the opera, Treasurer Kevin Foley at the theatre, or Premier and Arts Minister Mike Rann chairing sessions at Writers' Week.

Hill is one of the most liked, admired and trusted of the SA ministers; he's the friend of friends who have nothing but good to say about his integrity and intelligence, so I think there's a good chance he researched and wrote his detailed, charming introduction himself, putting the contemporary First World 'lifestyle disease' epidemic in its long historical context. By the end of his intro, Nestle was looking quite startled. 'It's a pleasure to be introduced by a Minister for Health who's actually interested in public health,' she said to the audience as she arrived at the lectern. 'He's really rare, so treasure him.'

Nestle was using a PowerPoint presentation, which could easily have been excruciating but wasn't; it was a tad too distracting, but she had put the images together cleverly (and it was, thank God, mostly graphics) and spoke to them with practised ease. Some of them were very funny, like the 'Shape of Things to Come' cartoon, a mocked-up parody of that 'evolution of primates' diagram that begins with a chimp on the left-hand end and moves through several 'Ascent of Man' type images to modern Homo Erectus -- except that there was a new figure on the right-hand end: a spherical, waddling slob clutching a burger in one hand and a shake in the other.

Nestle's topic was the contemporary obesity 'epidemic' and its origins, which she traced back to the 1980s. First, she said, a change in US farm policy in the 1970s saw production restrictions lifted and by the early 80s 'food became too cheap and too plentiful' (this had an absurd ring to me; I get the economic logic and the health consequences, but it still sounds a bit too much like the scene in The Grapes of Wrath where they're dumping and poisoning oranges while people with starving children watch them do it). In the early 1980s came the 'shareholder value movement' that saw pressure applied to food companies to show a profit, in this new buyers' market, every 90 days.

Other causes apart from the lower prices and the advertising push, she said, included the rise in consumption of food outside the home (at retail outlets there are almost always more calories and bigger portions); a rise in serving sizes (at this point we saw an alarming graphic of a gigantic paper cup called the Double Gulp, which apparently holds 800 calories' worth of non-diet soda; I don't know what this is in kilojoules but in my youth it was the daily calorie allowance that doctors put women on for a medical weight-loss diet, though not any more); and the new ubiquity of food, now commonly consumed at any time and in any place: 'When did it become okay to eat in bookstores?'

Her particular objection as far as the food companies are concerned is the way they market to children: 'You can argue "personal responsibilty" to adults about their food choices, but not to children.' On this topic she talked us briskly through 'brand loyalty' and the 'pester factor' before arriving at a phenomenon nobody can have failed to notice lately: selling food via cartoon or other cult figures, most recently the saturation exposure of the Shrek the Third 'brand' tie-in on practically half the food products currently available on supermarket shelves. 'Tell your kids that if they eat all the things that Shrek promotes they're going to end up looking exactly like him.'

Nestle listed a number of proposed antidotes, counter-movements and possible solutions to all this: the Slow Food movement; the organic revolution; the mainstreaming of animal welfare, leading to reform in farming practices (and if you think this one hasn't started working yet, go to a supermarket at the end of the day and look at the stacks of cage eggs left and the huge gaps where the free-range variety are all long gone from the shelves); the rise of local agriculture movements, manifest in things like the increasingly popular farmers' markets; a push for change in public health policy. 'I'm a firm believer in regulation,' she said. 'Government's role is to balance the needs of corporations against the needs of the population.'

Several commentators, including fellow-blogger Stu at Le Rayon Vert (who was there; see his recommended list of podcasts), have observed that the audience demographic at the Festival skewed 'old', but -- quite apart from being bloody annoying when it's meant as a putdown, though on the whole people over 50 think it's hilarious when people under 50 think "old" is an insult (and it's to Stu's credit that he doesn't) -- this isn't quite accurate in any case. Naturally the audiences at the Friday sessions tended to be older, because a lot of working-age people were at, um, work. The audience for the session the Chaser boys had all to themselves was, on the other hand, predictably very young. But on the whole there was a pleasing heterogeneity among the festival audiences in all kinds of ways, and one noticeable thing about Nestle's audience was the very large number of people in their teens and twenties -- many of whom, as became clear at question time, were apparently vegetarians or vegans.

There was also the bloke who asked the final question of the session, a fit and ferocious thirtysomething Nordic chap who addressed his question to the Health Minister. He worked in a hospice, he said, and he wanted to know if and when the Minister was going to do anything about some of the appallingly unhealthy food that gets sold in hospital cafeterias and canteens. Hill's reply kind of summed up the contemporary dilemma and the intractability of the problem. 'We're trying,' he said ruefully. 'We asked the people at the children's hospital in Melbourne why they don't get rid of their McDonald's, and they said it was because the parents had begged them not to. They say a trip to Macca's is one of the few things that will cheer their sick kids up.'

Festival of Ideas -- 'Digital Ink: the future of journalism', concluded

... continued from here ...

So it was left to Paul Chadwick, just as I had given up hope of hearing anyone say anything that was both knowledgeable and interesting about traditional journalism and possible online futures, to restore my faith. Walkley winner, former Victorian Privacy Commissioner and recently-appointed inaugural Director of Editorial Policies at the ABC, Chadwick is obviously an extraordinary person as well as an extraordinary speaker.

His background is in law and it is very easy to imagine him in court: he is one of those lucky few with a gift of speaking on his feet in complex whole sentences full of good grammar, audible punctuation, skilful rhetoric and lyrical speech rhythms, and he appears to be composing these remarkable sentences as he delivers them, in one smooth integrated action. He also appears to be not so much a 'Glass Half Full' type as a 'Glass Overflowing With Veuve Clicquot and Here, Have Another One, Why Do You Think God Gave You Two Hands?' sort of bloke.

Like Marion Nestle the following day, except without the PowerPoint, Chadwick had thought in detail about the structure of what he wanted to say, knowing (as do all lecturers and ex-lecturers) that information can be more easily delivered, and more of it retained, if it's presented in dot points, with headings, in a logical order. This he did. It isn't possible if all you have to say is waffle, so when someone does do it you can be sure that they are actually telling you something.

His three headings, or 'angles', were (1) History, (2) A Romance, (3) Opportunity, but before he embarked on any of them he gave his answer to the question implied in the title of the session: 'Has journalism a future? Yes. It is an essential service.'

'History' turned out to be exactly that: a quick, focused, potted history of journalism that laid the foundation for what was to come. He took us through a few precursors of modern journalism as we know it -- the names he mentioned were Defoe, Paine and Hazlitt, who were, he suggested, early prototypes of bloggers -- and through the relationship between technological innovation and changes in the nature of journalism, pointing out that the practice of 'journalism' changed dramatically in the 19thC with the invention of newspapers -- 'great lumps of paper with ink on them' -- as we know them.

He then drew a direct parallel between the historical moment around the turn of the 18th/19th centuries when the combination of a rise in mass literacy with progress in mass print technology enabled the evolution of modern journalism, and the historical moment we're currently in, 200 years later. Both, he argued, were a matter of 'technology enabling growth'; contemporary computer-literacy he called 'a different, parallel literacy ... a literacy assisting journalism in its new incarnation.' The internet, he said, was 'a tool for mass disclosure' that was available to everyone.

The 'Romance' turned out to be a rather dodgy love story about a recent bit of nepotism between lovers in high places that was immediately pounced on, exposed and torn to bits by bloggers in the US. This Chadwick used as an example of the 'new transparency' provided by the blogosphere.

A disconnect has developed, he argued, between the previously reliable Fourth Estate and its previously trusting audience; while people these days expect to be lied to by the newspapers, the emergence of blogging has enabled if not ensured the rapid investigation, exposure and exhaustive analysis of most such lies. Bloggers, he said, can and do quickly raise questions about conflicts of interest (both personal and business) in the MSM, 'and if you think Media Watch is tough ...!' There is, he said, 'a new transparency now abroad in old media, imposed upon it by new media.'

He enlarged on this point later in general discussion when he was talking about contemporary journalists' loss of confidence, not only because 'the economic model has been shaken by the new technology' but also because of this new online scrutiny: what bloggers are doing, he reiterated, is analysing and exposing journalism itself -- 'doing to journalists themselves what journalists, as a privileged caste, have been doing for 200 years.' This kind of change, he said, is quite frightening to those who have been used to controlling information: 'It's really hard, to lose that power.'

Under the heading 'Opportunities', Chadwick described what he saw as another vital role for the blogosphere: the support and augmentation of news-gathering and primary content delivery, a point on which Colleen Ryan, in the general discussion, later agreed: 'Bloggers provide such a fabulous resource,' she said. 'Some bloggers have amazing expertise.'

Chadwick's example of the kind of journalistic support he could see the blogosphere providing was the sifting and analysis, done very quickly because done by so many, of news as it broke -- the release, say, of a substantial government report that the MSM was expected to respond to overnight if not sooner. A 'critical mass of bloggers', he argued, can quickly process this kind of information, 'sifting and ordering the haystack' in such a way as to make it a great deal easier for frontline journalists to find the needle. 'What we're seeing in the digital world is an augmentation of journalism, potentially to its and our benefit.'


Broadcasts and podcasts via Radio Adelaide.

In chronological order, here are the earlier posts on the Ideas Fest: June 7, July 1, July 5, July 6, July 6 again, July 7, July 8 and July 8 again.

And more to come.

Festival of Ideas -- 'Digital Ink: the Future of Journalism', continued

Chairing this session on Friday, the editor of The Monthly, Sally Warhaft, was grace under pressure personified as what I presume was a late replacement for National Indigenous Times founding editor Chris Graham, who had been named instead of Warhaft in the program and whom I'd been looking forward to hearing. Warhaft chaired a three-person panel discussion featuring Colleen Ryan, Francis Wheen and Paul Chadwick.

(A digression: I should say before I go on that I don't subscribe myself to the notion that bloggers get to call themselves journalists simply by virtue of having a blog and writing about the things in the news -- any more than journalists get to call themselves bloggers simply by putting their columns online and opening up a comments facility, a lesson that most journos attempting to venture into the blogosphere have not yet learned.

A few bloggers are indeed much better journalists than a lot of the people you read in the papers, but most are not. Many bloggers have excellent writing skills but far fewer have the discipline, the formal training or the gifts for clarity and structure that make a good piece of journalism compelling, and that tend to come with the hard training of observation (including of things that don't interest you at all), followed by reportage to deadline, followed by standing by watching helplessly as your copy gets hacked up beyond recognition if not actually spiked.

I think the premature and extravagant claim for blogging as the 'new journalism' has muddied these waters possibly beyond clearing, as it has led to the energies of the old guard all being directed into the scornful refutations of these claims, rather than looking at the possibilities and the positives of online information delivery.

But (a) almost no bloggers have the resources financial or otherwise to take on a true investagtive role; (b) to accept finance from anywhere else is immediately to compromise the independence that most bloggers prize above rubies; and in any case (c) a blog is really no more than a vector and blogging itself a far more inchoate activity, endlessly pliable and therefore used to all sorts of different ends. I think an increasing number of us, myself certainly included, would echo the words of much-admired Adelaide blogger ThirdCat: 'Blogging isn't the new anything. It's blogging.' But all of that is, for the moment, by the way.)

The first speaker at this session was Colleen Ryan from the Financial Review, who perhaps sensibly focused on one particular aspect of the topic: the question of how journalism -- particularly investigative journalism -- would be paid for if it were to make the transition online. She argued a particular and very clear case about 'quality' journalism, by which she presumably meant the Fourth Estate ideal: that kind of of journalism, she argued, will only survive online if it uses the subscription model, unless higher-quality (and therefore, presumably, more lucrative) advertising was developed to finance it. Clearly she was also thinking wholly within the 'established mainstream media organisation goes online' model and gave no indication of what she knew or thought about the alternatives.

I'm not sure she's right about the subscription/advertising point, but I don't know enough about what kind of money some people make through online advertising to argue the point and neither, I suspect, does she. As I suppose befits a finance journalist, and it is certainly a pertinent question, Ryan's concern was exclusively with how the journalism 'product' would be paid for.

Then British journalist, editor and author Francis Wheen, biographer of Karl Marx, deputy editor of Private Eye and old-school Brit through and through, got up and opened with a bunch of cheap yuk-yuk anti-blog jokes uttered in sonorous and ultra-British baritone orotundities, a combination that got my back up right from the beginning. Yes, 'blog', 'blogging' and 'blogosphere' are indeed already inherently and self-referentially comic words and that is indeed the point of them, something we've all known for some years now. Talk to the hand.

All of which was a pity, because he did of course have a number of intriguing, knowledgeable and original things to say: 'Do newspapers have a long-term future? I suspect probably not. Which brings us to ... Does journalism have a future?' He went on to argue that the decline of news-gathering pre-dates the Internet and can rather be blamed largely on Rupert "After all, we are in the entertainment business" Murdoch and his concentration on what it is that actually sells papers. (This point was reprised yesterday by Norman Swan in the best session I've been to so far, but more of that later.) News-gathering, Wheen argued, is expensive and does not pay its way.

Sounding like a man in late middle age sighing about the cheap values of the young, which was almost as annoying as the easy sniggering about blogging that he kept getting out of the audience, he also mourned an alleged decline in the motivations of young trainee journalists and students of journalism, and told two stories to illustrate his point. Thirty years ago he asked a cadet journalist why he wanted to be in the profession and the cadet replied that he wanted to be like Woodward and Bernstein. Asking a journalism student the same question very recently, he got the reply: 'Because journalists get to meet famous people and celebrities.' If he'd asked different students on different days I'm sure he would have been able to find a shallow one 30 years ago and a dedicated one today, but that would not have suited his line of nostalgic lamentation for a lost golden age.

Sally Warhaft in her otherwise excellent post-panel questions to the speakers, in a skilfully conducted discussion, nonetheless showed no interest in the digital at all except for a few mild passing swipes in the middle of questions about something else. Her final comment -- 'People will always want something to put in their bag and take with them on the train' -- was revealing in that it suggested that she had bought the specious argument of aggro early bloggers that online content would sweep all before it and that hard copy of anything was doomed to the trash heap, which it's quite clear to me is actually unlikely to happen (thanks largely to J. K. Rowling, and no, I am not joking) until bags, trains and quite possibly people are all themselves obsolete. And, of course, there are an awful lot of people now putting their lightweight streamlined wireless laptops in their bags and taking them on the train.

(The attitudes expressed by these three people had reminded me anew of something I've fully realised only since I took up blogging: most people seem either unwilling or unable to go beyond the paradigm of the dichotomy. Maybe it's a hangover from being picked for competing teams in primary school. Whatever it is, I'm thinking of having the words 'It's not a matter of either/or' tattooed on my forehead.)

So it was left to Paul Chadwick, just as I had given up hope of hearing anyone say anything that was both knowledgeable and interesting about both traditional journalism and possible online futures, to restore my faith.

... to be continued, again ...

Broadcasts and podcasts via Radio Adelaide.

Liveblogging a nice idea but beyond me: at the Festival of Ideas

The 'blogging the festival of ideas' experiment is having all kinds of interesting effects including, it seems, people who were previously unfamiliar with blogging now sticking a toe in the water and coming here -- and presumably also to Gary Sauer-Thompson's Public Opinion and Tim Dunlop's Blogocracy -- to read. While few are leaving comments, the stats counter is through the roof, with all of the extra readers coming directly from links at the Festival website or at Tim's and Gary's and most of them staying on here for quite a long time.

Of the three of us, only Gary has tirelessly kept up his terrific almost-on-the-spot reporting, complete with some great photos (also at Junk For Code); Tim plans to post reports on the festival through the coming week, which strikes me as eminently sensible but which, if I do it, will put me hopelessly behind with work.

I've just been working on a very long and still not finished post on the 'Digital Ink: the future of journalism' session, which took place nearly two days ago now. Part of the problem is of course that one does not want to miss most of the sessions because one is too busy blogging. There is also the question of having a life: seeing one's mates, changing the cat litter, checking up on one's Aged Parent and making sure there are clean socks.

But my biggest problem, and I'm formulating it as I go along because this is the first chance I've had to think about it, has been the one of trying to blog in such a way as to highlight the differences between blogging and hard-copy reportage, for otherwise why do it at all? Ironically, though we all argue (usually correctly) that instantaneousness is of the bloggy essence, I'm finding that at the moment the Adelaide Advertiser is ahead of me in this time race.

Here's the reason: unlike a newspaper article, a blog post is as long as a piece of string. I want to do the sessions some real justice in a permanent record -- far more than would ever be done to them in the mainstream media -- and that means detailed reportage and some half-decently digested reflections on what was said and on the implications of what was said. This has left me with some very long paragraphs in an unfinished piece on the Digital Ink session, and I have yet to catch up with posts on two sessions from yesterday before I get in there this afternoon and hurl myself back into the cattle-car crowds in the hall foyers.

For the usually celestial Adders weather is at the moment highly changeable and intermittently vicious, and yesterday there were some nasty, dangerous crowd moments as people pushed up the stairs at the Elder Hall entrance, desperate to get shelter from the icy bullets pelting down out of the sky. They pushed to get in while the previous audience pushed to get out, and a number of fragile folk suffered: squashed in the rush, poked in the eye by a rogue umbrella, or suffocated by the pungent smell of wet wool. For a minute I almost thought I was back at the Melbourne Writers' Festival.

Adelaide Festival of Ideas: 'Digital Ink: the Future of Journalism': Prelude

I'm sorry to report that my brilliant career as a roving, erm, reporter of the Festival took a bit of a beating this afternoon when not only was I late arriving at the 'Digital Ink' session, but realised only after I was seated, in Adelaide University's very, very beautiful Bonython Hall, where at one point a shaft of afternoon light came arrowing in like a golden beam from the eye of God through a high window (and I don't even believe in the eye of God as a rule) -- and as if that were not enough, I was sitting in what was quite possibly the same seat in which my late Ma sat in at my graduation ceremony in 1976; this revisiting of old haunts is certainly unleashing an avalanche of tumbling rocks of memory, some of them very muddy, and heavy, not to say crushing -- anyway, I realised much too late that I had misread the program and that the 'Digital Ink' session was in fact concurrent with Jay Griffiths' 'Wild Mind: A manifesto for the essential wildness of the human spirit', which up until that moment I had confidently assumed I would be going to after 'Digital Ink' was finished.

(On reflection, I should have gone up to the audience mic in Question Time and asked what the panel thought of the proposition that the truly great beauty of blogging is that you can say whatever you like, and people can either read it or not read it, as they see fit: no corrupting cash nexus, which had been one of the things under discussion, and no harm done to anyone.)

I really did want to hear Jay Griffiths, despite a niggling scepticism about the phrase 'the essential wildness of the human spirit', which thirty years ago, or even twenty, though probably not ten, would have made all the hair on the back of my neck stand up, thereby demonstrating the essential wildness etc. But these days it has to me a ring of 'Women Who Run With the Wolves', and though I have indeed been known in the past to run with a wolf or two, I am these days much more of a Woman Who Potters With the Tortoiseshells and therefore inclined to look on such titles with a jaded eye.

So perhaps my misreading of the program was a Freudian slip. The design of the Festival program schedule is actually a bit hard to work out this year.

To be continued ...

Broadcasts and podcasts via Radio Adelaide.

Adelaide Festival of Ideas: The Elephant and the Dragon

Last night's opening session of the Festival featured a panel of five speakers discussing the economic (and, to a lesser extent, other) futures of India and China. There was broad general consensus that neither country is going to sweep ahead into world domination the way some people are predicting, and that, to paraphrase the Federal Leader of the Opposition, everybody needs to take a cold shower.

The general view, agreed on in particular by the calm and softly spoken Joseph Cheng and the ebullient Ramachandra Guha, was that in terms of global power and superpower there will be no shift to a different unipolar (or bipolar, as during the Cold War) world but rather an expansion into a multipolar one, with different kinds of power -- economic and other -- distributed across a number of different countries and regions.

Though the point was made several times that 'China and India don't get on' and that therefore talk of some future 'Chindia' alliance probably wasn't to be taken seriously, Cheng and Guha (as representatives of their respective countries) weren't letting this get in the way of a visible mutual respect that clearly deepened as the session progressed and turned into one of the little things that make these occasions so memorable: watching some kind of developing interaction on the stage that doesn't have anything directly to do with scheduled program but, in a small human way, brings the whole thing to life.

Guha, when introduced, bounced up to the mic as though on springs and made an electrifying beginning by reminding the audience that 'In five weeks from now, the 15th of August, India will have spent 60 years as an independent country.' (Well, it electrified me; it may seem like 'history' to the young folks, but 1947 was the year my parents got married and the person I was sitting with, the admirable Morag Fraser -- a member of the Festival's Advisory Committe from its inception -- was already a toddler.)

He went on to read out various prophecies by mostly British journalists and historians that had been made over the decades since 1947, repeatedly predicting that India would fall apart into a failed state: 'For the first five decades of our independence, Indians were told that we were going down the tube ... The Indian elite is now wallowing in a sea of self-congratulation.'

Guha and Robin Jeffrey, a Canadian scholar from Canberra via Chandighar, Sussex and Melbourne, had what were for those of us who have never been to India some quite eye-opening things to say about the diversity of that country from state to state: India has twenty-something different languages, written in ten different scripts, which seemed to amply justify Guha's praise of the way the Indian government manages at a national level to hold the country's 'shambolic' federation together.

Guha and Jeffrey also both made the excellent point that in the face of this diversity, with holders of high office in the Indian government included Muslims, Catholics, Sikhs and at least one Untouchable Hindu, it was bemusing to see the Australian government's attempts via the proposed citizenship test to impose some kind of official monoculture.

The usual format of these panels is one speaker after another followed by audience questions, but Peter Mares introduced and then skilfully facilitated from the Chair an intermediate stage of conversation among the speakers that brought out some of the most interesting remarks of the evening. (All who ever take or aspire to take the chair at festivals and conferences, take note: this works, provided you're well-prepared.)

What emerged from this stage was the closest thing to a disagreement that the panel produced all evening: asked about China's environmental problems, which is Mares' own specialist area of expertise, Cheng replied that there was a new awareness at government level of this issue and of the necessity to do something about it urgently; it involved, he said, some revivification 'not so much of Confucian but of Taoist values', of living peacefully and in harmony with nature -- 'and this is an implict criticism of Maoism.' Colleen Ryan, the Australian Financial Review's China correspondent, politely disagreed: 'The pollution there is just tragic. They're killing their population.' (She may have been referring to this.)

Panelist Philippe Legrain had talked with a scepticism belying his 33 years about the imponderability of the future, concluding that 'Predictions about the future are a mug's game', which made me think of Emma Thompson's hysterical turn as the Hogwarts Professor of Divination, Sybil Trelawny (of which we will be seeing more within a week when the new movie comes out), and did seem, considering the theme of this year's Festival -- 'Which Way to the Future?' -- to be a bit of a cold shower in itself, albeit obviously true.

But the most cheering thing anyone said all night came from Joseph Cheng: 'Over the next 20 years China and India just want to have a peaceful environment in which to concentrate on domestic modernisation.' Amen to that, I thought.


Broadcasts and podcasts via Radio Adelaide.

Adelaide Festival of Ideas 2007

There was a rich concentration of ABC figures, not to mention some truly awesome catering, at the Festival's opening reception this evening at the State Library. The first person I spotted, mainly because he was one of the tallest people in the room, was Ian Henschke from the SA edition of Stateline, who is an extremely old mate from university days, and then that work-horse, war-horse and hardy perennial Phillip Adams -- who worked bloody hard this evening: as a longtime member of the Festival's Advisory Committee he'd fronted dutifully on opening night and then in the car on the way home I heard him conducting a brilliant, at times quite emotional, and apparently live interview with the luminous 26-year-old author and former child soldier from Sierra Leone, Ishmael Beah, author of A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Child Soldier.

Norman Swan was there, and some of the Chaser boys, and the elegant, watchful Peter Mares from The National Interest, who bears an extraordinary resemblance to Australian opera singer David Hobson and whose father Tim taught me 18th-century literature in 1974. (At this point I reflected on the rich layering and lamination of memory involved in attending this kind of cultural event in your home city: here I was at the opening of a Festival of Ideas in the same building in which I used to study after school, and we were about to move a few doors down North Terrace to the campus of my alma mater.)

Premier Mike Rann gave a really excellent speech (note to self: find out who wrote speech, and whether it was the Premier himself) in which he acknowledged the presence and role of the Festival Bloggers, at which Gary Sauer-Thompson, Tim Dunlop and I all looked a bit surprised by the fact that this seemed to elicit none of the usual anti-blog sniggering among the crowd -- so either the tide is turning, or Adelaide is, as usual, a bit ahead in the open-mindedness stakes. The Premier said the sight of the Chaser boys was making him extremely nervous as the last time he'd seen them it was at the ALP National Conference, where one of them had been dressed up as the ghost of Mark Latham and chased him up the Ladder of Opportunity.

We then moved on to Elder Hall, where the first thing that happened was a funny, moving, intricate Welcome to Country by four young Kaurna men who talked, sang, danced and magically conjured up ceremonial fire on the stage, which made me wonder nervously how much the Festival had budgeted for insurance given that Elder Hall is a nineteenth-century warren, very big on wooden staircases and panelling and full of expensive musical instruments.

Then Peter Mares introduced the man to whom this year's Festival is dedicated: Elliott Johnston AO, QC, the dedication 'in acknowledgement of the contribution that he has made in Australia to the pursuit of justice for all under the law, and to achieving equality for all before the law.'

Johnston, frail and elderly but obviously with a firm grip on the occasion, said that when first invited to speak on this opening night he had said he wouldn't, but that the Howard Government's latest intervention into Aboriginal affairs had made him change his mind; a former Royal Commissioner into Aboriginal deaths in custody and before that a colleague of Don Dunstan's in implementing sweeping law reform in South Australia including Aboriginal rights, Johnston performed a briskish fisking of the government's plans and then sat down.

Upon which Peter Mares introduced the five panelists who would be speaking on the subject of China and India and their projected futures, in the festival's first full session: 'The Elephant and the Dragon'. But that should get a proper post of its own. Tomorrow.


If you would like to post a comment on any of these Festival posts but aren't too familiar with blogs yet, just click on the word 'comments' at the end of this post. Choose the 'Anonymous' option, which will save you having to go through a confusing registration process, but it would be nice to sign your name at the end of the comment. Please keep comments civil, and not too long!

Adelaide Festival of Ideas 2007

I'm sure most people experience the daily battle between the little devil sitting on one shoulder telling you what you'd like to eat and the little angel sitting on the other, telling you what you ought (and, of course, ought not) to eat. The moralising of food and its consumption is as old as the hills; Gluttony isn't one of the Seven Deadly Sins for nothing.

In an affluent post-industrial nation like this one, though, the stakes have changed a lot. There's now chemical input and genetic modification to consider as well; and the morality of international trade (such as the export of live sheep); and the treatment humane or otherwise of animals farmed for food and profit. The idea of what's "good" in the way we eat has become a lot more complex than it used to be.

Tomorrow's Festival of Ideas session 'Before You Eat' (Elder Hall, 11.15) features nutritionists Dr Peter Clifton of the CSIRO, Professor Marion Nestle from the USA (author of 2006's What to Eat) and Professor Kerin O'Dea from the University of Melbourne, with the redoubtable Dr Norman Swan as participating Chair. The program notes for this session end with the following list of things that 'we could afford to know more about':

-- The risks to health (real as opposed to imagined) from chemical inputs in the food chain

-- The costs and benefits to individual health of highly processed foods

-- ‘Food miles’ – the costs (nutritional as well as environmental) of having everything in season all the time

-- The further dietary implications of affluence that mean most people in the developed world can eat what would once have been luxury foodstuffs most of the time

-- The alleged ‘obesity epidemic’ and what we can do about it

-- The other risks of industrial-strength agriculture.

'What,' the notes conclude, 'are the desirable alternatives to the way we eat now?'

To me, the short answer to that question would be 'Produce as much of your own food as you can, eat it in season, and cook it yourself.' As a farmer's daughter of a certain age, I've got robust memories of childhood eating that make contemporary supermarkets -- much less fast-food joints -- look pretty lame.

Where I grew up, if you were hungry you went out and killed a sheep. Or, if it was a special occasion, a chook. Or you caught a fish, or shot a rabbit, or went yabbying down at the dam. In summer you ate tomatoes that your mother had grown, and in winter the gargantuan field mushrooms you'd picked yourself from up around the shearing-shed (no prizes for guessing the connection). You ate eggs that had been laid only hours before, with toast made from bread baked that morning before dawn in the big old ovens at the township bakery.

(Peace to vegetarians everywhere, but I don't apologise for the sheep, the chooks, the rabbits or the fish. I can attest as an eyewitness to their free, happy and well-looked-after lives, as I can to their quick and humane deaths; the worst thing that ever happened to most of them was getting bossed around by a Border Collie, which is a great deal more than can be claimed by most human beings.)

In the cities in 2007, most of us have lives that preclude the taking of time and trouble to maintain a close connection with the food we eat, which is why, although I still never eat fast food or even pre-prepared meat, I had never in my life grown a tomato until last summer. The astonished pride I felt when I picked my first three ripe Romas, brought them inside with some fresh basil cut from the pot growing on the back doorstep, did this with them


and then ate them is something I won't ever forget. It's not just that there's a powerful, primitive connection between producing food and then eating it; it's also that the process is beautiful and satisfying and will make you very happy.

Adelaide Festival of Ideas 2007

Back in the mists of time when I was doing what would now be called Year 11 but was then called Leaving and involved the second of three sets of end-of-year public exams (no pressure, then), I took a subject called 'Asian History' whose syllabus was, as I remember it, organised around two threes: Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam; and India, China and Japan.

To this day the single thing I remember most clearly about that year of study is the cautionary tale of 1857's Sepoy Rebellion. Even at that time and at that age it was clear to us that the cultural insensitivity of the British Empire in expecting its Hindu and Moslem soldiers to use a new kind of cartridges that had to have their ends bitten off and had been greased with animal fat, both pork and beef -- the unclean pig, the sacred cow -- was a perfectly good reason to rise up and slay one's colonisers, and as might have been expected of a bunch of bolshie Australian schoolgirls, we were amused that it had surprised the British.

For reasons not far to seek, I spend quite a lot of time these days thinking about some of these things. But since then, what we call and think of as 'Asia' is barely recognisable in that subject, and the 'Asian history' that has happened since -- at least in terms of its relevance to Australia -- has largely happened elsewhere. So thinking about China and India as such, systematically, and for any length of time, is something I probably haven't done for more years than I care to contemplate.

But I expect a lot more of that long-forgotten chunk of my education to come flooding back on Thursday evening at the Festival of Ideas' opening session, 'The Elephant and the Dragon', where the discussion will focus on the economic futures of those two countries. Here are the official program notes:

Thursday 5th July, 8 pm: Elder Hall, University of Adelaide

The Elephant and the Dragon

Joseph Cheng
Ramachandra Guha
Robin Jeffrey
Philippe Legrain
Colleen Ryan

Chair: Peter Mares

India and China are major cultures, which Europeans (and particularly Australians) have had an insulting habit of ‘discovering’ routinely for decades, indeed centuries. What does the discovery mean this time? And on what sort of schedule does the West have to get used to the idea that it will cease to be the dominant global force in economic and cultural terms? Will we live long enough to be grateful for an Indian or Chinese ‘discovery’ of Australia or Europe, perhaps?

‘Everyone’ has been saying for years that these waking giants are the future for the world economy, but what will this mean in practice? Will it be globalization as usual with different addresses for central office? Or will there be more profound realignments of human cultures? White Australia has a 229-year history of paranoia about the threat of Asian domination. What, instead, are the regional opportunities of grasping the coming future? And what are the vectors (migration, trade, sport, education, etc) along which this transformation might best be sought?

It would also be good to have your views on how two such populous giants can move rapidly towards first-world levels of consumption without destroying the host-organism, the earth. Other panels in the Festival will address the science of global warming and other apocalyptic prospects. It’s the economics and cultural politics of controlling the environmental risk in China and the Sub-Continent that you could inform us about.


Go here to make bookings for this and the other three evening sessions, and to find out more about the festival.

The year's midnight

Suse at Pea Soup and Stephanie at humanities researcher's mentions of the Winter Solstice have reminded me that I too celebrated the solstice, which coincided with the return home of one of my oldest friends from foreign parts; she stayed with me while recovering from jet lag, and on the night of her arrival home we made some mulled wine.

They say you have to do something 27 times before it becomes a habit, which explains why I forgot to take photos for blogging purposes.

Take one (1) bottle of decent red, something not too bossy that will accommodate additions, and pour it into a saucepan over low heat. Shake the cinnamon jar over it a bit. Tip the honey over the pan and squeeze till you think that's enough. Chuck in six or seven cloves.

Heat gently, stirring. Don't let it boil, just get it nice and steamy. (Actually you are supposed to heat it with a red-hot poker but that presupposes an open fire, which I could, but do not, have. The alpha tortoiseshell's tail would be on fire before you could say 'Too perverse to come in out of the rain', quite apart from the labour-intensiveness and the cost of firewood.)

Strain into pretty mugs.

Drink.

Repeat.

Paul Capsis

This has been a demented work week (and it's not over yet by a long shot) in which I have been too busy to blog, except to make a few manic comments on other people's blogs in little five-minute blogging time-outs from the making-a-living thing, but I want to say something quickly about a show I saw on Wednesday night.

We're in the middle of the Adelaide Cabaret Festival, which is always great -- for me there was not only Paul Capsis on Wednesday night, but there'll be Eddie Perfect in a work-in-progress version of Shane Warne: The Musical on Sunday afternoon, and if I'd been better organised I would most certainly have gone to hear Issa, formerly Jane Siberry, of whom I have been a breathless fan since about 1990 when I first heard 'The Valley' and 'The Life is the Red Wagon' and 'Something about Trains' and 'La Jalouse' and and and, on the album Bound By the Beauty. (If you don't know who she is, think of k.d.lang's version of 'Calling All Angels' - Siberry wrote it, and is the voice singing the high harmony.)

Anyway, there I was with friends at the short but extraordinary show being put on by singer, actor, 'female impersonator' and diva channeler Paul Capsis, and he was superb. We didn't quite realise how superb until he went into a sort of ballerina spin, gathered up and fastened his wild long Greek-boy hair on top of his head in a lightning-fast haute-feminine gesture, turned up his collar, did something mysterious with his eyes and mouth, and there, I swear, was a recognisable Judy Garland. And that was before he started to sing.

Doing Judy is standard, I know, but I've never seen her done as well as that, including by Judy Davis (who came in for a drive-by serve, in the best boy-bitch tradition). Two of his other 'channeling' standards were Marlene Dietrich and Janis Joplin, the former very funny and the latter terrifying, both performances quite stunning bits of mimicry.

Like most men who impersonate women, he was working with over-the-top, pre-feminist (and certainly pre-Queer) Les Girls type gestures and images of femininity; in the case of his Garland and Dietrich turns he was not just performing femininity but performing those particular women's particular performances of femininity, all with a deliciously obvious awareness of what he was doing and how he was doing it.

And it was a familiar form of theatre, brilliantly done. But what I found most riveting and magical was the straight (hah) part of the program, the songs he sang just because they were songs and he was singing them, songs he sang simply as himself. His third and final encore was a beautiful, exposed performance of Kate Bush's 'The Man with the Child in his Eyes', which he sang to simple piano accompaniment as though telling an old friend in private about his broken heart.

He also sang, of all things, the old Cher single 'Bang Bang'. Yeah yeah, I know, hard to believe, even after the Kill Bill revival. He sang it as a slow ballad and the effect all round our table was for us to shake our heads at each other in wide-eyed disbelief and say 'Well, Sonny Bono was a great songwriter. Who knew.' Capsis sang sweetly 'Music played and people sang, just for me the church bells rang' and transformed it into a story of the high point of somebody's life, and it was a wonderful example of how a good performer can transform a song you've known forever and never properly heard.

Given the degree to which the whole rationale of his act relies on the treacherous, shifting signifiers of sex and gender, it's amazing to see him take it up a notch to drop them so abruptly and so utterly, and sing those songs not 'as a woman', not 'as a man', but simply as an exposed human creature, where the emotions and images predominate, sexual identity seems a bit beside the point, and the role and image stuff falls away. Even his voice, used straight, is almost impossible to identify by gender, and he must have a range of at least four octaves counting the falsetto register, possibly more.

His impersonator mimicry is masterful, of course, and oscillates, as all good parody does, between the hysterically funny and and the creepily uncanny. But the straight stuff is just exceptional musicianship and performance, something I felt very lucky to be seeing.


Image: Queensland Government

2007 Adelaide Festival of Ideas: 'Which way to the future?'

The fifth biennial Adelaide Festival of Ideas takes place from July 5 to 8 and Festival Chair Mark Cully has asked three Adelaide bloggers -- Tim Dunlop, Gary Sauer-Thompson and me -- if we would participate in a kind of bloggy engagement with the Festival. This is not so much a formal report as an on-the-ground punter's overview and thoughts: I'll be going to things that interest me and talking around them and the ideas they raise, rather than providing straight, or comprehensive, reportage.

(For anyone new to this blog who is bemused by the catblogging and other domestic preoccupations indiscriminately mixed up with the posts about politics and culture and ideas, this kind of heterogeneous reportage is one of the most pronounced manifestations in the blogosphere of gender difference, and in my case at least is a deliberate if very mild bit of feminist activism. Never mind the women from Venus and the men from Mars; my equivalent book on the subject would be called Male Bloggers Compartmentalise and Female Bloggers Don't. Now read on ...)

The Festival of Ideas began in 1999 and takes place in the years when there is no Writers' Week; unlike the writers' festivals in other Australian cities (Adelaide WW is the oldest one by more than 20 years), WW is biennial, as an integral part of the Adelaide Festival of Arts. It seemed logical to the organisers to run the Festival of Ideas in the alternate years.

One effect this has had, if largely by default and in punters' minds, has been to somehow hive off 'literature' from 'ideas' and vice versa, but obviously there's no such clear-cut distinction, and the kinds of guest writers who might be sorted into the 'ideas' box have in fact often drawn some of the biggest crowds at Writers' Week -- Robert Fisk last year, Paul Keating at an earlier Writers' Week, Michael Ignatieff (who was really something) at an earlier one again.

The guests who feature at the Festival of Ideas, however, tend not to be 'writers' as such, in the way we usually think about 'writers', but rather scientists, theologians, economists, philosophers and others whose books, articles, essays and broadcasts are a means to an end rather than an end in themselves, whether it's to convey information or to argue a case.

Because 'literature' as such is my living, my specialist subject and my main field of endeavour, I always know my way round Writers' Week -- but I feel very much the bemused and humble punter at the Festival of Ideas, and that will be the perspective from which I'll be writing about the sessions I go to. So far, these are the sessions (there's a link to the Festival website at the end of this post, including a complete program with session notes) that I've got a big asterisk next to:

* Everything with Norman Swan in it. Swan is one of my absolutely favourite ABC radio regulars and has an extraordinary gift for making complex ideas accessible without dumbing them down. He's got a lot of work to do: first up he has a session all to himself on the Friday morning, called 'Survival of the Fittest, Survival of the Richest or Survival of the Thinnest'. He's also participating in three panel discussions: 'Before You Eat', also on the Friday morning; 'Lifting the Lid on Whistle-Blowing', on the Saturday afternoon; and 'A Passion for Science', later the same afternoon.

* The Festival has quite a strong emphasis on food and health, on workplace issues, and on Indigenous matters, and those are the sessions at the top of my list. But I'm also looking forward to the opening session on the Thursday evening, 'The Elephant and the Dragon': this is a large panel discussion on the future of China and India and their place in the world economy, featuring Chinese Professor of Political Science Joseph Cheng, Indian historian and biographer Ramachandra Guha, Australian specialist in Pacific and Asian studies Robin Jeffrey, British (despite his name) financial journalist and author Philippe Legrain and Australian Colleen Ryan, the China correspondent for the Fin Review, in a session chaired by the ABC's (and Adelaide's) Peter Mares from The National Interest.

* Other titles that intrigue: 'People Without Borders', 'Mumbo-jumbo, Snake Oil and Other Delusions', and -- especially beguiling -- Jay Griffiths on the topic 'Wild Mind: a manifesto for the essential wildness of the human spirit'. But that's just the beginning. What I'll probably do is what everybody does at such a time: juggle the parallel sessions on the program, make a lot of hard decisions about what I most want to hear, and occasionally get sidetracked when I run into a friend I haven't seen for months or years and goof off somewhere for a coffee.

The thing I love most about the Festival of Ideas is what it says about my city. Not only because I live in a place that could think up something like that, get it going, and support it enthusiastically over a period of eight years, but also because the ordinary punters of the place turn up for it, as they do for Writers' Week, in droves.

For those three days North Terrace is jumping with an amazingly heterogeneous assortment of Adders citizens, from teenagers in school uniform to shrewd-looking and well-wrapped elderly people briskly pushing each other about in wheelchairs. The city of Adelaide was founded on ideas and shaped by visionaries, and at this time of every other year you can still see that inheritance in the eagerness with which so many of its citizens turn up to hear the thinkers of the world expound.

UPDATE: If you'd like to make a comment or ask a question, click on the Comments link; choose the Anonymous option if you want to bypass the Blogger registration process. (But it would be nice to sign your comment!)


The Festival of Ideas website is here.