But one likes, as they say, to be asked

UPDATE, 27/10/11: I am reliably informed that the AGNSW did indeed have copies of the other books and had either sold them all or not unpacked them yet. I take it all back. This post was written with a small bit of my tongue in my cheek, in a knee-jerk reaction (if you will forgive the involvement of all these body parts) of a non-eastern-stater to Syd/Melb hegemonic etc etc. Mea culpa.



Cruising around the gallery shop yesterday at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, I was glad for the sake of their respective authors, Delia Falconer and Sophie Cunningham, to see on display for sale a little stack of copies of Sydney

and another little stack of copies of Melbourne.

But alas, that was all.

Having put a great deal of time and effort into writing a book that could be read for pleasure and instruction not only by Adelaideans but also by interstaters and overseasers, I couldn't help thinking that surely visitors to the gallery shop might be largely from elsewhere, and therefore perhaps interested in Australia as a whole. And that even the Sydneysiders might interested in broadening their horizons by also reading Adelaide,

Brisbane,

 

and In Search of Hobart.

Or is it really true that Melbourne and Sydney people think that the Hume Highway and everything to the east and at each end of it = Australia?

Coup schmoup

I think Tracy at Adelaide From Adelaide will excuse me for quoting her at such length: this is a paragraph that needs to be disseminated as widely as possible.

And another thing: don’t use the word ‘coup’, just don’t. It’s completely inaccurate and it’s bloody disrespectful. We live in a democracy, and we get to vote without fearing for our lives, and no tanks rolled up to the steps of Parliament House, and Kevin Rudd got the opportunity to make a dignified farewell speech and no one got locked up, and no one has disappeared, and actually caucus voted on it, and whether you like it or not that is the way Australian politics works. And you know what? If you don’t like it, you can bang on about it as much as you like. You can write about it on your blog, you can ring talkback radio, you can start your own ‘I’d never backstab anyone’ party, you can even meet Kevin Rudd for a drink and discuss it with him if you like. You can do all those things because it wasn’t a coup.

Tracy is currently, though not permanently, living in Abu Dhabi.