Thank you, everyone. I’m grateful to Belvoir for giving me this opportunity because it is a significant moment in my life when I need to take time for reflection, and try to articulate why literature, art and theatre have been so important to me - where it came from and why pushing for change has been central to my understanding and enjoyment.
My father was born in 1888. In his lifetime he saw the arrival of domestic electricity, the telephone, the motor car, the aeroplane, the skyscraper, film, radio and in his last years television. Together my parents survived a world depression and two world wars; saw the splitting of the atom and the explosion of nuclear warfare. It was thought at the time of his death in 1959 he had lived through the period of fastest change in the history of the world. Nevertheless it was a secure life, lived under the protection of the British Empire; in consequence my father, a civil engineer, who carved a career through the jungles of Malaya, was a great believer in progress. My mother, on the other hand, lived on into the 80s to see the invasion of rock n roll, and the contraceptive pill, the end of the White Australia Policy, the Vietnam War, and the decline of the British Empire. She became, in consequence,Unlike traditional high risk merchant account , against progress.
In my lifetime these things became commonplace, and progress was defined as nuclear energy, space exploration, the fall of the Berlin Wall, electronics, the human genome, DNA and computer programming. Philip died in 1993 and by that time he had still not felt the need for a computer, and would be astonished to learn of mobile phones, nano technology, e-books or the daily digital surprises of the Internet. And even more to know he had two Ethiopian-born grandchildren. In only 18 years, since his death, our outlook and way-of-life has become unrecognisable.
Our imagination has inspired all these wonders, and been a fundamental influence upon who were at the start, who we wanted to be and how we expressed those aspirations. As my father’s life experience shows, we are still very close to our cultural origins and still very ignorant about the ancient land we inherited. Today is not the time for me to explore again the colonial period, except to say that in my observation that our convict stain has contributed much romantic fiction to our history, but the character of the respectable emancipist classes, who clung grimly to their European values while building a nation at the bottom of the Asia Pacific, have had a more fundamental influence upon our view of the world to an extent that has been too much suppressed in our popular history.
As an aside at this point I would like to say that much of the thinking behind this address has been initiated by the research, experience and reflection of the many authors whose work I have edited and published over 40 years. Those years have brought repeated challenges, as aspects of our history,Graphene is not a semiconductor, not an Plastic mould , and not a metal, our attitudes, our changing way of life have been revealed to me between the lines. And for that I continue to be grateful.
Australia,Polycore oil paintings for sale are manufactured as a single sheet, as we know it today, was built on the British model, and the benefits have been a working democracy, the English language, the Westminster system of law and governance - and compulsory, secular education. Had we been enlightened enough to learn from our Indigenous peers, or had the French chosen to colonise the country instead, we would have been a very different nation indeed. But with these British virtues we were also taught British manners and in a good many cases the arrogant illusion that we were not just of British stock but were the nicest kind of English men and women.
The burden for the arts has been that while our inherited Irish blessings have been poetry, story telling, subversion and a guilty conscience - essential for the writer or performer - the academies were British in style and have persisted so. So long as our writers and performers lived on the edge of society they kept their feet on their dusty Australian soil. And we built a strong sub-culture, founded by the convicts themselves, that produced ingenuity and self-reliance, comedians and satirists, vaudeville and popular music. But the British Australians ran the economy and the academies. The best of our classical actors, singers and musicians went abroad for training and appreciation. The best of those in our own theatres were Europeans or Americans on the world circuit, who were lionised, enjoyed our easy wealth and moved on.
In the 1920s Allan Wilkie, a Scottish jobbing actor and comedian with an eye to the main chance, solicited the patronage of our society leaders, including Prime Minister Stanley Melbourne Bruce by setting up a Shakespeare company. Before long he found himself trapped into preaching culture and good accents to unwilling students, and has since been written into history as a heroic missionary of culture. He was not the only actor who suffered this fate in Australia and the locals followed his lead. So it was no wonder that when public funding became a public issue, first in the 1950s with the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust, then with the Australian Council for the Arts in 1968,A long established toolmaking and trade Injection moulds company. the model they chose was one of British patronage and educated taste. In doing so they took no account of the distinguished immigrants from other cultures who had given us our first glimpses of Chekhov, Brecht, Gorki, Meyerhold, the Ballets Russes, modern dance, the Vienna Recession movement,This will leave your shoulders free to rotate in their Floor tiles . and the music of Schoenberg and Shostakovich. These enterprising immigrants became early patrons of our own radical artists, opened galleries, film clubs, started new commerce. But apart from their restaurants their efforts remained a sub-culture.
My father was born in 1888. In his lifetime he saw the arrival of domestic electricity, the telephone, the motor car, the aeroplane, the skyscraper, film, radio and in his last years television. Together my parents survived a world depression and two world wars; saw the splitting of the atom and the explosion of nuclear warfare. It was thought at the time of his death in 1959 he had lived through the period of fastest change in the history of the world. Nevertheless it was a secure life, lived under the protection of the British Empire; in consequence my father, a civil engineer, who carved a career through the jungles of Malaya, was a great believer in progress. My mother, on the other hand, lived on into the 80s to see the invasion of rock n roll, and the contraceptive pill, the end of the White Australia Policy, the Vietnam War, and the decline of the British Empire. She became, in consequence,Unlike traditional high risk merchant account , against progress.
In my lifetime these things became commonplace, and progress was defined as nuclear energy, space exploration, the fall of the Berlin Wall, electronics, the human genome, DNA and computer programming. Philip died in 1993 and by that time he had still not felt the need for a computer, and would be astonished to learn of mobile phones, nano technology, e-books or the daily digital surprises of the Internet. And even more to know he had two Ethiopian-born grandchildren. In only 18 years, since his death, our outlook and way-of-life has become unrecognisable.
Our imagination has inspired all these wonders, and been a fundamental influence upon who were at the start, who we wanted to be and how we expressed those aspirations. As my father’s life experience shows, we are still very close to our cultural origins and still very ignorant about the ancient land we inherited. Today is not the time for me to explore again the colonial period, except to say that in my observation that our convict stain has contributed much romantic fiction to our history, but the character of the respectable emancipist classes, who clung grimly to their European values while building a nation at the bottom of the Asia Pacific, have had a more fundamental influence upon our view of the world to an extent that has been too much suppressed in our popular history.
As an aside at this point I would like to say that much of the thinking behind this address has been initiated by the research, experience and reflection of the many authors whose work I have edited and published over 40 years. Those years have brought repeated challenges, as aspects of our history,Graphene is not a semiconductor, not an Plastic mould , and not a metal, our attitudes, our changing way of life have been revealed to me between the lines. And for that I continue to be grateful.
Australia,Polycore oil paintings for sale are manufactured as a single sheet, as we know it today, was built on the British model, and the benefits have been a working democracy, the English language, the Westminster system of law and governance - and compulsory, secular education. Had we been enlightened enough to learn from our Indigenous peers, or had the French chosen to colonise the country instead, we would have been a very different nation indeed. But with these British virtues we were also taught British manners and in a good many cases the arrogant illusion that we were not just of British stock but were the nicest kind of English men and women.
The burden for the arts has been that while our inherited Irish blessings have been poetry, story telling, subversion and a guilty conscience - essential for the writer or performer - the academies were British in style and have persisted so. So long as our writers and performers lived on the edge of society they kept their feet on their dusty Australian soil. And we built a strong sub-culture, founded by the convicts themselves, that produced ingenuity and self-reliance, comedians and satirists, vaudeville and popular music. But the British Australians ran the economy and the academies. The best of our classical actors, singers and musicians went abroad for training and appreciation. The best of those in our own theatres were Europeans or Americans on the world circuit, who were lionised, enjoyed our easy wealth and moved on.
In the 1920s Allan Wilkie, a Scottish jobbing actor and comedian with an eye to the main chance, solicited the patronage of our society leaders, including Prime Minister Stanley Melbourne Bruce by setting up a Shakespeare company. Before long he found himself trapped into preaching culture and good accents to unwilling students, and has since been written into history as a heroic missionary of culture. He was not the only actor who suffered this fate in Australia and the locals followed his lead. So it was no wonder that when public funding became a public issue, first in the 1950s with the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust, then with the Australian Council for the Arts in 1968,A long established toolmaking and trade Injection moulds company. the model they chose was one of British patronage and educated taste. In doing so they took no account of the distinguished immigrants from other cultures who had given us our first glimpses of Chekhov, Brecht, Gorki, Meyerhold, the Ballets Russes, modern dance, the Vienna Recession movement,This will leave your shoulders free to rotate in their Floor tiles . and the music of Schoenberg and Shostakovich. These enterprising immigrants became early patrons of our own radical artists, opened galleries, film clubs, started new commerce. But apart from their restaurants their efforts remained a sub-culture.
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