Returning to reading – finding the best of all possible worlds

It’s a strange time we live in – but then, has any time not been a strange time. I often think that there is no way on Earth that I would ever want to live in an earlier era, before medicine was so developed, when the average life expectancy was in the mid 30s, when life for most people was a short spell of drudgery punctuated by poverty and fear. I'm making the most of it. Lately I’ve started to balance my fascination with the easy-earned opinion of the online universe with a return to reading writing, as distinct from glancing at jotting.

I grew up in the era of mass polio, where every child knew someone who was consigned to an iron lung and fear was everywhere. Then suddenly vaccination appeared and our generation embraced it with relief. In our day the way you became protected from a raft of diseases was to catch them and – if you were lucky enough to survive – when you eventually recovered, you were inoculated. Unfortunately, having spent hundreds of years dragging itself out of the Dark Ages, large chunks of humanity seem hell bent of dragging us back.

 The Boulten and Watt steam engine, Powerhouse Museum.

Easier to be connected than ever before
I like this well-connected time of ours, where I can find information (though not always knowledge) at the drop of a hat – if I’m wearing a hat, that is, which unfortunately in this country of extreme heat most people don’t seem to bother with. It’s a time where it is easier to be connected to those who are important in your life than ever before – no matter where they are on the planet.

Literature and languages – inaugural Indigenous literary festival sign of things to come

Happening this weekend is a very important event for Australian cultural life, the inaugural Victorian Indigenous literary festival Blak & Bright. It aims to promote and celebrate a diversity of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander voices.

The fabulous author and Indigenous languages revivalist, Bruce Pascoe, is co-headlining the festival. With 29 books to his name, including the 2013 Prime Minister’s Literary award-winning Fog a Dox, he will help make an historic event. In the lead up to the Festival he has been interviewed about his views on Australian literature.

Melbourne from across the  River Yarra.

There have also been important developments in Queensland, with the state Indigenous languages organisations, the Queensland Indigenous Languages Advisory Committee, having a history of involvement with the Queensland Writers Festival. They recently had a smaller event along the lines of Blak & Bright in Brisbane. There have probably been other activities happening that I’m not aware of, though I’d be keen to hear.

The history of the future

If you can’t fill a magazine with the past and the present, expanding your ambit to include the future adds a whole new area of material.

I find it interesting that many people who would claim they don’t read fiction, are avid readers of the popular magazines that appear from nowhere in newsagents, doctors surgeries and your mother’s latest emergency parcel. Popular magazines are the last great home of true fiction - if their stories aren’t true, then they should be.

Stars in the night sky, popular magazines, reading palms - the truth is out there.

They are so desperately short of new compelling material, that they have started to introduce psychics so they can add a whole new area of imagined material.