Books, birds and Barbara Cartland
Sep. 6th, 2008 05:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
todayiamadaisyIt's the first weekend in September, and that means Port Fairy's annual book fair is on. I made my way around the bay after breakfast and spent a top hour browsing the second-hand book sale in the Port Fairy hall. I wasn't looking for anything in particular, just whatever grabbed my attention. And what grabbed my attention was a 1967 book called Australia's Music: Themes of a New Society by Roger Covell, which will come in handy for my paper about the national anthem debate. This book was written ten years before the vexed national anthem issue was finally decided; here's what Roger had to say about the song that eventually won:
The song most often proposed in the eastern states of Australia as a possible national anthem is 'Advance Australia Fair', which has the worst type of jingoistic words and tune of such trudging mediocrity as to make South Australia's 'Song of Australia' appear positively inspired beside it. If 'Advance Australia Fair' is thought to be the best that can be done by intent in providing Australia with a national anthem, it would be better to abandon all thought of any such amenity until some tune, borrowed or original, should attach itself to words which do not leave the majority of its hearers embarrassed, bored, or amused.
Something tells me he's not a fan.
I also saw a shelf containing twelve pristine copies of Law on Water: A History of the Port Philip Bay Water Police (1838-1900) and its Administrators, but, oddly, I wasn't at all tempted to buy even one copy.
After the sale, I went to an exhibition of original illustrations by Shaun Tan, which were brilliant (mostly from Tales from Outer Suburbia and The Arrival, if you're looking at that website). The entry price to the exhibition included a ticket in a raffle to win a signed print of one of the illustrations, which would be nice but I won't hold my breath. Then I took a stroll down to the civic green to watch some of the Barbara Cartland Hurl, in which competitors dress up like Barbara Cartland (well... they put on flowing pink robes and dodgy wigs; lurid pink lipstick optional) and read a short passage from one of that lady's many fine works, before throwing the book as far as they can (winners judged on artistic merit and distance thrown). I got there in time to see one lady throw her book like a javelin; it went way off course and only missed the woman running the local primary school's fund-raising sausage sizzle because she saw it in time and ducked.
Between Port Fairy and Warrnambool is dairy land and I saw plenty of calves on the way there and back, including one that was so new it was still struggling to its feet. On the way back, I went for a quick flit around the Tower Hill State Reserve. Thirty seconds in and I saw Mr Emu with a flock of stripey emu chicks straggling behind him, which was very cute. There were also plenty of fairy wrens and firetails darting about the road. All in all, a good morning.
And it was made even better when I got home and read the paper. There was an improbable story in it the other day about a family that was terrorised by a possum. A woman and her three children were apparently trapped in their car for three hours and had to call the police to come and rescue them. Possums are small, shy, nocturnal creatures, so it is extremely unlikely that one would spend an afternoon 'threatening' a family without some sort of provocation. We had a fun morning at work laughing at it. And we weren't the only ones: today's paper had a letter from a man declaring that it was the funniest thing he'd seen in the paper since the time they illustrated an article about destructive winds with a photo of an overturned rubbish bin. I wish I'd seen that.
The song most often proposed in the eastern states of Australia as a possible national anthem is 'Advance Australia Fair', which has the worst type of jingoistic words and tune of such trudging mediocrity as to make South Australia's 'Song of Australia' appear positively inspired beside it. If 'Advance Australia Fair' is thought to be the best that can be done by intent in providing Australia with a national anthem, it would be better to abandon all thought of any such amenity until some tune, borrowed or original, should attach itself to words which do not leave the majority of its hearers embarrassed, bored, or amused.
Something tells me he's not a fan.
I also saw a shelf containing twelve pristine copies of Law on Water: A History of the Port Philip Bay Water Police (1838-1900) and its Administrators, but, oddly, I wasn't at all tempted to buy even one copy.
After the sale, I went to an exhibition of original illustrations by Shaun Tan, which were brilliant (mostly from Tales from Outer Suburbia and The Arrival, if you're looking at that website). The entry price to the exhibition included a ticket in a raffle to win a signed print of one of the illustrations, which would be nice but I won't hold my breath. Then I took a stroll down to the civic green to watch some of the Barbara Cartland Hurl, in which competitors dress up like Barbara Cartland (well... they put on flowing pink robes and dodgy wigs; lurid pink lipstick optional) and read a short passage from one of that lady's many fine works, before throwing the book as far as they can (winners judged on artistic merit and distance thrown). I got there in time to see one lady throw her book like a javelin; it went way off course and only missed the woman running the local primary school's fund-raising sausage sizzle because she saw it in time and ducked.
Between Port Fairy and Warrnambool is dairy land and I saw plenty of calves on the way there and back, including one that was so new it was still struggling to its feet. On the way back, I went for a quick flit around the Tower Hill State Reserve. Thirty seconds in and I saw Mr Emu with a flock of stripey emu chicks straggling behind him, which was very cute. There were also plenty of fairy wrens and firetails darting about the road. All in all, a good morning.
And it was made even better when I got home and read the paper. There was an improbable story in it the other day about a family that was terrorised by a possum. A woman and her three children were apparently trapped in their car for three hours and had to call the police to come and rescue them. Possums are small, shy, nocturnal creatures, so it is extremely unlikely that one would spend an afternoon 'threatening' a family without some sort of provocation. We had a fun morning at work laughing at it. And we weren't the only ones: today's paper had a letter from a man declaring that it was the funniest thing he'd seen in the paper since the time they illustrated an article about destructive winds with a photo of an overturned rubbish bin. I wish I'd seen that.