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Knowing I was going to spend six months in Greece, I arranged for a trunk of books to be sent over. My illiterate mother-in-law was stupefied: 'So many books! Can't you sell some of them?' I should have known she'd react like this, as during her one visit to Melbourne she'd told me roundly that too much reading was the cause of my prematurely grey hair and my need to wear glasses.
More than once I observed him walking from the Medley Building of the University of Melbourne to Newman College reading a book, not looking up. It was the book leading the human through the everyday world.
You could you call it coincidence that the week I'm asked to write on budgets, ours blows out. I call it life. Such is the cyclic nature of our 1.5-incomes-and-two-kids lives that just when we think our savings are safe, a new enrolment fee is due, the kids' jeans are suddenly a size too small and I've run out of nappies.
Free dictionaries on the internet are often bland and incomplete, while those that are complex and exhaustive require a credit card. Quality comes at a price, and this is an increasing educational issue. Rich institutions and individuals can pay for the words we all use, while others cannot, or just do not.
Somedays it looks like the most extravagant love letter to the humanist project, other days like the biggest ragbag of unsorted intellectual capital. The sheer scale of information is truly amazing. But as a reference, the time has come for Wikipedia to up its game.
'The failure of the Rudd and Gillard administrations', said Paul Keating last week, 'is the lack of an over-arching story.' Eureka Street poetry editor Philip Harvey believes poets have a role in articulating a sense of meaning and direction that is lacking in politics and the media.
There was a liberal use of corporal punishment in my school. We were seen as a loutish bunch of lads who needed a firm hand. It did nothing to help my education. You don't create a smart and confident Australia by taking to people with a stick.
'When you are growing up, there are two institutional places that affect you most powerfully — the church, which belongs to God, and the public library, which belongs to you,' writes Richards. Librarians know better than anyone that the library attracts the most unlikely clientele.
We are seeing only the early technology of the e-book. In five years the e-book will look, feel, sound, smell and gesticulate in very different ways from its iPad and Kindle prototypes. As usual, libraries are quietly ahead of everyone else.
Coming closer, one sees these are paintings of drowning people, headsor bodies suspended in metallic seawater. There are 353 images, mostly children and women, for it was mostly children and women who boarded the boat.
Eureka Street joins other online publications in beginning the new year with a fresh roll of the dice, publishing daily instead of fortnightly.