“When it was over, the performers joined Keating on stage in an exuberant throng.  The newspapers the next morning showed a photograph of the Prime Minister, wearing a [...]]]> An excerpt from The State of our Creative Nation, the 2010 Stephen Murray-Smith Memorial Lecture that I delivered at the State Library of Victoria on Thursday 21 October:

“When it was over, the performers joined Keating on stage in an exuberant throng.  The newspapers the next morning showed a photograph of the Prime Minister, wearing a trademark light grey Zegna suit, standing close between two Bangarra dancers who were wearing not much more than a laplap and a bit of body paint.

It was an endearing – and revealing – image of contemporary Australia.

Paul Keating was a very different kind of Australian from the hard-drinking, womanizing, sports-loving Bob Hawke. (Although both excelled in their profane use of the Australian vernacular.)

Keatng’s nationalism – his Australianness – exhibited itself in spectacularly different ways.

In his kissing the ground at Kokoda, with his two most famous speeches – the Redfern speech and the one on the unknown soldier, and in his inventive and often inflammatory aphorisms.  He thrilled his admirers with such outbursts as: ‘If you’re not living in Sydney, you’re just camping out’, or, ‘A soufflé does not rise twice’, ‘All tip and no iceberg’ and, memorably from a few months before this Arts for Labor event, when John Hewson pestered him as to why he would not call an early election, he said: ‘The answer is, mate, because I want to do you slowly’.

At the same time, the leader of the country was urbane and elegant, a man whose tastes ran to Regency furniture, Georgian architecture and the late-Romantic Austrian composter Mahler. And, now, here he was that Sunday in Sydney, embracing the Indigenous descendants of one of the world’s most ancient cultures.

How great our arts will be, Keating had said in his speech, when we are as one with Indigenous Australians, ‘when we say sorry for the murders and the dispossession and mean it, not just write a cheque off the budget’.[1]

Stephen Murray-Smith Lecture 2010

Watch the video

[1] Watson, Ibid.

AN ARTIST LOST: REDISCOVERING CONSTANCE STOKES National Gallery of Australia, 17 November, 2009

DCA DIVERSITY LEADERSHIP BRIEFING Review of EOWA and State of Play for Women at Work, Melbourne, Wednesday 25 November 2009

SWB 2009 OPENING Opening Address, Serious Women’s Business Conference, Melbourne Convention Centre, Tuesday 10 November, 2009

THE STORY OF THE STORY Talk [...]]]> I have posted some of my recent speeches:

AN ARTIST LOST: REDISCOVERING CONSTANCE STOKES
National Gallery of Australia, 17 November, 2009

DCA DIVERSITY LEADERSHIP BRIEFING
Review of EOWA and State of Play for Women at Work, Melbourne, Wednesday 25 November 2009

SWB 2009 OPENING
Opening Address, Serious Women’s Business Conference, Melbourne Convention Centre, Tuesday 10 November, 2009

THE STORY OF THE STORY
Talk to the Annual Dinner of the Copyright Council, Sydney, 15 October, 2009

THE NEW GFC: THE GENDER FAIRNESS CRISIS
Address to Victorian Premier’s Women’s Summit, Melbourne, 8 September, 2009

You’ll also find these and older speeches available to read on the Speeches page.

The Lost Mother has been well and truly launched into the world with great events in Sydney and Melbourne as well as smaller events in bookshops in Canberra and elsewhere.  I will soon be posting photographs from these events on this site.  In Melbourne the Governor General, Her Excellency Quentin Bryce AC launched the [...]]]>

The Lost Mother has been well and truly launched into the world with great events in Sydney and Melbourne as well as smaller events in bookshops in Canberra and elsewhere.  I will soon be posting photographs from these events on this site.  In Melbourne the Governor General, Her Excellency Quentin Bryce AC launched the book. Governor General’s Launch Speech