The Met is coming to Brisbane

Pretty cool advertisement for the Queensland Art Gallery and the Met Exhibition coming this year. I’m really looking forward to checking out QAG’s Gallery of Modern Art when I’m next home – it opened after I left. I hear it’s really great.

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Books and australian films

This morning I borrowed two books from my local library: the Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins and Forbidden Love by Norma Khouri.

Next weekend I’m going to three films at the Barbican that are part of the London Australian Film Festival. One of them is a documentary called Forbidden Lie$ about Norma Khouri’s claims that her book Forbidden Love is a true story – the documentary features interviews with people from Jordan, where the book is set, from the USA where Khouri lived for a while, and Australia, where she also lived for a while and where the book was first published. So, I want to have the book finished by 5pm next Saturday before I see the film!

Next Saturday I am also seeing All My Friends Are Leaving Brisbane. It’s a romantic comedy, which I’m a bit ambivelent about, but it’s set in Brisbane, which I’m very excited about. I wonder if the cinema is going to be full of people from Brisbane. And I wonder if it will make me homesick.

I’m also going to see Burke and Wills. It’s not about the explorers, but about two guys who live together in inner-city Sydney. It sounds like a low-budget, black-and-white arthouse film about sharehousing. I’m really looking forward to it!

I’m sorry too

On Tuesday night (UK time) I watched live ABC coverage of the apology made in the Australian parliament to the stolen generations. It was very moving – I cried quite a bit. I really liked Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s speech. Unfortunately, I think Opposition Leader Brendan Nelson’s speech wasn’t so good – he started ok but then he talked about things that were irrelevant (war veterans?) and he talked about some of the appalling social problems in some Indigenous communities – I think it was his way of justifying the previous government’s ‘intervention’ in the Northern Territory – which I think wasn’t necessary. Surely he didn’t need to rub salt into the wounds of the stolen generations. The day should have been apologising for the hurts caused to them, not bringing up horrible repercussions of that.

Anyway, I’m really glad the apology happened.

I'm sorry too

On Tuesday night (UK time) I watched live ABC coverage of the apology made in the Australian parliament to the stolen generations. It was very moving – I cried quite a bit. I really liked Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s speech. Unfortunately, I think Opposition Leader Brendan Nelson’s speech wasn’t so good – he started ok but then he talked about things that were irrelevant (war veterans?) and he talked about some of the appalling social problems in some Indigenous communities – I think it was his way of justifying the previous government’s ‘intervention’ in the Northern Territory – which I think wasn’t necessary. Surely he didn’t need to rub salt into the wounds of the stolen generations. The day should have been apologising for the hurts caused to them, not bringing up horrible repercussions of that.

Anyway, I’m really glad the apology happened.