'Have you turned conservative?' It was the early 1980s, I was back in Australia, and the speaker was a friend I had made during the campaign for Whitlam in London. It was the last time I saw her. Those on the Left are very aware that something is wrong with us even before we are. They are a sensitive lot, ever ready to scent dissent

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You met Chou, asked the president of the Chinese national federation? I was visiting Beijing many years later and replied that not only had I met him but he had shaken my hand, which I held up. The president took the honoured hand in her own and held it with the greatest reverence

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Such was Beijing's adherence to protocol that my table companions through two years of interminable Great Hall dinners never varied. There was the Greek who heroically tried to keep conversation going -- a daunting task given that two of our companions were Africans who did not appear to speak any known language

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At the time when I first tried to be a full-time professional painter—and make some kind of viable living from doing so—the whole matter seemed simpler and less unnecessarily complex than it does today. One major reason for this was that a substantial private market still existed for visual art, much as it did then, […]

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I stood at the window of our Los Angeles airport hotel while waiting for the flight back to Sydney and surveyed the runways, empty as country paddocks. The inter­connected world-taken-for-granted was gone, economic chaos and depression in its stead. Will we ever again be allowed to regain so much we took for granted?

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The parish priest was adamant. If I continued to insist on getting married on AFL Grand Final day, and I was a minute late for the cere­mony, he would not wait for me. I got the message. A high noon wedding, but with no guns. We’d had lots of chat with the priest leading up […]

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At various times as a full-time critic, I have wandered the storerooms of state and national galleries. If the public which pays for the art collected in its name could see even a fraction of the ephemeral rubbish it has effectively paid for, there would perhaps be cause for at least some form of cultural revolution

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Memory strikes when we least expect. I’m forced to remember events I would rather leave behind. They come out of nowhere and trip me up, usually as a commentary on my attempts to achieve something. Happily, they are brief and rarely span a complete period in my life. Therefore I was surprised when the following […]

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One problem with Victoria's schools, and a key reason why we quit the state, lies with the benevolent, malleable majority of teachers who assume the state, its schools and the wider popular culture supplant parents and families as arbiters of the most complex moral questions

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I was deeply and passionately in love, as only an adolescent who has glimpsed another existence can be. It happened quickly. I knew almost nothing about him, and he barely registered that I existed, but he was the whole wide world wrapped up as a present for me

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