There's something profoundly, fundamentally, deep down inside satisfying about a convergence of events that indicate a change of season. First there's the baby Kookaburra's sort of wobbling their way up and down the branches of the big ghost gum at the end of the house; then you realise that the King Parrots are calling each other from the trees on either side of the garden - and you get a sneaking suspicion that some of those King Parrots look younger than others - so the babies have hatched. The apple trees flower and leaf, the Yucca re-emerges from the ground and the self-sown tomato seedling start to appear. (Of course the downside of all of this is you can hear the blasted blackberries growing behind you as you walk and the fox is driving me and my chooks completely bats), but the one huge indicator that things have changed is the cricket's back on the radio. Skull's giggling, Damien Fleming's trying to keep it slightly serious - although his confessions about INXS yesterday were comprehensively trumped by Skull's Sherbert reference, Jim Maxwell, Glenn Mitchell, Drew Morphett and others are all sitting in Brisbane commentating on Sri Lanka and Australia in the first Test of the Summer and suddenly the election campaign is even less interesting than it was a few days ago.
Of course real life still does intrude, and a non-fiction book that we picked up at this year's Melbourne Writers Festival - Do Not Disturb, Is the Media Failing Australia? was finished off. This is a series of essays (edited by Robert Manne) that discuss the workings (and failings) of Australia's media. We picked up a couple of books on this subject at this year's festival - David Salter's The Media We Deserve being the second one.
Found Do Not Disturb fascinating and somewhat disturbing reading.
At a time when the Howard government in Australia has radically narrowed the national vision, the mainstream media has failewd to notice or to hold it to account. Do Not Distrub offers diverse and enlightening explanations for this failure. Eric Beecher gives reasons for the decline of quality journalism, and Guy Rundle charts the rise of the attack-dog commentators. Margaret Simons goes inside the ABC, while Jon Faine lifts the lid on the unruly democracy of talkback radio, and so on. The contributors to this book are all independent insiders.