Publicity proceeds apace, I suppose. I am down to about one interview a day now. Most of them are still for various state capital ABCs but I am looking forward to the Frankie interview tomorrow and the JJJ one next week. I have talked to friends/colleagues who have been in similar situations (as authors, mainly) and our notes do not reveal major discrepancies. For the first time, I started to think this morning about whether there was a serious possibility of following this book up with something else - on a different topic (it would be death to keep ploughing this furrow, it was so of the moment). That said, it won't do to start thinking too much off-topic in the next few weeks. With that in mind I am about to head off and buy Lindsay Tanner's recent book to add to Judith Brett's Quarterly Essay which I purchased last night to try and cobble together something new and interesting to say for Tuesday night's New Internationalist Bookshop talk which reiterates the basic themes of the book but ties in with other work. This is as good for my mind as it is for the life of the 'project'.
When I passed through the atrium of the ABC Southbank for the fourth time on Wednesday I remembered finally that (I am pretty sure that) the first time I saw the frieze panels that now adorn the walls there it was when they were in the 3AR building in, I think, Lonsdale Street Melbourne: I probably visited there, though I cannot for the life of me remember why, in the late 1970s. Maybe a school trip or something? Anyway, they are pretty fine. I find them most intriguing; they represent pre-radio attempts to communicate to, well, the masses I suppose.
1 comment:
Were those friezes simply trying to ape the Eric Gill ones around BBC's Broadcasting House in London? (i.e., the ABC was simply trying to ape the BBC more generally)
I too recall the 3AR studios in Lonsdale St because my dad worked in an office building opposite in the 1970s. Adjacent to the terraces occupied by the ABC in Lonsdale St there was once a grand Italianate mansion built by the man who brought Chloe to Melbourne (the portrait, that is, not the subject). It later became the first home the Commonwealth Conciliation and Arbitration Court. It was demolished before my time, although I think one of its gateposts stands on Lonsdale St still.
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