ANZAC Day is the only day that really has any national or cultural resonance. Australia Day, Queen's Birthday etc are becoming historically irrelevant to modern Australians.
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The Schonell is a Brisbane theatre, and one of its few great art cinemas. It's in the middle of the University of Queensland St Lucia campus, the product of a confused but surprisingly functional moment of seventies architecture. A distinctive feature is the internal brick cloisters enclosing the stairs descending past tiers of seats: cinema as church. The Schonell
stopped trading as a cinema tonight
.
By coincidence I was there: I knew it was coming, but not that it was so soon. Voluntary Student Unionism is blamed for its closing, and though that certainly seems to have brought it to a head,
other factors are at work
:
"The Liberal Party actually voted to keep the Schonell open! They're claiming the financial loss the Labor Party says the Schonell was running at isn't accurate, and that the financial records actually show the Schonell breaking even."(more)
The Howard Government has decided that capitalism and globalism erode culture. As a consequence they have decided that establishing culture is the role of government. Sadly their view of what constitutes Australian culture is myopic, and backward looking. It is non-adaptive, and overly nationalistic - an attempt to keep the government and nation-state relevant. Government can encourage culture through reducing the artificial barriers to interaction, innovation and cultural memory.
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The word "elite" gets bandied about alot but often defies definition due the nature with which it is used. One of the most insightful descriptions of the Australian elite I have seen is by
Greg Egan
. In his novel
Distress
one of his characters called the elites the "Professional Australians".
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