Flowers and Powers
Oct. 15th, 2005 12:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skyringDD had the car yesterday, so I set off on foot to Parliament House. A pleasant walk throght the bushland along the lake shore, over the bridge and up Kings Avenue. Half an hour's walk in the spring sunshine, though as I crossed the bridge and felt the wind I was somehow reminded of the time I crossed the Potomac to the Lincoln Memorial from Arlington, except that Lake Blue-Green doesn't freeze.
Passed through security and into the Main Committee Room, just as the lecture began. Professor Greg Craven, one of my favorite constitutional scholars, giving one of the Senate Occasional Lectures. He talked about the innate conservatism of the Constitution, and how it is so dedicated to federalism, that "if you took a Stanley knife to it and removed everything dealing with federalism - the separation of powers, the division of money, relations between the States and so on - you wouldn't finish up with a constitution so much as confetti."
Very true, and he spoke of how if the current conservative government persisted in its push to centralise power still further, the Labor party (which controls the State governments) might find it expedient to backflip on their historic stance and seek to divide power further.
Fairly dry stuff on the face of it, but Craven has a way with words and drew a chuckle or two from the audience, which included at least one Senator.
I admired the artworks on the way out and ingered in the souvenir shop. Some lovely portraits there, including a few by Ivor Hele, who won the Archibald Prize seven times. Hard to pick the difference between his style and that of his contemporary William Dargie, but as many of Hele's paintings were done in the 50s and 60s, when his style had tended more to the "textured" than his earlier works, that was a help. I play a game with myself, trying to identify the painter before looking at the signature, and though you might think that one painting of a politician looks much like another, it ain't so.
Must return and take some photographs, now that the construction work is complete and many of the temporary barriers are gone.
Our garden is blooming, and there is a bold show of white daisies in the garden, which I photographed and then discovered a smudge on the lens when I looked at the results. Have to do it again tomorrow. For now two close-ups will suffice.
Passed through security and into the Main Committee Room, just as the lecture began. Professor Greg Craven, one of my favorite constitutional scholars, giving one of the Senate Occasional Lectures. He talked about the innate conservatism of the Constitution, and how it is so dedicated to federalism, that "if you took a Stanley knife to it and removed everything dealing with federalism - the separation of powers, the division of money, relations between the States and so on - you wouldn't finish up with a constitution so much as confetti."
Very true, and he spoke of how if the current conservative government persisted in its push to centralise power still further, the Labor party (which controls the State governments) might find it expedient to backflip on their historic stance and seek to divide power further.
Fairly dry stuff on the face of it, but Craven has a way with words and drew a chuckle or two from the audience, which included at least one Senator.
I admired the artworks on the way out and ingered in the souvenir shop. Some lovely portraits there, including a few by Ivor Hele, who won the Archibald Prize seven times. Hard to pick the difference between his style and that of his contemporary William Dargie, but as many of Hele's paintings were done in the 50s and 60s, when his style had tended more to the "textured" than his earlier works, that was a help. I play a game with myself, trying to identify the painter before looking at the signature, and though you might think that one painting of a politician looks much like another, it ain't so.
Must return and take some photographs, now that the construction work is complete and many of the temporary barriers are gone.
Our garden is blooming, and there is a bold show of white daisies in the garden, which I photographed and then discovered a smudge on the lens when I looked at the results. Have to do it again tomorrow. For now two close-ups will suffice.
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Date: 2005-10-15 06:40 am (UTC)The camera is my new one, a Canon S2 IS. 12xOptical and 5 megapix, it's a good chunk of my tax return. It's about halfway in size between your basic bog-standard digital camera (like my Canon A60 I brought to Fort Worth) and a digital SLR. I mainly wanted to keep the Canon way of doing things so I wouldn't have too steep a learning curve, and it uses the same software.
It's about as big as I can comfortably fit into an airline seat pocket, maybe a bit on the big side for that, but it gives me a great amount of flexibility in taking pictures, and I'm intending to use it to illustrate the sort of Bookcrossing travel books I plan to write next year.