Once again we have come together for a full display of the Australian AIDS Memorial Quilt. In the age of the Internet, of global telecommunications and fast travel, it must seem to some to be an old-fashioned form of communication that we have chosen.
Cloth of gold goes back to biblical times.
Quilts are found in ancient societies. Recently I opened, at the High Court Building in Canberra, an exhibition of the masks and quilts of the people of the Cedar - the native Canadians who stare at us across the Pacific from the mountains of Western Canada. So ours is a deliberately old-fashioned display. It returns to the simplicities of human life. The little bits and pieces of our personal existence.