Our own professional association would endorse this shift in the flavour of the professional epitaph. Certainly it is all but absent from the professional syllabus, if there is such a thing now that the profession has largely conceded such matters to the academy. A recent 'Frontline' had our president, tongue not quite out of cheek, endorsing the term 'webliographer' as an appropriate substitute for bibliographer. We happily use the technology on a daily basis, and there is no longer any doubt about its power and utility to hold, search for and deliver information . Apropos of nothing, we suspect that the member for Oxley has not read many books.
Many people do.
At the very least, it might help to have read Mein Kampf , and to have reflected on the vicissitudes to which the author of that seminal work exposed not only his own, but many other nations of Europe in his nomination of a scapegoat race and his expositions on the miseries of the working poor and the threatened middle class, to whose members the oratory of the senator from Ipswich makes such a powerful appeal in Australia today. Not the 'kings and queens' versions of history, but that rich compost of individual lives and disparate cultures reflected in the items to be found in any good Australian library collection. And by items, we mean books, for only books give one the time, the depth, the horizon, the perspective and the humanity to see where it is that we in this country have come from. True, they are for a moment unfashionable with us. Only in books can we read and experience, in extenso , the complexities of humanity in all its richness and frailty.