There's an endless debate about whether they should influence the society or reflect it, whether to lead or to follow. I don't find too many that are leading anyone anywhere. The great educational trailblazers of the past, people like Winifred West and Betty Archdale, Dorothy Ross and Peter Gebhardt, the visionaries, the risk-takers, have become as scarce as luthiers and apothecaries. Schools are scared of lawsuits, scared of the media, scared of parents, scared of bureaucrats, in short, scared of criticism. Fear rarely leads to growth and innovation, and its manifestation in schools has suffocated much of their potential.
Stories are another of the defining forces in any society.
Just as we are defined individually by our stories, so too the identity of Australia is shaped by Aboriginal Dreamtime stories, tales of Burke and Wills and Bass and Flinders, the fiction of Lawson and Furphy, Jolley and Halligan. The stories of past generations, many of which are preserved in books, are critical to us. It's not only language that these books preserve. It's also relationships and attitudes, customs and events, that are explored through stories and thereby made available to readers who take the trouble to drag the books out of dusty library shelves - always assuming they can find them on those dusty library shelves. For example, many Australians believe they invented conservation in the last 20 years, but the book They Found a Cave , published in 1949, contains a scene where a boy is about to kill a six-foot black snake that slithers away in the bush.