U

niveristy of Sydney

 

Two talks and a museum - November 30, 2006








Australia flag






When we first thought of taking an apartment in Sydney we had in mind again being able to attend all sorts of political and non-political talks as we had in Washington and Paris (and to a much lesser extent in Berlin and Athens). On arrival we learned that the calendar was working against us. It was, as we had expected, the beginning of summer, but we had not expected, as in the northern summer, universities and think tanks, as far as public talks, were as good as shut down.

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University of Sydney, traditional stone buildings
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Stone lion

Nonetheless, a few weeks after arrival we started to look at the newspapers event-listings more closely and searched the internet. We were pleased to find that on a single day there were three interesting things to do at the University of Sydney, and set out for there on the last day of November for two lectures and a visit to one of their museums, The Nicholson.

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John Wyn Owen and title of his talk

First we went to the talk "Global Health Policy - Is there a European Perspecitive?" Although the speaker had a prestigious background we thought the presentation was pretty vacuous. In fact, the speaker hardly said anything more concrete than "Europe" is nicer and can do it better than the US! He didn't even mention WHO (the World Health Organization.)

As we walked out we got in a conversation with a woman, who is a public health professional. She agreed with us the talk was pretty empty. We asked her what she thought was meant by the word "colonial" when Owen said that the United States, as sort of could be expected, was engaged in "colonialism" in the way it provided public health assistance around the world. With a straight face, she said, "I know. They come in and tramp on the local culture."

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Jorgen Randers and "Global Colapse"

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Jorgen Randers

The second talk was by Jorgen Randers, one of the original (but less famous) authors of the 1972 hit, "The Limits of Growth". He was basically promoting the 30-year update of the original book. He's switched from saying we'll run out of oil to saying we're going to burn so much oil that (due to CO2) the earth will bake and we'll all die of ... you name it. The audience of about 100-200 people was pretty sympathetic to his dire warnings, delivered in a very humorous, almost self-deprecating way, of the crash that is coming due to global warming. This topic has gotten a lot of news in the Sydney papers recently because the Prime Minister, John Howard, has become a sort of convert, possibly out of the necessity of keeping ahead of his voters. Gerry is pretty skeptical over the whole matter; Jan much less so or at least thinks due worry should be given.

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Nicholson Museum, Grece-Crete-Cyprus Collection

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Nicholson Museum, Egyptian Collection

The Nicholson Museum is named for one of the university's founders and a great benefactor. It was a small gem, with lots of artifacts from ancient Greece, Cyprus, and Egypt. Half were bought by Nicholson in his travels, post 1860-1880, when one could do that sort of thing, and the other half were gifts from various British "cousins", e.g. the British Institute of Archeology in Tehran. As always, the Australians proved themselves very friendly. We were among the few visitors and the curator kept the museum open for us an extra half an hour.

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Librarian with Jews for Jesus T-shirt
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Restaurants on King St near Universit of Sydney

The same day we had an interesting philosophy discussion with a librarian who was wearing a "Jews for Jesus" T-shirt; he said he meant it. And on his recommendation we had lunch on a nearby street that had three Thai restaurants, three Vietnamese ones, and half a dozen other international cuisines. We chose Thai, but Jan followed it with a decaf cafe latte at "McCafe."




December 15, 2006