Just by way of note:
Having decided to catch up at a festival event on Sunday, Swee Leng and I were torn between the earlier "Exclusion zone" session about "those politically unfashionable responses: compassion, anger and action" to the federal government's refugee policies and the self-help debate. In the end, we settled on the latter because it seemed more likely to be soul-nourishing and less potentially heavy on the intellectualisin'; unfortunately, we'd misinterpreted the blurb and what we'd thought would be a discussion of the value of literature in one's life in fact turned out to be a 'debate' about the value of self-help books (Linda Jaivin, Andy Griffiths, Kerry Greenwood, Danny Katz)...o well, better luck next time. Having arrived early, we also happened to catch Toby Burke, who it turns out I'd seen perform before, under the name 'Horse Stories' (as a support to Kathleen Edwards) - he was quite good though not getting much in the way of attention.
