A Thinking Reed

Front Cover
Allen & Unwin, 2007 - Biography & Autobiography - 591 pages
From quiz kid to Australian Minister for Science, from frustrated school teacher to National President of the ALP, from the suburbs of Melbourne to UNESCO in Paris, Barry Jones has had a prodigious public life.

Barry Jones first came to public prominence as Pick-a-Box quiz champion, and from then on he has embraced a myriad of passions and causes. A Thinking Reed spans his remarkable career, from a lonely childhood in Melbourne of the 1930s and 1940s to the fight he led against the death penalty to his crusade to make science and the future prominent issues on the political agenda. He has worked tirelessly on both a global and local scale to rethink education, to improve and preserve our heritage, to revive the nations's film industry, and to build a better Australia.

Almost unique among politicians, Barry Jones is held in enormous public affection. And while he reveals many insights into the political process - both the problems of office and the atrophy of Opposition - he concentrates above all on the life of the mind; a mind with deep, passionate and often witty insights into history, philosophy, music and literature. A Thinking Reed is a generous gift from an extraordinary Australian.

'A Thinking Reed is a book that works through accumulation and accretion . . . and in his requiem for contemporary politics, we reach the finale of what we now see has been a symphony, and one with Mahleresque intimations of tragedy'. - Australian Literary Review

'Barry Jones has written the best autobiography of a politician I have ever read'. - Don Aitkin, Canberra Historical Journal

'A Thinking Reed is a mixture of honesty, FUN, common sense and scholarship too. It makes a delightful portrait of a life. - Owen Chadwick, OM, historian

'It is breathtakingly ambitious, clear-eyed but generous about other people Rich and strange - like travelling with Gulliver as he discovers the world and himself in it . . . I don't often hanker for multi-volumed works, but I wished for more all the while I was reading this'. - The Age

From inside the book

Contents

An abundant life
1
1 Family
8
2 Childhood
28
3 Death Penalty
72
4 Quiz Show
103
5 Fifty Years Hard Labor
130
6 Faces
182
7 Bump Me Into Parliament
226
12 Backbench Explorations
395
13 Beliefs
417
14 The Third Age
443
1979 1989 2001
475
Afterword
529
The Second Coming
530
Lists
531
Blbliography
538

8 Life of My Mind
259
9 Sleepers Wake
310
10 Inside the Hawke Government
332
11 Ministering to Science
353
Acknowledgments
547
Index
548
Copyright

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Popular passages

Page 131 - Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.
Page 76 - What's that so black agin the sun?' said Files-onParade. 'It's Danny fightin' 'ard for life,' the Colour-Sergeant said. 'What's that that whimpers over'ead?' said Files-onParade. 'It's Danny's soul that's passin' now,
Page 329 - I must study politics and war, that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.
Page 527 - So first of all let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.
Page 275 - Tell all the Truth but tell it slant— Success in Circuit lies Too bright for our infirm Delight The Truth's superb surprise As Lightning to the Children eased With explanation kind The Truth must dazzle gradually Or every man be blind...
Page 530 - Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.
Page 154 - God save our gracious Queen, Long live our noble Queen, God save the Queen: Send her victorious, Happy and glorious, Long to reign over us: God save the Queen.
Page 317 - In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat...
Page 528 - I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on" (Three Novels by Samuel Beckett [New York: Grove Press, 1955], p.
Page 530 - Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,...

About the author (2007)

The Hon. Dr Barry Jones is a writer, broadcaster and former Labor member of both the State and Federal parliaments. He was Australia's longest serving Science Minister (1983-90) and served as National President of the Australian Labor Party from 1992 to 2000 and again in 2005-06. He is the only person to have been elected as a Fellow of all four Australian learned academies: Technological Sciences and Engineering in 1992, the Humanities in 1993, Science in 1996 and Social Sciences in 2003. He was also a member of the Executive Board of UNESCO in Paris (1991-95), Vice-President of the World Heritage Committee (1995-96) and a consultant for the OECD. He now serves on six medical research board and the board of CARE Australia.

In 1998 he became a Living National Treasure and received a John Curtin Medal in 2001. Barry Jones Bay in the Australian Antarctic Territory and Yalkaparidon jonesi, a rare extinct family of marsupials, were named for him.

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