Month: February 2012

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Events in Melbourne this week…

This week the Reframe book tour heads down to Melbourne for a mixed set of radio interviews and events. I’ve listed them below in case you’re interested:

On radio, I’m doing:

  • The Conversation Hour with Jon Faine – on Monday from 11am
  • Interview on 3RRR – on Tuesday morning around 10.40am
  • Steve Vizard on Melbourne Talk Radio  – on Tuesday around 12.40pm

I’ll also be doing two events:

  • Debut Mondays at the Wheeler Centre – on Monday from 6.15pm
  • Book launch at Readings bookshop in Carlton – on Tuesday from 6.30pm

Finally, on Wednesday I’ll be doing a panel on ABC TV The Drum.

Feel free to come by or tune in if you’re around!

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Solving ‘race’ and other stuff with John Safran and Waleed Aly

Walking into the Tardis studios in the ABC, you get the impression it’s been there for a long time. Pictures of athletes, in black and white, hang on the wall with old-school microphones held to their faces. Noni Hazlehurst also hangs there. The set from Playschool is still strangely familiar to me. I obviously did a lot of my best work watching that show.

I was in the studio yesterday to do a series of radio interviews. Tardis is the booth you go to when you’re speaking on a program outside of Sydney. You sit in a little room with a microphone and talk to a blank wall. I was on Steve Austin’s morning program in Brisbane. I then left Tardis to speak with Richard Glover on 702 Drive in the afternoon. Richard is a super energetic guy and we had a great chat. Sitting in the studio,  it reminded how much of Drive is taken up with traffic reports!

In the evening, instead of heading out early on a date for Valentine’s Day, I was on air with Waleed Aly and John Safran on Radio National Drive. You can hear it here. John Safran pulls out some hilarious stuff on his show Race Relations…all of it slightly kooky. I think he must have worked out pretty quickly that I’m Eurasian because his first comment on the book was the picture of the back. Safran, of course, has Asian heritage as he explains here. You’d think between a Jewish guy, a Muslim and an Asian, we’d have solved the world’s race problems. Reading today’s papers, looks like Reuters missed the show.

I’ll be in Dymocks George Street, Sydney today 12.30-1.30pm signing books. If you’re at a loose end over lunch swing by and say hi.

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Annabel Crabb on Reframe – ABC The Drum

As the news cycle rumbled back into action this week, it struck me that we have lost something in Australian politics. We have lost the art of communicating major political reform. The mining tax is still kicking around the Senate. Advertising to sell the carbon tax has made it back into the papers. Lots of stuff has happened, but much less has been completed. Why is that?

My view is that our politicians have been more focused on winning the news cycle than they have on bringing people along with them. They know how to spring announcements at the last minute so they get good coverage. They know how to bring out the dead in quiet times of the year, so that certain issues slip under the radar. Other tactics seem harder to explain – like dropping the carbon tax and proposing a mining tax on either side of a weekend back in 2010.

What we need are strong leaders who have the capacity to walk us through issues. That often requires time rather than just media intensity. Media technology may have changed with the 24 hour news cycle but people are still the same. They need to be presented problems in the right way and work through them bit by bit.

 I had the privilege of being interviewed by Annabel Crabb on The Drum last night about this and Reframe. See our interview here at about 34.05 minutes. Annabel is fantastically energetic and really loves Reframe! I’ll leave her to promote it in her own words. 

I also went along to the Stanton Library yesterday to give a talk to about 50 people about my story behind writing the book. It’s a fantastic library in North Sydney and I used to go to day care next door! The Constant Reader, who are the local bookshop, were there in full force as was my aunt who is one of the local councillors in North Sydney. The talk will be up on the Stanton website soon.

That was Day 1 of the Reframe road show. Today’s task  – a longer conversation on Triple J with Tom Tilley around 5.30pm about the book!

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Reframe is here!

It’s taken several years of work, but REFRAME finally hit bookshelves across Australia this week!

I first got news it was on sale when my cousin messaged me from Manuka to say he’d bought a copy in Canberra. It was then spotted in Melbourne airport and Potts Point. I finally saw it yesterday when I walked into Dymocks on Hunter St in the city and signed a heap of copies. I was going to upload a picture -it’s on the bestsellers shelf! – but my computer isn’t cooperating.

You can buy the e-version here and buy delivered and discounted hard copies here.

Reframe is the story of how we make really big decisions in a world with short attention spans. One of my colleagues turned to me last night after reading a few chapters and said it took him until chapter 3 to realize what my thesis was.”You’re not necessarily telling us Eric Knight’s answer to every problem,” he said. “You’re telling us how to solve the problems ourselves.”

I’ve got The Essay in today’s News Review. It’s being published in the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. Buy a copy today! It’s 1700 words on some of the big ideas from the book.

If you want more, I’ll be giving a talk at Stanton Library at 1-2pm on Thursday this week. It will be the tale of some the personal stories from the book.

The details are here and below:

Where: Stanton Library, 234 Miller St, North Sydney

When: Thursday, February 9th

Time: 1-2pm

Cost: Free, with book signing

More news soon, but happy reading!