This time we have chosen the Australian movie The Dressmaker. This will be held at the Belgrave Cinema on Thursday 29 October at 6.15pm. The tickets are concession of $16 up to $20. As this is a fundraiser, we are hoping for $20 per ticket! There will be the usual raffle and a door prize. This fundraiser will not be held on the National Release of this movie as it would be on the night following a
Rotary film fundraiser. Please come and support this fundraiser and your local library. Tickets are available at the library or phone Chrissie 67719147 or Gail
0438956286
This will be held on Thursday 12 November and this year our focus will be on
Children's Literature and War. There will be excellent speakers and hopefully some poems as well. Donation will be a gold coin and as usual we will provide our excellent morning tea. This will, of course, be held in our library at 10.30am and we look forward to seeing you there.
This will be held on the 22 October at the Armidale Club at 8.30pm. The entertainment will be Stormy Weather who are a Rhythm and Blues band. Shirley
Smith is the Special Guest. All money raised will go towards the Library.
This was held last Thursday and the speaker was Alun Davis. His presentation of
Libraries in the Digital Age was truly fascinating...perhaps the Council needs to listen to him! We ran out of time to hear Tony Sorenson's presentation, so he is coming back to talk to us in a month (date yet to be set) - members are welcome to attend.

To direct our lobbying of Armidale Dumaresq Council on the future of library facilities in Armidale, the FOADL Committee has sent questionnaires on the subject to current financial members.
Results of this survey indicate our members' strong interest in this topic (65/100 surveys returned) and the importance they place on the library's role in our community, with many members adding extensive and interesting comments and suggesting options not covered by the questionnaire. Thank you all very much for participating.
A large majority of members’ first preferences was for the Council to support the building of a new Library in Cinders Lane as proposed in the existing Strategic
Plan. If the building of a new library is not currently possible, the majority of members' second or third preference was to postpone the building of a new library until a specified date or until the Council was in a better financial situation. This is the position currently presented to Council by the Committee.
A significant number of members preferred the option that the Council purchase and refit a new building within the CBD, with various buildings being suggested as possible options.
However the option for renting was not well supported, with most members either not choosing it at all or placing it low on their preference list.
Generally members favoured having a library within the CBD but a small number expressed a preference for building on the fringes of the CBD, generally because of possible parking problems.
Several members suggested that recycling the current building by extending it or re-configuring it on the present site may be the cheapest and most environmentally sensitive approach.
Common themes emerged in the suggested options and comments.
The most obvious was the members’ affection and support for the library and its place in both their lives and the social and cultural life of Armidale.
As well, the work of the manager and staff and the significance of their contribution were frequently mentioned as being a great asset to the library and to
Armidale.
Some concern was expressed about the adversarial nature of the debate on the
Library issue. The Committee shares this view. We believe that it is essential to maintain a courteous and respectful tone towards all participants in the debate.
Many members had a strong message for the Committee; to keep lobbying for the library to be built on the Cinders Lane site as planned and to consider how
Friends of the Library can take an active role in keeping the Library on the agenda for the Council election in 2016. Several members commented that they have been very disappointed or annoyed by the Council’s handling of this matter.

In this book, forty three authors set out their earliest experiences of reading, their pleasure in reading and their lists of the top ten favourite books that have inspired them. Royalties from this project go to the UK Give a Book Charity, which aims to get books where they are needed, in poor schools, prisons and shelters.
All forty three essays give a fascinating insight in the reading habits of well known authors, and it is not surprising that many of the books listed by them are repeatedly offered as being life time favourites. Some of the most mentioned books include Bleak House by Dickens, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, Wuthering
Heights by Emily Bronte, various titles by Jane Austen, poems by TS Eliot, To the
Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, Anna Karenina by Tolstoy, the collected works of
Shakespeare and the Bible. However, many other various works are mentioned as well as childhood books, such as Winnie the Pooh by AA Milne, Wind in the
Willows by Kenneth Grahame and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis
Carroll.
All the essays are interesting. Many are humorous and written with grace, and the authors’ genuine love of reading shines through the pages. I have had great pleasure in subsequently reading some of the listed books of which I had never heard or never read. Many authors make impassioned pleas for libraries with
Doris Lessing describing a public library as “the most democratic thing in the world”. Libraries have played a great part in many authors’ lives.
This book caused me to reflect on my early interest in reading, and the books which have remained as stand outs in my mind. I can still never go out without a book, in case there happens to be a few moments to be lost in someone else’s imagination. I can recommend this book as a very good read and a wonderful treasure trove of other books to add to a reading list.
Marnie French.

One of our most engaging interviewers and journalists, Jane Hutcheon from ABC
TV, will be this year’s Armidale FABC speaker. She will go “one on one” with one of our own media insiders, freelance journalist Janene Carey, to explore the art of the interview.
Jane will share many anecdotes from the amusing to the profound that have come out of her interviews with a broad range of individuals including
Hollywood celebrities, chefs, actors, musicians, CEOs and a fascinating range of everyday people with extraordinary stories.
Jane has been a reporter for 20 years, beginning with radio and television in Hong
Kong, then SBS television before joining the ABC in 1994. After her posting as the ABC’s China correspondent, she returned to Australia in 2001 to present
ABC TV’s national midday news bulletin World at Noon. She presented the ABC’s live coverage on the morning of September 12, 2001 and was in the chair during the Tampa crisis, the 200l Federal Election and the US led war in Iraq.
Jane was the ABC’s Middle East correspondent in 2003-2004 and covered stories including the war in Iraq, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, elections in Iran, terrorist bombings in Istanbul and the death of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.
She speaks French and is fluent in Mandarin and Cantonese.
Friday 13 November, 7.30 pm,
Armidale Bowling Club (bar open at 6.30)
Tickets: $12 ABC Friends members, $15 non-members
Available from Carr’s News Agency and at the door
Enquiries: 6771 1828

Mainstream fiction leads our selection for this month. James Patterson, with another of his numerous co-authors, comes to Private Sydney. Sue Grafton has brought Kinsey Milhone to her 24 th mystery, the wonderfully-named X. Sara
Paretsky’s Brush back, in comparison, is only VI Warshawski’s 17 th investigation; and Greg Iles’ The bone tree is prosecutor Penn Cage’s fifth outing.
On a different level of American literary life, Jonathan Franzen brings us an entertaining amalgam of factors (Bolivia, Wikileaks, mothers, daughters and black humour) in his 564-page Purity. Benjamin Markovits’ You don’t have to live
like this leaps fictionally off a decaying Detroit. David Gates sets his stories, A
hand reached down to guide me, in the US northeast – but even this place is not guaranteed to help people resist “impulses pulling them away from comfort into distraction or catastrophe”. Ken Kalfus’ stories, too, deal imaginatively with current events: does this outline of his title novella (Coup de foudre) ring a bell – “a sometimes farcical, ultimately tragic story about the president of an international lending institution accused of sexually assaulting a housekeeper in a New York hotel”?
Then there’s the rest of the world. Why not try New voices of Arabia: the short stories.
Mo Yan’s Radish: “During China's collectivist era in the late 1950s, a rural work team responsible for building an important floodgate receives a strange new

recruit: Hei-hai, a skinny, silent and almost feral boy. Assigned to assist the blacksmith at the worksite forge, Hei-hai proves superhumanly indifferent to pain or suffering and yet, eerily sensitive to the natural world. One day, he finds all that he has been seeking embodied in the most mundane and unexpected way: a radish”. Scenes of strife from Darfur, “the world's worst humanitarian crisis”, were witnessed by Michelle Green and transformed into her short story collection, Jebel Marra. Angela Readman stayed at home in Britain, despite the title of her story collection (Don’t try this at home): one her stories is entitled There’s
a woman works down the chip shop.
Spring is in full swing with new growth and flower. Harry Rose and others from the NSW Primary Industries Department have produced the well-illustrated and informative Grasses of the NSW tablelands to increase your understanding of these vital plants. Kerry Rathie waxes lyrical about all known species of Brachychitons:
flame trees, kurrajongs and bottle trees. Meanwhile, Ben-Erik Van Wyk explores benefits of plants which provide more than just food and flower: his
Phytomedicines, herbal drugs and poisons covers chemistry, efficacy and legality in its
304 pages.
Philippe Claudel spent his youth outdoors in Lorraine, and now recreates the joys of experience in Parfums: a catalogue of remembered smells. But life on earth exposes us to more than optimism: Jonathan Waldman looks askance at oxidation and imagines Rust as the longest war; and Gernot Wagner refers to ‘willful blindness’

before suggesting ‘what you can do’ as a final chapter in Climate change: the
economic consequences of a hotter planet.
Travelling outdoors, Lars Gustafsson conveys the Smile of a midsummer night: a
picture of Sweden, his home country. Sunshine on stones put together thousands of years ago enlivens the cover of Steven Snape’s The complete cities of ancient Egypt.
But come inside for just a moment – that’s all it will take to read Mark Forsyth’s amusing 23 page pamphlet The unknown unknown: bookshops and the delight of not
getting what you wanted. In this, he posits that Donald Rumsfeld was not talking about “Mesopotamian weaponry” when he invented the phrase, but about methods of buying books. “There are three kinds of books: the ones you’ve read, the ones you haven’t read (like War and peace), and the others: the books you don’t know you don’t know”
While we are here, what else can we do? Both a famous French Buddhist monk
(Matthieu Ricard) and a famous Australian philosopher (Peter Singer) have simultaneously suggested that being genuinely concerned for the welfare of others might be the way to go. Ricard urges Altruism: the power of compassion to change
yourself and the world and Singer demonstrates The most good you can do: how effective
altruism is changing ideas about living ethically. Robert Zaretsky shows how a keen enquiring mind can also engage with the world: this study of James Boswell’s
enlightenment reveals how his outlook remained conservative at base.

For visual stimulation, try Koloman Moser: designing modern Vienna 1897-1907; or
Otto Dix: the art of life by Philipp Gutbrod; or even 70x70: unlicensed preaching: a life
unpacked in 70 films, Iain Sinclair’s account of a special series of screenings for his
70th birthday in 2014.
There are also collected writings from Max Beerbohm (The prince of minor writers) and DFW (The David Foster Wallace reader – including his rhapsody to Roger
Federer); and an eight-chapter exploration On Silbury Hill, “a manmade prehistoric mound, a flat-topped pudding dish of grassed-over chalk, whose origins and purpose are essentially mysterious” said the Guardian reviewer about the object of Adam Thorpe’s ruminations.
On DVD this month, we have the little-seen King Kong of 1976, where Jessica
Lange joins Fay Wray and Naomi Watts in the pantheon of beauty admired by the big ape. The wrong box, from 1966, has an amazing cast, including Ralph
Richardson, John Mills, Michael Caine, Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Peter Sellers

and Tony Hancock. Legends of the canyon: the music and magic of 1960’s Laurel
Canyon has a pretty good cast list for a documentary, too: Crosby, Stills and
Nash, The Mamas and the Papas, Joni Mitchell, America, Buffalo Springfield and The Byrds.
Liz Chappell, of Dundee, has written the first treatment of local New England gardening since Marilyn Pidgeon’s 1991 book, Gardening secrets: successful gardeners
show how they cope with the variable Australian climate. It is a compendium of gardening wisdom for this climate, based on gardens she visited over four years as the regional coordinator for Australia’s Open Garden Scheme and on her own gardening journey over twenty years. Beautifully illustrated by the seasonal photography of Kim Woods Rabbidge, Celebrate the seasons: garden memoirs from
New England will be launched in Armidale Library at 11am on Monday 23
November.
Liz will outline some garden history of the area, the gardens selected for the book and plant suggestions, all accompanied by images of local gardens. All welcome