Backbencher

Lecture 10 was an audio lecture by Manning Clark when he was talking at the National Folkfest in Australia. Now this audio segment seemed to relate to his book we read in a lot of aspects as he tended to talk about Henery Lawson quite a bit, which who we all know by now is one of Clark's favorite people. Yet one thing that stood out to me in this lecture was the energy of his speech and how he seemed so enthusiastic about this subject, whereas in his book, albeit you can only show so much energy with words on paper, was not as interesting. Now even though he was more influential in speaking it did tend to get a little boring at times as he would begin to stick with one part of his speech instead of moving on to the next segment. The other thing I liked about the audio compared to the book was that he didnt tend to get into the same political and religous aspects that tended to make his book tough to read. One thing I did enjoy in this lecture was the songs that were played to breakup a little bit of the monotony of the speech, plus it gave some more insight to just what the Australian culture is all about and how they go about living day by day.

Matt Liese