The theme of the Symposium was " Capitalising on the Law", designed to reflect not only the nature of Canberra as the nation's capital, but also the desire of law librarians to do their best for their clients.

Just as the chilly weather arrived in London, I was jetting off to Australia for the 2004 ALLG Symposium in Canberra. My first impressions of the capital city? Chilly. And rainy. I instantly felt at home..!

I soon met up with one of only four other Brits attending the conference, Barbara Tearle, president of BIALL. Barbara very kindly helped to keep the jetlag at bay on my first night in town and took me out for dinner. Thank you Barbara! It was good to see a familiar face, half a world away from home.

The next day was registration day. After years as a CLIG committee member, used to meeting people I know at every event I attend, it was unnerving to face a whole conference full of strangers – but I couldn’t have been made more welcome and in no time at all I was collecting business cards and discussing the impending election like a native.

That evening I gate-crashed a taxi share to the High Court of Australia for the Welcome Reception and mingled over cocktails with my fellow conference goers. We were a pretty diverse bunch. The ACT (Australian Capital Territories) were well represented, as you would expect, with many government information staff and quite a few lawyers too. But people had come from organisations and law firms all over the country (that might not sound surprising but remember, it is the size of Europe) and even from as far afield as the UK, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands. Far from being an isolated event, the conference had a truly international feel and the more people I talked to, the more I realised how many common interests we shared.

The Symposium sessions over the next two days were equally enlightening. The impressive programme of presentations covered topics such as Copyright and the National Licensing Agency, Reporting the Law, Building Legal Collections, Pacific Twinning, Legal Research Training, Consortia, Federal Legislation, Training for Legal Librarians, the Law in the Australian Territories, the Courtroom of the Future, and the Parliamentary Press Gallery. Over the next two issues of the CLIG Newsletter you will be able to read my review of the sessions I thought you might find the most interesting.

Reporting the Law
If you’ve ever wondered why so few cases get reported in the newspapers, Rod Campbell, a reporter for the Canberra Times, has the answers. From the point of view of the reporter, reporting the law is a very tricky business. Not only do you have to read through and understand incomprehensible judgments and lawyers’ submissions, often having to produce an easily understood report that same day, you also take on the risk of being sued if you get it wrong. Knowing that your reports are being dissected by the police, judges, administrators and all other interested parties makes it even more nerve wracking. And then there are the editors. Editors, we heard, prefer to report only the sensational cases, which sell lots of papers and ignore more complex cases which might be a bit hard to understand, and don’t sell quite as much. Oh dear!

James Grubel, a senior member of the Australian Associated Press, gave us a very different view of the media. He spoke of the tremendous competition and camaraderie that exists between the 300+ reporters, TV crews and support staff that work in Parliament House. Everyone is looking for an original scoop and the challenge is to make their story stand out. Strangely though this can lead to an almost pack approach to coverage of an issue as everyone tries to match their competitors stories. No-one wants to be the paper, network or station that missed an important bit of news.

We also heard about the strict control that can be kept over government events. One such was the recent Bush visit. Our speaker was one of only eight journalists allowed to cover the visit. It was quite staggering to realise that the whole world was relying on the observations and impressions of only a handful of reporters – what might they have missed? In a cheering moment of solidarity between medias we heard about the U.S. print journalist who was refused entry to the first meeting of the US President and Australian Prime Minister while the camera crews were allowed in. The camera crews put down their cameras and refused to go on without their colleague. When the officials in charge realised that there would be no coverage at all of this important event in the US media without them, the print journalist was allowed in.

Security for Government press presentations is just as tightly controlled. The procedures sound like a covert MI5 operation. The chosen members of the press gallery receive a text message late at night with a time and a location to meet the next morning. On arrival their identities are checked by the police and they are hustled onto a bus , with no knowledge of the events they are to cover or their destination. On one occasion, the reporters spent 40 minutes being checked and loaded onto the bus, to be driven just 200 yards down the road to their ‘secret’ destination.

In this culture information is power and both are guarded very closely. All this secrecy has a serious side of course. It is designed to keep the location and the government officials safe and secure and avoid tipping off protestors.

Strangely this didn’t deter the protestor dressed as a giant cod who followed the Prime Minister about the country during the election campaign. Unerringly turning up in each location before the press gallery tour bus. At the most recent rally, James also spotted a sheep, a rat and at least another two fish.

In the March edition of the CLIG Newsletter…
Being dropped from a great height and getting the chop in the guillotine…my experiences at the Symposium Dinner at Questacon, the National Science and Technology Centre. Also, Building Legal Collections, Consortia, Federal Legislation, Legal Research Training, Pacific Twinning Project and Training for Legal Librarians.