Jacqueline Kent

what drew me to her life was basically that i hadn't heard of her i had a friend who did a thesis about australian suffragettes and i didn't i hadn't known there were any actually and then she kept mentioning the name of ida goldstein who was the first woman in the western world to nominate

for a national parliament in Victoria in 1903 and all the other things she'd done as well.

So the name, this is a long time ago, but the name kind of lodged.

And about three years ago, I thought, I wonder if anyone's done a,

biography of her.

In fact, there is one, but no one had done a non-academic one.

So I thought, well, let's have a go.

And this is it.

And it does have its moments, doesn't it?

I've been reading a really interesting book by Alan Rusbridger, who used to be the editor of The Guardian, and he was very instrumental in the release in the WikiLeaks with Julian Assange.

But he's written this book, it's about four or five years old, I think it's called Play It Again, and it describes his struggle

to try and play a diabolical Chopin piano piece.

It sounds very sort of esoteric, but it's not because the struggles he has to do this, bring in a whole bunch of things about how you interpret music, what you're trying to do, what you think that Chopin, in this case, was trying to do musically, why it was important.

And it's good because he doesn't go on to, you know, George Sond and tuberculosis and all that stuff.

He talks very much about the process of listening to, interpreting and playing music.

And it's a bit of an interest of mine.

I do tend to read quite a few books about music.

And two of my favourite writers are Alex Ross and of course the ABC's own Andrew Ford.

And it's nicely written.

He sort of juxtaposes it with a lot of stuff about WikiLeaks and trying to run a newspaper and all hell breaking loose and trying to get five minutes to play the piano and not being able to and