The Fallible Web!!

What is it with computers and the internet?

These days the more powerful the tools the more likely it seems they are to fail in ways that are irrecoverable. We apologise to all those who are searching for the last two issues of It's time. They have vanished without a trace and we now must begin the task of re-creating them step by step from the originals. It's a chastening experience, much blood, sweat and tears has gone into the development of the web site over the last few months.

But we hope that you will bear with us. The great things about the internet far outweigh the disadvantages and frustrations. After all, we have now uploaded hundreds of pictures and speeches that Mr. Whitlam has made over the past ten years, and these are available across the length and breadth of the world wide web to students, researchers and interested members of the community. As time goes on, we will, in partnership with the National Archives, add other decades and I am confident that the Whitlam collection will be one of the collections that will be a weather guage for the latter half of the twentieth century. The bredth of issues covered by Mr. Whitlam is unprecedented and whether you agree or not with his conclusions, Whitlam will be there as a measure of our times.

But at the moment, I feel jinxed. For those of you who were unable to attend the official opening of the Whitlam Reading Room, it was ironical that the much vaunted presentation of Whitlam images, "Leader", jammed on an image of all people, John Kerr. The point of that show was to demonstrate that the events of 1975 never slowed Whitlam, he just kept on working, so it was a disappointing failure! However, the slide show is available, and we promise to edit out the Kerr slide if necessary!! If you would like to see the slide show, a perfect classroom presentation at university, or school, or community history functions, just let us know and we will be happy to arrange a presentation.

In the meantime, every time we think of the web, we keep our fingers cross and place great weight on the measures that our partner, Social Change Media, will take to keep our website up and running and, current every day and every month! So stay tuned.

Peter Botsman

April 5, 2002