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There is literally a word for the chaos of my desk. If I could just find the Roget’s

7 0
07.01.2025

Visitors to Canberra’s sterile parliament house sometimes declared their spirits had revived once they’d seen my desk in the press gallery.

Books were stacked to teetering heights, print-outs of long-forgotten research papers rose in yellowing heaps, old showbags of budget papers, never opened or read, cluttered the foot well.

Tony Wright among his precious stuff, including his “new” Oxford English Dictionary.Credit: Justin McManus

Airline boarding passes had a special spot in case I wanted to cheer myself up by recalling years-ago trips to London or Moscow or Nairobi or Tokyo.

Reams of expenses receipts from long lunches – some involving actual food – spilled from drawers. Leaking pens, ancient notebooks filled with scrawl that only I could decipher …

I knew it was a proper filing system, no matter how sternly the critics frowned.

How could I get rid of this stuff? Any part of it might be needed at any time.

Why, if it became necessary to know the whereabouts of every Commonwealth war cemetery in France, Belgium, Gallipoli and South-East Asia I needed only remove 10 books from one of the stacks (having first swept a clearing through collections of disused computer bags and mouse pads, trusting there might be no mouse droppings), and there would be exposed the required text, its pages stained with spilled coffee or something stronger.

Lording over it all sat my most treasured possessions: an Oxford English Dictionary and a Roget’s Thesaurus.

The Oxford was thick enough to use as a weapon in a furious argument over the correct use of such words as “literally”........

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