What the cat dragged in

Ramsay Centre announces – finally – it has secured a mistress . . .

. . . and the next step, in due course, will be a blushing bride from within the G8.

Yes, that’s the bottom-line from today’s announcement.  The non-sandstone University of Wollongong is – of course – happy to take the cash for breaking the drought, and keep schtum.  Meanwhile the Ramsay Centre, well aware that if, shock horror, it was seen to be marrying beneath itself, people would talk, emphasises that this is only a preliminary, and definitely not a monogamous, arrangement.

The secrecy in the lead-up to the deal being inked is all class, too – a charming early window into the behavioural expectations upon the mistress from now on.  If UoW wants academic freedom, then first and foremost, it needs to behave!

I would like to think that if the estate of some dead billionaire came knocking at the doors of the main state galleries, offering buckets of cash for them to administer an art prize with one stipulation – it had to be a traditional Australian landscape of gum trees and livestock – the said main galleries would laugh off the approach as “Nice try, but we’re not:  (i) your April Fool, or (ii) that desperate".

It will be interesting to see who will be the academics who staff this joke.  But even more interesting, I think, will be who the scholarship students are – and will be, in a few years’ time.  If I was a bright young thing looking to start uni in 2020, I’d play along, firstly to land the scholarship and then, and most importantly, to get a comprehensive inside story of the course over the next year or more.  Then voila, when the time was right, I’d have one of the juiciest (and, in the present climate, best paid!) stories of investigative journalism in Australian history, all ready to roll.