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I can think of few books about Israel and Palestine, written by an Australian, as important as Antony Loewenstein's brave j'accuse. In challenging the propagandists to give up their addiction, he is a truth-teller bar none.
--John Pilger

On Tuesday night, the night of Census and glabal thinking while acting locally most of the Sydney packed into the Glebe Bookshop. David Marr, Margo Kingston, Liz Jackson, and Terry McGee created a soulful atmosphere for Sydneysiders as book was born entitled My Israel Questions Antony Loewenstein - a Sydney-based journalist and author

PS: Could Cold River and Sophie Scholl be under the same director?

Eye on Census Confessions of a census collector: it's not all bad    
CENSUS collectors get a vivid insight into Australian society when they pound the streets. Just ask Brett Rutter, a veteran of three surveys. One man signed his form Donald Duck and named his residence as Hollywood. A refugee family, fearful of authority, cowered when he arrived on their doorstep. Some families let their children answer the door, alone, to strangers at night. And Melbourne gets bloody cold in winter.

Spare a thought for the 30,000 census soldiers, who, Australia-wide, have traipsed some long, lonely miles handing out forms for us to fill out on census night, this Tuesday, August 8. From Wednesday, they have 20 days to return to 10 million households and collect 13 million forms, each form containing 61 questions.

Information gleaned, including age, education, ethnicity, employment, housing and religion, is crucial for governments to plan future services including schools, hospitals and aged care.

This year Rutter, 35, has been assigned the city end of the inner Melbourne suburb of Fitzroy, a socially mixed area where student bedsits sit next to toffy townhouses.

In the past week, Mr Rutter has also visited government flats, which he felt apprehensive about and so visited by day. He got worried looks from one family, but soon discovered they were from a war-torn country and spoke little English. "Maybe where they're from, any type of authority is something to be feared," Rutter says.

Rutter gave the family information in their language about a free phone interpreter service to help them. Many Fitzroy shops have flats upstairs, but Rutter found some sales staff had no idea of who, if anyone, lived above them. One problem for modern census collectors is that a house is no longer just a house. People live in warehouses, stables and even former places of worship.

Rutter rang one church to make sure no one lived on-site. "The minister said that no one lives in the church, but there's a homeless man who sleeps under the veranda every night. So that gets reported to a special unit in the ABS and they'll send someone around on Tuesday night to interview him for the census."

One surprising thing about Fitzroy was that as late as 8pm, children as young as five would answer the door alone, "and for a good minute I'd be saying, 'is Mum or Dad there? Can you get them? And there'd be no security screen' ."

The first census Rutter collected for was in 1991, in the middle-class, largely English-immigrant Adelaide suburb of Para Hills, where one man threatened to belt him with a cricket bat if he didn't leave his property.

Then there was the man who called himself Donald Duck. Rutter got talking and discovered the man "just didn't understand the purpose of the census and felt it was a bit intrusive". But the man relented when Rutter explained the information would benefit his own community.

Collecting forms for the 1996 census, Rutter was assigned the inner Adelaide suburb of Fitzroy, an affluent area full of multimillion-dollar mansions with high walls that were hard to get around.

"Three or four houses had no doorbells and no letterbox slots," he says. "One or two owners I only got to when the security gates opened and they drove out in their Mercedes, and I'd yell out, 'excuse me …'."

Another resident admitted he didn't want to fill out the census because he made all his money on the black market. He gave in when Rutter assured him the information wasn't cross-checked the with the tax office. Having moved to Melbourne in 2001, Rutter says he still loves the social aspect of census work, and it's extra income to his full-time administration job at a university.

He's a believer in the census. "I just believe it's a good thing to have done," he says. "Some countries don't bother doing it for their people. I don't think anyone has anything to fear from it. It's a good thing to do and everyone should feel that they matter to the community."

Confessions of a census collector: it's not all bad