It is exactly 27 years since I began working in the Parliamentary Library of NSW on 29th November 1982, but the memories of the Velvet Revolution of 1989 - the seven years difference blends into abyss ...

Schabowski shrugged and the Berlin Wall came tumbling down ... A night never to forget Ritter took his camera along the Death Strip... Daniel Johnson was there, and asked Schabowski a crucial question... Some Ossis would bring back the GDR, if they could: no surprise there... Whom do we credit? CIA? Dissidents? Ronald Reagan? There was no single cause... Some walls remain in the mind... It was Reagan and Gorbachev
... Hour by hour, history was being made... Germans still grope to understand what happened ... The fall of the Wall was years in the making Victor, what are you doing here? It’s midnight and you live in East Berlin
... Berlin today is “poor but sexy... For West Berliners, the world suddenly had no edge... After collapse, jubilation, fear, and uncertainty
... The Wall made for many great escapes... No, it was not about bananas
... At the Bornholmer bridge, a vast tide of people, in tears, stunned... Life will never be the same, say East Germans.. visiting U.S. presidents have left an outsize footprint on Berlin... There have been missed opportunities... The Stasi destroyed the most ordinary trust between people... There was life beyond the gray cement certainties of Stalinism... Not all lands in the East are doing well today... Angela Merkel was excited, but still stayed in the sauna