Oh Christ. Did we really need that Hugh?
:) I guess you either laugh or...
--- Hugh Tolhurst <[log in to unmask]> wrote: >
Kennett pays tribute to pooches
>
> Wednesday 1 November 2000
>
> Jeff Kennett's passion for pooches has prompted the
> former
> Victorian premier to compile a collection of more
> than 90 of
> his favorite dog poems.
>
> Dog Lovers' Poems, a collection of prose and verse,
> was launched
> by Mr Kennett today - more than a decade after he
> read out his first
> canine caper during an eight-week stint on Melbourne
> Radio 3AW
> in 1989.
>
> "I read it on air and the response was quite
> electric and for the rest
> of the eight weeks we had poems coming in, etc," Mr
> Kennett told
> the station today.
>
> "I said at the end of it, one day I will publish
> this collection of poems
> that I have, or I have received."
>
> He said his publishing "juices" were stirred by a
> woman who earlier
> this year told him that her dogs were the only thing
> that had stopped
> her from taking her own life on several occasions.
>
> Mr Kennett, who is chairman of a national depression
> initiative, said
> he went home, found the ageing box of listeners' dog
> poems in his garage
> and set his son, Angus, the task of typing them up.
>
> The rest is history.
>
> The book is, in part, a tribute to his love for his
> own four-legged friends.
>
> His current dogs are two Hungarian vizslas called
> Heidi and Ruby, who
> he said were the most intelligent dogs he had ever
> had.
>
> "Dogs to me are wonderfully personable. They have
> very different characters.
>
> "Dogs don't talk to you, they just return affection
> - whereas so many other
> parts of life are about conversation, etc."
>
> He also told of the sadness he felt when several of
> his previous
> "wonderfully
> big friends", which included great danes, had to be
> put down "before their
> use by date".
>
> "You make a conscious decision in the interests of
> your friend and then
> you've
> got to take the friend to a place where his or her
> life is going to be
> extinguished,"
> he said.
>
> "That is a very, very emotional moment."
>
> He also admitted that if he were a dog, he would
> probably be great dane
> like,
> while his former treasurer Alan Stockdale would have
> been a terrier.
>
> - AAP
>
=====
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