NY Times ignores WWII Townsville black mutiny story

The New York Times holds a particular place in the English-speaking world. Especially for Americans, it is the "newspaper of record", which means that the paper (confides that it) feels an obligation to cover every newsworthy story that occurs in the world on a given day. It has a reputation for being (what Americans call) "liberal", as does the UK's Guardian, another news vehicle with a special profile in the English-speaking world. Both papers stand out in these two respects, which makes it rather surprising that neither covered the biggest story with a US angle to come out of Australia for many weeks, if not months. I mean, of course, reports of a mutiny by African-American soldiers in 1942 at Townsville that were unearthed by a history researcher named Ray Holyoak and which became public when the story appeared on the ABC's AM radio program on Friday. Among US media organisations, the Voice of America covered the story but it is an outwardly-aimed service that broadcasts in markets without the US. In Australia, Fairfax broadsheet website the Brisbane Times rushed to pick up coverage by Saturday and Rupert Murdoch's Australian did likewise. But in the US there has been a curious silence.

It's hard to account for this silence. When floods inundated large parts of Queensland in January 2011 the New York Times was on the story quickly and had soon posted a link on the top page of its website. It did the same when Australia elected Julia Gillard prime minister in 2010. Both stories are newsworthy although neither has a US angle. For the paper to disregard the Holyoak story is exceptionally strange as it has a strong US angle, involves a dead president (Lyndon Johnson), and concerns the type of clear injustice that the paper usually responds to positively in providing coverage of events overseas.

If anyone has a clue why this story has been ignored by the New York Times, I'd be interested in hearing about it, so leave a comment if you are inclined.

The Global Mail so far delivers on its early promises

First mooted in the middle of last year, The Global Mail is now up and delivering quality journalism for free, with an Australian perspective. The stories are longer than those that are normally found in the mainstream media, and for this reason there's the "luxury" of its journalists getting more viewpoints per topic, leading to a broader coverage of any issue and more in-depth reporting. As editor in chief Monica Attard recently said:

We’re taking a step back from the breathless, 24/7 news cycle to think, research, inform, provoke and entertain, gloriously unfettered by commercial and other pressures that conventionally shape news and current affairs.

And this, apart from the new vehicle's boast of its aim to deliver "quality, non-partisan, uncompromising and fearlessly independent journalism for independent minds" - a bit of marketing guff that appears to flatter its intended audience while at the same time talking up its own sense of professionalism - is the crux of the matter. Because it's the "breathless, 24/7 news cycle" that leads to what many people in Australia consider to be the mainstream's weakness.

For a start there's a fair amount of casual, and enduring, talk of staff cuts at commercial news organisations leading to fewer hours available to dedicate to any one story. Well, this is a truth. As the quantum of money exits news companies, and the quantum of available scribes - generated by the many journalism schools operating in Australia - shifts to communications departments and public relations outfits, the quantum of text available in the public sphere that is produced as journalism goes down.

The other thing that's worth saying is that the "commercial pressures" that "conventionally shape news" are also real. The need to generate revenue impacts on the journalist's (and the editor's) work because revenue on websites is still generated through traffic. To get traffic you need clicks. To get clicks you need to provoke interest. To do this you need to write (especially) your headline so that it is as "sensational" as possible and this tendency will also affect how the story is written, and what questions are asked of the politician, academic, or other interviewee. And how many angles for any story can a journo on deadline reasonably cover? The forces of commerce run up and down the links in the news chain like electricity, causing it to warp and bend in strange ways. Writers and editors at The Global Mail think that their - more leisurely, less "breathless" - approach can ensure that the product they deliver retains its "truer" shape.

Commercial pressures also impact on story selection, with the low-hanging fruit more likely to be handled because it takes less effort to get at them. This keys in with the idea that the quantum of writing is shifting toward communications professionals, with thousands of these people producing pre-made material aimed at attracting the attention of overworked journalists in the mainstream.

Aspiring to truth in journalism must be a good thing. As I discussed on the last day of last year, however, achieving such a product requires that certain key things be in place. In my view, those preconditions are in place at The Global Mail. The most critical being 'Time'. Another critical element that I talked about in my post, 'Editorial relationships', is moot because we're talking about an integrated newsroom and my viewpoint when writing that post was coloured by the fact that I'm a freelancer. Being a freelancer is a good thing for journalism because you easily avoid any groupthink, any editorial line that can begin to cohere in a newsroom, because you have your own priorities and interests that are independent of those of the masthead that ultimately publishes the work.

But reading a Global Mail story is a satisfying experience, despite a few subediting hiccoughs of the type that you would anyway see in mainstream media stories. Predictable and, in my view, trivial objections to the user interface are of little concern or interest. What's important is that The Global Mail continue to adhere to its founding principles. The expansiveness you sense in Attard's description of the outfit's happy predicament as one that is "gloriously unfettered" must, somehow, remain relevant and accurate. And so it will also be important for the outfit to find sources of funding beyond those so far promised by seed funder Graeme Wood, of Wotif fame. This will be the work of the outfit's board and top editors. Go and read about them, it's worthwhile.

Did Jane Austen embed a puzzle in Mansfield Park?

Some readers of this blog know that I'm a big fan of Jane Austen and especially of her third published novel Mansfield Park. This novel came out in 1814 after the first two books, Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice, which Austen had written a fair bit earlier and then rewrote around this time. So in a way MP was the first book of Austen's mature phase of writing. I spent a lot of time about a decade ago reading Austen, and reading around Austen, which led to a bit of knowledge of the political and social milieu within which she - and her parents' generation - lived and died.

So of couse I knew about Mary Wollstonecraft. This meant that when I met Mary on Twitter (ah, the wonders of modern technology!) we began to exchange ideas and then Mary introduced me to Arnie Perlstein, a man who loves books too and spends time investigating literary puzzles. So this blog post is about a literary puzzle I found in MP all those years ago, but had not yet aired in public. Arnie suggested I write about it so that he could add his views to the debate. If you have any views on this, please leave a comment.

In MP, the unworthy specimen who is Rushworth gets a part in a play that the young people at the country home, Mansfield Park, decide to stage for their own enjoyment while the head of the household, Sir Thomas Bertram, is away looking after his interests in the West Indies. And Rushworth keeps reminding us of the fact. In fact, he reminds us all the time. Not only that but he keeps on telling us that he's got 42 lines to remember - a bit much for the poor sap's limited cranial capacity I would have imagined. But the point is that every few pages Rushworth pops into the narrative and lets us know, again, that he's got 42 lines to memorise.

Right. So, the next thing is: why? Why does Austen make this point so often? Is it just to remind us of the fact that Rushworth is, indeed, an unworthy specimen who probably has trouble remembering his own name when he comes into contact with a fellow member of the human species? Maybe. Or else she's making a point about the number 42. What does the number 42 have to do with Fanny's future, her story? Fanny is, after all, the hero of Austen's masterpiece.

Well, you have to go to Fanny's cold little room to find out. There are three books there. One is an account of the visit to China of England's first diplomatic delegation to the kingdom. There is also a collection of poetry by George Crabbe, who was one of Austen's favourite authors. And there is a collection of issues of the Idler, a periodical that was written for the most part by Samuel Johnson, another of Austen's favourites. If you look in detail at the three, the one that stands out in regard to the number 42 is the Idler. Number 42 was published on Saturday, February 1759 and is signed 'Perdita'.

This issue of the magazine is a reader offering and it talks about the problems a young, marrigeable woman has with her unpleasant father, with whom she lives in a small village in England. 'Perdita' says her topic is "the snares that the bad behaviour of parents extends over the paths of life which their children are to tread after them", one of which is the tendency of parents in England at the time to 'market' their childrens' virtues with a view to an advantageous (economically speaking) marriage. It is this, mostly, that 'Perdita' regrets and in her convoluted (to us) Augustan prose she details her miseries.

The analog in the novel is clear, if not a perfect fit. Not so much Sir Thomas but, instead, his wife's sister, who lives in the large house, Mrs Norris, has an eye to 'marketing' the virtues of Sir Thomas' two daughters among the tribe of eligible bachelors who live nearby. The most eligible of them all, of course, due to his immense personal wealth, is Rushworth. Those who know the novel will know that Rushworth is designed to marry Maria, Sir Thomas' eldest daughter. But the picture is complicated when two strangers arrive in the area. Henry and Mary Crawford are more urbane and knowledgeable than the bumpkin-ish Bertrams. It is their idea to stage a play. To do so they are forced to move Sir Thomas billiard table to make way for a stage and auditorium.

Billiards is a game in which you hit a ball with a cue. Sometimes, you hit a ball with a design to hitting another one so that you can sink it into a pocket. Taking this as a cue, let's look at the name 'Perdita' and see if this can take us further in our quest. The name is indeed famous in English letters because it's the name of the heroine of Shakespeare's A Winter's Tale.

Perdita is the lost child in Shakespeare's late play. The play has, furthermore, for a long time been thought of as an allegory encapsulating the lives of Elizabeth Tudor, who would become Elizabeth I, and Henry VIII's first wife, Catherine of Aragon. In the play, Perdita is sent into exile in Illyria because Leontes, the King of Sicilia, believes that his wife has been unfaithful to him, and that had led to his wife, Hermione, giving birth to the girl child. So Perdita is raised by shepherds but returns to Sicilia as a young woman, whereupon Hermione comes "back to life" and Leontes repents for his malfeasance. So in a way the play sets right the life of the infamous Henry VIII, and gives back legitimacy to his first wife, also sparing young Elizabeth much of the unease she experienced in her early life due to the complexities of the succession and the counter-Reformation.

In the end, in Austen's novel, it's Fanny who returns, after the hardships brought on by the injection of the Crawfords into the Bertram household - especially given Sir Thomas' absence overseas - and it's Fanny who restores peace to this small world in the face of discord and unease. So there's the analog with Shakespeare's play. Rushworth's "42" leads to the Idler, which leads to A Winter's Tale. All along the chain of reactions that Austen sets off in the novel we are dealing with the hardships of young women in societies that offer them so few options beyond marriage. There's also the themes of loss and redemption - the second often only available through art.

This little puzzle is, I believe, a stunning tour de force of literary subterfuge. It's had critics snookered for centuries. Until now!

Think-tank flack Ian Hanke comes to Rinehart's aid

RRRRRRRRRRRRRRrrrrrrrrrrringggg!

"Ian, it's Trevor Bleach. Yes, mate, I know. It's been a while. Yep. Yep. Haha, no worries mate. Listen, just giving you a quick bell to ask if you're good for a column on this clown Hamilton's take on Gina's move on Fairfax. Thought so. Yeah, it looks pretty bad, I know, Ian. But don't worry, just slam the bastard. Don't worry about facts. No. Nah. Nah. Yep, that's it. Make 'em look like stuck-up fuckin' snobs. Which they are, of course, yeah I know. Out of touch with middle Australia. No don't say unAustralian, that's too big a target. And talk about alternative views. Yeah, good one. I like that, "conspiracy", beaut. Fantastic. Yeah, just really nail their asses and talk about the share price. But don't talk about Gina wanting to shift the debate to the right, no. No. No. Let them carry on about that, the punters'll never twig. Just slam 'em. Right. See ya mate."

I imagined a telephone conversation in this vein when this morning I read the dishonest opinion piece published in The Age, by Ian Hanke, director of communications and strategy for the H. R. Nicholls Society. This body was singled out as a right-wing think-tank by op-ed writers from the other side of the political spectrum, and held up as proof that Rinehart associates with people whose views are not, at all, representative of middle Australia. So it's a defensive attack on the Left, Hanke's piece, and it verily drips vitriol.

Hanke knows that most readers are not as knowledgeable about the way the media works in society, as he is. So he first of all sets up a few straw men. "Look," he says to his readers, "the guys on the Left say Rinehart is a 'right-wing ogre' who is going to 'tear down society'."

Well, no, Ian. That's not at all what the Left is saying. What they're saying is that if Rinehart starts to change the editorial position at Fairfax then all of Australia's metropolitan newspapers will be writing from the Right. Rupert Murdoch already owns 70 percent of this sector, and Murdoch demonstrably and aggressively operates on the Right. In fact, Murdoch's ploy - to use his loss-leading newspapers to influence public policy to favour his profitable TV assets - is exactly the one that Rinehart desires to action in her own interests. For the benefit of the Australian mining industry. This is precisely the reason Rinehart has bought such a large stake in Fairfax Media.

People on the Left already complain that the ABC is shifting too far to the Right, because there are people like Gerard Henderson, from right-wing think-tank The Sydney Institute, regularly attacking the ABC with claims that it's not representative of middle Australia, and is too far to the Left. In fact, with Murdoch's editors working ever more assiduously to promote right-wing views, the entire spectrum of Australian media is being dragged to the Right. Outlets like Fairfax and the ABC, which are centrist, appear to be on the Left because of this deliberately distorting effect orchestrated from the Right by editors at Murdoch tabloids and The Australian.

Hanke also drags out the victim card and plays it endlessly. There's the "orthodoxy" of the latte set, the chardonnay-sipping know-alls in Newtown and Glebe. Can't have "alternative views" can we? asks Hanke. So climate change scepticism is the birthright of those on the Right, regardless of the overwhelming consensus among - not the latte set, but - scientists all the world over. It's not just the latte set who think that climate change is man-made, it's 99 percent of the world's scientists. Giving equal weight to the remaining one percent is balanced, representative? Ian, mate, I don't think so.

But you don't care what I think, do you Ian. All you care about is making the majority of Australians doubt whether the truth that's being told about Rinehart is real, or not. Well, it's real.

Journos go prospecting for insights on the Rinefax

If you ever wanted proof of the continued relevance of the mainstream media, the acquisition of 12 percent of Fairfax Media's shares by mining magnate Gina Rinehart should convince you. There seems little doubt that Rinehart's move is motivated by a desire to influence government policy by working on the opinions of people living in the big cities of Australia's south-east. Fairfax operates two broadsheets here, the Sydney Morning Herald and Melbourne's The Age, among a large number of other media properties.

Since the announcement of the share buy yesterday, these newspapers have published several analyses. You only have to watch the video, featuring the Herald's senior business columnist Adele Ferguson, to get the gist. "There's a lot going on in terms of the mining tax, and the carbon tax," says Ferguson. "And she wants to make sure, given she owns some of the biggest iron ore tenements, that nothing goes wrong in that space."

She goes on to talk about Rinehart's low opinion of journalists, who in Rinehart's mind are "very left-wing", according to Ferguson. "There are a few journalists who she really respects, one of whom is Andrew Bolt," says Ferguson. "Another one is Alan Jones. They are the two people that stand out for her. Just about everybody else, she thinks, are too left-wing and really don't understand the need to push mining forward and give it tax breaks."

In The Age we have a piece by Clive Hamilton, a professor of public ethics at Charles Sturt University in Canberra who stood as a candidate for the Greens in a byelection in the federal seat of Higgins in 2009. Hamilton is equally blunt, saying that "If Gina Rinehart succeeds in getting a controlling interest in Fairfax Media ... the nation's political landscape will be changed." He goes on to list a slew of Rinehart's eminently regrettable policy foibles that reflect views evidently of long duration, since she "dropped out of the University of Sydney claiming the lecturers were communists". Hamilton gives us the names of those she trusts, and they echo ones included by Ferguson: Andrew Bolt and Alan Jones and Ray Hadley and Christopher Monckton and Ian Plimer and Hugh Morgan.

Hugh Morgan is prominent in [a lobby group Rinehart created, Australians for Northern Development and Economic Vision]. Morgan used to run Western Mining Corporation, but his enduring legacy is a series of right-wing groups he established or supported, including the H.R. Nicholls Society, which is dedicated to attacking trade unionism and expanding the power of employers.

Since taking a stake in Channel Ten, Rinehart has promoted a TV show for Andrew Bolt and she helped fund Monckton's Australian tour last year. She has used her money to advance her ideological interests and policy preferences. There is no reason why we should imagine that she will not try to do the same in the case of Fairfax.

But investigative journalist Paul Barry says that such fears are at least premature. He was interviewed on the radio by Eleanor Hall for the ABC's The World Today:

She'll definitely get a board position if she has 15 per cent. Whether that will allow her to dictate the policies of the paper I very much doubt, because it's not enough to control the paper. It's got a tradition of independence. It's got a very antsy staff, basically, and I think that she'll find that 15 per cent doesn't buy her what she's after.

...

She may think 15 per cent is going to buy her all the influence she wants; I would doubt that.

Farmers' interests drowned in creeping globalisation

Residents in Griffith burning Murray
Darling Basin Authority plan, October 2010

Farmers appear to have no qualms about attacking the government, but the raised fist turns into a cat's paw when the time comes to criticise their largest customers, the retail giants.

Look at the image. It shows farmers from country round about near the Murray River burning the Murray Darling Basin Authority's plan when it appeared that the Labor government would retain in the river (in their view) too much water, leading to cuts to water allocations. Residents in the area grow crops through irrigation. It's not the only time farmers' frustrations at the government have been expressed strongly in the media. Similar ire was sparked last year when the Labor government temporarily terminated exports of live cattle to Indonesia following the showing on ABC TV of a program that revealed maltreatment of cattle in Indonesian abbatoirs. And, again, when the Labor government finally passed its carbon tax legislation in the House of Representatives, National Party leader Warren Truss could be heard across the back paddock fulminating generously against the government's success.

But representatives of fruit and vegetable farmers this week merely expressed reasonable disquiet when it emerged that retail powerhouse Coles, a unit of Wesfarmers, would reduce prices of fruit and veges by half. Today Woolworths, Coles' rival for the weekly food spend of urban consumers, said it would match the cuts. The price wars continue, it seems.

Wesfarmers and Woolworths are publicly-listed companies, so profits are important for their managers. While profits at these companies continue to grow, farmers continue to complain - on the back channel, in the background, if you like - that their incomes do not grow to match the cost of inputs and other expenses.

Bringing in produce from overseas is not, of course, a novelty for local growers. "We are already a net importer of fruit and vegetables," said federal independent MP Bob Katter today. And while the present deep cuts to prices for these consumables reflect recent good harvests, due to the La Nina effect that has delivered strong rainfalls in Australia, you wonder what will happen when the situation changes. Will Coles and Woolworths lift their prices or will they continue to look overseas for cheaper alternatives?

Structural changes in markets take place over the long term. The US opened up the manufacturing industry in China in 2000 by granting Most Favored Nation status to that emerging economy. The following year, China entered the WTO. As I wrote back in August:

Access to foreign markets then led to a shift in global trading patterns. At the time Clinton was pushing for China's acceptance by the world it was said jobs would be created in the US. What happened instead was the hollowing-out of the US industrial heartland. Both jobs and manufacturing capacity migrated to China.

If urban consumers lead the retail giants to pull down the shelf prices of fruit and veges, the logical long-term effect will be to push jobs overseas, to countries where wages are lower. Lower wages lead to cheaper produce. This kind of structural change is implicit in the notion of globalisation, as companies and consumers make rational choices - choices based on the rational self-interest of lowest cost - about where the products they buy are made.

So what can the government do about these changes? Today Opposition lightweight the shadow small business minister, Bruce Billson, made this comment in the same Age story quoted above:

''The concern that the Coalition has is that there's an enormous power imbalance in the supply chain, between the big supermarkets and smaller suppliers and where that market dominance is detrimental to suppliers in the longer term, consumers will also be disadvantaged.''

To say there's an "enormous power imbalance in the supply chain" is just the most extraordinarily wild understatement, but it's hard to imagine the Liberal Party actually doing anything about the situation even if they were in government because of their business-friendly attitude and their economic-libertarian tendencies. The National Party would huff and puff but in the end the views of the larger partner in the Coalition would win out. The Labor Party is unlikely to do anything because if it did it would be blamed for any price increases felt by consumers. It would fall to the Greens to support the agricultural sector in Australia, but they are unlikely to lead a majority government for the forseeable future. In coalition with Labor their views would also be smothered. But what can government do, anyway. Probably not much.

What can farmers do about this situation? Please leave a comment if you have an opinion.

Canberra Tent Embassy saga lasts like a boozy lunch

It's not as bad as it looks, Felicity

The spillover of protesters from the Tent Embassy in Canberra that took in a nearby restaurant where the PM and Opposition leader were giving out awards has taken on a life of its own. The commentariat has had a field day, with new stories still appearing despite the fracas taking place last Thursday, 26 January, Australia Day. The photos showing Julia Gillard being manhandled roughly by her security detail as they whisked her away from the melee to the safety of her state car are deployed again and again by a press hungry for eyeballs and mouse-clicks. Along with the commentariat, Liberal Party politicians have been pushing hard to keep the issue in the news. The saga goes on and on like a bad and boozy lunch from the bad old days of the fat-jack expense account and the Beemer at the curb on Queen Street. It's time, folks, to fold up our napkins, visit the necessary one last time, and "move on", in Tony Abbot's parlance, to other, more productive debates.

Let's put the thing in perspective.

First, the protesters. Aboriginal activists are not like the anodyne-sounding Institute of Public Affairs, which is actually a highly-active conservative think-tank that ruthlessly campaigns on issues that it deems important. Aboriginal activist groups do not have dozens of well-paid text monkeys researching issues and writing the opinion pieces that the IPA is famous for. They have their Tent Embassy, they have their voices, and they have their passion. At the IPA it's all a bit more civilised, but it's no less raw, the protesting and campaigning. Instead of voices and bodies, scribes at the IPA deploy nouns and verbs. But the upshot is the same: publicity. So let's give credit to the folks at the Tent Embassy. If what they wanted was publicity, they eminently achieved their goal.

The media have beaten this event up shamelessly, with grinning politicians feeding eager journos new soundbites in an effort to keep the machine running smoothly. Headlines in Murdoch tabloids from the day it happened were so over-the-top that I had to check several sites to make sure it wasn't just a lone subeditor on the warpath. But no, it was editorial policy to lash the issue into a froth and the punters swallowed the bait like a school of frenzied orcas driven mad by blood and burley. But it was never critical, never dangerous to the PM. A woman in peril just makes good copy.

So a few noisy protesters made a fuss outside the restaurant. That didn't justify the response of Julia Gillard's security detail in treating the event like an assassination attempt. Dragging a puzzled PM off toward the waiting car was bad enough. Making her lose her shoe? It's truly novelistic. Treating the Tent Embassy protesters like an organised posse of axe-wielding maniacs was the first crime. Treating the event like a major story of national interest was the second. Can we please just turn off the music, put away the cask wine, and clean our damn teeth? At some point we need to start thinking about the serious stuff.

Archer Russell waltzed Matilda as a tonic for modern life

Archer Russell goes a'sauntering
in the Australian bush

Before Steve Irwin was born, before the Leyland Brothers packed up their first Land Rover, before even Rolf Harris picked up a wobble-board for the very first time, there were few people to tell Australians about the bush. But back in the days when nature writing was yet a gumnut on the Aussie branch of world literature – still yet to fully flower – there was a man named Archer Russell.

Back in the 1930s, 40s and 50s Archer’s travel books struck a chord with readers living in the nation’s crowded cities, who had begun to value wild places.

“Most of our lyric songsters in poem and prose – great naturalists all – have realised the sedative of the untamed bushland,” wrote ‘Waratah’ of Springwood in a letter to the editor of the Sydney Morning Herald in 1939, “and turned to it for inspiration, far from the pleasure and scenic resorts.”

I first came across Archer Russell a few years ago when I stopped at a roadside bric-a-brac store that sells books. Then I spent a fair bit of time last year researching the man and turned that into a magazine article published this month. But space limitations meant that an amount of material I had gathered was not published, especially as regarding Archer's iconoclastic bent.

From the beginning of his career as a nature writer Archer saw himself as a man apart. 'Bushwalking' as an accepted pastime was a thing of the future. In those days the guy tramping alone in the outback was looked on with suspicion, especially during the dark days of the Depression, in the 1930s. The swagman celebrated in Banjo Patterson's famous poem, now a song of almost mythical status in Australia, 'Waltzing Matilda', was considered an undersirable interloper by remote communities in the hard-scrabble days following the Wall Street crash of 1929. But Archer tramped on, pen and paper handy in his pocket, and wrote stories which he published first in the newspapers and magazines of in his native Adelaide, and then more widely. His bibliography goes like this, as far as I've been able to fix it:

Wild Life in Bushland, W.K. Thomas, Adelaide, 1919
Sunlit Trails, Building Limited, Sydney, 1930
A Tramp Royal in Wild Australia, Jonathan Cape, London, 1934
Gone Nomad, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1936
Bush Ways, Australasian Publishing Co, Sydney, 1944
The Truth About Spain, Current Book Distributors, Sydney, 1945
William James Farrer, F.W. Cheshire, Melbourne, 1949
Murray Walkabout, MUP, Melbourne, 1953
Laughter in the Camp (John Fairfax, edited by Archer Russell), Warwick Boyce, Sydney, 1958

The list of standalone articles is far too long to include here. The key thing is that from the age of about 40 Archer was able to forge a career out of writing about the bush. He was 38 when his first book was published. He was married to Marion, his first wife, by 1920, when he was around the same age. Both the articles and the books would have supplied him with enough money to make a living from writing alone. An iconoclast is someone who dismantles orthodoxies - I'll get to this in a minute. But Archer was also a self-made man who built up a career without any support other than that which derived from the esteem of his readers. This is a fantastic achievement in my view and rivals the achievements of other Australian entertainers such as Clive James and Barry Humphries. Archer's gumption and pluck deserve celebration.

But look at the bibliography again and note what happens in the 1940s. Let's take note especially of the book published by Current Book Distributors, a company known better for its publication of Communist works. The Truth About Spain is less than a book, in fact. The pamphlet, which inveighs against conservative social forces that had assisted the fascist military in the Spanish Civil War, drew the attention of critic Vance Palmer who recommended it on his ABC radio show.

“There is nothing particularly new in these pages, but the humiliating story – humiliating to democratic onlookers in every country – has never been told more clearly and concisely,” Vance wrote. 

This interest in universal values would extend to an involvement in several progressive organisations such as the Australian Culture Defence Movement, the Frank Hardy Defence Committee and the Fellowship of Australian Writers. While publishing with mainstream media he also worked for a magazine called Progress. The pamphlet and such ties would bring him to the attention of ASIO, the national intelligence agency, during the 1950s. ASIO eventually decided that he was merely a “radical minded character, disliking authority”, and left him alone.

Then there's the Farrer biography. Farrer was an unusual man who worked to develop strains of wheat that could withstand the dry climactic conditions found in Australia. His work was not valued at first, and in fact he was ridiculed by many. Farrer is now considered to have hugely contributed to the national good but in his time he was not popular. I have yet to buy Archer's biography and look forward to reading it.

This interest in the individual rather than the mass, the person alone rather than the rollicking group, is what strikes me when I consider Archer's life and his interests.

Somehow a love of nature is blended with this ethos, and it's there in his writings from the very beginning. In a prefatory note to his first book, Archer regrets that “pursuing an unmapped itinerary” is a pastime infrequently adopted by his peers, and he reserves a pointed barb for the “get-rich-quick maniac” who considers tramping “too idle”. The disdain for wealth is clear, and it is linked to a love of the outdoors, which delivers Archer a different kind of wealth.

Archer’s books tend to regard the natural environment purely as a tonic, and he eschews the martial tone evident in the writings of earlier Australian nature writers. Professor Tom Griffiths writes in his 1996 book Hunters and Collectors, about early Victorian naturalists of the generation that came before Archer's, that they inhabited the fringes of bohemian literary culture and shared its obsession with a masculine ethic. “Environmental consciousness blended with the advocacy of racial purity and the assertion of white ‘native’ traditions,” writes Griffiths, director of the Centre for Environmental History at the Australian National University.

Archer’s Romanticism is from an even earlier time than this, and resembles that of Wordsworth rather than that of Kipling. When you read Archer's books there is in them the ancient (for us!) Romantic concept of 'Joy', Schiller's 'Freude', a sustaining sense of pleasure that only the natural environment can deliver. It comes together, in Archer's mind, with the labour of a man like Farrer, who worked against the odds to create something that only he could see a benefit in. It is a feeling that is self-evident to the person who undertakes the activity, in Archer's case bushwalking, in Farrer's case agronomy. And it makes him value freedom from oppression wherever it occurs, as for example it did for Archer after the bloody Spanish civil war of the later 1930s, a war backed by Nazi Germany with the support of the Catholic Church and (what Archer called in his pamphlet) Big Business.

In my mind, the disparate publications that constitute Archer's bibliography all have something that ties them together.

What can Australia celebrate on its national day?

Mary Lee, sufragette, 1821 - 1909

A country that ignores its history is a country that has lost its memory. Without a memory a man or woman cannot live. That goes for any man or woman. Imagine having no memory. My father died with Alzheimer's in March last year with, to all intents and purposes, no memory. If you had no memory how would you recognise your friends, your enemies? How would you do the simplest thing, like make a pot of coffee or clean your teeth? Without a memory you regress to an inflantlike state and, like an infant, you merely cry when you're hungry and laugh at teddy bears held up before you by your doting parents. In short, you lose the ability to care for yourself. You are dependent, helpless, and vulnerable.

When I see people on the street wearing Australian flags or with Australian flags attached to their cars I see vulnerable people. Like the man walking down the street yesterday wearing an Australian flag as a sarong. The man had long hair, down to between his shoulderblades, and he wore a slouch Australian bush hat. He also wore a black T-shirt with 'Australia' printed on it next to a depiction of the Southern Cross. When I saw him I felt a mixture of pity and revulsion. Here is a man who depends on overt expressions of patriotism in order to make sense of the world, I thought, and the belligerence attached to his patriotism makes it brittle, like a dare. Overt patriotism in Australia carries always with it an unmistakeable tone of racism, of exclusion, of a sense of entitlement explicitly denied to people whose only difference from ourselves is the place where they were born. This is ignoble and I want nothing to do with it.

So how should we view Australia Day? Perhaps there are things that can be celebrated, that we can justifiably be proud of? Proud of wherever in Australia we live. After all, you do not see cars emblazoned with patriotic signs in the countryside, but that doesn't mean people out in the bush have no feelings to call forth on the national day of celebration. I know that cars in the bush do not have Aussie flags attached to the cowlings of their mirrors because I was out in the bush recently during a 5000-km roadtrip to Adelaide and back.

I don't recall seeing flags around Adelaide either. But Adelaide has a special reason to be proud on Australia Day because the colony of South Australia amended its constitution in 1894 to enable women to vote. At federation, in 1901, the female franchise was extended to all Australian women. The pic attached to this post shows a bronze bust set up on North Terrace outside Government House in Adelaide to celebrate one of the activists associated with the female franchise in Australia.

South Australia was not the first place to allow women to vote. That credit belongs to New Zealand, then still a British colony, which had made the change a few years earlier. But Australia was the first sovereign nation where women could vote and stand for parliament. Why in these places and not, for example, in Europe or North America? I think it has to do with the fact that these places were still settler societies. In settler societies there are never enough women, for a start. But also, there was the recognition that the work done by women was absolutely essential to the continued prosperity of the colony. "Thank you," farming husbands might have said to their wives. "I work in the paddock all day. I cut down trees, lop branches, cart away logs, blow up the roots, put up fences, I plough, I sow, I harvest, I store away the grain." But that's not enough to live. You need food prepared to enable you to sleep at night, because you need sleep to enable you to work the next day. You have property in freehold, which implies inheritance, and inheritance implies children, and children imply a mother to concieve and birth and raise and care for them.

So here's a 'value' that Australians can rightly be proud of: equality. When we talk about Australia Day we talk about values. It's the same on ANZAC Day. In fact, surrounding the cenotaph here near where I live there are some big, black blocks of granite on which are fixed words made from cast metal. The words include 'courage and 'mateship'. I'm not sure I like blocks of granite telling me what to think and how to feel. The ideas expressed by the flying of Australian flags are big and blocky too. I recoil from them in revulsion. But celebrating equality is something that I can accept. After all, it is a universal value. Its roots go back even further than the date of Mary Lee's birth in 1821. It belongs to the Enlightenment project that also gave birth to the idea of Australia in the first place. But if we are to celebrate equality then we have to think about other forms of equality. Saying the word gives us license to improvise and discuss other alternatives, such as marriage equality. Perhaps we should fly the rainbow flag on Australia Day instead of the other one?

And while we're improvising let's take stock and remember the thousands of Aborigines who were still being hunted down and killed when Mary Lee finally achieved her stated goal of "leaving the world better for women than she found it". Our memory demands that we do so. Remembering the Indigenous fallen makes us think that their sacrifice should also be celebrated on ANZAC Day, too. Why not? The notion of equality is a rational one. And once you start really employing your memory and your reason there is no end to the things that you can achieve.

To the brown country, then back to the green country

The Mallee - brown country

I drove down from the green country - Queensland, northern New South Wales - into the brown country, to my destination, which was the city of Adelaide, a place as dry as a chip surrounded by wineries soaking in the sun. There are grapes growing all across the meridien, even as far east as Griffith, a town I stayed at on the way down in NSW. I didn't have to drive. I covered around 5000 kilometres during the trip. And, for sure, next time I go to Adelaide I'll catch a plane instead. Sitting cooped up in a thundering coccoon of plastic and metal for 10 hours a day is not exactly lots of fun. But it's the price you have to pay if you want to get around in this vast country on the ground - that or the train, and I haven't travelled interstate on a train since I was a child. Maybe next time I will.

I had driven from Melbourne to Brisbane before, along the Newell Highway. But I'd never been through the Mallee country, which extends mostly west of the Newell across into South Australia, capital Adelaide. After waking up in Griffith in the half-light of dawn I hit the road, gouging a path down the local road to the Sturt Highway past paddocks filled with growing grapes and across irrigation canals that were filled with water. Once on the Sturt, I headed west, through the Mallee. It's a lonely landscape, flat, where you can see the trucks coming for a long way. The trucks appear as big, flat boxes jutting out of the landscape, then they get closer, then they thunder past a few feet from your car.

I spent four days in Adelaide talking with people. It's a comely city with lots of limestone-and-brick buildings, and sandstone buildings along the western part of North Terrace where Government House sits shoulder-to-shoulder with the library, the art gallery, the University of Adelaide, and the hospital.

On the return trip, which I decided would take me four days instead of three, I stopped at midday on the first day in Mildura, the biggest town in the Mallee. Mildura is citrus country, and is located on the Murray River from which it draws the water needed to grow its crops. Mildura is hot and dry. The hottest I felt during the trip, however, was when I stopped for a few minutes on the road between Hay and West Wyalong. This stretch of road is 250km long and you pass almost noone as you drive along it. If something goes wrong with your car out there it'll be a while before you get back to business. So I felt nervous. When I stopped to relieve myself the dead vegetation crackled under my feet as I stepped across the dirt shoulder of the road toward the trees and bushes. The cockpit temperature gauge told me it was 36 degrees Celcius outside. The desolation overwhelmed me and I didn't tarry. There's a pub out there somewhere and I stopped for a bottle of water, then continued on.

At Forbes that night there was a thunderstorm, which I watched from the motel's restaurant as I ate an enormous steak with a serving of giant grilled marrow. The space between the lightning and the thunder was a mere millisecond's distance. The action was taking place right overhead. But the storm only lasted about an hour. When it was gone the road was wet. When I woke in the morning it was dry again. That morning I drove up through Parkes and Coonabarabran, and slept in Moree. Green country again. By the next morning I was in Queensland.

As soon as I was able to see Toowoomba I could see the rain sheeting down out of a bank of cloud hovering over the mountain range. Rain fell on the country I drove through. I put the wipers on. There was no rain when I drove along the Lockyer Valley - scene of much of last year's flood drama - but by the time I hit Brisbane it was bucketing down. Back to the green country. The country I live in. The country of summer rains so heavy the rain takes on an elemental force and drowns out every other sound when it falls, unrelenting, from the grey sky.

What does SOPA mean for me?

This is what I think of SOPA: it’s the entertainment industry getting the rest of us to watch out for piracy, and to stamp it out for them. Wait, I’ll explain.

But first: there’s a fair amount of material available on the web about the proposed Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA for short) that has been brought to the United States House of Representatives for consideration as law. Unfortunately, most of the online comment is furiously partisan. Because SOPA has to do with freedom of action on the internet tech writers and bloggers en-masse hotly condemn the law. In doing so they say some fairly sharp things. A lot of heat, but little light, as the saying goes. This blog post is designed to (hopefully) increase the amount of information available about SOPA without resorting to the hyperbole of its heretofore critics.

To be bald and unadorned (whew!), to start off with: “SOPA is an effort to get at the very real problem of rogue Web sites … offering illicit downloads of movies, music and more,” according to David Carr in the New York Times (1 January 2012). 

Now, one of the problems the online commentariat has with SOPA stems from the fact that the companies pushing for the law, such as big motion picture production companies, have deep pockets and are donating money to politicians. That has made for a big, fat, easy target set up in the faces of anarchically-minded web-naturals like Cory Doctorow, the fiction writer.

Carr’s article is worth reading but his conclusion is that you the individual should just go away and work out what SOPA means for yourself. Not a big help, David, but thanks. The law is important for people to know about but his suggestion is not helpful when you’re dealing with some great, big piece of legislation that is expressed in incomprehensible legalese. So I’ll use Doctorow’s article in Publisher’s Weekly (5 December 2011) as my jumping-off point because I think that his clear style at least makes the partisan viewpoint easy to understand.

Keep in mind that, for the moment, my main concern about SOPA is its likely ability to impact on my own activities as a blogger and user of social media. Blogging is something that I have thought a lot about, and I’ve also written about it before in an opinion piece on the implications of paywalls for bloggers (12 February 2010). I also have plans in the future to make movies at home using material available on the internet, such as photographs. So I would want to know how SOPA would affect my use of such material.

SOPA places the onus of responsibility on the middleman, rather than on the person loading the offending material to the web. So, for example, “Web hosts, payment processors, and operators of technical infrastructure, like the Domain Name System,” observes Doctorow.

“Under SOPA, these intermediaries could be ordered to censor or block access to, and funding for, any site accused of copyright infringement, without due process, without a jury or the right to rebut accusations,” Doctorow goes on. Who does the ordering? The US State Department, Doctorow tells us. Carr says it’s the Department of Justice. 

Doctorow says that body would be “vested with new power to demand Web sites be delisted from domain name servers” and also be able to “demand that payment processors cut off access to funds for these sites and demand that advertisers and ad brokers sever ties with the accused”.

It’s the mechanism that would be used, say the law’s opponents, that offends intelligence. It’s the fact that an order to cease service could be issued “without due process, without a jury or the right to rebut accusations”, that rankles. But what does “due process” mean? Ok, well Carr says the Dept of Justice “could seek a court order against a Web site that illegally hosts copyrighted content”. So there’s a judge involved, not just the government department alone. Wikipedia’s SOPA page says that judges could “immediately block access to any website found guilty of hosting copyrighted material”. Presumably that means the copyright holder would have to convince the government department of an offense, and that body would then have to convince a judge that an offense had taken place.

Carr says also that under SOPA “private companies would be allowed to sue Internet service providers for hosting content that they say infringes on copyright”. So private companies can go straight to court to get a website blocked. Carr again:

[These measures represent] a very big change in the current law as codified in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which grants immunity to Web sites as long as they act in good faith to take down infringing content upon notification.

Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 (DMCA), websites that are identified as hosting infringing material are notified by the copyright owner and then given a certain amount of time to remove it. SOPA brings that onus of responsibility back to the ISP rather than just the website. And the block would be immediate, rather than delayed.

The DMCA is obviously not working, for copyright holders. For example, right now, YouTube is fighting a suit brought against it by entertainment company Viacom, who say the Google subsidiary “was engaging in ‘massive intentional copyright infringement’ for making available a contended 160,000 unauthorized clips of Viacom's entertainment programming” (from Wikipedia’s DMCA page). I think Viacom’s case has merit. There are a lot of pirated videos on YouTube at the moment.

SOPA would allow the offending website to be blocked immediately, with the “burden of proof then resting on the website to get itself un-blocked” (Wikipedia’s SOPA page). Opponents of the proposed law say that websites would in future need to remain vigilant against the possibility that infringing material could be posted on their pages. In such a situation, a chilling effect would come into play as website managers would be extremely cautious about what material was posted on pages they hosted. Yes, there is no doubt that the law, if passed, would exert a chilling effect. But maybe it’s time for websites like YouTube to take responsibility for content that is loaded to their pages.

Lamar Smith, the Republican proposer of the law, says that “Sites that host user content—like YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter—have nothing to be concerned about under this legislation”, but of course we know that users often post content they do not create, such as pirated videos and links to pirated videos. This is a common form of sharing and engagement on social media.

Just imagine that Twitter was shut down by a judge on the urging of a US government department because one user had posted a shortened URL pointing to a page containing a video that offended a copyright holder. What the law is about, in effect, is distributing responsibility for breaches of the law of copyright. At the moment, the copyright holder holds all of the responsibility. What the entertainment companies are saying is: we want the middleman to also take on part of the burden of making sure that the law is not broken.

What might happen in the real world is that a copyright holder might tell a middleman, such as YouTube or Twitter, about an offending video or an offending link. The middleman would then immediately take it down – not wait until it had confirmed that a breach of copyright had actually taken place. Because of SOPA the middleman would act quickly, fearing that its entire domain could be taken offline. It seems to me that SOPA giving this kind of muscle to copyright holders is not such a bad thing.

Social media sites like Facebook and Twitter would then probably instruct their users in what could and could not be posted on those sites. Social media sites, given responsibility for ensuring copyright law is not broken, would shift some of that responsibility onto users.

Consideration about copyright would in future become something that everyone will make more of. If you’ve followed so far, then I’ll get to Doctorow’s summation, which follows. I’ve highlighted the words that I think are just wrong:

SOPA would put the world’s ability to communicate freely about anything—movies, music, or books; or government corruption, police violence, employer malfeasance, and military atrocities—behind the entertainment industry’s desire to secure its business models, because, under SOPA, there would be no way to create an Internet platform for free public discourse that could satisfy the level of control demanded by these firms.

Really? And what about fair use? Personally, I can live without the need to post videos I might have made using my TV that show Beyonce singing her latest blockbuster. The way Doctorow phrases his summary it sounds as though commentary by unpaid bloggers with, say, a photo clipped from a promo vid, would be actionable under SOPA. I don’t believe it, and neither should you.

But if you know of examples of egregious abuse that have been perpetrated by copyright holders under the DMCA, then please put your information in the comments. All opinions are valued, and will be listened to.

US not-for-profit radio serves a glass way over half full

Mike Daisey

I was on Twitter yesterday and saw a couple of mentions of this guy, Ira Glass who, it turns out, is in Australia to appear at the Sydney Festival. So I did the normal thing when you see several unconnected people talking about the one thing: I checked out the website for This American Life online. That led to me listening to Mike Daisey's monologue, 'Mr Daisey and the Apple Factory' via the podcast. Go on. I can wait. Listen to it, it takes about an hour.

This post is not about Mike Daisey the performance artist but I used his photo because there are virtually none available online for Glass, which is not too surprising because he's a radio host. This might have something to do with the culture of public radio in the US, for all I know. Maybe public radio hosts in the US don't show their faces because they're too busy making outstanding radio programming for their audiences. Or something. There were virtually no news stories in the past 24 hours about Glass, too, and so I decided to do this post to rectify a perceived lack. The podcast impressed me intemperately and I think more people should know about Glass and what Chicago Public Media, his employer, do. All this information is from the web but readers may find this little digest to be of value. If you are an American reader and you think I've missed something please feel free to use the comments section.

The one news story about Glass's appearance in Sydney mentioned that Glass is "Best known for his weekly radio show ‘This American Life’ on Public Radio International (PRI)." And this is true. But the program is actually made by Chicago Public Media, although out of premises in New York City.

PRI is a producer and distributor of radio programming and it reached 14 million weekly listeners in the US in 2011 via 887 radio stations, and the website says: "PRI leads by identifying critical but unmet content needs and partnering with producers, stations, digital networks and funders to develop multi-platform resources to meet those needs." The annual report says that production expenditure in 2011 was around US$13.5 million and PRI bought programming worth about half that amount in the same period. Total revenues for the year were US$23.7 million, with 21 percent being grants and gifts, seven percent corporate sponsorships, and 58 percent station revenue (presumably, sales of programs). There's a list of donors as long as your arm in the annual report, and they range from Allianz to Turner Broadcasting. PRI has supplied programming to the ABC in Australia.

Public radio in the US seems to have kicked off in 1970 as a result of a Lyndon Johnson law, the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967. Chicago Public Radio started in 1943 as a broadcaster of programming for schools and was one of the first charter member stations of National Public Radio in 1970. In 2010 they changed their name to Chicago Public Media.

For some, the idea of American public radio is almost as implausible as the notion of healthy and nourishing fast food. But it's real. In Australia we're used to public-good broadcasting because we've got Aunty, but then again we've also got the Labor Party. For Americans the idea of a Labor Party in a democracy is about as implausible as multi-party elections in Communist China. In terms of public media perceptions, one of the touchstones is James Murdoch's 2009 MacTaggart lecture at the Edinburgh International Television Festival. In those pre-NoTW days of carefree outspokenness, James Murdoch really hit the accelerator in this attempt to frighten the BBC into scaling back its activities. The wash also reached Australia where it animated various members of the commentariat into slamming the ABC. I've come across Americans who deprecate the notion of publicly-funded radio on Twitter also, the reality being that NPR receives most of its money from sources other than the government. "In 2009," says Wikipedia, "member stations derived 6% of their revenue from federal, state and local government funding."

All this could have been said more economically, to be sure. But regardless of how NPR and its member stations get money, their not-for-profit status remains a stubborn bird-flip to the likes of the Murdoch clan. Not only that. Going by the quality of programming that Mike Daisey's contribution represents, NPR stands out as a leader in the US media space and is lightyears ahead of such trash buckets as Rupert Murdoch's Fox Network.

Looking to a fourth way to ensure a viable news media

The product hasn't changed much since
1942, when this photo was taken

Newspapers still have a patchy relationship with social media. There are quite a lot of self-identifying journalists on Twitter now, after a rocky start, and even Facebook has begun a campaign of sorts to draw them into its web. The relationship wasn’t always as healthy as it is now.

Back in September 2009, I wrote a story about how the media were talking about Facebook. Not long after it was published the media began to change its tune, so the story was a little late, but never mind. I didn’t talk about Twitter in it because I wanted to restrict my focus so that the story kept itself short enough for the target website. Then six months later, in March 2010, I wrote another story, about how the mainstream media were using and thinking about social media. Both stories tell a tale that is unfortunately characterised by a slow pace of adaptation. And I think that the disaggregation that social media promotes remains a problem for media companies today, in 2012, rather than being perceived by managers to offer a solution to the fundamental problem of monetisation.

Fairfax, the big Australian media company that hosted the event which formed the basis for the second story I have linked to above, has done a bit better by readers than has News Ltd, the Australian arm of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. News Ltd has started charging for stories at its flagship The Australian website using a proprietary login method. Fairfax recently started enabling readers to log into their masthead websites, which could be the first step down the track to charging to read. But at least Fairfax allows readers to login using Twitter or Facebook, rather than encumbering them with the need to remember another set of login details. This is a good move, as it demonstrates awareness inside the company of reader preferences.

As a journalist myself I sympathise with the step taken by The Australian. Readers should pay for content. But just charging them a subscription fee while retaining the corporate infrastructure underpinning the news-gathering and -publishing process seems, to me, a bit lame. Surely there are other ways to engage with readers. We know by reading down past the end of online news stories to the comments section that there is a huge appetite among readers for more involvement in the news process. And this appetite is as visible again within the confines of social media.

Rupert Murdoch has his own Twitter account now. So do a lot of working journalists. But what about the editors who provide so much of the direction a newspaper follows? Where are they? They’re at their desks, old-school, answering emails and working to ensure the next day’s edition gets published. They are not on Twitter, engaging with the audience, as the working journalists are. They are firewalled away from the action taking place in social media. I think that until these individuals start to engage with their audience in social media their companies will just continue to privately express regret at the relentless disaggregation of the publications they work at, and do nothing to address the monetisation problem.

Twitter is, of course, appearing in the news. Journalists talk about how the Twitterverse reacts to particular stories. But that’s it. There’s no attempt to extract opinion in the aggregate from Twitter, which could be done if a newspaper decided to build a curation engine for inhouse use. Such an application could be used to drive the editorial process, even in such a limited way as helping to refine the agenda for the following day’s output. With eyes on the interface, journalists could also pinpoint specific individuals who could be interviewed for any follow-up story.

But that’s not all they could do. Live curation of information already happens, for example, and to a limited degree, on the Guardian website. This company often runs a live blog for developing stories, with updates every few minutes. The rate of refresh of the displayed data this entails, ensures editorial consistency and accountability while supplying readers with new information on a regular basis. And it’s a model that could be used by all media companies who decide to give social media curation a whirl. Readers on social media want to be involved, they ask cogent questions, they are intelligent and often better informed than the journalist writing the story.

The monetisation problem still remains. Readers balking at keeping track of multiple passwords will be a major barrier for news media companies. What’s needed is a micro-payment engine that lots of media companies across the board could deploy on their websites. The workflow has to be as simple as Fairfax’s website login design: click on the short URL in Twitter, click to pay ten cents or twenty cents – this would be a small screen that pops up and that would be delivered by the transaction provider – and read the story. No logging in, no fuss, no barrier. Google could provide this service, as the search engine company already provides services linked to the Gmail account of each user. Whether news media companies want to give more cash to Google, however, is another issue.

There seem to me to be four levels of media engagement with social media. The first level is not working; just pushing out stories and letting readers access them for free is unsustainable for media companies. This is the model most media companies follow but they cannot continue to just give their content away for free. The second level is a login-with-subscription method. This seems unimaginative and also unsustainable because readers will just bypass these websites. A third way is micro-payments using Google as the transaction service. Everyone, in practical terms, possesses a Gmail account, so why not piggyback off this existing infrastructure to enable small payments for individual stories in a way that does not put readers off clicking?

But there’s also a fourth way. This method of engaging with readers while ensuring continued profitability involves curating the chatter that takes place in the Twitterverse, drawing on the opinions expressed there, and accessing the expertise that it will inevitably lead to. How this would be done is hard to say, but media companies need to start thinking about developing user interfaces that link editorial material with the conversation that is happening in real time. If it was successful they could charge for it.

When tablet devices started to be talked about there was a lot of anticipation in media companies starved of cashflow. Managers thought they saw a new income stream. It didn’t happen. The reason it didn’t happen is not because the devices were unpopular. The reason it didn’t happen is because media companies were unwilling to change their content production methods. If you want new income streams you need to offer new products, and this is something that media companies have signally failed to do.

They have journalists but they need to bring in more developers so that they can build new interfaces that allow them to really engage with what’s happening in the real world. Twitter is not a fad. It’s not going away. It’s where people like to spend time. Unless media companies start to think up new ways to interact with this growing constituency they will continue to stagnate financially. If the media fails and falls, we will all be worse off.

Othering and the dynamics of survival in a time of peace

Got a minute? Yeah you. I know you want to know more about what I want to say. And what do I want to say? Well yes, it does have something to do with the photo attached to this blog post, which shows a scene shot at the Cairo riots. It's also got something to do with my recent blog post about the human need for community, which I said was "hardwired" in humans. But what's that got to do with the Cairo riots? Ok. Maybe I should explain this notion of 'othering', which is the topic I have chosen for today.

This topic came to me while I was on Twitter. Someone mentioned that she had picked out 27 different flavours of feminism, and wondered what all that was about. Then I saw another tweet which asked what had happened to the ANC (the African National Congress, the political party that grew out of black South Africa's struggle for ownership of the franchise and for social equality). In the first case, I think that what "happened" is that feminists lack a credible enemy and so have started to turn on themselves as they work to continue the feminist program. In the second case, the ANC has entered a new phase of its existence, in the absence of the traditional white police state as an enemy, and now finds itself in a position where it must "win the peace". In both cases the problems experienced by the 'movement' relate to the absence of the Other, and it's the same in Cairo. Or it will be at some point down the line once Egypt has done what it needs to do in order to feel that is has entered the community of stable, successful nations. Egypt has already held parliamentary elections. It must now complete its Constitution, and then hold presidential elections. Then it must work out how to handle the Army. Once all these things are done it must start improving the conditions of everyday life for Egyptians.

So Egypt achieved the universal franchise and regular elections by othering Mubarak. Feminists achieved some sort of equality in Australia by othering the entrenched patriarchy. And the ANC achieved government by othering the white South African police state characterised by Apartheid. Once these goals have been achieved you enter the phase of gradualism, where governance is more important than guns and consistency is more important than protest. I don't know who first made that line about "winning the peace" but it was Russian writer Anton Chekhov who said, “Any idiot can face a crisis, it is this day-to-day living that wears you out.”

A classic case of failure in the absence of an Other is visible in the phases of the French Revolution. Once the monarchy and the clergy had been removed and Reason placed in the void, the new state apparatus failed to sustain itself and this led to a military coup which brought Napoleon to the leadership. The new state then turned on external enemies and began its explosive expansion across Europe, which continued for about a decade until Waterloo. With the failure of the government to deliver prosperity and security, a king was reinstated. Three steps forward, two steps back. Same in England 150 years earlier with the Commonwealth.

In Europe, nation states have indulged in othering for as long as there has been written history, and probably longer. You wonder if there could be a thing called 'England' without a rival thing nearby called 'France', and vice versa. You see the dynamic at play, today, in places like Iran and North Korea where leaders drum up internal support for their regimes by demonising an external enemy. In these cases it's the United States. "Look," the leaders say, "you need to support me because otherwise the US will come and take over and then where will you be." It sounds like bluster but for their part the people being addressed in this manner have a dominant grievance, too. They resent the wealth differential that characterises the relationship between their country and the othered country, and so they play along. It makes them feel better. It also delivers the feeling of community they need to compensate for a real lack of material wellbeing. So othering serves the purposes of the leadership and also those of the people led. This kind of relationship between leaders and the people they lead has happened innumerable times throughout history.

In Australia, othering occurs as well. From the outside, Australia probably looks like a really stable, happy place where people are fulfilled and nothing ever goes wrong. The truth is that, inside, it is animated by conflict and riven with rivalries every bit as fierce as those that exist in a revolutionary nation-in-the-making. What is different is the way that these rivalries are expressed. To a degree you have to be in a position to fully view them in order to appreciate how fierce they are. Journalism can - and should - do this for people outside. But who cares about Australia? It's hard enough for Australians to get reliable information about rivalries inside the United States, that wondered-at global hegemon.

But we have othering too. You take a classic example. One day another boatload of asylum seekers appears off the coast, or near Christmas Island, or at Ashmore Reef. The Navy picks them up and the headlines start to appear. Then along comes that delightful character, Scott Morrison, with some quip about the Labor Government's failure to protect our borders. Typical dog-whistle stuff. What the Liberal Party is doing is drumming up support for itself among the disaffected and the marginally unbalanced, the people who troll the comment threads of Daily Telegraph news stories and who make phone calls to Alan Jones to whine about how Australia is going to Hell in a handbasket. Morrison gives them an enemy - the Labor Party - and they start baying. The shock jocks and Andrew Bolt know they are there, and play to their prejudices. It's delightful, yes? But this is party politics in a stable country.

The 27 different flavours of feminism have the problem that both major parties support equality. Yes, we had some slight embarrassment with At Home with Julia, but we've also got the deputy leader of the Opposition who is a woman. The problem here is that feminists need to locate a new enemy inside the fabric of Australian society. It must be one that most Australians can easily recognise, and it must be demonstrably dysfunctional. Further, it must be identifiable as such by the mass media. By fighting amongst themselves those 27 groups of radicals are in the process of identifying who the new enemy is to be, and how they should be addressed. Progress isn't easy, especially once you have achieved the step-change that can be illustrated with a headline, a quote, or a dynamic frontline photograph. Up on the plateau the air is thinner and the dynamics of revolution come to assume the dynamics of survival.

Japan recklessly endangers its good name for nothing

Sea Shepherd crew in action, January 2012

It's exhausting. Every year, Japan sends ships into the Southern Ocean to hunt for whales and every year the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, a non-profit outfit based in Washington State, USA, sends out its boats to try to disrupt the harvesting of whales. And every year, in the town of Taiji, Wakayama Prefecture, near the Japanese city of Osaka, boats crewed by other Japanese hunt and kill dolphins.

The whale hunt always makes the news because of the danger involved when boats on the high seas jockey for space in close quarters. It's inherently risky and the media thrive on stories of danger and death. And Taiji got its fair share of publicity in 2009 with the release of a movie, The Cove, made by conservationist Ric O'Barry and his team of stealth activists. If you haven't yet seen the movie you should because it's not just about an issue of great concern, it's also quite fun. Distressing but fun.

Japan stubbornly continues to kill cetaceans, claiming it's for scientific research. Some of the harvested meat is consumed in Japan but Japanese people are about as fond of this source of protein as Australians are of kangaroo meat. The average Japanese would much prefer to eat a good, lean piece of honest Aussie beef than a carton of fatty cubes, which is how whale meat is sold in Japanese supermarkets. To claim that Japanese people have a cultural heritage in hunting whales that needs protecting is like claiming that Australians have a cultural heritage in eating unleavened damper. We're about as fond of damper as the Japanese are of whale or dolphin meat. Japanese consumers simply don't care about whale meat.

The stubborn attitude displayed by this globally-relevant country every year is a source of great distress to millions of people around the world. And there's no doubt that it's a stance the government has decided to adopt despite significant international pressure on them to reverse it. We can see the truth of this statement by remembering how two Greenpeace activists were treated. In 2010, Junichi Sato and Toru Suzuki were given one-year suspended sentences for entering a transport depot, removing a box of whale meat and giving it to the authorities as evidence of embezzlement of public money. In short, whalers were selling boxes of whale meat on the side to make some extra cash. This is meat from whales harvested for scientific purposes. The "Tokyo Two" appealed to the Sendai High Court but their appeal was rejected. This despite the fact that after the original verdict was handed down the Fisheries Agency of Japan admitted that its officials had illegally accepted whale meat “gifts” from the whaling industry. The hypocrisy is breathtaking.

It's just difficult to believe that modern Japan could be so at odds with international public opinion. What are they fighting for? To preserve a so-called ancient prerogative (whaling) that benefits noone and that the Japanese people in aggregate do not care about, and to protect a handful of jobs in a single fishing village in the central countryside, the Government of Japan is willing to risk its good name in the world. International opinion is overwhelmingly against the continuation of these activities.

But instead of taking a path that would bring Japan back into alignment with the international community, this year the Government of Japan has dispatched a guard vessel to the Southern Ocean to act as a watchdog for its whaling fleet. So far this year, three Sea Shepherd activists have been detained onboard a Japanese ship and will most likely be returned to Japan to be tried in court. Sure, some sort of "justice" would be done in the eyes of the Government of Japan, but the court cases will also present the international media with another opportunity to show how backward Japan's leaders are, and how out-of-step they are with a modern, humane and rational viewpoint of the natural world where cetaceans - whales and dolphins - are considered to be intelligent, harmless creatures and that killing them for any reason is viewed as a crime against the natural order of things.

It's exhausting, every year, to be reminded of this ugly drama because it tells us that the Government of Japan actively promotes policies that are irrational, xenophobic, inhumane, and unnecessary. This ugliness remains, for the vast majority of people in the world, a toxic stain that can only be removed by stopping the hunt for cetaceans.

Assange, in free-fall, needs people to speak out

Julian Assange, tall poppy,
London, November 2011

It's been said that Julian Assange is the most famous Australian currently in the world and you'd have to be pretty isolated not to at least ask yourself if that were true. For some, Assange has been a presence for several years. I remember watching him, via a live link, at a podium in some European country in 2009 talking about what he was passionate about, and because he is Australian I paid special attention. Jumping around on stage, Assange gave off a geeky vibe. Another reason to listen. Then there was what he was talking about. Yet another reason to pay attention. Pretty soon, people started to pay a lot of attention to Assange.

Julian Assange knew he was going to attract attention. He knew that he would be a person of interest for many people. One segment of his audience cheered at first, and this was the big media franchises: the New York Times and the Guardian in the UK. Here was this solitary crusader for free speech with strong opinions about right and wrong, but instead of the usual blogger or leftie protester, Assange was delivering the goods in a way that forced the media franchises to sit up and listen. Because he wanted to maximise the impact of the information WikiLeaks possessed, Assange decided to work with the media companies. For their part, the media cos chosen to participate in the preparation of material for publication were enthusiastic. At first at least. But Assange had his own way of doing things and it seems that he didn't pay enough attention to the needs of these companies. Never get between a reporter and an exclusive!

The same self-reliance that made it difficult for WikiLeaks to work with the media companies had enabled Assange to reach the point at which he had something that they wanted a part of. But as a sole operator, Assange failed to ensure that he could rely on the media companies to support him if things got complicated, which they did when he was accused of rape in Sweden. Things got even more complex when a US Army private, Bradley Manning, was arrested for allegedly giving information to WikiLeaks. Because of this new event the US government began to put together a case against Assange in Virginia. They put Manning in solitary confinement and then they put him up before a military tribunal, hoping to extract information from him that would implicate Assange in the process of leaking the material that caused such a sensation when it was released in early 2010.

It's all a bit cinematic, in fact. Everyone has let go and Assange is in a sort of free-fall, heading toward the crushing jaws of some infernal judicial machine that aims to inflict maximum harm. It seems the only link that is keeping Assange from falling is his successful appeal, in the UK, to take his case against extradition to Sweden to the Supreme Court in London. Of course, lots of people are baracking for Julian Assange, some of them people with a high profile. But the Australian government has failed to take up the suggestion that it approach the US government on Assange's behalf. One Greens senator has talked with the Swedish authorities. But the Australian prime minister, Julia Gillard, and the foreign minister, Kevin Rudd, remain silent. Gillard's contribution, when the merde hit the fan, was that Assange's activities were "illegal". The Australian federal police looked into it and said that, no, they were not. But the pollies here stay mum.

It's hard not to pass some of the blame onto the media. Assange was cool and they were happy to work with him when he had something they wanted for themselves. But he pissed them off and now they also remain largely silent as Assange dangles helplessly in space desperately holding onto that last link to the normal world. The media companies have placed their pride in the balance with the truth and found that their self-esteem is more important than are the principles that animated Julian Assange in the first place. Thanks for the footage and the lists and the stories but, sorry matey, you're on your own now. Their embarrassment, like the embarrassment the US government felt when the information WikiLeaks possessed became public, is of greater moment than are the values they - and the United States - routinely use to justify their actions: truth, justice, transparency, accountability.

Assange is being consumed by the organisations he has come into contact with, not the least of these being the global public. He is being martyred for his ideals, and while many people experience feelings of horror as he dangles in space, even more do nothing. As the days tick off on the calendar the silence in official quarters sounds more and more ominous to our ears. If they will do nothing and say nothing, it is up to us to at least say something so that people in positions of influence at least take a few moments to think about what they are doing. So that, if Assange does go to court in Sweden, they can hear us complain. And if Assange does go to court in the US, they can also hear us complain.

Community is a need hardwired in the human fabric

I was listening to Stephen Fry talk on a video that someone posted on Twitter about the internet, and noted that he began by talking about how humans are social animals. People need to feel part of a community, he said, and this sets us apart from other animals. This may be true in some cases. On balance, I think it is true to say that people - and many animals - want social interaction as much as possible, and seek it out wherever they can find it. Sometimes we need to be alone, but in the main we feel more comfortable when we are in contact with others of our species.

Community is something that religion provides and I believe that this is the reason for its popularity. And it's not just going to church that I'm talking about. It's also the personal relationship that you can achieve with a God that gives you comfort at those times when life seems to offer up just too many challenges. It's a community of two, if you like, but if you feel like your life offers nothing but some form of solitary confinement then one other person is enough to give you what you need. In a modern secular democracy authority ultimately resides in the collective of individuals and this reality shifts the weight of responsibility for the health of society onto the individual. That is a responsibility in addition to the other responsibilities the individual carries, such as completing an education, keeping down a job, managing family life, balancing a domestic budget, or maintaining a healthy lifestyle.

Secularity is a very recent phenomenon but its rise corresponds with the period of greatest improvement in the material wellbeing of the largest number of people. There has always been a lot of debate in the West within established religion, and this conflict has led to schisms and the emergence of new religious denominations. But the forward movement of rational justifications for the universe began in the 18th century, along with science. By the end of that century there had also been big changes in the political settlement in several major countries, including the United States and France. Those changes quickly led to changes in other countries, such as England and Italy. By the end of the 19th century the claims of science and technology had begun to challenge the dominance of revealed religion as an organising principle for individuals throughout Europe, as well as in the United States and other countries with roots in the democratic West.

But secularity was not always easy to support, for the individual. To find evidence of this we can look at how the Romantic poets, for example, decided to order their intellectual lives. These articulate men and women offer us insights that are not available elsewhere, at the micro level, during the period when Western culture was taking on the form that it would largely keep up to the present moment. The Romantics, faced with the triumph of Reason in France after the fall of the monarchy and the clergy, faced a severe trial. On the one hand they welcomed the new world order but on the other hand they sought to retain a spiritual link with the world, because not to do so would conflict with their deepest-held feelings. This spiritual element might be labelled pantheism, or just an overarching organising principle for the universe, or else a kind of visceral sympathy with other people. Whatever it was, it is clear that in the absence of organised, state-backed religion - which the Romantics initially turned away from violently - something other than pure reason was required to enable them to live happy and contented lives. The great poetry that we still read today chronicles these internal debates.

This pattern would continue, later, during the 19th century, among even people we would identify as the most rational beings in history. Different forms of spirituality arose in this period that would go some way toward replacing the apparently indispensable intellectual cognates of revealed religion. Always, something other than reason was needed to enable the people to live happy lives. Victorians were always searching out some larger scheme of organisation for the universe.

And so religion endures as a prop for many people who cannot live without this overarching organising principle for the world. They should know, however, that they are not alone. Even people, like myself, who live without religion, seek out community and attempt to develop theories that will explain the complexity of the world. In a largely secular country, like Australia, where about eight percent of people go to church on a weekly basis, there are myriad props available, such as sport. For those who eschew this rite there are other ways to achieve a state of grace, be it through music, food, literature, volunteerism, or something else. We all crave the comfort that community brings. Like language, it is a need hardwired in the human fabric. We all look for ways to connect with the world, and a reliable conduit for information about distant events is essential for individual happiness.

This is why we criticise the media when it appears that it distorts reality. The media is a contested space. On the one hand, it is a public good, like clean water, safe streets, universal education, or unpolluted air. In a sense a price cannot be placed on it, and so it feels natural to us that online we do not pay for news. But on the other hand journalism takes time, and so it costs money to produce, and so the majority of media is privatised. The conflict between these two aspects of the media is present whenever we consume a piece of news - whether it's in textual form, over the airwaves, or via TV - and we are forced to exercise our judgement in order to interpret it so that we can establish the truth about any event. Because our judgement is linked to our value system, we then judge the media itself in terms of our own political beliefs. And so we seek out media that corresponds most closely to those beliefs.