tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-212770692012-02-15T16:38:48.470+10:00A man can do all things if he will.Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.comBlogger15151100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-51996726877387342702012-02-15T05:00:00.000+10:002012-02-15T05:00:26.357+10:00

At first it was only News Ltd newspapers that possessed an animus against Julia Gillard. Its editors believed that, due to the close result of 2010's federal election, which delivered a hung parliament, her cobbled-together hybrid government was, somehow, illegitimate. Australia is not used to these sort of coalitions of non-aligned parties. Novelty is scary, folks. There were "concerns" in

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-42438597865398600802012-02-12T05:44:00.002+10:002012-02-12T05:44:41.946+10:00

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

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-17919138886133132822012-02-09T05:36:00.000+10:002012-02-09T06:20:14.580+10:00

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

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-89523680903137928302012-02-07T06:51:00.001+10:002012-02-07T15:52:08.956+10:00

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

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-3149342793528912772012-02-03T05:28:00.000+10:002012-02-04T05:57:25.678+10:00

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,

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-51219152873592278542012-02-02T03:11:00.001+10:002012-02-02T03:11:28.220+10:00

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

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-52288064489112249282012-02-01T06:12:00.000+10:002012-02-01T09:04:24.460+10:00

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

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-19664134948703239972012-01-31T07:13:00.000+10:002012-01-31T07:17:44.852+10:00

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

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-91956382866033949902012-01-29T05:54:00.000+10:002012-01-30T09:09:51.457+10:00

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

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-65599569655894054332012-01-26T06:00:00.000+10:002012-02-03T06:42:04.462+10:00

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

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-52206675058038872822012-01-25T02:14:00.000+10:002012-01-29T12:57:15.574+10:00

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

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-34876928058280529532012-01-13T00:07:00.000+10:002012-01-13T00:47:48.425+10:00

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,

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-19250560148299300262012-01-12T05:30:00.000+10:002012-01-12T09:32:39.920+10:00

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

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-90609883844198585142012-01-11T06:30:00.001+10:002012-01-11T06:47:03.842+10:00

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

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-58284481682058284042012-01-10T08:30:00.000+10:002012-01-10T08:49:09.575+10:00

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

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-67469691846642442112012-01-09T06:07:00.000+10:002012-01-28T01:24:54.465+10:00

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,

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-78751009188120203922012-01-08T06:22:00.001+10:002012-01-08T17:28:58.375+10:00

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

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-86489939241605201772012-01-07T06:44:00.000+10:002012-01-07T07:04:04.966+10:00

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

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-83989736158727634822012-01-06T00:13:00.000+10:002012-01-06T21:18:20.662+10:00

Is her name Honey Chandler? Well, she'd better watch out! A few days ago I posted my thoughts about crime novels and thrillers because I had decided to do a bit of reading within the genres. It’s been fun but I want to bring up a concern I have with these books because it’s something that I’ve noticed in pretty much all of them, even in Karin Fossum’s Black Seconds (2007). I make this clear

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-3069488926138430132012-01-05T00:06:00.001+10:002012-02-07T19:02:42.902+10:00

The sign says it all. Two out of three ain't bad, eh Rick? The Iowa count was exciting. A close-run thing, the caucus poll delivered an insignificant margin between the two front-runners, Mitt Romney of Massachusetts and Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania. The headlines made much of the 8-vote difference but a rational view would simply be to do a recount, or declare a tie. The media didn’t do so

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-44961052368846837032012-01-04T08:05:00.000+10:002012-01-04T11:19:56.713+10:00

When you rub a balloon there's a stretching sound. It's the sound of the suburbs expanding all over Australia in cities and towns, in the east and the west, in the north and the south. The houses are growing to fill the blocks of land they sit on - right to the edges! - and the stretching sound is what you hear as they gradually get larger. It's the same sound that's generated as the ALP

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-76336133204671146442012-01-03T00:55:00.001+10:002012-01-03T08:34:03.201+10:00

It's a bit meta. Danny Kingsley is the Manager of Scholarly Communication and ePublishing at ANU and a sessional lecturer with the Centre for the Pulic Awareness of Science at ANU. Her article on The Conversation website - it's a non-profit vehicle that is designed to bring academic work direct to the public, and employs journalists - talks about the need for scientists to speak plainly.

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-44749350592504728192012-01-02T05:51:00.000+10:002012-01-02T07:23:01.598+10:00

For me it was Jane Austen from the moment I read her for the first time in 2001. It was just Jane Austen and then more Jane Austen, please. I had not read her at high school and in this, perhaps, I was lucky. For others the problem’s with the Romantic poets: school turned them off. This is a pity. After all (as I discussed in yesterday’s post on Thomas Gray’s ‘Elegy’) we remain children of the

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-58854607006762272992012-01-01T09:48:00.000+10:002012-01-01T09:53:49.478+10:00

I decided to start the new year with first principles. We talk a lot about 'progressive' politics but usually little think of how such terminology came to be commonplace, or how the values inherent in it developed through the jumbled thickets of history. One place to look for signs of these developments is in literature, and so I took it into my head to pay attention to one of the most famous

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-50470207933063305862011-12-31T05:37:00.001+10:002011-12-31T05:40:30.989+10:00

I’m wrapping up this blog for 2011 with a list of things journalists need to know in order to practice their craft excellently. I got the idea for this post from a tweet that had a link advertising a position teaching journalism in Africa. I saw the tweet and my mind went off on a tangent all on its own. I hesitate to use the term ‘profession’ for journalism as there is not any type of body

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-55546739741523583532011-12-30T08:16:00.000+10:002011-12-30T08:52:02.030+10:00

It was a kind of empty feeling I experienced when, having spent a week or so reading crime novels and action thrillers, I realised that the last one was finished and it was my regular time for reading, which is in the evening from about 8pm after dinner is finished and I am once again back home after cooking dinner at my mother's house. I didn't know what to do. There were no new crime novels,

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-47683689892380806532011-12-29T06:59:00.003+10:002011-12-29T07:23:01.256+10:00

We've gotten used to seeing Bashar al Assad's nerdy little rat face on TV denouncing as "terrorists" thousands of protesters in Syria demanding change of the regime Assad inherited from his father 11 years ago. A total lack of credible elections, a lack of viable opposition parties, and a dirty electoral process has caused Syrians - like their brothers in Tunisia, Egypt and Lybia - to finally

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-28980142982691435892011-12-28T08:42:00.000+10:002011-12-28T15:00:57.859+10:00

The Arab uprisings continue as a civil war develops in Syria. Apparently fair witnesses, in the form of a delegation sent by the Arab League, are touring Syria taking notes and visiting hotspots. The protests are painted as "terrorism" by the Assad regime but it's clear that some army soldiers are defecting and joining in the rebellion. Many people believe the protests are a legitimate

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-81032179596667620762011-12-26T11:24:00.000+10:002011-12-26T12:27:42.577+10:00

In 1450 the printing press, invented in Europe by the German manufacturer Gutenberg, was operating. It was blue-sky stuff. By the second decade of the 16th century - 70 years, or three generations, later - when Martin Luther started his campaign against the sale of Church indulgences, the printing press was in wide use in Europe. The combination of technology and protest was dramatic and

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-88828280813988073042011-12-25T00:03:00.000+10:002011-12-25T16:37:44.208+10:00

So here I am, telling you how I met up with a representative of Santa Claus last week. It's strange but there was something inspiring and at the same quite ordinary about her. The conversation we had appears below but some people reading it will miss the sense of cameraderie that permeated our exchanges in that house in Brisbane, on a sunny late December day. I just sat and listened while she

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-88247375258568835902011-12-24T00:08:00.001+10:002011-12-24T00:09:42.272+10:00

A software developer at Kei Katsu America  demonstrates a prototype 'Polly' shoulder-mounted fax machine. Thought the fax was dead? Think again. A new type of fax machine which is miniaturised, portable and contains cutting-edge patented voice recognition technology is under development by a leading Japanese electronics manufacturer. Two squads of developers – one in Japan looking after the

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-81776344905589214762011-12-23T06:53:00.001+10:002011-12-23T07:02:02.205+10:00

Ever since reading the Millennium Trilogy of Stieg Larsson not so long ago I have been flirting with genre fiction in a way that would not have been likely five years ago. I'm a die-hard literary fiction fan and have been since graduating from science fiction - supplied by my brother, who is two years older than me - back in my teenage years. In my late teens and early twenties I was into

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-1397586950856877492011-12-22T00:56:00.002+10:002011-12-22T00:57:16.008+10:00

Dr Letitia Stork-Wang in the Centre for Human Studies lab in Sydney yesterday. There is no longer such a thing in society as a "middle class" say researchers at a distinguished Sydney research centre that focuses on cultural studies. Two years of studying the Australian resident in every concievable setting - from coast to coast, and from Bar to barroom, lab wits affirm - allows the

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-65150114006643302292011-12-21T06:54:00.000+10:002011-12-21T06:54:33.419+10:00

This is the face of a desperate man. This survivor of the recent refugee boat sinking off Indonesia, during which over a hundred people died, is recovering at an Indonesian facility in East Java. If you were in his shoes, you too would hold your head in your hands. You would have left your country because of discrimination, torture, harrassment, overwhelming economic hardship - the types of

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-14336166187807978512011-12-20T05:40:00.005+10:002011-12-21T05:49:01.080+10:00

News yesterday that North Korea's hereditary leader Kim Jong Il had passed away began to filter through to Twitter in the morning and newspapers were quick to follow up as people around the world quickly began to speculate as to what this event might mean for them. Share markets fell, most notably in South Korea, and regional militaries went on alert. Australia's foreign minister, Kevin Rudd,

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-56694018867058060762011-12-18T06:09:00.000+10:002011-12-18T07:55:54.643+10:00

A 20-minute video produced by the Guardian provides new insights into the mindset of people involved in the August riots in London. Reporters interviewed 270 people in making the video, with the interviews being part of research conducted alongside the London School of Economics. (I wrote about this research, and the government's reaction to it, recently.) Revenge appears to be a dominant

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-65986700687262456162011-12-17T07:52:00.003+10:002011-12-17T08:10:48.178+10:00

It went off without a hitch, if you'll pardon a pun at this sad time in the world of letters. Actually it's broader than that because Christopher Hitchens was, most recently, as well-known for his TV appearances as he was for his famous works, which anyway tended to be the ones that are polemical in nature rather than literary. But what I mean is the universal consensus among the Twitterati

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-70827621639623780672011-12-14T00:32:00.000+10:002011-12-14T16:07:41.154+10:00

Time for Kevin Rudd's people to begin working on setting up an IMDB page for the man we all love to speculate about. There are more rumours of impending leadership challenges for Ruddbot than there are DUI charges for Mel Gibson. It's embarrassing. Give the guy his due you facelsss minders! A list of starring roles can't be hard to put together, with names of co-stars and directors. Anything

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-44154226529351646312011-12-11T07:19:00.001+10:002012-02-07T19:03:08.161+10:00

They've done some research into the August riots in London, which I wrote about at the time, and have come up with a plan. But first, let's look at the reason they think the riots took place. The Guardian reports: A "get rich quick" celebrity culture exemplified by The X Factor and the dysfunctional lives of footballers has created a society "out of balance", the work and pensions secretary,

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-44546934341183778752011-12-05T04:54:00.001+10:002011-12-05T05:36:43.535+10:00

The story begins in the later days of WWI and it concentrates on a bunch of young German socialist activists campaigning against the war despite solid community support for the war effort. After the war ends they organise, and because they are highly engaged in Germany's political sphere they soon begin a struggle against the Nazi push that will continue in some form or another for the

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-14277132841578421812011-12-04T06:04:00.001+10:002011-12-04T06:55:15.059+10:00

Australia is holding its breath. For some reason, marriage equality as an issue possesses a gravitas and import far beyond that of any putative consequence which could derive from a change to the Marriage Act. Rainbows have always enthralled humankind, especially in the aeons before the scientific revolution allowed us to explain why they occur. Nowadays for, example, we understand why a

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-13481600514225112072011-12-03T07:29:00.001+10:002011-12-03T08:11:22.713+10:00

So now we have two studies available to read that show that News Ltd print media outlets campaign on specific issues and thus relegate to the dustbin their own codes of conduct that require impartiality and fairness in reporting. First there was Robert Manne's year-long examination of the products published under the masthead of The Australian, which I wrote about three months ago. That was

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-74072859289379797862011-12-01T06:23:00.001+10:002011-12-05T09:53:08.131+10:00

A new documentary called Strange Birds in Paradise by Charlie Hill-Smith, which I wrote about last year, is now available free to view on Fairfax's BrisbaneTimes website. A lot of Australians will have some memory of the scene shown in this picture - a group of refugees who escaped from West Papua by outrigger canoe in 2006 - because of the uproar generated when Indonesia complained to the

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-71462986714004567932011-11-23T05:57:00.001+10:002011-11-23T15:51:48.732+10:00

"Hey mate. Got a minute? I just want a quick word." You can imagine the scenario. A senior newspaper editor gets the attention of a politician who is involved in deciding the future direction of a part of the media. The editor's company has a financial interest in that sector of the industry. So the editor offers to support the politician if the politician supports a policy direction

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-33112066689767477892011-11-17T03:33:00.001+10:002011-11-17T08:55:42.807+10:00

As the Media Inquiry trundles along, a well-oiled machine under the confident, guiding hand of Ray Finkelstein, a number of journalism company managers and their underlings have written denunciations against any form of regulation of the media whatsoever. But most journalists are keeping their heads down. Even on social media they do not express an opinion about things like whether there is

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-6400227412346408952011-11-13T03:06:00.001+10:002011-11-13T05:04:11.224+10:00

Last week a government inquiry into Australia's media set up shop in Melbourne headed by a former Federal Court judge, Ray Finkelstein. The inquiry moves to Sydney next. This ambulant technique respects the need for the public to be involved but it should be kept in mind that the inquiry was set up in reaction to events in the UK, where Rupert Murdoch's News of the World was revealed by

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-37599331652487252582011-11-12T07:56:00.001+10:002011-11-12T09:16:22.665+10:00

It's happening, folks. You are being commoditised more and more effectively by your social media providers. It starts with an innocent "Location data cannot be found" message line in Twitter, suggesting to people viewing the tweet that there would be nothing more natural than the person who tweeted adding their location data. In fact, it started a long time ago - in 2007, in my case, when I

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-7110928752470960642011-11-08T08:37:00.002+10:002011-11-08T08:37:55.632+10:00

This book is a sort of sequel to Lewis' The Big Short, which came out in 2010 and which I wrote about in May that year. Lewis talks about the genesis of Boomerang: The Meltdown Tour in his acknowledgements at the back of the book when he thanks "Graydon Carter and Doug Strumpf, at Vanity Fair, for encouraging me to go [to the places he visits for the new book]". And yesterday I saw a link to a

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-87616835802733236702011-11-07T08:22:00.000+10:002011-11-07T09:41:13.371+10:00

The first thing I need to say at the outset here is that there will probably be a few spoilers in this review, so if you haven't read the book and don't want to have outcomes disclosed at this point, then stop reading at the white rabbit and come back at the fat twins. As I say at the end of the review, there's more to the novel than just a clever plot. Reviews I've read have been a bit

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-67612367798786754812011-11-02T22:40:00.000+10:002011-11-02T23:01:02.155+10:00

It's really funny. News emerges that Julian Assange's case before Britain's High Court has resulted in a refusal by that body to prevent his extradition to Sweden. There's the prospect of appeal, but little hope that such action will be successful. Meanwhile, I go apeshit on Twitter - in all-caps - trumpeting the undesirability of Assange's extradition to Sweden to face rape charges. And then .

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-17370701012740950132011-10-30T06:14:00.000+10:002011-10-30T08:44:40.344+10:00

Why are these men - Qantas CEO Alan Joyce (left) and chairman Leigh Clifford - smiling? They're at the annual general meeting of Qantas where unions protested against company policies. The next day (yesterday) Qantas management took the extraordinary step of grounding its entire fleet, locking out workers allied with unions that had been disrupting operations over the previous several months,

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-621972849762548982011-10-29T08:22:00.000+10:002011-10-29T08:57:23.652+10:00

This is the kind of announcement that politicians love because it was a bombshell. In Perth at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, which was opened by the British monarch, it was announced yesterday that the rules of succession to the British throne would change in two material respects. A daughter can now enter the line of succession over a younger brother, for a start. The story was

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-91519488616735029012011-10-22T07:17:00.000+10:002011-10-22T08:33:15.983+10:00

Mike Keating, chairman of the Australian Republican Movement, knows a thing or two about Australians' sense of independence. Keating was interviewed by Fairfax journo David Marr for a long story about the republic debate that appears in today's Sydney Morning Herald. Two things in particular that he said are worth commenting on. "People say when the Queen dies it will happen. But it's not

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-86069401029303728982011-10-20T17:16:00.002+10:002011-10-20T23:00:58.691+10:00

A visit from the Queen of England is not an every-day event. When it happens, there's a lot of kids carrying bunches of flowers, a lot of headlines, and a lot of speculation as to how the Australian prime minister of the day will behave - at least since Paul Keating place his arm on the Queen's back in 1992. But this time there's been a noticeable lack of excitement compared, say, to when my

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-46740488139830333212011-10-13T08:26:00.001+10:002011-10-13T08:26:25.489+10:00

Farmers often express regret that their interests are not given sufficient weight in urban electorates and feel left out of the national debate. You see it especially, now, on Twitter. If you didn't see it before it's probably because you're a resident of a metropolitan area and you don't read any of the newspapers that are written for - and purchased by - farmers. Those newspapers tell you a

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-57859186448250963422011-10-07T06:44:00.000+10:002011-10-07T06:44:13.612+10:00

It was a no-brainer for me to buy Christos Tsiolkas' The Slap when I saw it high up on a shelf yesterday at a local second-hand bookshop. I'm an avowed long-time fan of Tsiolkas and Loaded, The Jesus Man and Dead Europe were all reviewed on this blog in early 2006, when I quickly made up my mind that Tsiolkas was one of Australia's best writers of fiction. So when the ABC decided to

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-91493349095969130032011-10-05T05:45:00.000+10:002011-10-05T06:04:06.895+10:00

It seems to me that a lot of people would just prefer that the Occupy Wall Street protests just go away because coverage in the media has been uneven. Puzzlingly meagre, in the main, I should say. I tweeted my concern at the lack of coverage by mainstream media outlets and was told that CNN was doing a lot. But the majors I usually refer to - the New York Times, the Sydney Morning Herald -

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-7353896782121900022011-10-02T07:37:00.002+10:002011-10-02T15:49:06.595+10:00

There he is. Charles Ephrussi. In the black top hat at the back of Renoir's 1881 painting Luncheon of the Boating Party. Charles loves art, collects it, writes about it, surrounds himself with it. He's the scion of a rich banking family. He employs Proust as his secretary at one stage in his life. He's a flaneur and a socialite and a womaniser. It's the final decades of the 19th century and

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-33571595091286145932011-09-29T17:25:00.000+10:002011-09-29T22:28:22.239+10:00

If Julia Gillard expects Australians to look closer at China the news media has to get on board too. We need more than just news about sex slaves held for years in underground caverns - though, admittedly, the story is justifiably newsworthy. The prime minister has said she will establish a working group to write a white paper to act as a basis for Australia's future government policies in

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-37789699244047763862011-09-26T08:10:00.001+10:002011-09-26T08:19:39.326+10:00

When I jumped in the car yesterday after a sleepless night seeking diversion, and drove 100km south to Brisbane's entertainment precinct, there to take in an art exhibition, I had no idea that Surrealism: Poetry of Dreams would be showing at GOMA. Or a Henri Cartier-Bresson show next door at the QAG. "There," I thought, "nothing like a solid dose of high modernity" to placate the spirits that

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-56979383976465652962011-09-24T08:57:00.000+10:002011-09-24T08:57:13.840+10:00

I've posted in reaction to stories in The Australian on many occasions and in that sense they are driving the agenda and I'm frankly quite sick of the whole enterprise. Truth be told I know what angle they're going to privilege on any given issue so the reading is wasted, a confirmation rather than a learning experience, a new opportunity to get hot under the collar merely, and really no way

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-69537720110102018762011-09-22T08:18:00.000+10:002011-09-22T08:29:20.650+10:00

At Home With Julia has its supporters and its detractors. The ABC comedy has copped flak from those who say such a program would never have been made about a male prime minister and these people tend to fly off the handle pretty sharply when they criticise the show. Supporters guffaw, snicker and chortle happily. What noone has said in my proximity is that the show - especially in episodes one

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-68857088814792140552011-09-17T10:14:00.000+10:002011-09-17T10:28:09.637+10:00

The response to Robert Manne's Quarterly Essay, 'Bad News', which I wrote about on this blog a few days ago, was predictable. The Australian summoned forth not one or two leading lights to rebut the thesis put forward by Manne - that The Australian is a campaigning newspaper that ruthlessly pursues a set of specific agendas - but eight of them and they all read from the same script: Manne is

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-73900822324896143952011-09-14T05:03:00.000+10:002011-09-14T05:03:40.275+10:00

A group of chefs who jointly serve on the international board of the Basque Culinary Centre have adopted a vocal position with regards to the way they will carry out their profession in an 'Open letter to the chefs of tomorrow'. Meeting in Lima, Peru, the nine chefs issued the statement in the "hope that these reflections will serve as a reference and inspiration for the young people who will

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-85855450808680035792011-09-10T07:48:00.007+10:002011-09-15T06:45:58.742+10:00

It's funny that Australian polemicist and academic Robert Manne decided to leave the board of The Monthly immediately prior to his Quarterly Essay, Bad News (issue 43, 2011), appearing in bookshops. Or not. I'm not suggesting that he anticipates a lawsuit from News Limited (the essay is a lengthy investigation of News Limited's flagship broadsheet, The Australian) and was asked to leave by the

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-45179058150172359612011-09-09T08:09:00.004+10:002011-09-09T15:41:33.035+10:00

Over the coming week we're going to see a lot of images like this. It's sort of comforting in a perverse way. It's comforting because not only are such images now plain fare for media consumers, but because they recall a moment of common purpose. Nine-eleven is a historical moment most of us can share. Those excluded - the very young - can refer to their parents' or relatives' memories and the

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-58935827347564139922011-09-01T07:57:00.004+10:002011-09-01T16:24:30.252+10:00

It's an unmitigated disaster for Labor and a PR coup for the Coalition. The High Court's ruling in favour of refugees who want to be processed for asylum in Australia is quite clear: Malaysia cannot offer adequate protection for asylum seekers sent there, and it does not have adequate provision for access to effective procedures for gauging asylum claims. Australia's international obligations

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-61718449677513060112011-08-28T02:31:00.002+10:002011-08-28T09:19:54.880+10:00

WHAT DO YOU MEAN, 'CAN I HEAR THE LORD?' OF COURSE I CAN, WITH THIS SPECIAL ETHERIAL MESSAGE TRANSPONDER ATTACHED TO MY SKULL! ARE YOU BLIND? Well, at least that's the picture I get from where I live Down Under after reading Ryan Lizza's well-researched piece in a recent issue of The New Yorker (admittedly a pretty liberal Big City, blue state magazine) about Republican presidential candidate

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-52212142737947330542011-08-20T08:25:00.000+10:002011-08-20T08:25:50.305+10:00

Here are two images showing air transport in action. At the top is a Qantas aeroplane, the kangaroo emblem on its tail significative of a solid, safe Australia. As Matt O'Sullivan describes it in his story today in Fairfax papers, Qantas is "linked to the national identity" in a way that many other companies are not. While Qantas no doubt enjoys some market advantage as a result, the link also

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-62467528431060088862011-08-18T22:56:00.001+10:002011-08-18T22:59:55.917+10:00

Coal seam gas (CSG) has helped produce a mass of words in Australia, as well as handsome profits for well developers. Since these companies started to target agricultural land the debate has become progressively more heated, reaching - it's fair to say - epic proportions in social media, let alone the traditional media. Farmers are outraged, and rightly so. In Australia they hardly benefit from

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-10785921060552518602011-08-10T09:15:00.002+10:002011-08-10T09:27:23.393+10:00

Within four days rioting had spread from London to Leeds, Liverpool, Bristol, Birmingham and Manchester. The spark was police shooting a young black man in Tottenham, where the disturbance started. But it's not about that death any more. "They just want to be heard," said a young black woman quoted in a Guardian story that assigned blame to society at large. "This is the only way some people have

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-69502041887552115822011-08-08T08:16:00.003+10:002011-08-08T08:41:50.420+10:00

China's second rebuke to the US in almost as many days provides a stinging challenge to America's national pride and it won't be forgotten. What has been forgotten by politicians in the US capitol and in Beijing is that it was a Democrat president, Bill Clinton, who serially favoured granting Most Favored Nation status to China. That took place back in 2000, which led to China's acceptance in the

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-45952767383260805022011-08-06T09:12:00.003+10:002011-08-06T10:38:21.111+10:00

Last time I was down in Sydney I dropped by Gleebooks for a recreative fossick and asked the guy behind the back-store counter for a book about the Tea Party movement which has taken the US by storm over the past two years. A book, Boiling Mad: Inside Tea Party America by New York Times journalist Kate Zernike, was chosen in preference to one by an actual Tea Partier since I wanted something

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-41364060687146851292011-08-05T02:40:00.002+10:002011-08-05T10:23:18.198+10:00

If I'm right there will be more written about the case of Mazoltuv Borukhova, the woman sentenced in 2009 for paying for the murder of Daniel Malakov, her husband. If only because of the "disquiet" The Guardian's Rachel Cooke estimates as one of the rewards available to the careful reader of Janet Malcolm's latest essay Iphigenia in Forest Hills. Like Malcolm's other books - or at least the two

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-80435405264007898332011-08-03T08:02:00.001+10:002011-08-03T08:08:24.812+10:00

Everyone of my generation knows the TV character Kojak played by Telly Savalas in a police drama that screened regularly during the 70s but they may not know where the character originated and why. This book will help to understand where Kojak came from. For people growing up in sleepy Australia throughout their teens during the era of civil rights protests T.J. English's The Savage City (2011)

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-20539970333673966822011-07-30T07:30:00.002+10:002011-07-30T16:33:17.842+10:00

Apparently we should be worried. Odd things are happening, like the Australian dollar jumping in value to over US$1.10 - the highest it has been since the currency float of 1983 - and the Australian stock market's S&P/ASX 200 index falling almost 40 percent in a single day to its lowest level since the depth of the global economic crisis in 2009. While we're told Australians are saving more than

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-10121248088028955452011-07-28T06:56:00.002+10:002011-07-28T07:13:57.849+10:00

Fallout from the Norway killings less than a week ago is somewhat confusing with some politicians excusing Anders Breivik's rampage - notably Mario Borghezio, a member of the European Parliament from Italy with the anti-immigrant Northern League, Erik Hellsborn, a local politician for the nationalist Sweden Democrats in the southern Swedish town of Varberg, and Jacques Coutela, a member of the

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-39317287453388438302011-07-26T06:57:00.002+10:002011-07-26T07:55:22.508+10:00

As news of Anders Behring Breivik, the Norway terrorist, continues to emerge we have read criticism from the liberal commentariat aimed at early media coverage claiming that the bombing and subsequent shooting were the work of Islamic extremists. The assumption in much of the West was that a person imitating al-Quaeda had perpetrated the attacks and, for people living in Britain or the USA, such

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-30092120774470457692011-07-20T02:44:00.003+10:002011-07-20T12:22:50.641+10:00

Twitter user @danielrhamilton says, "I was at U w/ guy who attacked #Murdoch. It's Jonathan May-Bowles. (@JonnieMarbles)" And who are we to argue? The cheeky comedian's last tweet before his attack on Rupert Murdoch at the Commons culture, media and sport select committee meeting, where Rupert and his son James appeared today, was: "It is a far better thing that I do now than I have ever done

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-34707562198937820352011-07-17T08:30:00.003+10:002011-07-17T08:41:39.508+10:00

Discussing things openly raises awareness but it can also highlight gaps, and so is doubly useful. 'Awareness' is an oft-used word and when matched with 'raising' or 'lowering' refers to how much people in the community think about something. I've been participating in the #ruralmh hashtag on Twitter a fair bit of late because it is available and interesting. People participate. Things are

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-84400123652723609582011-07-16T08:46:00.001+10:002011-07-16T08:56:38.008+10:00

With the News of the World soap opera in its second week we're now over the initial shock we experienced at the news that NotW journalists paid private investigators to hack into the mobile phones of crime victims, and that they paid police for information. Two senior executives in Rupert Murdoch's empire have stepped down including Rebekah Brooks, CEO of News International (Murdoch's British

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-36259313263163876422011-07-15T07:21:00.003+10:002011-07-15T07:30:23.312+10:00

Watching John Hartigan perform on the ABC's 730 program last night I was unhappy. Hartigan, CEO of News Limited, the Australian arm of News Corp, is a polished performer and he demonstrated yesterday a suitable quantity of professional diffidence although the constant movement of his hands struck me as slightly defensive (news editors are accustomed to be the ones asking the questions, not the

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-50353977200209896672011-07-14T06:29:00.001+10:002011-07-14T06:30:16.749+10:00

Twitter users may never have seen this before. I had not and it surprised me to see geo-location data appearing in tweets during the #rurlamh hashtag convo last night. I can't remember it happening before. Once a week on Wednesday evening peeps get together online to talk about rural mental health issues using Twitter. During last night's conversation, I noticed that location data was appearing

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-70082150311306517782011-07-13T02:14:00.001+10:002011-07-13T02:21:25.355+10:00

I have been concentrating as a journalist on food for some time and as a result I have come across many stories that have caught my attention and made me think. Because I have been working on a story about a new tomato variety development project being carried out in a government-private partnership in Queensland I have come across a number of writings about tomatoes. This book is one of them.

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-11286018449911267802011-07-11T20:24:00.003+10:002011-07-11T23:19:35.387+10:00

Although Australia's east coast has had some serious rain this year farmers are not so easily convinced that the tough times the drought brought with it are finished for good. This is part of what I took away from a blog post by Vana in the Wimmera about the times when it was really bad on the land. I was especially interested in part of what she wrote: In the Wimmera not all of us experienced

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-22171263984709379802011-07-09T07:36:00.003+10:002011-07-09T08:05:04.526+10:00

You can hardly blame Rebekah Brooks' look of anxiety as her car is snapped by a photographer as she leaves her office. It's the kind of photo that's standard fare in tabloids like News of the World, the newspaper the company she manages - News International - owns and has now decided to shutter following shocking revelations of unethical and illegal practices used by its reporters to glean

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-53775219873779081712011-07-08T05:42:00.001+10:002011-07-08T05:58:54.255+10:00

The photo shows a man waiting at a Kenyan refugee camp for assistance while supporting his hungry children. The children are alive, at least for now, but the death toll mounts daily. Prolonged drought in the Horn of Africa has forced hundreds of thousands of Somalis - already beleaguered by sectarian conflict inside their country - to leave home in search of food. After securing rides on trucks

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-31555506385232570852011-07-07T07:02:00.005+10:002011-07-07T09:03:36.715+10:00

When footage screened on the ABC's Four Corners on 30 May this year a palpable shiver spread through the Australian community. Images of manifest cruelty by Indonesian abattoir workers flashed across our screens. The footage was taken by animal welfare campaigners Animals Australia at 11 randomly-selected abattoirs in Indonesia, with spokespeople gaining unfettered access to see business-as-usual

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-17141163301279235772011-07-06T07:13:00.001+10:002011-07-06T07:18:31.417+10:00

Using the hashtag #agchatoz last night to tap into the tweetstream reflecting a part of rural Australia was instructive for me, a journalist who wants to write about rural issues. It's a regular gathering. Each Tuesday for two hours participants discuss issues surrounding a single theme and this week it was about youth on the land. It's a pressing question as most farmers are far older. As one

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-41523244895580618652011-07-05T09:11:00.002+10:002011-07-05T09:21:17.583+10:00

So the time has come when the barbarians have crossed the threshold and are now firmly seated within the chamber. As of yesterday the Greens' enlarged contingent - nine Senators in total from the country's third party - took their places in the Senate. Their first order of business, The Australian reminds us, will be carbon tax legislation. The national broadsheet said that the "emboldened" party

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-28597959409847731922011-07-01T07:46:00.002+10:002011-07-01T07:46:56.865+10:00

Soil is a good place to store carbon. Or at least agricultural land is a good place to store carbon. Not only does Australia have a lot of it, but we have a history of using farmland to sequester carbon starting with negotiations surrounding the Kyoto protocol which led to an easy-to-meet target that was entirely met by reducing land clearances across the continent. Now there's legislation

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-52357051173115625882011-06-26T07:42:00.001+10:002011-06-26T07:43:03.179+10:00

The Australian has stripes in the game of public advocacy in this country and most media watchers know that its allegiance lies toward the conservative end of the political spectrum, which makes it no surprise that the paper today brought a big gun onside - British sociologist Frank Furedi - in its campaign to ensure that Australia's marriage laws are not tampered with. Furedi says that support

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-59729497951676869812011-06-18T22:14:00.000+10:002011-06-18T22:14:01.290+10:00

With opinion polls hammering Labor under Prime Minister Julia Gillard, some good news was due and it took the form of an announcement of two new utility-scale solar power plants to be built in Australia. The news appeared here and here but it didn't make the Saturday night news, no doubt disappointing the PR personnel in Gillard's battered camp. The plants will use different technologies. One,

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-38321417881784901852011-06-13T21:54:00.000+10:002011-06-13T21:54:55.704+10:00

Yep, that's me in the reflection of this embroidered depiction of a paddle steamer named 'City of Grafton', an artefact the lady at the front door of the museum told me cost $3000 to repair before it was displayed - along with thousands of other objects of historical significance - to the eager public. You can tell that it's me because I need a haircut, and I'll get one as soon as I get back home

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-8065914609950228652011-06-03T08:13:00.002+10:002011-06-03T08:24:18.286+10:00

Although born in the US, Martha Gellhorn lived in the latter part of her life in London, and the prize named after her - for "journalism that challenges secrecy and mendacity in public affairs" - is awarded by a judging panel appointed by UK-based organisers. The international nature of the prize is fitting. Gellhorn garnered fame for reporting from all corners of the globe, most notably in Spain

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-66515991057238451592011-05-30T08:20:00.005+10:002011-05-30T09:30:27.346+10:00

The UK's The Telegraph is reporting an important case involving Twitter releasing details of some of its accounts to a UK-based plaintiff on the order of the Superior Court of California in the San Mateo County. Twitter has released the name, address, email address, telephone number and geographical location of the users behind five accounts. Twitter says it notified the defendant and that

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-90792869283332459992011-05-29T07:52:00.000+10:002011-05-29T07:52:43.489+10:00

O the enduring power of stories to enhance the features of things obscure, things half-understood, things kept out of view by the powerful entities that surround us and that suppress evidence of their power by gaming the media. Questions such as the one many are asking in light of the continuing silence of WikiLeaks, that hactivist posse of outlaw data handlers that has disconcertingly hit the

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-76248603418818882502011-05-28T10:03:00.000+10:002011-05-28T10:03:21.870+10:00

Jay Rosen, the news commentator, turns his gaze on his blog onto what he calls the "neurotic" relationship between the mainstream media and bloggers. The MSM, he says, "others" bloggers and in so doing tries to defend its ancient prerogatives. But people aren't listening, it seems. The media continue to be in financial trouble. Circulation continues its downward slide. Alternatives proliferate.

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-74628616094479053652011-05-25T08:27:00.002+10:002011-05-25T08:35:09.718+10:00

Going back to Annabel Crabb's post 'Finding a coin for the journalistic juke box', published two Fridays ago, I wanted to comment on this one comment in particular. Lots of the extant comments were of the "we're not going to pay" type, with a few saying that "money is not the only reward". In the first case we just don't know how consumers will treat media, if all media do the same thing (if a

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21277069.post-25167349421384274282011-05-23T08:33:00.003+10:002011-05-23T08:38:17.253+10:00

Bob Gould is dead. A hundred tender feelings and a thousand distant memories crowd the mind at hearing the news that one of Sydney's most famous booksellers has passed away. Bob Gould was really a one-off of a human being. He was totally unique. And he occupied a signal station in my personal record beginning - as so many stories that we read seem to do - when I was an undergraduate. I was living

Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07158988637117138260noreply@blogger.com2