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 along with individual tweets - here's a screen shot to show what I mean.

You can see that it didn't matter whether the original tweet was sent from the web, from a software program like TweetDeck, or from a mobile device. My interface in this case was Seesmic Web, which accesses Twitter via a web interface. And the geo-location data did not appear with the same tweets that were viewed in other tweetstreams, or with tweets from the same people that came without the hashtag, or when viewed using the Twitter web interface. So it was a very specific issue relating to Seesmic Web when the hashtag was present, and only in the hashtag tweetstream.

Another odd fact is that the location data had nothing to do with where the actual person was physically located. I know this because location data for my own tweets appeared - see the next image.

Those are indeed  my tweets but I do not even know where "Basalt, QLD' is! I asked @johnalchin about his location (in the first image above he is shown as being at "near 354-360 George Street, Sydney", which is right in the centre of Sydney's CBD). He said he was actually out in the suburbs but that his "provider's wireless broadband has that as point". I did mention the phenomenon in the tweetstream but nobody else twigged, so I assume that I was the only person seeing this data in their browser.

It certainly is a mystery, and one that I do not know the answer to. If anyone who reads this post has the answer please leave a message explaining why this happened!

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.

Finding the book and reading more than half of it changed my approach to the story I am writing on the tomato development. Barry Estabrook's Tomatoland (2011) is a piece of investigative journalism on an unusual subject. It's also an unusual book in other ways. Estabrook is originally a food writer who has brought his writing skills to bear on a different angle of food: the way it is produced. He has written for such American food publications as Gourmet and Eating Well magazines. And his new book was brought out by a small publishing company - Andrews McMeel Publishing, LLC - with offices in Kansas and Sydney! When I say that reading the book changed my way of thinking about my own project I don't mean to say that I have decided to write 150,000 words on the development of hybrid tomato varieties (although that would no doubt be a worthy project). But the book did alert me to a weakness inherent in writing stories that depend mainly on the input of the main players. So I decided to also talk with a company that markets heirloom seeds. Heirloom fruit are distinct from the modern hybrid varieties developed by multinational seed companies, in that they are the "original" varieties that our parents ate and that can be found possibly in some restaurants where the food culture has taken an alternative direction.

Heirloom tomatoes matter a lot to Estabrook. The book starts with the writer driving his car down an interstate highway in Florida. When he comes up behind a truck laden with green tomatoes he is concerned because some of the fruit bounce off the truck into the road. He gets out of the car to find the road littered with undamaged tomatoes. The rock-hard fruit have simply bounced to the roadside where they will eventually rot but their consistency forces the writer's mind to contemplate an unmistakeable fact of the modern food production system. It is designed to favour appearance over flavour.

Estabrook does not stop there. Up to where I have read in the book there are two things about tomato growing that incite the writer's alarm. One is a lack of safety in an industry that uses a lot of highly toxic chemicals for pest control and fertilisation. Florida's sandy soil is not an ideal medium to grow tomatoes in and growers compensate for this lack by applying a number of pesticides prior to planting seedlings and at other times during plant growth. The migrant workers who work in the paddocks do not understand in many cases how to interact with the chemicals, and in addition a casual attitude to worker safety means that exposure to potent chemicals happened frequently. In one case a number of pregnant women working on farms gave birth to deformed babies. Estabrook examines the reaction of the growers to the events. It is sad and enlightening.

Even more frightening are the slaves kept by crew bosses to work in the fields for almost no pay. Despite criminal investigations and convictions the trade in slaves continues. Tomatoes are farmed using labour made up of men and women brought into American by unscrupulous operators who intercept them as they cross the US border and place them in trucks for transport to Florida. There they are kept in unsantiary conditions and forced to pay off "loans" incurred, the bosses say, while bringing them to the States. When they try to escape they are beaten or killed. Estabrook relies to a significant degree on the testimony of men and women attached to the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, a local peak body with 4000 members. Most disturbing is the fact that growers know that slavery happens but do nothing about it. Weak laws mean that there is little incentive to disturb a system that supplies them with cheap and reliable labour. Workers' rights are not a major concern for private companies.

Immokalee is a small, poor town near the rich conurbation of Naples, Florida. As an Australian journalist Estabrook's stories are interesting for me but the paradigm probably does not easily transfer to this country. In Australia, there are low-paid workers picking fruit and vegetables, including backpackers, and certainly I think that there are good stories to be told about our own horticulture industry. But slavery? I doubt it. Then again, you never know. If I put in the hours needed to find out more about Australia's horticultural labour I might be surprised by what I discover.

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 the kind of drought you might see on 60 minutes, because my kind of drought wasn’t so camera friendly. Mr  & Mrs Non Farma may not be able to recognise that the crop that just covers your ankles should be up to your waist when shown on TV! The media liked to portray starving stock and drifting soils on a barren landscape. We don’t run stock and because our farming practises are minimal tillage our soil didn’t drift as much as conventional methods.

I don’t blame the media for missing us out, I applaud the constant reporting they did of the drought and the subsequent recovery period which for many will be as long as the drought itself.

Surely it's true, as Vana says, that city folk have to get by on what they can glean from the nightly news. And that may not be the way the farmer herself experiences the drought. The drought brought heartache and pain to many people in rural Australia. For some rural residents, the drought also brought with it a bleak sense of occasion. For me, talking with such people delivered some sort of understanding beyond what the TV supplied.

In December 2007 I went down to Wagga Wagga in order to gather material for a story I planned to write. The story never got written but I spoke with Fay and a friend of hers for an hour or so and had a cup of coffee in the kitchen. I also took photos of the embroidery work they had made and intended to exhibit in Sydney. Ths work was the reason for my interest in the two women. The image below is one of their creations with needle, thread and cloth: a rendering of a news photo. (Click on image to see larger view.)

I say the drought created a sense of occasion because the photo this image is based on was taken by the media during a visit by John Howard, the prime minister, to Charles Sturt University, which has a campus in Wagga Wagga. I think the image embodies a dual threat - both within the lines of the cracked, grey earth as well as in the disembodied figure of the man (the PM) kicking up dust for the cameras and the accompanying media personnel gathered around him. The image says much about the curious relationship between the rural community and the government, which is it seems the only entity large enough to counterbalance the size and sheer overwhelming power of nature itself.

There is something of Vana's dark mood in this image, a brooding power that threatens life and renders up nothing more than a man kicking dirt, as if kicking dirt were enough to keep the farmer in food and petrol, clothing and school fees, insurance levies and mortgage payments and the hundred other things weighing on her mind at all times. The image is an interesting reflection of a dark time. When everything else goes wrong we turn to each other, whether it's a mate down at the pub for a chat on a social night or one of the big boys in Canberra who controls the nation's purse strings. Community has to be enough, sometimes.

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 private information for stories by hacking into the mobile phone accounts of British individuals. Standard fare, indeed: the accused being transported to or from the courthouse and the airing of allegations that could destroy a person's reputation, reshape their life. It may come to that, the British prime minister says.

James Murdoch fronted staff at the newspaper to make the unexpected announcement - which included words that pointed a trembling finger at "wrongdoers" at the paper who will "have to face the consequences" - that the paper would close after the following Sunday's edition. But the firm hand of his father Rupert is discernible behind the move.

It's no great loss for the family. Newspapers account for only 13 percent of its revenues. Newspapers serve a purpose in that they let Murdoch influence politicians, public institutions and the public so that money can be made in abundance elsewhere, notably in television. Shutting down the NotW was, for Rupert Murdoch, nothing more or less than than a mercy killing. When you own racehorses and one breaks its leg there's only one thing to do. A sick horse can win no races. Then there's the pain to endure. Better for all concerned, if you ignore the paper's 200-odd staff who received the news that they would lose their jobs with a mixture of astonishment and shock.

In plain fact, the NotW had quickly become something of a liability because of the revelations. It's unwelcome high profile suddenly threatened to derail Murdoch's plan to purchase the 61 percent of British pay-TV broadcaster BSkyB that he didn't already own. Since the scandal broke, lawmakers have decided to push back a decision about the takeover until September. It is a decision that had been imminent.

As for what will happen to Brooks, former New South Wales premier Bob Carr thinks that she must eventually resign. Another view holds that Brooks is being kept at News International so that she can be sacrificed at a later date if circumstances take a worse turn as police and official investigations proceed and as further dirt emerges to stain the reputations of people close to the newspaper. Certainly Rupert Murdoch will be keen to protect the reputation of his son, James, and shielding him from anticipated attacks might just save him from any further shame rubbing off.

Whatever happens, Brooks does not have much to be happy about at this point in time especially since it has been announced by persons unknown that she will not take the helm at the planned Sun on Sunday paper that is being widely mooted to replace NotW, as far as we can credibly assert given the extent of present knowledge within the rapidly-evolving environment in which this astonishing story is unfolding. We have seen a short video clip showing Brooks admitting before a parliamentary enquiry that police had been paid by NotW for information. We have read that a previous NotW editor, Andy Coulson, has been arrested by police. And we have have learned that the prime minister is to launch two official enquiries - possibly with powers to compel people to answer questions - into both the police bribery and into press oversight in Britain.

Murdoch's media rivals globally are unlikely to let him off the hook easily, which guarantees extensive media coverage of the case at various points around the globe as events unfold in the UK. There are also those, such as the UK Opposition leader Ed Miliband, who are sure to maintain the pressure on News - in Miliband's case so that he can continue to score points against adversary Cameron, who has close links to Coulson and Brooks. Other politicians will be ready to snap at Murdoch's heels every time he enters the public sphere because of the resentment they feel about the power News papers have held.

It's a couple of months until summer emerges Down Under, and those involved in the multinational News franchise will see the season change before this drama has completely played itself out. The saga raises questions about how large media organisations operate and whether they can be sustainable. Clearly Murdoch has few friends with the current situation, and this prompts queries about the sustainability of a model of proprietorship where editorial tone and direction are driven from the very top. The elephant in the room being, of course, the amount of control that the octogenarian partiarch exercises over editorial decisions. Few who watch the media on a regular basis will have any doubts that this happens, despite public pronouncements from News management and the credible-seeming structures that have been put in place to deflect accusations of control over editorial.

The NotW case puts all of this into play in a dangerous way because it alters the power relations between actors involved in the routine drama of daily headlines and allegiances cemented in tony restaurants and executive boardrooms. Is this model of media ownership sustainable when things go awry somewhere else in the corporate structure? If the public is angry because you have stepped over the line of decency that they feel to be their due, and politicians are angry because they smell blood, and the authorities have become involved because laws have been repeatedly broken, and your enemies are energised by the opportunities you have suddenly handed them, can you continue to thrive within the system of laws, customs, and rhetorical devices that have kept the machine running for so long?

How much goodwill can a media owner rely on when the performers no longer collude in the (apparently) scripted web of relations that exist in the public sphere? The answer to that question explains the anxiety on Rebekah Brooks' face.

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 and in cars, or after walking hundreds of kilometres on foot, the displaced people arrive at camps in Ethiopia and Kenya where administrators are stretched to allocate resources, finding it difficult sometimes to process the refugees, who may receive little at first in the way of relief. The statistics are alarming.

Dadaab camp in northeastern Kenya, near the Somali border, now contains over 380,000 people and it was designed to accommodate 90,000. A UN spokesperson told America's CBS News that there were more deaths among arriving Somali children in the first quarter of 2011 than in all of 2010. Another UN worker said 54,000 people fled Somalia in June alone and 30,000 of them went to Dadaab, according to an AFP story, with 1,400 refugees arriving there daily. Voice of America says 61,000 people have come to Dadaab this year.

“When I was first there, in 1992, there were about 40,000 refugees in the transit camp,” said Kevin McCourt, CEO of CARE Canada. “By 1994 it had reached capacity. Now there are close to 400,000 people.”

The European Commission has sent $7 million to Dadaab in an effort to ease the crisis but there seems to be little in the short term that the developed world can do for the people affected by drought in Somalia unless humanitarian intake quotas set by elected governments are lifted. In the case of Somalia we have known for some time about the numbers of displaced persons. Sectarian conflict that is present in that country is also a factor determining the volume of people on the move. And it's not just in the Horn of Africa that numbers of displaced people have gone up in recent years. Pakistan, for example, hosts 1.9 million refugees or asylum-seekers inside its borders because it is located next door to Afghanistan, where the decade-long American war has displaced vast numbers of people.

What is true to say is that the 21,000 or so people arriving by boat on Australian shores in the past decade or so represents but a tiny fraction of the total number of displaced persons globally fleeing drought or armed conflict. The Toronto Star's Olivia Ward says that in 2010 "some 43.7 million people were forcibly displaced by conflict or persecution". With the current Horn of Africa crisis added to the inhuman mix, the number of displaced persons can only go one way.

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 practices that would shock Australian TV viewers. The Labor government imposed a ban on live cattle exports to the featured abattoirs the next day. A week later it was announced that all live cattle exports from Australia would be stopped.

Over the succeeding weeks the sound emanating from the farm sector gradually rose in pitch to an audible scream and the websites of the rural news media filled with complaints from various bodies and political representatives close to producers. Minister for Agriculture Joe Ludwig came under siege as stocks of cattle built up in Northern Territory holding yards and one producer even threatened to start shooting cattle.

The Northern Territory Cattlemen's Association said it was "disappointed with the Federal Government's decision to temporarily suspend all live cattle exports to Indonesia", the Cattle Council of Australia said the ban would particularly hurt the Northern Territory, and LiveCorp said there would be a significant impact from the move. One cattleman shown addressing a government panel that included the prime minister, Julia Gillard, said the move was "bloody bullshit".

Yesterday when the live export ban was lifted by Minister Ludwig the National Farmers Federation released a statement jointly prepared along with the Meat & Livestock Australia, LiveCorp, Australian Livestock Exporters' Council, Cattle Council of Australia, WAFarmers, Northern Territory Cattlemen's Association, AgForce, Sheepmeat Council of Australia and the Goat Industry Council of Australia.

The industry welcomed the news, the statement said, it was "an important first step" and "the recommencement of the trade will be gradual to those supply chains that meet approved international standards".

"While ever volumes remain below normal levels producers in northern Australia will continue to suffer," the statement went on. There was no mention of the Indonesian abattoirs responsible for the cruelty to the cattle that had been shown suffering on TV. Keen not to upset important customers, the NFF and farmers generally remain mum on the root cause of the government ban on live exports. The statement went on to note that "the industry and Government must now work together with Indonesia to bring additional facilities up to international standards".

While Jakarta says it will still seek to import 500,000 head of cattle this year, the Ministry of Agriculture, Prabowo Caturroso, said the ban was "a hidden blessing" as the country is seeking to become self-sufficient in livestock for slaughter. The Minister also said "the number of imports will definitely go down". In Australia, federal Nationals leader Warren Truss said that "the Minister made the right decision initially, closing trade to 12 offending abattoirs and allowing trade to continue to those abattoirs with acceptable animal welfare standards".

Mr Truss said the decision offered hope but did not mean a full resumption of trade, with far fewer cattle to be processed due to the business disruptions of the past month, caused by the suspension.

It is striking that throughout this controversy the published comments of those close to cattle producers say nothing about the appalling conditions experienced by Australian animals being killed in Indonesian slaughterhouses. Time will now show whether the practical measures mandated by the federal government will be enough to ensure the safety and comfort of animals sent to Indonesia to be killed for meat.

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 participant framed it, "Regardless of farm size, the fact remains that our farmers are generally 60+ but provide 90% of our food. The next gen is critical."

But how to attract young people to the farm? Part of the problem, as I see it, is attracting the attention of the urban young to take up agricultural studies in many of the excellent universities in Australia with courses on offer that provide training and learning in these areas. What are young people in the city interested in? how to cut through, reach them? It appears to be a problem for farmers in Australia. I think one of the problems in this respect is the differences in the way farmers see themselves, and the way other sectors of Australia's population see them.

A way to view this is through the lens of the rural media, which for all intents and purposes runs a parallel course to the editorial desks of the major metropolitan news organisations. To get attention from the metro population farmers need to be depicted positively in the metro media. Unfortunately, they don't really seem to understand what metro dwellers care about and think about. A perfect example of this disconnect is available by contemplating the way that a personage such as Barnaby Joyce (pictured) is depicted in metro media - as a bit of a loon - and in the rural media - a serious participant in the public sphere. Not even the right-leaning papers in the metro areas give Barnaby air, unless it's to get an easy laugh.

Some of the tweestream participants urged rural industries to get urban dwellers involved through on-farm experience. There was talk of special courses at universities that cater to those wishing to take up agricultural studies. One or two people talked about Farmer of the Year as though it were something that an urban dweller gave a second's thought to during an average year. It's not, I'm sorry to say.

The truth is that most urban dwellers go to an agricultural show like the Royal Easter Show in Sydney once a year and never give a second thought to the countryside after that. If the rural sector gets into the news it's always via a negative story, for example the current fight against coalseam gas extractors. Or a flood. Or the furore over live cattle exports to Indonesia. As some of the tweetstream participants noted online, the positive stories just don't get a run in the metro press. How to broach the divide? Putting a segment about an urban farmstay family on the ABC's Landline is not the answer because metro media consumers do not watch the program, they watch Insiders early on Sunday mornings then go out to buy bagels and croissants for brunch.

One way to capture the attention of the urban middle class is to focus on something they think about, like sustainability. It may be anathema for the rural farm owner to give air to a Green issue but the fact is that the people living in the inner west of, say, Sydney pay attention when you talk about climate change. Farmers are better placed than any of those people to make a difference on climate change because so much land is controlled by farmers, and land can be used to store carbon away from the atmosphere. What about water? Seventy percent of the water we consume is used up on the farm, so it's a big issue for farmers too.

Another issue the metro droogs care about is natural produce. Inner city droogies buying direct from a farmer's market has become a significant income stream for many farmers based near the city. And city types think about where their food comes from: growing crops in the city is an expanding practice in many parts of the urban landscape. Selling direct to consumers without the involvement of the big two retail chains is another way that farmers can cut through and reach the urban consumer.

It's true that agriculture is a high-tech industry but unless people living in metro areas think about these things in a positive way there is little that farmers can do to counter the stuffy image that they possess in the minds of the city folk, who see rural Australia as right-wing, pro-monarchy, agrarian-socialist (always asking for the government to do things for them), and a bit quaint. Like butter dishes and crochet hooks. The rural press does farmers no favours by lambasting anything progressive like a carbon tax: those inner city types are responsible for the Greens holding the balance of power in the Senate. It's pointless to let yourself to be seen as holding back the tide of natural social progress toward a more sustainable future when you are perfectly placed to contribute in a very meaningful way in the project of ensuring the future safety of the planet.

This is how urban folk think. And stewardship is a great way for farmers to engage with that urban constituency. It's a population full of intelligent, hard-working Australians eager to make a difference, strike out on an exciting journey toward a better future, and save humanity. Everyone has grandiose dreams when they're young. It's better to harness those dreams rather than pander to fear of change at any cost.

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 made an "audacious bid" to secure for itself the position of Senate President.

Right-wing flack Gerard Henderson leapt from the gate with an opinion piece comparing the Greens' success with the performance of two other challengers to Australia's entrenched two-party system: the Democratic Labor Party and the Australian Democrats. Henderson works for The Sydney Institute, a right-of-cantre think tank, and is frequently to be seen growling menacingly on the ABC's Insiders program. He's an old hand at this sort of thing, but Bob Brown's claim that the Greens would supplant Labor in the future holds enough water to dampen Henderson's enthusiasm in this case. The fact is that the Right in Australia is struggling with the ascendancy of the Greens.

Labor is staying mum at the moment. A week ago, on the ABC's Q&A program, Labor's Anthony Albanese sat next to the Greens' Adam Bandt on the panel and the two were on their best behaviour. Albanese at one point carefully deflected a call to attack the ruling party's coalition partner. It was an interesting performance, and an instructive one.

But then here comes Henderson accusing the Greens of "hubris" - raising the sickle at the stand of tall poppies that have miraculously sprouted in the fecund field of Australian politics post-Rudd - and threatening the emerging party with doom. The DLP and the Democrats faded fast, he reminds us. The Greens need no reminding but you can hardly blame leader Bob Brown for crowing a little. Following Rudd's disastrous backdown on the issue of carbon pricing, the result in last year's federal election must have felt good to the 66-year-old environmental veteran. It's been a long road. Finally there appears to be the promise of movement on the climate front and, since Senators hold office for six years, little chance of the Coalition repealing any carbon price legislation once it has been passed by Parliament.

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 about to be introduced that allows farmers to offset costs associated with the planned carbon tax - rises in fuel and fertiliser prices, for example - which is tied to a plan called the Carbon Farming Initiative. Farmers are starting to pay attention to how they will be allowed to help mitigate climate change (despite a high level of scepticism in the bush about the cause of global warming).

The NSW Department of Primary Industries is kicking off the process of understanding just how this can be done by asking  farmers to place tenders for work they will conduct on their farms in order to study carbon sequestration. This work is essential for the purpose of learning how our farmers should in future be paid by the government for any carbon storage efforts they conduct on their farms.

The project is restricted to a small area in central NSW to the west of the town of Orange. It is being led by NSW DPI which has a long track record of sequestration research that includes looking at how biochar can store carbon in the soil. The current project needs at least 30 farmers to be involved so that it can begin. Farmers are being asked to put in tenders stating how much their work - to be conducted over a period of years - will cost the NSW government. Tenders will be run by the Lachlan Catchment Management Authority and paid for by NSW DPI.

Farmers will be paid for land use changes that sequester soil carbon. Such changes would include reducing cultivation, sowing permanent pastures or planting trees.

There's no mention of biochar in the story but I expect that NSW DPI will be anticipating some work done using this carbon sequestration method. If not, maybe they can suggest it to some of the participating farmers. Use of biochar in trials at NSW DPI's Wollongbar Research Station further north in the state have been going on for years. The main problem with it at the moment appears to be the high application rate required to achieve soil amelioration and also a shortage of available supplies. Biochar is made by burning organic matter in an oxygen-depleted environment at high temperatures, so the carbon it contains is 'fixed' and does not escape into the atmosphere through decomposition. It is an ideal storage method, but appears at the moment to be a bit dear.

I have written about biochar before and it's something that interests me as it possesses a dual efficacy: not only does it sequester carbon away from the atmosphere it also helps build soil structure. Soil structure is essential for healthy soil and for improving water use. We'll see how the NSW DPI and its collaborators go with this new project, if they get some biochar action happening, and whether they get a solid take-up from local farmers in the Orange area.

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 for gay marriage is a mere pose, a way to differentiate oneself from the Great Unwashed, a self-serving item of garnish whipped out from the cabinet of the elitist conformist and dabbed on the persona like parseley in a butcher's display, saying "I'm better than you, sod off".

This rant of Furedi's is published after New York State in the US legislated yesterday to allow gay marriage following a period of 30 days.

Furedi's spray is upsetting because it posits the feelings of those who disagree with gay marriage as the point of primary concern. We disagree with you therefore we believe we're better than you, so go back to your suburb and your midday soaps. Queue tears of frustrated rage from men and women in the middle class.

But it's not the whole story. Most people I know who support gay marriage do so because it is an equity issue. The real story behind the news here is the number of - especially young - people who find themselves on the outside of the social compact due to their homosexuality. It's not in the news because of the media's silent acknowledgement of youth suicide. When young people kill themselves, as they do all the time, the story never gets reported. This silence allows characters like Furedi to happily sound off on the issue of gay marriage as though it were merely a neighbourly spat over the back fence about tree litter.

But it's not. It's not about the actor who apologises for a homphobic comment by "coming out as an ardent supporter of gay marriage", as Furedi says. And it's not about "evangelicals ... being more troublesome than Muslims in their attitudes towards mainstream views". One is merely conforming in order to avoid being ostracised by the community that feeds them. The other merely takes the path of least resistance: the Bible says homosexuality is a sin and it's easier to question "mainstream views" than question the Bible, and God. These are inconsequential and venal peccadilloes in the face of the distressing loss of life among our youth who, faced with the bullies that abound in society, take an option that immediately removes them from anguish and sorrow.

A vote for gay marriage is not a vote for the views of the New York elite with their coffees and high fashion accessories and weekend visits to the Off-Broadway theatres. It's not a tug at the cultural forelock. It's a matter of basic human rights. It's an acknowledgement of the realpolitik of the suburban street, where "gay" is a term of automatic disparagement and suffering is real, and happening right now.

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, to be built in Queensland, secured $464 million toward construction of a 250MW plant. The other, for New South Wales, secured $306.5 million toward construction of a 150MW plant. Both of the deals come under the federal government's Solar Flagships program.

They are due to be completed an in service by 2015 but we've seen other Solar Flagships projects stall due to a refusal by the government to release funding as a result of incomplete execution. But these are details. Most important for Gillard at this point is to push through a dose of good news. In any case, by the time any hold-ups emerge the political climate can have altered a lot and the story may be a dead one, nothing to see here, move along.

Glitches in renewable power projects have usually been too soft to qualify for the feature spot in the media but with the carbon tax continuing its damaging run from the government's point of view, maybe the journos will keep an eye on how these two new projects develop. We'll see if the same sluggish pace that Solar Systems made in pursuit of its Victorian plant eventuates in these cases. Gillard is talking them up, which suggests some sort of commitment on the part of the government to making sure they run all the way through construction, commissioning and full-time operation with effective links to the existing power grid.

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 from this research trip into rural NSW.

I visited the Grafton museum on a day off. It was raining, as it is today, but not heavily. I parked my car in the centre of historical Grafton, down by the Clarence River (that unruly, swashbuckling serpent with its roots south west of Brisbane in what Queenslanders call the 'Granite Belt') outside the post office, and wandered back toward the cathedral of brick where a chorus of some sort was making itself heard. The water sloshed through the gutters and ran off the sodden nature strips into the grey road. A man told me that church is not free after asking me how much the entrance fee was, because you have to "give your life to it". He was a short and slightly grizzled gentleman of the sort you can find anywhere, not as florid as the petrol station attendant in Inverell whose red face spoke of innumerable cold nights.

When I wandered down to the river's edge I could hear the cattle bellowing across the strait. I stood in the drenched green grass listening to the kine low and scream. The grey distance made itself felt. I couldn't see the Grafton Bridge, or hear it. The only sound was the incessant rain and the voices of the cows across the water.  I took some more pictures and then asked a pair of elderly ladies how to find the museum. They told me it was in Fitzroy Street and off I trudged.

There are probably hundreds of such museums scattered across Australia. They have been established by citizens concerned with a disappearing inheritance. There is one in Gympie not far from where I live. Like the one in Gympie, this one contains thousands of items packed together in rough order. So, items that would have been found in a living room are all arrayed in a recreated living room. Items that would have been found in a bedroom are all arrayed in a recreated bedroom. There are tags describing in miniature print the identity of the item and who donated it. It's all very curious.

But not informative. You could easily remove 75 percent of the items from the museum without losing anything in terms of relevance. What is needed more than anything is some sort of curation. You need well-written signs pasted alongside the items you decide to keep. These signs should tell a story. The way things are inside these cabinets of curiosities you must stagger from one room to the next ghasping for breath, overwhelmed by the plethora of material and the paucity of consideration on the part of the designers.

In fact there is no design. Proof, if any were needed, is in the book cabinet off the living room. There, hundreds of old books sit on exposed shelves waiting for a learned nimble-finger to spirit away the choice volumes. Glass facings for the shelves must be given consideration if the running committee is not to end up losing valuable pieces from the city's past.

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 during the civil war (1936-39) and in Europe at the close of WWII. Gellhorn earned her stripes through connections to the Roosevelt White House and by reporting on poverty in America but she subscribed to universal values of human dignity and justice. And like Julian Assange, who has just been awarded the prize, she was controversial. She was married a number of times, most notably to the author Ernest Hemingway.

The award of the Marth Gellhorn prize to Julian Assange is good for Assange - it gives him needed support during a difficult period of his career as a journalist - and good for the prize - by raising awareness of it. It seems fitting that Assange should win it. Gellhorn had little patience with humbug and official posturing and created a reputation through grit and by consistently focusing her attention on important global concerns. Gellhorn's reputation is possibly greater than Assange's in terms of the quality of her writing - she pioneered literary journalism techniques that were only widely adopted 30 years after she began to use them - but the two sing from the same scoresheet when it comes to bucking the system.

Assange has recently been compelled by external events to lower his profile, leading to a reduced journalistic output, but new ventures that build on the foundation established by WikiLeaks have emerged in numbers. This means that there will be more radical transparency in future regardless of how the battle between Assange and the US Administration turns out. Gellhorn's reporting set a new standard for journalists everywhere. Assange continues to confound those who seek to blindfold the people and save the status quo. Gelhorn's example fuelled later generations of writers as they explored new ways of talking about the world. Assange is an inspiration to those who would change the world.

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 he declined to contest the order. Zee, a blogger at The Next Web, says that this is "key".

South Tyneside, a local authority in the northeast of England, hired a US law firm, McDermott Will & Emery, and filed a complaint in California in an attempt to uncover the identity of a person or persons calling himself (or themselves) "Mr Monkey".

Mark Stephens, a leading media lawyer who has represented Julian Assange, said it was inappropriate for a local authority to bring a suit in this manner. But the council through a spokesperson said it had a duty of care to protect its employees.

David Potts, a former Conservative leader who now serves as an Independent councillor said some of the claims made on the blog were "disgusting". Potts is one of those claiming defamation. The other people claiming defamation are the council's Labour leader Iain Malcolm, Labour councillor Anne Walsh, and Rick O'Farrell, the council's head of enterprise and regeneration.

According to the BBC:

Mr Potts said: "This is a deeply tawdry, perverted and seedy little blog that has been in existence for quite a while.

"It's no longer active, as I understand, but the information is still on the internet for all to see.

"This was a blog that didn't just affect councillors; it also affected council officers.

"We have a duty of care, as any employer does whether public or private, to defend not only our commercial interests, but also the interests of our employees.

"That's why we took the action, that's why we're pursuing it so aggressively, and I have no doubt that we will get there, and we will win.

"There have been many, many disgusting claims, which I won't repeat in order to protect my family and friends - allegations of corruption, sexual deviancy, of drug use."

The most recent post on the blog is dated 30 July 2009. It gives notice to readers that "From midnight tonight Mr Monkey will no longer be posting any new material on his blog".

Zee at The Next Web says that "there is a time wherein the person served with the subpoena, [Ahmed Khan, a UK council whistleblower,] in this case, can contest it.  He chose not to, so the subpoena request proceeded, Khan waived his right, and Twitter revealed the information.  If Khan had chosen not to waive his right, it would then be for the claimant [Tyneside Council], to convince the court to grant an order compelling Twitter to disclose the details. And for Khan to convince the Court otherwise".

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 deck following the emergence of multiple attacks on its integrity and the personal safety of its founder: 'Who is Bradley Manning?' A 20-minute video produced by 10 reporters at the Guardian lifts up the cover on this particular tome of secrets and goes some way toward explaining why Manning released classified military information to WikiLeaks and why he then gave himself away to the lurking presence in this drama: Adrian Lamo. Like Lamo, Manning is not a particularly heroic figure and one who is likely to be viewed by society as deeply flawed and slightly unpleasant.

One thing the video achieves is to show part of the reason why the US administration is intent on linking Manning and Assange together in a sort of conspiracy to spy on the US. It's an important achievement by the filmmakers as it reduces the burden of opprobrium that can reasonably be placed on the administration's shoulders. Manning's small-town background and his homosexuality neatly tie in with his aspiration to attend a prestigious US technology school, such as MIT in Boston. A kid from the boondocks in Oklahoma with a high IQ and an interest in computers from an early age, since his father bought him one, is likely to want to rub shoulders with the elite along the banks of the Charles rather than stay on Main Street with the hicks and their ingrained suspicion of anything out-of-the-ordinary. A military scholarship was the only way out. So he went to Boston. Did he meet Assange while he was there?

The picture at the top of this post shows Manning at an IT event in Boston surrounded by like-minded geeks. Manning is small of stature, is gay, and is smart. Therefore he was persecuted in the military and, the video tells us, was on the brink of discharge due to unfitness for service when staffing shortages led his superiors to deploy him to an operating base in Iraq. A peer in the video says he was completely unsuited to the military culture. He wanted something better.

Another peer describes the lax security amid the culture of copying in Iraq. There was plenty of opportunity to copy material and remove it from the secure confines of the operations room. This is mitigating evidence, as it says that Manning was not the only one in Iraq who did the wrong thing.

In December, Manning will be tried in a military court. It will be interesting to see what kind of information emerges at that time in the press to provide more detail about the administration's plans for Assange. Can the boys in Alexandria, Virginia, on the prosecution side establish a manifest link between Manning in Boston with Assange the white-maned Aussie globetrotter?

"Without information you cannot make informed decisions," wrote Manning at one point to Lamo during their online chat. It's a sophisticated response to an unusual situation, and mirrors almost exactly ideas present among journalists when they have their thinking caps on, when they're thinking about the real reason for their business. In Australia, the High Court said pretty much the same thing when it established a de facto First Amendment for this country during a famous court case involving the ABC and a New Zealand prime minister who felt that he had been defamed. Without political reporting there is no responsible government, the High Court said. Manning's mind is clearly his passport to the realm of the angels.

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. And social media more and more allows what were formerly faithful readers to talk to one another. And Rosen underscores the cause of his dismay by linking to a pithy cartoon which, he says, illustrates exqusitely what the problem is.

In the cartoon, a husband and wife are in bed with their laptops. In the first frame they voice a lack of regret about the recent demise of the news media. In the second frame, while the husband points at a cute video on his screen that involves a cat kissing a porcupine, his wife glances out the window and says: "Why are there black helicopters hovering over the house?" The subtext? "We warned you," the media is saying. If we're gone, your liberty is at risk.

I think there are two things that should be added to Rosen's post. The first is that while the MSM are foolish to describe bloggers as biased and socially inept loners doing their business is the basement of their mother's house, the fact is that most bloggers do not do original research before writing - unless it is using material that is available online already. I posted a few days ago about a person saying in a comment to a recent online column that journalism is just about aggregating information already available in cyberspace. It's not. And most bloggers only use what is already in cyberspace for their writing. Few actually make calls, find relevant subjects to interview, or venture out for a day or a week to a distant locality in order to gather the material required to write an original story.

So the MSM are overegging the mixture with their characterisation, but the result still tastes something like a cake.

The reason bloggers don't do much original research is that it's hard and costly. I may not be a pimply teenager in mum's basement, but I'm going to baulk at driving 300km and spending a day off work in order to get one interview for a story that might require five. Just finding those other four interview subjects might take weeks. It might take another few weeks to get one of those people on the line so the final interview can go ahead. These are the reasons journalism costs money. Time is money. At the end of the day, the journalist who spent five hours waiting for a contact to call back still has to eat dinner.

The second thing that needs to be said is that not all newspapers have fulfilled their trust with complete honesty. If journalists are resorting to highminded tropes (such as illustrated by the cartoon mentioned above) you'd expect them to always be highminded in their work. The fact is that they're not. There are some newspapers that are known to be sensationalist. Fair charge. There are some newspapers that are known to be biased one way or the other along the political spectrum. Again, fair charge. And as long as these traits are visible to at least some - the more observant reader, for example - then the media's claim to be somehow upholding democracy is going to be compromised and their special plea to the dwindling readership - "Please read me! I'm important!" - will lack volume. It's sort of like the triangle faintly heard amid the din of the brass section during a concert performance: you can hear it, but it's not the main feature.

So Rosen is wrong: journalists do things that are uniquely important. But Rosen is also right: the media have to lift their game or else they will continue to risk being thrown out of the main game.

And just back to the cartoon for a moment. What does it mean? If society becomes so severely polarised that government is no longer possible, does that mean the generals will emerge from their bunkers and ride atop tanks down Main Street? Possibly. There's a risk. But probably not.

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 few go behind a paywall they will of course lose readers). In the second case, with respect, it's a crock, because it's really about respect.

But the comment that stuck in my mind was Gregory's, in which he said that he will never pay for "content" that he "look up easily" himself. He goes on to describe in a bit more detail what he thinks is involved in journalism:

I will pay for someone else to troll through the evergrowing pile of data and pick out the good stuff, then catogorize it and put it into a searchable index form.

And I just sigh inwardly.

What is involved in writing a story? Do you just search Google and collect a bunch of material already in the public domain (with or without rewriting to avoid abusing someone else's copyright)?

No, not a bit of it.

Here's an example. In late March I drove for two hours south of where I live in my car to meet a government employee at his place of work. We talked for two hours on the record (that is, with a digital recording device running to capture what was said). I drove back home (picking up lunch at McDonalds on the way) and loaded the recordings to my computer. I then transcribed the whole of the recordings to text, manually (there's no other way to do this).

Then I sat on the story for a while, thinking about treatment. What direction should the story take? Should I get opposing views?

I contacted a private company eventually that is involved in the same product development as I spoke to the government guy about. Over two weeks or more we swapped emails and even spoke on the phone a couple of times trying to line up an interview with their spokesperson. I expect to talk to them tomorrow.

Meanwhile, on the story development side, there were other phone calls with potential interview subjects during the two months that have passed since I did the original interview. Lots of internet searches. A few more phone calls. A Twitter convo that turned out to be a dead end. A Twitter convo that raised a quote. More emails, more phone calls, more dead ends. A possible promise of an interview.

Then another interview was conducted on the record. A win, at last, two weeks ago. (But with a caveat: the interview subject wants me to run the clips I use from the conversation by him for an OK before publication.) Now I'm sitting here wondering if I need another point of view to balance out the scale of judgement. (Balance is, we're told at journalism school, a virtue.)

So, Gregory, we have here hours of real work over a period of two months in order to generate content that is completely original and unprecedented (as far as I know), and that will never be published on the internet (I guess, although this publisher occasionally puts up my stories online as well as in print). Go figure, Gregory. Go and try to find this information ANYWHERE and I will pay for your petrol for a year. Journalism is not about "aggregating" "content". At its best it's about doing the hard yards with intelligence and a sense of responsibility: to your readers, to your editor, to your interview subjects, to their organisations, to yourself.

And unlike opinion, it's not cheap.

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 in Glebe just behind the big Grace Bros store which is now a Mirvac shopping centre. Then, there was no gargantuan parking station with its lofty pedestrian bridge leading back toward the front door of Glebe's legendary food strip. In those days there was a printing shop owned by a bloke who sailed at my dad's club, a low-rise parking area, and mostly-empty streets that echoed down to Ultimo like the chambers of doom. You could hear people walking from two hundred metres away.

I used to ride my pushbike into town down Broadway and George Street of an evening; jostling for space with a hundred busy cars I would pull up opposite Hoyts near Town Hall and enter Gould's emporium, and while away hours fossicking for treasures among the comics just arrived from the States and the eclectic collection of fiction published in San Francisco in the 1960s.

Later, when I worked as a salesman for a publishing company, I would visit Gould's shop in Leichhardt where a similar chaos reigned. There, lined up near the shop's entrance, sat a long series of tables stacked with LPs sporting the garish covers of disco legend, and the unseemly plethora of bands competed sadly - like all the items in Gould's have done since the beginning - for the shifting attention of the lazy shopper. I sold Gould a few books. But the mainstream range of titles I was tasked with purveying was not completely suitable for his clientele. People didn't go to Gould's to buy Wilbur Smith. They went because they wanted to be surprised and because - you never knew - Gould might just have in stock the title you had been searching for for months.

I would later pass by Gould's Newtown bookshop on my way to lunch or a movie when I worked at Sydney Uni. The format was of course the same. The stock refreshed from second-hand sales. The system chaotic. The vibe was one of handled-paperback grunge and a kind of Sisyphean mnemonic: a hundred years of good intentions stacked to the roof inside a structure with all the charm of a country barn. What lies ahead for this typically Sydney emporium I don't know. I do know that the city will be poorer if it disappears, and we will have lost one more link with a strange past that deserves our considered attention.

Pic credit: candytrip.

On a post by Annabel Crabb at The Drum, I made a comment (just one among 52 that were made yesterday). Her post is about reader payment for journalism. There were a couple of follow-up comments to mine but the real debate is yet to start due to media managers' ongoing concerns about alienating readers and losing traffic to competitors.

--------------------

The print media everywhere is currently trying to work out how to "monetise" what is more and more often being called "content". For freelance journalists such as me, who write stories and get paid a per-word rate for it (e.g. 75 cents a word for 800 words), this uncertainty translates into difficulty getting income. Some publications have cut their freelance budgets, or eliminated them entirely. Other publications voluntarily offer a rate that is inadequate for the purpose of recompensing the freelancer for their work.

Paywall models have appeared. There's The Times in the UK where you can pay 1 pound to get access to the website for a day. This model has been criticised for being too restrictive. Then there's the more recent New York Times model where you get sent to a subscription page after exhausting a certain number of clicks per month. Stuff, in other words, is being tried. The fact is that display ads online are not compensating publications for the loss of printed ads.

At some point readers are going to have to pay to read a story, if only to prevent freelancers from being squeezed out of business. The fact is that if you value a quality story you should consider who made it, how much time it took to make it, and the specific skills involved in making it. It takes time and effort to acquire the skills needed to write a good story. It takes time and effort to write the story (writing is the least part; there's also finding and contacting interview subjects, lining up interviews, research, interviewing, transcribing, and administration).

Maybe there needs to be a universal payment engine, not one owned by a specific publication. A universal engine of this kind could be used many times daily by readers as they negotiate the internet. A couple of clicks could serve to deduct the few necessary dollars or cents from an account linked to the reader's credit card, for example. But it would have to work on all websites. All websites would have to agree that this would work for them, and put the requisite link on the story page. It has to be quick, hassle-free, and universal. I know that Google has thought about this. There's also been a group of media owners in the US who have thought about it.

But basically readers have to be more appreciative, in a financial sense, of the work involved in producing what they consume. Briefly, the better a story is, the more time it took to write. A freelancer may have a dozen stories "on the go" at any one time. Each day he or she touches on many of those stories. It takes time. It takes effort. And it's a highly-skilled craft that takes time to learn.

I will not be posting to this blog for the forseeable future. This decision was not taken lightly but is the result of considered reflection over a period of some time. The reason for the indefinite suspension of posting is that I need more time to look after my fitness, which has been neglected in recent years for a variety of reasons, one of which is the daily need to post on the blog. So thanks for reading, if you are a regular. Even irregular readers are due my gratitude. This has been an instructive and rewarding epxerience for a period of almost exactly five years, and I look back on those years with affection. I have honed my writing skills, the blog helped me get my first journalism gig, and it has also assisted in developing an understanding of the nature of the public sphere. So farewell. Until anon. Perhaps.

Review: The Big Fella, Peter Thompson and Robert Macklin (2009)

I suppose that a book about a company as famous as mining giant BHP Billiton should focus on the machinations of senior executives as they negotiate such pitfalls as poor investments, corporate takeovers and mergers and acquisitions. There is a certain thrill to be experienced in reading about their decisions about whether to go ahead with one thing or another as their company grows from nothing with German prospector Charles Rasp clomping around the far-west of New South Wales with his eyes fixed firmly on the ground, to a $30 billion behemoth with stock exchange listings in Sydney and London and employing tens of thousands of people. Hence the subtitle: 'The Rise and Rise of BHP Billiton'.

And it certainly is interesting to learn that Billiton, which is the partner firm most Australians would be less familiar with, was a South African company that had its roots in tin mining on the island of Belitung in what is now Indonesia. There's enough material in the book to satisfy the curiosity of anyone interested in such arcana. It was certainly enough for me.

But the book suffers from two faults: an excess of facts and the lack of a driving narrative. Journalist-reviewers might applaud the fact that we often get an inside line on information about goings-on behind usually closed doors, but I felt that the carefully-modulated utterances of recent executives who are talking about colleagues still-living suffer from the same credibility problem as soundbites made by politicians on the campaign trail. It's all a bit too surreal and clubby. You frequently yearn for more substance.

There are some interesting leads that the authors unfortunately refused to follow up, such as the nepotistic proximity of BHP to the Liberal government of Robert Menzies. A few facts are revealed with some fanfare - "you heard it here first" - but the leads go cold quickly. And while the authors declare at the outset that there was no editorial control by either company during the writing of the book, the fact that such potentially-embarrassing leads are left alone leaves you wondering about the strength of the authors' backbones.

Compared with the volume of material that is disclosed when dealing with business events, the amount of material dedicated to unfavourable leads like this is deeply disappointing. Other areas which the authors leave largely alone are the Ok Tedi mine disaster (where millions of tonnes of toxic tailings were discharged directly into the Fly River in Papua New Guinea, severaly damaging the ecosystem), the AWB scandal (where BHP facilitated the supply of a shipment of wheat from Australia to Iraq during the period when a UN trade embargo applied to dealings with the pariah nation) and, most damaging perhaps, BHP's role in managing the Howard government's response to the challenges of climate change.

Both authors are former journalists. They are not used to managing long narratives, but rather are familiar with short ones. For this reason a lot of the book feels like an extended feature article. One major problem with this method is that the reader is constantly surprised by names that had been introduced earlier in the piece but whose relevance the reader has subsequently forgotten. In a 1000-word feature this is easy to counter: you just scroll back up the story until you find the first reference to the peron. In a book running to 500 pages you just shrug and concede defeat and plow on, remaining ignorant of which Bob or David is being talked about at that particular point. This is a failing of method and it is routine in this book.

But beyond this weakness there is an overriding lack of narrative theme. The journalists have decided to pack the book with every available fact and just forge ahead using time as the main ordering principle. It doesn't work. The book is fragmented and often seems repetitive because the strong editorial hand is missing from it. It could have been a really gripping read if the authors had possessed more long-form experience. Unfortunately, they don't and so the reader is faced with trawling through pages and pages of unimportant detail in search of the theme that will make everything make sense. It's just not there.

Regardless, it's a book that any Australian with curiosity about the social, environmental and economic performance of a major mining company can profitably read. It's a page-turner at times. It's just that sometimes it seems that the authors are more interested in being seen to be experienced insiders than they are in showing the truth about an industry that will cintinue to be controversial well into the industrial future that awaits us all.

Oh dear.

The holidays have not even ended and already I've got a gripe, and not a trivial one. The attack, by journalist Brigid Delaney, on inner-city types who go to art galleries and wear tight jeans and sand shoes is another example of the kind of reaction against progressives that we have already seen from Christian Lander, author of Stuff White People Like. Back in my days of youthful experimentation, the run-of-the-mill progressives who favoured Newtown over wherever they originated from (Brisbane or Dubbo), were dubbed by us "droogs". The term derived from the 1971 Kubrick film A Clockwork Orange but unlike the Droogs in the film our droogs were just the routine latte-sipping trendoids who got shit-faced at friends' parties at squats in Pyrmont then went to work in the public service on Monday like everyone else. Like the bogans.

The thing that Delaney and Lander forget about the inner-city type is that he or she often came from somewhere else, gravitating to those parts of the big cities of Australia because of an often-inchoate yearning for a better way of living. There may now be critical mass in some areas. The election of Adam Bandt, of the federal seat of Melbourne, to the Lower House of Parliament, is merely the result of decades of demographic shifting in that part of town. When I was young and living in a share house in Newtown there was little choice for droogs: it was Sydney or Melbourne and nothing else. Now, the same shift is no doubt occurring in other major urban centres in Australia. The thing to remember is that the change was a long time coming. And it was never, for the individual, a sure thing.

The barriers that used to exist that worked against a shift to the inner city were significant. We called these people droogs in a humorous vein, considering them to be just nice, middle-class kids with grungy pretensions (and this was a long time before Pearl Jam appeared). But the progressive impulse, which both Lander and Delaney choose to lambast, is often the result of a long period of gestation. During this period the individual can go through a process of soul-searching as they decide what to do to mitigate the sense of ennui that regular suburban life engenders in them. As I said, it's not usually a sure thing, although it suits glib pastiche to redeploy those motivations in such a way as to make them small enough to criticise. As such, the criticism is essentially facile.

The cute duality that Delaney sets up - between the bogan and the intellectual - ignores the rather depressing fact that bogans overwhelmingly outnumber intellectuals. Many intellectuals came from bogan families and then rebelled at the end of their teens. A far smaller number were privileged to grow up with parents who respected their ideas and gave license to alternative life choices. Most broke out of the bogan straight jacket in order to "find themselves" in a more congenial environment - this they knew to exist at the very centre of the major conurbations. It takes a large city to support a droog, whereas a bogan can live anywhere, even in such inhospitable places as Karratha or Rockhampton.

The thing is that the intellectual, the droog, is still a minority and intellectual types like Lander and Delaney should know better than to slip the knife in where it can do real damage. They should know that, on the streets, people who look different still get hurt.

If ever there were proof of how necessary WikiLeaks is in the modern world, it's action flic The Losers (dir Sylvain White, 2010), a fantasy based on a comic series of the same name published by DC Comics from 2004 in which "a team of special forces soldiers ... declare war on the Central Intelligence Agency after their Agency handler tries to assassinate them". The film opens during an operation the group are carrying out in Bolivia against a drug baron, which carries loud echoes of Oliver North's Iran-Contra scam, in which proceeds of illegal sales of arms to Iran were diverted to rebels in Nicaragua fighting against the Sandinista junta ruling there. Manuel Noriega, the ex-president of Panama, was indicted for drug smuggling as part of the affair and served time in a Miami prison before being extradicted to France to face further charges there. It was a nasty chapter in America's foreign affairs and one that we would do well to remember now, as the WikiLeaks debacle unfolds in the media.

The original DC Comics series, also called The Losers, dealt with a group of WWII soldiers and began in 1970. The shift to the CIA signals popular awareness that while war continues in peacetime, it's carried out by clandestine operatives in secret.

The film is not at all realistic. Notable in this regard is the way the men in the team seem so readily to recover from serious injury sustained during their adventures. It's also formulaic. When Clay (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) meets Aisha (Zoe Saldana) they fight ruthlessly in a seedy Bolivian motel until it burns to the ground. Outside, Aisha then blithely tries to conscript Clay's support for a revenge attack Aisha plans to carry out against Max (Jason Patric), the CIA boss who betrayed the team. A romance also develops (yawn), which will figure largely in the (otherwise thin) plot due to Roque's (Idris Elba) suspicions about this shadowy female who effectively infiltrates their tight-knit group.

Yes, the plot is thin and yes it's pretty incredible based, as it is, on the existence of a lethal weapon of mass destruction that uses sonics to destroy a target without generating harmful waste. It's Max's goal to secure enough of the WMDs to allow him to create a terrorist threat in the community because it's in his interest as a member of the secret agency he works for to have people scared and willing to tolerate further impositions by the administration on their freedoms. As such, the movie also contains echoes of the spin-doctoring that took place ahead of the American invasion of Iraq, when governments throughout the West used devious public relations methods to convince their electorates to support a military action that had no other rationale than finishing off George Bush's incomplete 1990-1991 Gulf War.

It's part of the beauty of basing a movie on a comic that you don't need to worry too much about verisimilitude. But the other comic legacy is the underlying humanity of Clay's team and the way they function as a group. They all agree that justice must be served and they believe that they are the best-qualified to ensure that it is. They act from consensus, while Max is temperamentally brittle and capricious, and rude to those who serve him. They value their freedom but target only those who they believe are acting contrary to the best interests of society. It's a simple equation, but interesting nonetheless. The film is all action, most of which is completely outlandish (as when sniper Cougar (Oscar Jaenada) punctures the petrol tank of the motor bike Max's lieutenant Wade (Holt McCallany) is riding on so that he catapaults directly into the jet engine of the plane that is about to take off, carrying Roque to safety with his ill-gotten billion dollars). But it's not meant to be believeable stuff. It's meant purely to entertain. Apart from that, it contains multiple messages about the way that governments go about business that, if they were widely known, would without doubt be labelled illegal.

And why are they called 'The Losers'? Because they believe in things that the majority of people can understand. It's a question of morals.

It's hard to believe that it actually rained again this morning. Last night, as the fireworks went off at Mooloolaba in front of the tourist holiday lets, there was more light rain a-falling. It got heavier towards midnight and the streets were wet this morning. Then more sprinkles of precipitation around breakfast-time. It's a sign the drought has broken.

Up north, they say that an area the size of New South Wales is under water. Other pundits in the media say it's an area the size of France and Germany combined. All that water, which fell over the past week, sometimes in veritable torrents that crashed from the sky accompanied by thunder and lightning, is now draining seawards down creeks and rivers that have swollen to record volumes. Houses and businesses are expecting the flood to subside in Emerald in the next few days. Down the Fitzroy River - which they say constitutes Australia's second-largest catchment after the Murray-Darling system - seaside Rockhampton (pop 75,000) waits for the water to arrive.

Those in the food industry will tell you that prices for vegetables in Australia's major south-eastern cities will rise as a result of the wash-out. We can also expect that some of the water will have started to drain toward the wouth-west, toward Lake Eyre in South Australia, where already last year heavy rain brought water not seen thereabouts in a decade. While some will applaud because the drought has finally broken, others will short-term rue the deluge and raise their fists in anger at the gods. Eheu! At least the grass is thriving.