Sydney fireworks, New Year’s Eve

The first five photos in the 42 images that follow were taken at the end of 2008 from the north side of Sydney Harbour from a vantage point near Luna Park. These images, taken while I was facing southeast, shows the final, stunning, release of explosives into the air above the bridge. This is the usual kind of photo that you see when people shoot fireworks. There is nothing remarkable about these images or what they contain.

The second lot of five photos were taken a year earlier, during the kids’ fireworks display on the final day of 2007. This display starts at 9pm. The remaining 32 photos were made during the fireworks that erupted at around midnight on New Year’s Eve, 2007. These 37 photos are the images that interest me because of what they say – when compared to the more conventional photos I would take a year later – about my state of mind at the time.

2008 was a difficult year, one that included a period of several months of extreme suffering followed by recovery to equilibrium. That year at work I had a new manager, Anita Hoving who, it seemed to me, had, at some point in my career in the organisation, taken a dislike to me. I had a mental breakdown though somehow kept my job.

The three months leading up to October were cataclysmic, as the nature of the later photos shown in this post demonstrates. It is symptomatic of how I was, in myself, before and after this crisis that the 2007 photos are more experimental. I was deliberately trying to achieve unusual effects whereas a year later I was happy to go with the flow. I had been schooled by experience. Suffering dulls creativity.

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The thing about fireworks is the way they provide the illusion of destruction and the final photos shown below convey some of the feelings that you might have if you were watching something being destroyed. There is a feeling of awe rather than, in the case of the first five photos, less complex feelings such as can be inspired if we see something that is merely beautiful. The armaments mounted by professionals on the bridge can create, if seen in a certain way, a form of spectacle informed by horror. Hence our delight; Edmund Burke reflected on this in an essay he wrote in the mid-18th century that was published in 1757, two years before the British would take Montreal and less than a generation before the American Revolution happened (the two events are decisively linked).

People can be inspired by a suggestion of ruin that accompanies the end of the calendar year, and by its corollary: rebirth. Death as the origin of life is an old trope and it reminds us of one of the critical aspects of reproduction. Physical release can be transcendent not just once but twice, the second time in the fact of children, who can bring you – once the difficulties of youth are overcome – a great deal of enjoyment. They can also provide a source of comfort in old age and, of course, they live on after you are dead (everything else being equal). Immortality is a kind of transcendence that, in this proxy form, can be achieved by most people.

For the 9pm shots I was down under the Harbour Bridge in the Rocks (at Dawes Point, to be precise) looking up through the supporting beams of that august structure. Then with a friend I moved up the hill to Observatory Hill next to the motorway that feeds the bridge’s span. On the grass hundreds of people, some with video cameras, were watching the display. Others wore lights they had bought from street touts who flog this kind of stuff at such events. The photos taken from this vantage point were taken facing north, with one taken by turning around and looking at the city’s skyscrapers.

Only after retirement do public figures say what they really think

This survey ran for almost four months: from 14 August to 5 November. Times used are Australian Eastern Standard Time (AEST) except after 6 October, when they are in Australian Eastern Daylight Time (AEDT).

I started the survey because it really gets my goat when public figures come out and say controversial things – things that they actually believe in – only after they retire from their jobs. Why don't these people have the courage of their convictions and say something when they have a chance of making the changes they, evidently, want to see? Or are they hypocrites?

The truth is that people follow the herd and politicians are no different from the rest of us. They stick to the approved script because it is in their interest to do so, and because it is human nature to do so. We are social animals and our survival has always depended on our ability to conform to the values of the collective. The standouts – the artists, and inventors – have therefore always had a hard time of it.

I started this survey with the case of Julie Bishop – the former foreign minister under the Liberals – who was quoted by the Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) on 14 August. The story includes this:

Former deputy Liberal leader Julie Bishop says women need to take up 50 per cent of federal parliamentary seats before the toxic misogyny she witnessed during her 20-year political career ends.

Her party, which is conservative, had signally failed to appoint female ministers to its cabinet under a series of prime ministers. They had also poo-poohed the Labor Party and its calls for quotas for women. The Liberals had always insisted that people would be promoted based solely on merit and this had led to a low proportion of their party room being women, let alone their cabinets.

A former federal government department head named Martin Parkinson got a piece in The Conversation on 27 August about inequality. In it he deplored the number of generations during which some families in Australia remained poor. Parkinson had been in office under the Liberal party, which had signally failed to help the disadvantaged and who had, indeed, introduced a draconian program in the department responsible for welfare payments. Under the program, the recipient’s records were compared with data from the tax office, but this matching was done by software, leading to a large number of people being falsely accused of ripping off the government. Some had even suicided due to the pressure resulting from receiving a letter from the department.

Then there was the enduring matter of climate change. On 5 September I saw a tweet from Asher Moses, a former Sydney Morning Herald journalist, who said, “Former Head of the Australian Coal Association Ian Dunlop tells it like it is about the upcoming collapse.” The tweet came with a link to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s (ABC) News web page that had a clip from an episode of the evening current affairs program ‘The Business’. The guest for the interview was the person Moses had mentioned in his tweet. In the interview, Dunlop called for businesses to take a firmer stand on climate change, saying that if nothing is done then the risks are extreme.

The idea of someone from the coal lobby campaigning for renewable energy was rich, but others were getting in on the act as well, including John Hewson, a former Liberal politician. On 11 September at 4.42am the Guardian tweeted a story with the comment, “John Hewson urges Liberal conscience vote on climate emergency motion.” At 6.17am Denise Shrivell, a person who routinely criticised the media, retweeted this with a comment of her own, “Anyone else think we missed a good PM here?” The idea of Hewson – who is a serial offender in my books, always nowadays coming out with some canard to throw at the conservatives he used to support – backing renewables was rich in the extgreme.

Hewson was back in the news on 10 October at 9.47am when Stephanie Dowrick, a prolific tweeter and a progressive, tweeted, “’PM turns his back on ordinary Australians.’ Exceptionally strong comment from #JohnHewson - surely now most cogent, best-informed commentator from the once-‘Liberal’ side of politics. @smh @theage This quality is what we want far more of.” Dowrick’s tweet came with a link to an opinion piece on the website of the Sydney Morning Herald (SMH; like The Age owned by Channel Nine, an Australian media company) that attacked the prime minister over his relations with Donald Trump and with China, and the government’s lack of action on climate change. He also wondered aloud about the likelihood of being dragged into further conflict in the Middle East. The first paragraph went:

Prime Minister Scott Morrison would have us believe that he is putting Australia "first", and is governing primarily to reflect the values and aspirations of the "quiet Australians" he would also have us believe gave him his "miracle" election win.

It is always hard for me to work out whether Hewson in his little sallies is being ironic or not, considering his past performance in office. The narrative that he seems to be peddling is that the Liberals have gone over further to the right since Hewson left office, and the current PM is a symptom of this trend. I don’t really see much evidence that this is the case, but many people in the community agree with him.

If you can credit it, I also saw a former diplomat (named Bruce Haigh) campaigning for refugees. He tweeted on 9 September at 10.33pm, “#QandA #Biloela Administrative Appeals Tribunal stacked with LNP supporters/sympathisers. Other courts looked only at the law and not the merits of the claims. Zed [Seselja] you are ill informed and a dope. I say this after this after 25 years in [the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade] and 6 years on the [Regulatory Review Tribunal].”

This comment was made in relation to a family of asylum seekers from Sri Lanka the government was trying to return to their country of origin. The case caused an uproar in the public sphere and it was discussed widely on TV shows. The Liberal and Labor parties had both adopted, after decades of debate in public about refugees who arrive near the coast of the continent by boat, a policy that mandated offshore detention.

In regard to refugees, the former head of the Immigration Department’s media named Sandi Logan (Sandi is a man) was getting hot under the collar. On 18 September at 9.37am I saw a tweet from Dowrick that included this, “The big muzzle: how a Govt turns information into propaganda.” The tweet came with a link to a story on the website of Crikey, a news outlet owned by Melbourne company Private Media, that had that as its headline. The article was by Bernard Keane, whose work I like. It included quotes from Logan. The story included this:

“Increasingly, Coalition governments are seeking to impose muzzles and very short leads and sometimes impose complete regimes of silence on their departments, and specifically on their department’s media teams,” Logan says in his distinctive Canadian accent, “and we’re really in trouble.”

The irony here of course is that the Immigration Department had been very solid in cracking down on employees who veered from the approved line. In fact, a woman named Michaela Banerji had been sacked from her job in Logan’s work unit for voicing publicly opinions at variance with the department’s official line on refugees.

Former cops were also getting in on the act. On 17 September a story appeared on the website of the Sydney Morning Herald about the former police commissioner of NSW, Andrew Scipione. He retired in 2017 and was being reported now as calling for the decriminalisation of amphetamines and ecstasy, saying “the system isn't working”.

He … had personal experience when he tried to find a treatment facility for a friend's adult son whose addiction had spiralled out of control and he was in trouble with police. 

"I saw this man, who was a good man, change overnight," Mr Scipione said. When they tried to find a room, there was nothing. 

"We couldn't get one. I couldn't get one. I am the commissioner of police. And what does that say for others ... that's an indictment. 

"It should be easier to get help than find a drug dealer," Mr Scipione said, borrowing a line frequently cited by Dr Alex Wodak, a leading campaigner for decriminalisation of drugs.

Also on 18 September an article appeared on the website of Ten Network by a former Australian Federal Police commissioner named Mick Palmer. The article was in favour of pill testing at music festivals and concerts. His profile page on the website describes him as a spokesperson for the Take Control campaign for safer, saner drug laws.

Journalists who, for decades, had lived high off the fat of the land now professed to have a sense of right and wrong. On 20 September at 6,11pm former journalist Mike Carlton tweeted, “Yes, I’m old and cranky. 50 years a journalist. Done Canberra, Indonesia, Vietnam, London, Washington. And more. Done the White House (Reagan). So I’m gonna be extra cranky about suckholing ‘journalism’ on this wanky Morrison odyssey.” The reference was to the visit by Prime Minister Scott Morrison to Washington to see the US president, Donald Trump.

Then on 7 October, starting at around 6.30pm, the ABC’s ‘The Drum’ account tweeted words from Stephen Duckett, a former secretary of the federal Department of Health, that had been spoken on-air during the evening’s broadcast. His comments follow below.

“The rebate for private health insurance is about letting someone in the public health system have shorter waiting times for elective surgery.”  

“There’s a handful of greedy doctors who drive the private health excesses… roughly 7% of doctors account for 89% of all out-of-pocket costs.”  

"Unlike any other insurance, if you take out private health insurance, you have more out-of-pocket expenses."  

“If I had cancer, the pathway I'd want is the public system. I know I might have to wait an extra week or two, but I think in the end the quality of care would be better.”  

"If a 25-year-old could accurately predict their use of private health insurance, their premium would be half what it currently is."

Globally, leaders are exactly the same as they are in Australia. Does anyone else think that Mikhail Gorbachev in calling for nuclear disarmament is being just a tad hypocritical? On 5 November at 1.31pm Tim Wright, treaty coordinator of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017, tweeted, “The former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev urges all countries to declare that nuclear weapons should be destroyed.” The tweet came with a link to a video on the BBC’s website with the kicker, “The former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev has warned that current tension between Russia and the West is putting the world in ‘colossal danger’ due to the threat from nuclear weapons.”

All of these things were summed up for me by a couple of tweets that I saw around this time. I was listening to the ABC’s news channel on the TV on the morning of 8 September when a man started talking about how organisations that reward loyalty invariably become oligarchies. I looked this up online and found a page on Wikipedia titled ‘Iron law of oligarchy’ that talks about the theory of a German sociologist named Michels. The theory dates from 1911.

So corruption is inevitable as long as people are involved. The mob rules. The individual is crushed. In this vein, on 8 September at 8am I saw a retweet from a US account that regularly posts about the media and politics. The tweet she had sent was from a person called Ken Montenegro from Utah and it said, “The most dangerous silence is the silence people keep until it's ‘safe’ to break it.” ‘Nuf sed ..

Book review: Where the Jackals Howl, Amos Oz (1980)

Originally published in Hebrew in 1965, this is the author’s first published work of fiction and it is ravishingly good on that account. Oz died in 2018 and I have written about his work before but it always strikes me, when I read his prose, how competent he was at what he did. I can’t understand why he never got the Nobel.

This collection of stories derives for its inspiration from the desert, where Oz lived for part of his life on a kibbutz. The jackal follows the reader from one story to the next, popping up like a refrain to enliven your experience. And you can feel the author’s youth in these stories – he was about 26 at the time they were first published in his native tongue – and there furthermore is a kind of ellipsis in some of them, a gap where things seem to happen outside the reader’s sight. Violence is never far from the surface and the thing that is left out is usually some form of extreme action that serves to turn the narrative in a new direction.

Having spent some time in Israel and in other Middle Eastern countries, I intuitively recognised the characters that Oz creates. For me, reading this book at this time, it was like returning to a place I had already been to.

The last story in this collection – ‘Upon this Evil Earth’ – is different from the others as it is not set in a modern Israel, rather, instead, it is a kind of parable set in a mythical past. It is stupendous, however, a great shining jewel of a story ..

My copy of the book is part of an edition brought out by Vintage in 2005, and I bought it from the Co-op Bookshop.

Book review: The Clash of Fundamentalisms, Tariq Ali (2002)

I read up to page 256 many years ago and I thought, a few days ago, that this book might be worth revisiting but I was mistaken: this is a tendentious screed only justified by the stupidity of the US administration in preparing to invade Iraq. I even hadn’t remembered anything from the time of my first reading, which would have happened at least a decade ago.

The cover of the book has a Warhol-style montage with George W Bush’s face photoshopped with a beard and cap (taqiyah) to make the (then) US president look like a mullah. The message is clear and reflects feelings that were shared by many in many communities at the time about the US’ approach to radical Islam following 9/11.

But the problems with the book go much deeper than any general unease about the “coalition of the willing” – which included the UK as well as Australia in addition to the US – invading Iraq. The book is evidence of a fairly conventional but misguided understanding of economic realities. Ali blames Capital for all the evils of the world, including the attacks on the Twin Towers. This despite the fact that hundreds of thousands of men, women and children from the developing world annually migrate to developed countries seeking out opportunities to prosper in pluralistic democracies. Ali’s view is, unfortunately, shared by many but it is deeply flawed as the problems that beset the frail and corruption-filled polities of so many countries reflect mostly indigenous failures to adequately manage the polis. 

But you find so many, especially in the developing world, who share Ali’s ideas. Their countrymen and -women however reveal a different truth when they move to live in Australia or the US or to Canada or France. This is the real mark of value, but no country can ever learn the lessons it needs to understand in order to thrive. Each country must make the same mistakes as every other country, just as a parent cannot save his or her children from making the same mistakes he or she made in his or her own youth.

I didn’t read as much of the book the second time around. The section on the author’s childhood is, like the other parts of the book I read this time, boring and over-long.

Visual disturbances: Six

These photos were taken, on 3 August 2008, while I was visiting the capital of the state of Victoria. At some point during the afternoon or late morning on that day I walked from Melbourne’s central business district to the suburb of Fitzroy. Later that day, in the evening as it was getting dark, I walked to Carlton, another inner-city enclave.

This photo of a burning motorcycle taken that day at 1.07pm, from the doorway of a restaurant on Johnston Street in Fitzroy, neatly echoes the theme of armed revolt that emerges in what follows below. (I don’t remember, unfortunately, what I ate for lunch.)

The rest of the photos that are shown below were taken between 5.37pm and 6.15pm. The final shot shows Drummond Street as seen from the front door of Carlton’s La Mama Theatre, where I went to see a play. I don’t remember too much about that day, but the play’s title is ‘Three Oaks’. Its final performance at the theatre was on 10 August, so this must be the one (I looked up the details online). The playwright’s name is Monica Raszewski.

That evening’s migrant theme fits a pattern as my grandfather, who came to this country from Africa in around 1925, was from the earliest parts of his sojourn in Melbourne – which would last until his death in 1979 – a staunch supporter of the Carlton Football Club. He died a few years after the revolution in what is now Mozambique but which, when he had lived there, was called Portuguese East Africa. 

"Self taught to speak and read English and proud of it," wrote my father Peter in his memoir (which he started in the early 90s in his retirement), "I understand that my father’s view of the world was that the British knew the best way to govern and both he and Maria Nazaré (his sister) desired to have English spouses and live in English speaking countries.” This expressed sentiment could, of course, merely indicate the bias that influenced my father’s memory. We’ll never know.

In 2011, dad died from septicaemia stemming from refractory (stubborn) urosepsis which, it is recorded on his death certificate, existed for two years prior to his demise. Before entering the nursing home in 2009 he been forced, for a period of about two years, to empty his bladder using catheters inserted into his penis. Eventually, he had a permanent catheter installed so that he could micturate. Dad also had Alzheimer’s disease, which had marked his life for at least three years.

So we never knew for sure why Joao Luis left the home he grew up in, although he did go on a long trek overland when he was 18, visiting different countries, including South Africa, where his sister ended up living.

There were more mysteries about my father’s parents that in time I learned about, but this one remains intact. No-one in the Portuguese arms of the family knows the answer to the question. Joao Luis’ father had been the chief of police in the colonial capital, so Joao Luis had been practically guaranteed a comfortable life if he had chosen to remain at home but perhaps, in addition to admiring our British heritage, he anticipated by 50 years the upheavals.

I was born in Melbourne but grew up in Sydney. When I was 10 days old my mother, with me in her arms and my brother in tow, relocated to the capital of New South Wales. In these photos you can see some of Melbourne’s wide streets which, when the city was designed, were set out in a regular grid. This pattern extends right across the city and contrasts starkly with Sydney’s disorganised road network, which grew haphazard from a tiny core at the end of the 18th century. 

Book review: The Face of War, Martha Gellhorn (1987)

The publishing history of this book needs some explanation to start out with. Gellhorn was in Spain in 1936 during the civil war that served as a prelude to WWII. Her stories were published in the US. Then she was in other parts of Europe to cover the end of the larger conflict. The latter parts of this book involve coverage of war in Israel and also conflicts in Vietnam and in Nicaragua. So, 50 years of writing from war zones. There are a couple of articles about the meetings that wound up WWII as well.

In all of her articles, Gellhorn is scrupulously honest and candid although she also betrays her own biases when furnishing material for the stories. This is unfortunate but hardly surprising, given the nature of what she witnessed. Her method is to deploy colour in the style of literary journalism, and she carries it off with aplomb. You see and hear things that would otherwise, in the hands of a less engaged journalist, be elided or obscured. She is very concerned to report on the lives of women and children.

Looking at the past through this kind of lens is educational, and so this book can be recommended for anyone who wants to know how today’s political – and geopolitical – domain compares to what existed in the past. I really enjoyed reading this book and I took my time with it. The book has a “Gleebooks” sticker on its back, so that is where I bought it. I hadn’t read it through before now, but it was on a shelf in my library waiting for its chance to reveal things about the 20th century that many have forgotten, or that they never knew.

Conversations with taxi drivers: Ten

This is the tenth in a series of posts relaying conversations I have had with taxi drivers. The first of these posts appeared on 6 June 2018. 

21 October

Caught a cab from home to Broadway. The driver’s name – which I saw in the SMS the taxi company sent to me as the car approached my building – was Jewel, and he arrived at the front shortly after I made the call. He was possibly from South America (I didn’t ask), and he didn’t talk bar the bare minimum needed to complete the steps required for the transaction. I told him to go to Broadway at the corner of Harris Street and he said nothing. He signalled left at the end of my street and then silently turned the wheel. At the next intersection he turned right and made his way east.

The radio in Jewel’s car was tuned to 2GB (owned by a company called Macquarie Radio which is, itself, owned by the company that owns my favourite newspaper). Shock jock Ray Hadley was talking quietly – his distinctive voice coming through the speakers into the cabin Jewel and I shared – for most of the trip down Harris Street.

Hadley at one point gave a stock market report and then segued straight into an ad, delivered with his own voice, for travel to Japan, emblematising the way that Capital seamlessly inserts itself into all parts of our lives, even to the point of blandly eliding the interstices between things with its inane patter. In a similar way, the state government allows companies to erect massive billboards, some of which these days are video displays, on busy motorways. The danger being, one supposes, that we shall for an instant be able to escape from the moronic blandishments of the advertising industry and its optimistic customers.

The only place that appears to be free of this kind of pollution is the sky but, even then, skywriting can enter into the frame, as happened in September in the lead-up to a football game. Perhaps, one day, a company shall lift a huge stencil into the sky and position it so that the face of the moon shines through a corporate logo, in a way similar to how a bat signal is projected onto clouds, using a spotlight, by the authorities in the fictional Gotham when trouble visits their city.

The driver and I arrived at the headquarters of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC; it is publicly funded through taxes). I had asked to be let out of the car here because it is safe to exit cabs at this point, on the building’s forecourt, away from the traffic. Then I said I wanted to pay for the trip using EFTPOS. Without making a remark he picked up the enabling machine; it had been sitting on the centre console among a range of other objects.

He silently punched some buttons on its screen and then, hardly moving his lips, softly muttered, “There you go,” proffering the device to me with his left hand. I took my bank’s transaction card out of my wallet, which had already come out of my pocket, and held the card against the device’s display until the device gave a single beep. I then waited a few beats before uttering, “Is that good?” while putting as much emotion into the words as I could in the hope of eliciting a smile or, indeed, any sign that I was more than just a means of earning money. Jewel said, after a pause, during which time he watched at the EFTPOS machine’s screen, “Yeah.” “Ok, thanks then,” I said, got out of the car, and closed the door. He drove off into the traffic and I walked up the slight incline toward my destination.

Odd shots, 08: Use of anonymous sources

This is the eighth post in a series about the ways that people online blame the media for society’s ills. The title derives from an old expression, “Don’t shoot the messenger.” The first post appeared on 24 August but there was an earlier post on 18 February this year titled ‘Don’t shoot the piano player’.

This survey started on 25 September and ran until 11 October. Times shown are Australian Eastern Standard Time (AEST) except after 6 October, when they are Australian Eastern Daylight Time.

A jibe that journalists overuse anonymous sources is frequently evident, as the first case in this survey shows. But, soon enough, there was a case where an anonymous source became a whistleblower and, when that happened, people started getting behind the journalists involved. Their common enemy, now, was the politician (Donald Trump) that everyone on the left loves to hate.

To start with: a typical grouch about using anonymity when deploying material from a source in a story. On 25 September at 6.26am BBC political editor Laura Kuenssberg tweeted, “Another source says Jacob Rees-Mogg described what happened as 'constitutional coup' – [Rees-Mogg’s] team [is] not denying tonight, but [he] won't comment.” Rees-Mogg is a conservative British politician serving as leader of the House of Commons. The tweet was part of a thread about the reactions of politicians in the UK to news that the Supreme Court had disallowed the prime minister’s prorogation of Parliament. In response to this tweet, at 6.28am Alok Jha, the science correspondent of The Economist, another UK media outlet, retweeted her tweet with a comment of his own: “Seriously, this anonymous ‘another source’ thing is getting mega tedious.”

Then, on 27 September, the shit really hit the fan. At 4.01am on that day there was a tweet from the New York Times that said, “Breaking News: The whistle-blower is said to be a CIA officer who was assigned to work at the White House. His complaint suggests he is a trained analyst.” The story was that Trump had promised the president of Ukraine a loan if he would give Trump incriminating information about the son of Joe Biden, one of the Democrats up for nomination as the party’s presidential candidate ahead of the 2020 election. Information had come from the White House that had prompted the Democrats to announce that they would launch a Congressional enquiry into the case.

A few minutes later, at 4.06am on the same day, 27 September, the NY Times tweeted, “Here's more from Dean Baquet, our executive editor, on why we published limited information about the whistle-blower whose claims led Democrats to begin an impeachment inquiry against President Trump.”

In response to this, at 5.31am Mieke Eoyang, a VP at Third Way (“a national think tank that champions modern center-left ideas”) tweeted, “Message the @nytimes is sending to IC whistleblowers: even if you do your best to follow the rules to protect your identity, we will hunt you down and identify you, unless you publish your allegations anonymously in our op-Ed pages.” Then, retweeting her tweet and adding a comment was former Newsweek journalist Jeff Stein, who at 6.25am said, “Good question raised here by @MiekeEoyang : Maybe NYT reporters should double down on exposing identity of insider who penned famous Op-ed, rather than publish anonymously sourced speculation on Ukrainegate whistleblower.” Then Neil McMahon, an Australian journalist with 10,324 followers, tweeted, “True. It's a curious argument from NYT editor Dean Baquet that we need to know information about the whistleblower to assess their credibility but has zipped lips about Anonymous who penned that famous oped.”

I didn’t know what the op-ed piece referred to in these tweets was but, presumably, it was something about a politician that the newspaper had received from a whistleblower to publish on its website.

At 7.10am on the same day, a man named George Little, who describes himself as former chief spokesman for the US Department of Defense and the CIA, tweeted, “I was @CIA spokesman when @nytimes relaxed its standards for publishing the names of or identifying information about @CIA officers. I fought it. It's still wrong today. Whistleblowers in particular should be treated like newspaper sources, which the NYTimes staunchly protects.”

I saw a tweet from Jennifer Brandel, co-founder of media consultancy Hearken, at 12.45pm on the same day, that went, “Some math to put #CancelNYT in context. If the @nytimes publishes ~250 stories a day, which is 90,000 per year, and you read every one, and thereby learn a ton but disagree with their choices on even let’s say 5% - that’s 4,500 stories. How much are the other 84k worth to you?” The #CancelNYT hashtag had already been going for a while and I tuned in and it was being used widely. The news outlet Business Insider reported on that day:

The whistleblower who filed an explosive national-security complaint against President Donald Trump is a CIA officer who was once assigned to the White House, The New York Times reported Thursday.

The hashtag had slowed down by the following day but the reaction to the newspaper’s action in revealing some details about the identity of the whistleblower was a striking reminder, if any were needed to remind us again, of the power of social media and of the way that it has changed the world. And on the same day the Guardian used another anonymous source in its story following up on the information release, which was titled, “'This is very strange': Ukraine's view of the Trump whistleblower complaint.” The story included this:

“Politics should not affect whether our troops get what they need, supporting the guys who are out there,” said Mykhailo, a veteran of the conflict who served in 2014 and 2015, who spoke on condition that his last name not be used.

On 27 September the Huffington Post published a story that used another anonymous source, this time to allege that the White House had stored transcripts of the US president’s conversations with the Ukranian president on a server designed for other types of documents: those containing classified secrets. The story said:

An explosive letter from an unnamed intelligence official was released Thursday detailing attempts by the White House to cover up Trump’s wrongdoing.  

On more than one occasion, White House officials put transcripts of Trump’s conversations into a “standalone computer system” that was meant for storing sensitive and classified intelligence information.

By 29 September tweets in the #CancelNYT hashtag had all but dried up.

Then the case of another anonymous source blew up in the public sphere. Again, it was related to Trump. I first saw signs of activity on 1 October at 8.40am when Ben Dreyfuss, the editorial director of US news outlet Mother Jones, tweeted, “One of the reasons I want this presidency to end so soon is so I can read about the dysfunctional daily lives of cabinet level bagmen who spent the peaks of their careers not leading vast departments and creating change but being butlers to an old man with internet poisoning.” At 8.43am on the same day Anthony Nungaray, a California State University scientist replied to this tweet with this, “The books and subsequent movie is gonna be epic. It'll take years of evidence unraveling, numerous indictments and criminal trials, but it'll be worth it. I can hardly fucking wait.”

This exchange of tweets related to a story that had broken this morning in Australia about an allegation that Donald Trump had asked for help from the Australian government to get information on Robert Mueller, the ex-director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (which he led from 2001 to 2013). The people involved in the case were a former Liberal Party politician, Alexander Downer, and Goerge Papadopoulos, a Trump campaign aide. His Wikipedia page says:

On or about May 10, 2016, at London's Kensington Wine Rooms, Papadopoulos allegedly told the top Australian diplomat to the United Kingdom, Alexander Downer, that Russia was in possession of emails relating to Hillary Clinton.

Mueller had been visible in the public sphere investigating what were allegations of wrongdoing by the US president, in effect receiving information from Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, ahead of the 2016 presidential election. Now, Trump was trying to dirty Mueller’s reputation. A story in the Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) on this morning had the headline, “Donald Trump asked Scott Morrison to help discredit Mueller probe” into Russian election interference. Morrison is the Australian prime minister.  The story said:

Details of the phone call were restricted to only a select number of senior officials, mirroring the handling of Trump's controversial phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, The New York Times reported on Monday local time (Tuesday AEST).

A bit further down the page the story went on:

Australia's former high commissioner to the United Kingdom, Alexander Downer, helped trigger an initial FBI investigation into Trump's links with Russia after having drinks in London with Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos. 

Downer has said that Papadopoulos told him at the bar Russia had damaging material on Trump's presidential rival Hillary Clinton.

On 1 October at 6.39am Papadopoulos tweeted, “I have been right about Downer from the beginning. A wannabe spy and Clinton errand boy who is about to get exposed on the world stage. Great reporting, NYTs! Mifsud is next.” A story had appeared in the New York Times on Monday. “Clinton” referred to here is former US secretary of state and 2016 Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, whom Trump beat in the 2016 presidential poll. “Mifsud” referred to Joseph Mifsud, a Maltese academic who, according to Google (quoting Wikipedia), “became involved with George Papadopoulos, an advisor to the Donald Trump presidential campaign, and was later accused of being a link between that campaign and Russia. In 2018, he was described as missing, and an Italian court listed his location as ‘residence unknown’.”

On the same day at 8.34am Simon Cullen, a UK freelance journalist, tweeted, “Here’s the letter Australian ambassador @JoeHockey wrote to the White House in May, offering Australia’s support to investigate the origins of the Russia investigation. (Via @KerrieYaxley)” Joe Hockey is the current Australian ambassador to the US. Kerrie Yaxley is a political reporter for Australian TV station Channel Nine, which owns the SMH. Cullen’s tweet contained an image showing a letter on official letterhead (see below).

On 1 October at 7.55am, Antony Green, the ABC’s election analyst, tweeted, “'Clinton errand boy'! Downer as a representative of Australia reported a conversation to his government, which is exactly what he was supposed to do in his nation's interest.”

The seed had been planted and was growing daily in this new world of commoditised messages we live in. Every claim seems to be meet with an equal and opposite counterclaim as the polarised extremes battled for attention in the public sphere. The story had new facets added to it day after day as the political back-and-forth rolled on. 

On 2 October at 5.33am Washington, DC, resident Matthew Yglesias (who had 438,289 followers when I checked his profile) tweeted, “I was confused as to exactly what the conspiracy theory involving Italy that Trump and Barr are pushing was so I looked into it and ... it’s wild stuff.” The tweet came with a link to a story on the website of US news outlet Vox about an investigation by US Attorney General Willian Barr into “the origins of the FBI investigation of links between Russia and the Trump campaign”. 

The thing was still going two days later, on 4 October. At 2.37am on that day Papadopoulos tweeted, “We will soon find out who directed Alexander Downer to spy on me. The Australians don’t freelance without our rubber-stamp, this came from the top of the CIA.”

Then on 4 October at 11.04am Trump tweeted, “As the President of the United States, I have an absolute right, perhaps even a duty, to investigate, or have investigated, CORRUPTION, and that would include asking, or suggesting, other Countries to help us out!” Papadopoulos tweeted on 6 October at 8.10am, “I understand the effort to try and discredit me for two years, and ongoing, because of the information I released that exposed the worst spying scandal in modern American history. This will continue unhindered. We are at the precipice, folks. Stay focused.” 

The Associated Press, a US media agency tweeted on 9 October at 8.26am, “BREAKING: White House notifies House that Trump administration will not participate in impeachment probe, which it calls ‘illegitimate.’.” On 9 October at 9.05am Jim Sciutto, a CNN anchorman, tweeted, “New: WH official who listened to Trump's July phone call with Ukrainian President Zelensky described the conversation as ‘crazy’ and ‘frightening,’ leaving that aide ‘shaken’, according to whistleblower complaint. @cnn reporting.” CNN is a US cable TV network.

I’ll finish this survey with a different case, not related to Trump at all. (Surprise!) On 11 October at 6.32am Mark Di Stefano, a BuzzFeed UK journalist, started a thread:

During the Brexit media panel today at Reuters Institute, @puzzlesthewill said something that stuck with me — he just succinctly put something we’ve been all talking about re: anonymous sourcing. He said it was something he discussed with @flashboy. Here goes: 

"Journalists sometimes merge habits and principles. There are lots of habits of how journalism is done that start in important principles. Protecting your sources is an important principle. Giving people a right of reply is an important principle."

"When malicious actors find ways to exploit those and turn them against your audiences, it’s time to update your reporting process so that your powerful platforms and principles can’t be misused."

The account with the Twitter handle @puzzlesthewill is Will Moy, executive director of Full Fact, a UK factchecking charity. On its “About” page, the organisation says, “We are a registered charity. We actively seek a diverse range of funding and are transparent about all our sources of income.” The account @flashboy is Tom Phillips, editor at Full Fact.

Book review: The Gods of Tango, Carolina de Robertis (2015)

I submitted early to the charm of this historical novel. You have to do this if you want to enjoy it properly. It relies for its basic elements on popular culture tropes, and while the story is rooted in truth – the anarchists and the immigration that helped make Argentina what it was are factual enough – the book is determinedly modern. It has a strange blend of gothic elements and ideas apparently drawn from pop-culture self-help books as well as a curiously high verbal register that meshes with the kinds of plot elements common to create drama that verges on melodrama. This aspect of the book makes it read, in parts, like the libretto for a 19th century Italian opera.

All things considered this is an unusual book, but it is one that deserves to be widely read.

Because I don’t want to give the game away, the bare bones of the plot will have to suffice as bait for prospective readers. In 1913 a 17-year-old girl from the countryside near Naples travels to Buenos Aires in order to be with her husband, whom she has married in his absence in Italy. But when she gets there on a ship she finds he has been shot dead by the police during a protest against Capital. Inspired by one of the girls in the house she shares in a poor part of the city, and having learnt how to play the violin from an old, blind man who performs on the street for coins, Leda absconds one night dressed as a man.

Most of the rest of the novel is about how she manages her adult life and is filled, unsurprisingly, with passion and violence. Buenos Aires is a city dominated by men; their pursuits when not at work become the background upon which Leda grafts the fabric of her existence. There is nostalgia in this novel, furthermore, not for a benign past – certainly nothing like that! – but, rather, for the true meaning of the tango. Who are its gods? You’ll have to buy the book and read it to find out.

Grocery shopping list for November 2019

This post is the eleventh in a series. It describes buying groceries online from Woolies and, at the end of the month, a purchase from a free-range butcher.

1 November

Went to the Woolworths website and put in an order for sliced ham, lettuce, a capsicum, eggs, Truckle Brothers “Roaring Forties” Cheddar cheese, taramosalata spread, pumpkin and couscous salad, potato salad, flavoured mineral water (no added sugar), some Calbee “Harvest Snaps” (wasabi flavour; the salt and vinegar ones I bought before weren’t overwhelmingly good), and Jatz crackers. Delivery charge added. An SMS came, as expected, at 8.05pm to notify me of the delivery the following day.

2 November

At just before 7.30am the intercom buzzed and I told the deliveryman I would be down. “Ok, you’ll come down,” he said. Outside the building he put the goods in the bags I had brought with me. He said the invoice was in one of the bags, and pointed with his finger. I looked and saw that the piece of printed paper was lying in the bag with the groceries. The man whipped out his phone and asked me to sign with my finger on the screen, which I did. As I was picking up the bags he asked if I needed a hand with the door and I demurred, saying I would be ok. He bad me farewell and I went up to unpack.

3 November

On the way home from the Egyptian café, where I had had coffee with friends, I went to Woolworths and bought a sultana butter cake, milk, mangoes, and flavoured mineral water (no added sugar).

4 November

Went to the Woolworths website and ordered Scotch fillet steak, lamb chops, ling fillets, barramundi fillets, Truckle Brothers “Roaring Forties” cheese, carrots, capsicum, garlic, mushrooms, lentil salad, coleslaw, Jatz crackers, Calbee “Harvest Snaps” snacks, and flavoured mineral water (no added sugar). Delivery at no charge scheduled for the following day. At 8.04pm the SMS came from the retailer about the next day’s delivery.

5 November

In the morning when I got up there was the expected email from Woolworths in my inbox referring to variable weight products. “The pending charge on your credit card used for payment will be reduced by $13.64 prior to payment finalisation,” the email, which was timestamped 2.05am, went on. 

Just after 7am the intercom buzzed and I told the deliveryman I would come down. I repeated the phrase twice so he would get my message. I heard him say, “Ok, no worries. Thanks.” I went down in the lift and he was waiting outside the street door with a trolley and three green crates. He loaded my groceries into the bags I had brought with me, then said, “Can I get a signature please?” After he had tapped a couple of buttons on the screen of his phone I signed there with my finger, then picked up my bags and turned to go inside. He said, “Have a good day,” as he left to go back to his truck. I went upstairs and unpacked everything. The paper tax invoice, which looked like this, had a total amount of $115.24.

In the afternoon I had some errands to do locally and on the way home bought some zero-alcohol beer at a bottle shop.

6 November

Ordered some coffee using the Campos Coffee website and some Fleurieu Peninsula (South Australia) chardonnay using the Laithwaite’s Wine People website. The wine a treat for other people, not for me (I hadn’t had a drink since the beginning of August).

7 November

Saw an article in Business Insider about the new Coles “Delivery Plus” subscription service. The Coles plan is similar to the Woolworths plan. With Coles you can also pay $19 per month to get free deliver (on orders over $100). Coles also offers a “Mid Week Saver”. This plan is $14 a month and gives you deliveries on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. So a slightly lower cost if you go off-peak.

In the afternoon after meeting someone about a story, I went to Woolworths and bought some flavoured mineral water (some with no added sugar, and some no-sugar).

8 November

Email arrived from Australia Post about a delivery. A box of coffee was ready to collect from the local post office, it said. Strange that no-one tried to buzz me …

Went to the Woolworths website in the early evening and put in an order for T-bone steak, pork chops, ling fillets, bacon, sliced ham, couscous salad, potato salad, eggs, mushrooms, a cos lettuce, a carrot cake, flavoured mineral water (no added sugar), and toothpaste. Delivery free and scheduled for Sunday the 10th.

9 November

This afternoon I went across the road to the convenience store and bought bread and a bottle of Pepsi Max. Later, at 8.04pm, the SMS from Woolworths arrived in reference to the following day’s delivery.

10 November

There was an email from Woolies in my inbox when I opened up my email client in the morning. It was timestamped 3.11am and was about the variable weight items in the order. This kind of email is normal with orders that contain things like fresh fish and meat because the picker cannot know how much to charge until the goods have been packaged ready to deliver. 

At 7.13am the deliveryman buzzed me on the intercom and I told him I would be down. I got two tote bags and got in the lift and went to the lobby. When I got there I saw the guy standing outside with his trolley. I opened the street door and greeted him and he said to me, “Morning mate, how are you?” 

I got one of the bags ready in my hands and told the man to put the drinks into it. The bottles were sitting in the top crate on the trolley. He put the bottles in my bag along with the toothpaste. Then I got the other bag ready as he removed one crate from off the top of the other. He put most of the rest of the groceries in the second tote and then said, “I just need your signature.” He took out his mobile phone and I signed on the screen with my finger and he got ready to leave. “Thank you mate have a good day,” he said. I thanked him. As I was using my tag to open the front door he added, “See you!”

I took the stuff upstairs and unpacked. The tax invoice that came with the delivery showed a total amount of $103.93. the ling was exactly 500 grams in weight; I had ordered 500g but it seemed odd that the actual amount matched precisely the ordered amount. The T-bone steak was 722g and the pork chops came in at 542g.

11 November

At around 9.30am I got a call from a deliveryman with Fastway Couriers who asked me over the phone to come downstairs because he had something for me. I got my phone and keys and went down. Outside I saw a van parked up the street just as I was making a return call to the guy, and walked along the footpath to meet him. He was carrying the wine I had ordered and, to acknowledge receipt of the box, I signed using a stylus on his handheld device. I took the wine upstairs and put it away.

12 November

I went to the post office to pick up my box of coffee at around midday. Then I went to Woolworths and bought milk and some flavoured sparkling mineral water (no sugar).

14 November

Went to the Woolworths website and put in an order for ling fillets, bacon, Bega cheese, sliced corned beef, eggs, tomatoes, a capsicum, a cos lettuce, lentil salad, potato salad, a butter cake, hot English mustard, olive oil spread, shortbread biscuits, flavoured mineral water (no added sugar), and a packet of sticking plasters. Delivery free scheduled for the morning of the following day.

After completing my order I walked to Woolies and bought bread and some drinks. There was Solo lemon drink and lemonade with no sugar; I also got flavoured mineral water with no sugar.

15 November

The SMS had arrived from Woolies at 8.03pm the day before alerting me to the delivery and at 6.37am this morning the intercom buzzed. I told the deliveryman I would come downstairs and he said, “Ok, thanks.” Outside the building he said he would put the heavy things in a bag first, and loaded up the bottles with the biscuits and the Elastoplast on top. Then he put the eggs on the ground and loaded the second bag with the rest of the stuff, placing the eggs on top of everything so as not to break them. I put the lettuce in with the bottles as the second bag would, I saw, be too full to accommodate it. The guy whipped out his phone and I signed on the screen with my finger, then he turned and left. I unlatched the front door and went upstairs to pack everything away. The printed tax invoice that came with the delivery said the total amount was $109.19.

17 November

Went to Woolworths and bought milk and some flavoured mineral water (no-sugar) as well as a carton of coconut water (yes, real liquid from inside a coconut).

18 November

Went to the bottle shop near Miller Street and bought two six-packs of zero-alcohol beer. In the evening after dinner I went to the Woolies website and ordered fillet steak, lamb chops, sliced corned silverside, potato and sweet potato salad, couscous and pumpkin salad, coleslaw, eggs, mushrooms, a capsicum, tomatoes, a cos lettuce, a fruit cake and a Christmas cake, kitchen paper towels, and flavoured mineral water (the kind with no added sugar). Delivery at no charge (the amount to be paid was $104.70) due on the Wednesday, two days hence.

20 November

At 8.05pm the previous evening I had received an SMS from Woolworths about the delivery this morning, then there was an email, also expected, about variable weight items in the order. The email, which was timestamped 2.16am, referred to the meat, and said that the amount charged would be reduced by $14.30 before payment finalisation. 

An SMS arrived from Woolies at 5.59am telling me that their delivery would be delayed and at 8.25am the intercom buzzed. I said to the guy downstairs I would come down and he said, “Ok.” In the lift I met my neighbour from the unit above mine, who is also my usual dishwasher repairman, and I repeated an offer I had made the other morning for him to come down to have tea with me at the end of the year. He said I should come up to have a drink at his place. He also asked me about flyscreens on the sliding doors in the living room. He wanted to leave the door to the balcony open at night while keeping out insects, and I told him I have a screen on one of the sliding doors in my living room. He should come down to see it, I said. “So it’s possible,” he said.

Outside, the deliveryman told me to put the bags I had brought on the ground, and he started filling one of them up with goods. Then the drinks and the paper towels went in the other bag. After signing to acknowledge receipt of everything I took everything upstairs and unpacked, putting the protein away in the freezer as usual. One of the eggs was a bit cracked. 

The total amount for the order came to $90.40 and they hadn’t charged for delivery or added a fee for the “crate-to-bench” option I had selected. “Thank you for working with us towards a greener future,” was appended to that line item on the printed tax invoice. I hadn’t seen this piece of text before so, I mused, they must have recently added it to their system. Some of the things were bagged in the little green bags they use. The eggs, for example, and the veges. The plastic tray for the lamb chops I would recycle but I put the tray for the steak in with the general waste, which would go down the garbage chute.

Later I went to drop off some things to be fixed at the tailors’ shop and left one of my tote bags to be repaired. The guy whose name, on the receipt, was “dawod” said he wouldn’t charge me for the bag repair. The seam had started to come away a bit so I asked him to redo all the seams on the bag. Then I walked down to Woolworths and bought two loaves of bread, some Persian goats’ cheese, and two containers of soup (Italian minestrone, and mushroom).

21 November

Went to the Woolies website and ordered fillet steak, lamb chops, T-bone steak, Bega cheese, lentil salad, potato salad, coleslaw, a cos lettuce, canola oil, flavoured mineral water, insect spray, Post-it Notes, tissues, and a soap dish. Delivery at no charge due the next day.

Since the last time I had used the interface the check-out process was new. Now, the menu where you select the delivery time was put side-by-side with the payment fields, which was a bit confusing at first. I worked out what had to be done but it involves scrolling down the page before the payment button can be clicked, and pressing a button to finalise the delivery options first. The website gave me a survey to use once the transaction had been completed, and I gave the new interface a lukewarm review adding, at the end in a comment box, “Bit confusing …” I didn’t see how the new design improved the process for the user, although it did reduce the number of screens you have to use.

At 8.04pm the anticipated Woolworths SMS arrived to remind me of the next day’s delivery.

22 November

When I got up this morning there was the expected Woolies email, timestamped 3.53am, about variable weight items in my order. It said the charge would be reduced by $19.29 before payment finalisation. Then at around 7.05am the intercom sounded and I told the deliveryman I would come downstairs. I saw him turn to his right to head to the door as I repeated, “I’ll come down,” three times to make sure he got the message, which he finally did. It would take too much time and effort to explain to the guy about our faulty lift buttons and a risk the lift might not get to my floor. I could have let him into the lobby but this, again, would have required too long to explain if he wasn’t going to come upstairs.

When I got outside the street door we loaded the goods into the bags I had brought along. First, the drinks and the tissues and some other non-perishable items went from one crate into the Ikea bag I had brought with me, one of the large blue totes the Swedish retailer sells in its stores. Then the deliveryman placed the rest of the groceries, that were in a second crate, into a Freedom Furniture bag I had been using for this purpose since I began to buy things online. He whipped out his phone and I signed, then I thanked him and he said, “Thank you,” with a rising inflection to his voice as if to say, “I appreciate your custom and I am gainfully employed today with other people to serve.” Upstairs I unpacked, putting the protein away in the freezer in sandwich bags. The printed tax invoice that came with the delivery showed a total amount of $137.85.

Just as a matter of interest, this is Google Maps’ store locator for Freedom Furniture in the Sydney metropolitan area. The central office is at North Ryde (it’s not labelled in the image below). Not sure what JojoBaba Furniture is, must be a competitor which has paid Google to be shown on their map along with Freedom’s results. The Auburn Freedom Furniture store is tagged in this image but is not labelled. So there are nine Freedom stores in Sydney. Their store in the central business district, where I used to go to buy things, closed.

23 November

Went to the pharmacy and to get a haircut and on the way home stopped at the bottle shop and bought a six-pack of zero-alcohol Heineken and a six-pack of Coopers original pale ale. The second item for my son, who had bought a ticket to Australia so that he could spend a few days with me in Sydney at the end of the year.

25 November

On the way back from the post office I stopped by Woolworths and bought flavoured mineral water (no-sugar) and milk.

26 November

Went to the Woolies website and ordered pork chops, locally-sourced barramundi fillets, sliced salami, mushrooms, couscous and pumpkin salad, coleslaw, a container of mixed potato and sweet potato salad, eggs, butter cake, green olives, kalamata olives, Jarlsberg cheese, flavoured mineral water (no-sugar), and mouthwash. Delivery free and due the next day.

In the acknowledgement email that came from Woolies the salami was labelled “sopressa” but it is actually Bertocchi’s soppressa with fennel though Wikipedia, for its part, has a page about what it calls “soppressata”, a type of dry salami from the south of Italy.

The sparkling mineral water I bought this time was a brand I had been buying from Woolies’ store in my suburb. It has no artificial flavours or colouring and no sugar. It does, however, have a “best by” date which, for bottles bought the previous day, would fall in September of the following year.

Around lunchtime an email arrived from Woolies offering a $10 discount on orders of at least $110, but the offer would expire on the 28th. Then at 8.01pm the usual SMS arrived about my delivery due the next day.

27 November

When I woke up in the morning there was the usual email about variable weight items in the order; it was timestamped 2.30am. The total amount for the order would be reduced by $3.78 before payment finalisation.

At 7.45am the intercom buzzed and I told the deliveryman outside I would come down. He said, “No worries,” and I grabbed my keys and two tote bags. At the building entrance I explained about the lift buttons and he loaded one bag with the drinks and the mouthwash, and the other bag with the rest of the things. He took care to put the eggs in my Ikea bag where they wouldn’t be damaged. 

I signed on his mobile phone and thanked him. He asked if I was ok with the bags and I said it was fine, then I took everything upstairs and unpacked. The pork chops came to 464g and cost $7.42, the barramundi weighed in at exactly 500g – the quantity I had specified when ordering; it wasn’t clear if this was a “variable weight product” referred to in the email I had received earlier that morning – and came to $14. The total on the invoice was $100.80. 

The printed tax invoice had a colour-printed offer stapled to it that was mainly green – the company’s branding colour – offering 30 days’ free delivery if you sign up. I imagined this was something I would be able to give to a friend. I learned by reading it that you can get a discounted option for midweek delivery – the same as Coles has for its customers – and that you can get next-day delivery if you order online before 6pm; I hadn’t understood this before.

28 November

On the way back home from the post office and the tailor’s shop, I stopped at Woolworths and bought some flavoured mineral water (no-sugar). Then I stopped at the bottle shop and bought a six-pack of zero-alcohol Heineken.

An email had arrived at my inbox, the evening before, about ethical food. It was a distribution from someone I follow on Twitter and it mentioned free-range pork. A producer had gone out of business in a town near Gympie, in Queensland, and there was a link to an Australian Broadcasting Corporation story about it. 

I read the story and then did a quick search online for this kind of retailer and found one in Sydney but when I phoned them I found that they cannot guarantee that the deliveryman will buzz you when they drop off an order. The business ships out orders on Friday to arrive any time between midnight and early morning on the Saturday each week. I decided that this would not work as the woman I spoke with said that they are unable to control how the delivery is carried out; they use a third-party company for this part of their business.

So I called another free-range meat provider, this one in Marrickville. They said that you can set up an account and leave a note on your order specifying how the delivery should be performed. I asked if they buzz you and the woman I spoke with said they do. The company is called Feather and Bone Butchery. I ordered some veal T-bone steaks, pork loin chops, bacon, a dozen pasture-raised eggs, and lamb and lemon thyme sausages. I set up a login in their database.

Delivery is charged at a rate of $10 per order but the charge depends on where you live, so the cost of delivery might be different for other people. You have to order goods worth over $80 to enable the delivery option to work when you check out. Given a set of options, you can choose which day delivery takes place. Not all areas are covered every day of the week, so if you buy from Feather and Bone and you want delivery you have to find a day that suits both parties: you and them.

29 November

On the way home from the tailor’s I stopped at Woolworths and bought a container of lentil salad and one of bean salad, as well as some flavoured mineral water (no-sugar). In the evening I went to the convenience store and bought a loaf of bread.