the sydney institute quarterlypodcast.thesydneyinstitute.com.au/podcasts/siq archive...margaret...

with Gerard Henderson’s

MEDIA WATCHMEDIA WATCH

ISSUE 40 MARCH 2012

ANNE HENDERSONon the British Riots

STEPHEN MATCHETTlooks at politicalbiography with Cheney,Rice & Rumsfeld

SANDALISTA WATCHCONTINUESSophie Cunningham and the Leftie Luvvies ofInner-City Melbourne

SHELLEY GARE on Food as Art

DOCUMENTATIONUNSW Goes Post-Modern under Fred Hilmer

JOHN McCONNELLlooks at Andrew Robb’sBlack Dog & KatherineBirbalsingh’s TeachingExperience

MEDIA WATCH’S Anti-Gongs for 2011 withGuy Rundle, Judy Davis,Michael Brissenden,Margaret Simons andmany more

Published by The Sydney Institute 41 Phillip St.Sydney 2000 Ph: (02) 9252 3366Fax: (02) 9252 3360

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Editorial The Sydney Institute Quarterly Issue 40, March 2012

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ABC - ANYONE BUTCONSERVATIVES

ABC managing director and editor-in-chief Mark Scott isnow in his second five year term as head of the taxpayerfunded public broadcaster. Mr Scott had a broadlysuccessful initial term. However, he has not delivered onhis promise to ensure a greater plurality of opinionwithin the ABC. This is evident on the ABC’s revampedprogram format for 2012.

It’s an extraordinary fact – but a fact nevertheless. TheABC does not have one conservative presenter or oneexecutive producer of any of its significant programs onradio or television or on-line – although it has some non-political types. The only program which has aconservative presenter is Counterpoint, which is co-hosted by Michael Duffy and Paul Comrie-Thomson.This goes to air at 4 pm on Mondays – hardly anattractive time-slot. Moreover, the program isconsciously titled Counterpoint – implying that it isunfashionable.

There is no conspiracy here. It’s just that, over thedecades, left-of-centre types at the ABC have appointedleft-of-centre types. The culture of the public broadcasteris so narrow that many people making appointments donot understand that there are valid positions contrary totheir own.

Individuals – however well educated or well qualified –who support George W. Bush’s policy on Iraq, or USpolicy in the Middle East, or Israel’s right to exist withinsecure borders, or who oppose same sex marriage, orwho are concerned about unauthorised boat arrivals orwho happen to agree with the teachings of PopeBenedict XVI, or who believe in the importance ofprivate education and private health or who are scepticalabout the impact of global warming are regarded asunusual. Conservatives do not get key positions withinthe ABC because their positions are not consideredlegitimate. In short, left-wing fashions prevail at thepublic broadcaster – which is why ABC types tend tocriticise both Labor and the Coalition from the left.

The history of the ABC Media Watch program depictsthe reality of the ABC. It’s first presenter was a leftist –Stuart Littlemore QC. In his book The Media and Me,Littlemore acknowledged that he used his time as areporter on This Day Tonight in the 1970s to campaignagainst political conservatives. Littlemore was followedby a bevy of leftists – Richard Ackland, Paul Barry, DavidMarr, Liz Jackson, Monica Attard and Jonathan Holmes.

The fact is that there is more balance on the News Watchprogram on Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News Channel in theUnited States (which airs on Foxtel and Austar inAustralia) than there is on the ABC Media Watchprogram. On News Watch, you can hear the views of left-liberals and conservatives. On Media Watch only left-of-centre types get guernseys as presenters and no otherview is heard. Jonathan Holmes is an example of theproblem. He acknowledged last year that he wasappointed to the key role as executive producer of FourCorners in 1982 despite the fact that he was a Britishcitizen who knew nothing, absolutely nothing, aboutAustralia. It was an appointment of the left, by the left,for the left. The long-term impact of the late leftist AllanAshbolt – and what was called “Ashbolt’s Kindergarten”– on ABC news and current affairs is still with us. Whichexplains why the public broadcaster is a conservative-free zone.

CONTENTSEditorial 2

Sandalista Watch - Sophie Cunningham’s Melbourne- Gerard Henderson 3

Heartburn- Shelley Gare 9

Political Views - A Game of Thrones- Stephen Matchett 13

Rioting Britain’s Cultural Meltdown- Anne Henderson 20

Book Reviews - - John McConnell 25

Documentation - Gerard Henderson and Fred Hilmer re UNSW Press 28

Gerard Henderson’s Media Watch 33

Cover Design and production by D T Graphics

The Sydney Institute Quarterly is edited by Anne Henderson and Gerard Henderson.

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The views expressed in The Sydney Institute Quarterly arethose of the designated authors. They do not necessarilyreflect the views of The Sydney Institute or of its governors.

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For a complete list of our forthcoming functions,visit our Website: www.thesydneyinstitute.com.au

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SANDALISTAWATCH -SOPHIE

CUNNINGHAM’SMELBOURNEIn his 1937 book The Road to Wigan Pier,George Orwell defended “the ordinarydecent person” against “the intellectual,book-trained socialist”. He wrote that the latter:

“... type is drawn, to begin with, entirely fromthe middle class, and from a rootless town-bred section of that middle class at that. ...Itincludes...the foaming denouncers of thebourgeoisie, and the more-water-in-your-beer reformers of whom [George Bernard]Shaw is the prototype, and the astute youngsocial-literary climbers...and all that drearytribe of high-minded women and sandal-wearers and bearded fruit-juice drinkerswho come flocking towards the smell of‘progress’ like bluebottles to a dead cat.”

YOU CAN JUDGE A SANDALISTABOOK BY ITS COVER

As the saying goes, don’t judge a book by its cover.Except if the tome in question happens to be

Sophie Cunningham’s Melbourne, which is publishedby the University of New South Wales Press underthe label NewSouth. The blurb on the back ofMelbourne commences as follows:

Melbourne’s a city you get to know fromthe inside out – you have to walk it to loveit. That’s when you capture glimpses ofpeople – eating, laughing, talking, arguing,watching TV and reading – through half-open terrace house doors and windows.

Hang on a minute. Anyone who knows Melbourneunderstands that only a fraction of the city’s fourmillion residents live in terraces. These are a relic ofparts of old Melbourne and are located in what is nowcalled the inner-city. Clearly Sophie Cunningham’sbook is not a study of a city but, rather, a small part ofit. Namely, the inner-city which was once home to

the working-class but is now the abode of the tertiaryeducated, sandal-warning, left. Sandalista territory,to be sure.

The map on Melbourne’s inside covers gives an ideaof what is to come. It only mentions eight suburbs –Richmond, Fitzroy, Carlton, Brunswick, NorthMelbourne, Footscray, St Kilda and Hawthorn. Onlyseven places are illustrated on the map – the NationalGallery of Victoria, Federation Square, the StateLibrary of Victoria, Readings Bookstore (Carlton) LaMama Theatre (Carlton), Merri Creek (Abbotsford)and the Westgate Freeway (don’t worry, it’s on theway to inner city Footscray). Abbotsford is next toCollingwood and Collingwood is close to Richmond,Fitzroy and Carlton.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR – AND SANDALSSophie Cunningham was born in 1963 and educatedat Toorak Central School John Gardiner High Schoolin Hawthorn and Monash University. She hasworked in publishing and edited Meanjin Magazineand is the author/editor of a number of books –including the semi-autobiographical novel Geography.According to Melbourne, at John Gardiner HighSchool students wore “Lee jeans, Miller shirts andlurex treads”. SC writes that, treads are “heavysandals made of ribbons of suede and had tyre treadsfor soles”. Enough said.

FOREWORDApart from seven years living in Sydney,Cunningham has resided in Melbourne her entirelife. In her revealing Foreword, the author declaresthat Melbourne “feels like a small town to me, though in reality it no longer is”. Earlier in her Foreword,Cunningham refers to the house in inner-city Fitzroy North “in which Helen Garner set her semi-autobiographical 1977 novel, Monkey Grip”.Cunningham adds:

Almost everyone I know claims to havelived near that house.

How about that? Virtually everyone SophieCunningham knows claims to have lived in FitzroyNorth – a small suburb in inner-city Melbourne.Elsewhere in the Foreword, the writer reflects:

...if my ashes were scattered in the CarltonGardens you could mount an argument fora life lived as narrowly as that of any 18thcentury English village girl. About 2square kilometres would cover it. The onlystrange thing is that this isn’t, really, suchan unusual Melbourne story.

The Sydney Institute QuarterlyIssue 40, March 2012

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Yes it is. Sophie Cunningham is asking her readersto believe that many or most citizens of Melbournelive much of their entire life in a two kilometresquare. This is nonsense. It’s just a rationalisationfor the author’s narrow life. An idea of just hownarrow this is is evident in her Foreword.

Sophie Cunningham lives in a terrace house inFitzroy Street, Fitzroy – which runs parallel toBrunswick Street. According to the author, suchproperties sell at around $1 million. Hilary McPhee,the author’s “former mentor and now friend”, livesonly a few houses away. Neighbours include theatredirector Betty Burstall, literary agent John Timlinand literary critic Peter Craven. In fact, Mr Craven is“visible from the street, his desk piled high withbooks and cats”. Really. Film critic Philippa Hawker“lives less than a kilometre away in Carlton”. SophieCunningham lives with her “girlfriend Virginia...in ahouse once owned by James Button and his wife MayLam.” She adds:

Like many of my friends, James used towork at The Age, the oldest remainingMelbourne daily founded by David andEbenezer Syme, the grandfather andgreat-uncle of my great-grandmother LucyWawn (she of the dinner gong). When I firstmet James, almost twenty years ago, helived about six houses away from thiscurrent house, which is next door to aplace I shared for a few years with W.H.Chong, the designer of the cover of my twopublished novels and also a formerdesigner of Meanjin, the literary journal Iwent on to edit between 2008 and 2010.

Clearly Sophie Cunningham is part of the inner-city-luvvie-left. Most of her friends work, or used to work,at The Age – sometimes called “The Guardian-on-the-Yarra”. The remaining friends appear to be acollection of actors, academics, film or theatredirectors, authors, fine dining cooks, publishers,gallery owners and journalists. They are all part ofMelbourne’s inner-city-sandal-wearing-Age-reading-friends-of-the-ABC-left. Helen Garner, who oncewrote a column in The Age, commented that the piecewhich received the most feed-back from Age readersfocused on her decision to buy a new pair of sandals.

Sophie Cunningham declares in her Foreword thatshe has attempted to write “a photograph of the city”.Her series of photographs are divided into the fourseasons and focus on Melbourne in 2009. SC’simages of Melbourne are reported in chronologicalorder.

SUMMER – BALLROOM DANCINGSHOES BURNINGSC and a group of friends get daring. It’s 24 January2009 and Melbourne is enduring a summer heat waveand drought. They elect to travel out of their Fitzroy-Carlton-Brunswick safety zone and visit the RochfordWinery in the Yarra Valley – about an hour out ofMelbourne. The occasion? Well, Leonard Cohen –the patron (secular) saint of the Sandalistas – issinging. Sophie and Virginia may have gone toRochford but they are not at risk of meeting any ofthe locals – as in workers or people who left school at15 years of age. Not at all. Rather, all the luvvies ofFitzroy-Carlton-Brunswick appear to have gone toRochford. As SC puts it:

As I stood with Virginia and looked aroundthe crowd, I saw the faces of many peopleI’d met in my 45 years: former housemates,current friends, my publisher, ex-lovers,friends of friends, authors I’d worked with,a guy who’d designed the cover of a bookI’d once published, the woman who ran my favourite deli stall at Queen Victoria Market, my osteopath. Thesepeople create my version of Melbourne,those looped connections that start inkindergarten, school and university andare refined by where you live and the workyou do.

Enough said. Four million people may live inMelbourne but Sophie Cunningham’s version of thecity seems to be limited to university educated, inner-city professionals – the only possible exception beinga woman who ran a deli store at the oh-so-fashionableQueen Victoria Market.

It turns out that SC has had a much-travelledSummer. A week before her Leonard Cohenexperience at Rochford, she drove to Yea – to do areading at the town’s library. Once again, SC did notrun the risk of coming across the Yea working classor any non-university educated types. It’s a hotSummer in Melbourne. Very hot. So hot that “ourfriend Lizzie found her ballroom dancing shoesmelted at the back of her car”. That hot.

AUTUMN – YOGA AND BOOT CAMP INCARLTONMelbourne is still recovering from the heat wave ofSummer 2009 – which included the terrible bushfiresof Black Saturday (9 February 2009). So Autumn isvery much a reflection on that sandal-wearerobsession – climate change.


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Sophie and Virginia have cats. “Fitzroy and nearbyCarlton are cat suburbs”, she declares. It’s alsowriter’s territory. Did you know that Don Watson andFiona Capp hired rooms above the Standard Hotel inFitzroy “to write during the day”? Well, you do now.SC has much respect for her fellow writers – but notmuch for those who run car parks. She reports thatthe car-park at the Prahran Market has a sign whichreads: “If paying by Cridet Card Mastercard or visaonly.” Get it? Car park operators can’t spell. SandalWearers: 2; Car Park Operators: Zip.

Sophie and Virginia love the Queen Victoria Market.Be careful, however. There is “invariably a bratwurstwith way too much sauerkraut to be eaten” at theQVM. SC heads off “to the Gertrude Street YogaStudio at 6.30 am...where a group of us sit in a largeroom....salute the sun, make like warriors and do theplank”. Go on. Meanwhile, “Virginia and severalfriends head to the Carlton Gardens to torturethemselves at boot camp”. How truly fascinating.Reading Melbourne, you begin to wonder whetherany residents of the city have a regular job or bringup children or go to the supermarket. There is nomention of the CBD nor of such Melbourne basedorganisations as the Business Council of Australia(BCA) and the Australia Council of Trade Unions(ACTU).

To Sophie Cunningham, Melbourne in autumn is allabout theatre and food. But she does find time to joinin the Sandalista’s criticism of Australian culture –and to bag “the years that John Howard was primeminister”. She seems to assume that all ofMelbourne agrees with her. Not one of her friends isa conservative – and the only sitting politicianmentioned is Greens MP Adam Bandt. SC’s father“went to the footy with a group of Carlton friends,including the playwright Jack Hibberd and other LaMama and Pram Factory identities”. Just as well –otherwise the old man might have stood near manual workers.

WINTER – A BAD DOSE OF SUBURB-PHOBIAWinters in Melbourne are cold and “unpleasantlyclammy”. So much so that “one is invariablydepressed by the end of them”. The author travels toinner-city Richmond to meet novelist Michelle deKretser and they walk “along the Yarra [River]through Richmond, Hawthorn and Kew towardsDights Falls”. She indentifies a “stubbornness andrecalcitrance” in the “river’s spirit”. Really. InMelbourne, the Sandalista set communicates withthe Yarra – apparently.

Here’s another of SC’s Richmond experiences. Sheused to visit the late Peter Mathers there, he was awriter-gardener. The author declares:

I always envied those who receivedremainders of his novel The Wort Papers.He had composted the unsold copies butdug them up on special occasions to giveas gifts. The rotting books, full of soil andchewed through by worms, seemed bothsymbolic and practical.

Yeah. Especially if the recipient had no intention ofreading what SC concedes was Peter Mathers’language which resembled “a range of outrageous,punning shapes”.

After some reflections on St Kilda, SC warns thatMelbourne is “in danger or running out” of water andadmits to being a “suburbia-phobe”. There follows anincomprehensible rant about Melbourne’s suburbs –focusing on the abduction and presumed murder ofyoung Eloise Worledge in Beaumaris in 1976 and the1991 murder of teenager Karmein Chan who lived inTemplestowe.

From these two child killings, SC theorises:

The suburbs are spaces where perfectionis possible, the argument seems to be. It’sjust everyone who lives in them who fails.This smug sense of certainty combinedwith the inevitability of failure are just whatone rebels against, a rebellion that hasfuelled many great Melbourne comedians.

So the author of Melbourne believes that “everyone”who lives in Melbourne’s suburbs “fails”. Fairdinkum. Some suburbia-phobe, to be sure.

SC now travels to Hawthorn, just over the Yarra fromRichmond and within walking distance to the CBD.Even so, this is just too far away from Fitzroy Street,Fitzroy. The author refers to the “bland horrors ofHawthorn” while she quotes an acquaintancecomplaining of “the even blander horrors ofBrighton”. Hawthorn is beyond Richmond; Brightonis beyond St Kilda. To the author of Melbourne theyare in another country – or universe.

Sophie Cunningham is a real leftie-luvvie. She isproud of the fact that her parents were involved in theteacher movement, opposed the Australia’s Vietnamcommitment and belonged to the Gough WhitlamFan Club. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, SC wasinvolved in the nuclear disarmament movement. Shesimply assumes that all Melburnians share herpolitical views.


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Before the end of Winter, SC finds time for anotherput-down of the outer suburbs. She worked for thepublisher Penguin in the early 1990s and this meant“a drive up the Maroondah Highway to Ringwood”.She remembers the experience:

It was...like being stuck an hour out of townand forced to buy potatoes in their jacketsfrom the car yard next door for lunch.

SPRING – A DATE WITH FOOTBALLSpring gives Sophie Cunningham a chance to opineabout her love for Australian Rules football in thelead-up to the Australian Football League grand final(which is usually held in the final week of September)– and more besides:

Football is important to Virginia and me. Ourfirst what-I-can-now-see-was-a-date morethan nine years ago was to a footy match.Virginia had turned up wearing a Geelongbeanie, and if you’re prepared to go on afirst date wearing a beanie, you know whoyou are. That’s an attractive quality.

How twee. SC soon confesses that she once lived inBalaclava (don’t worry it’s not too far from St Kilda).Her local cafe there was Wall 280, which was fittedout by Six Degrees. Peter Malatt, a member of the SixDegrees team, described his approach on fit-outs as follows:

Most of us went to uni and lived in terracehouses in the inner suburbs.

This made sense to SC – who is under the illusionthat the residents of Melbourne all live in terracehouses and have university degrees.

Now SC visits Footscray, another inner-city suburb.Her contacts there are Tony and Maureen Wheeler,formerly of the Lonely Planet publishing house whoare now associated with the taxpayer subsidisedWheeler Centre and another leftist – Jeff Sparrow atOverland magazine. SC does not seem to know anynon-luvvies.

SUMMER, AGAIN – THE YARRA AS AGREAT DIVIDEIt’s time for a final reflection on summer. Once again,Sophie Cunningham reflects on the Yarra River as “asocial divide in Melbourne”. She describes anoccasion when North Fitzroy luvvies had to travelover the Yarra River to Albert Park (don’t worry, it’sclose to St Kilda). Gosh. She refers to riding fromFitzroy to St Kilda by bike as “crossing the great

divide”. Really. By the way, Balaclava is recommendedby SC for its “bagels, lox and kugelhopf”.

Summer ends with a wedding, James Button and MayLam got married “after a courtship involving fifteenyears and two children”. It was a 40 degree day. At theBoulevard Restaurant in Kew (don’t worry, it’s justover the Yarra from Collingwood), Sophie talked toAge journalist Martin Flanagan, former Age journalistPeter Wilmoth, writer Helen Garner and film maker Tony Ayers. The latter gave a speech aboutsharehouses and sprinklers – apparently SC believesthat all Melburnians of a certain age once lived insharehouses. This gave the author anotheropportunity to inform her readers that Melbourne isrunning out of water – this time quoting from singerPaul Kelly’s autobiography.

AFTERWORDIt’s time, again, to talk about cakes and football, theWheeler Centre, the Melbourne Writers Festival,Overland and SC’s new bike. Oh yes, SCacknowledges the dams are filling and that thedrought seems to have broken. Melbourne ends withSophie and Virginia looking at the rain from theirFitzroy abode. She reflects: “No horses had beenswept away, but a couple of Range Rovers looked introuble”. Apparently all the bikes were saved. That’sinner-city Melbourne. And, alas, that’s SophieCunningham’s Melbourne.

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FACTUAL ERRORS AND HISTORICALHOWLERS IN SOPHIE CUNNINGHAM’SMELBOURNE – WITH SOME HELPFROM PETER HAYES In Melbourne (UNSW Press, 2011), Sophie Cunningham(born 1963) writes that she has spent all but seven yearsliving in Melbourne. She has worked in Melbournebased publishing houses and edited Meanjin at theUniversity of Melbourne.

Yet Melbourne is littered with factual errors andhistorical howlers. Clearly – as with its publication AllThat’s Left, which was edited by Nick Dyrenfurth andTim Soutphommasane – UNSW Press did not engagea fact-checker for this publication. Gerard Hendersonidentified some of the errors/howlers in his MediaWatch Dog blog on 4 November 2011 (Issue 119) – andhas since found some more. The remaining errors/howlers – which are identified by an asterisk – havebeen provided by the Melbourne writer Peter Hayes.

• Page 10: SC describes Melbourne as “endlesslyflat”.


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Not so. From Doncaster, for example, you can see theentire Melbourne CBD set out below. Doncaster isonly a 15 minute drive from Fitzroy, where SC lives.

• Page 30: SC writes: “From the forties, the FitzroyCouncil was, reputably anyway, stacked by JohnWren’s men”.

Not so. The Catholic business entrepreneur JohnWren was involved with Richmond Council – notFitzroy Council. Anyone with an understanding ofMelbourne politics in the first half of the 20thCentury would know this.

• Page 30: SC writes: “Wren’s grip [on Melbournepolitics] was firm and held for much of the 20thCentury”.

Not so. John Wren died in 1953, half way into the 20thCentury. His influence died with him.

• Page 54: SC writes that Melbourne criminalSquizzy Taylor “died of gunshot wounds – inflicted bya standover man from Sydney – in Fitzroy’s StVincent’s Hospital in 1927”.

Not so. Squizzy Taylor died on 27 October 1927following a shoot-out between him and theMelbourne based criminal John “Snowy” Cudmore.The shootings, which took place in Barkley Street,Carlton, were regarded by police as a double murder– that is, according to Victoria Police, Taylor shotCudmore and Cudmore shot Taylor at the same time.Taylor suffered bullet – not gunshot – wounds.

• Page 60: SC writes:

John Wren died a month after suffering aheart attack watching his team, Collingwood,win the 1953 grand final. A close game cando that to you.

Not so. John Wren suffered a heart attack at hishome in the early morning of Monday 28 September1953. The VFL (now AFL) Grand Final was played onthe previous Saturday.

• Page 62: SC writes that until the mid 1980s “theVFL residency rules meant that players lived andworked in their team’s suburb (or its catchmentarea).

Not so. There were residency rules which controlledrecruitment at certain times. However, there was noregulation as to where VFL players lived or worked.

*• 2: SC writes about the comedy teamCoodabeen Champions and declares: “Its currentmembers are comedian Jeff Richardson, lawyer IanCover…”

Not so. Ian Cover is not a lawyer.

*• Page 83: SC writes about Barry Humphries: “Hewas the inspiration for the working-class boy from

Balaclava, Graham Kennedy, who was in turn aninspiration for the working-class boy from Reservoir,Graeme Blundell (later Kennedy’s biographer).”

Not so. Graham Kennedy was a household name longbefore Barry Humphries and had worked his way upthrough radio under the tutelage (and inspiration) of“Nicky” Whitta. Blundell’s biography of Kennedy(King: The life and comedy of Graham Kennedy, PanMacmillan Australia, Sydney, 2003) lists Humphriesonly twice in the index; both entries refer to passingmentions of Humphries’ name that give no support atall to the “inspiration” thesis.

*• Page 83: SC quotes Graeme Blundell as makingthe following point about Barry Humphries:

Blundell wrote: “Barry transformed notonly the comedy business, but also theway we look at ourselves; he was thebridge that took us from the cosy non-threatening world of vaudeville into adangerous new territory of satire”.

Not so. The relevant article by Graeme Blundell is“The clown prince of suburbia”, Inquirer, TheWeekend Australian, 7–8 February 2009, p 17 – whichis cited in Cunningham’s bibliography as ‘The crown[sic] prince of suburbia’, Australian, 7 February2009. In fact the quote in question comes from GarryReilly. This is what Blundell actually wrote:

Comedy writer Garry Reilly, co-creator ofthe ground-breaking Naked Vicar Show,agrees. “Barry transformed not only thecomedy business, but also the way welook at ourselves; he was the bridge thattook us from the cosy non-threateningworld of vaudeville into and [sic]dangerous new territory of satire,” he says.“It was uncomfortable at first as westruggled with what it revealed aboutourselves and even worse, how others saw us.”

Graeme Blundell’s Weekend Australian article alsocontains the following quote from David Williamson– it may have been Cunningham’s source for the“inspiration” claim noted above:

“He gave permission to a new generationto refuse to be ‘nice’, to wage war on the insufferable Australian smugness,”according to Williamson. “Graham Kennedy,I’m sure was a beneficiary.”

This is David Williamson’s view. Graeme Blundellmade no such claim.

• Page 86: SC writes about the “six o’clock swill” –the requirement that hotels in Victoria close at 6 pm,


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which was removed in 1966. She comments that sixo’clock closing:

…led, inevitably, to the “six o’clock swill”,a ritual in which men downed as muchbeer as they could before vomiting and/orbeing ejected onto the street.

Not so – this is a gross exaggeration. There weresome instances of what would now be called bingedrinking in the lead-up to 6 pm. But there wasnothing “inevitable” about this – and many men andwomen were well behaved as they left hotels atclosing time.

• 6: SC writes that around 1966 “AboriginalAustralians received full citizenship”.

Not so. This is clearly a reference to the 1967referendum. This provided for Aborigines to becounted in the population (i.e. the Census) and gavethe Commonwealth Government power to make lawswith respect to Aborigines. That’s all. ManyAborigines were citizens before 1967 and there was noreference to citizenship in the referendum question.

*• Page 87: SC describes Carlton’s La Mama theatreas “a grotty little two-storey shed in a bluestone laneoff Grattan Street in Carlton”.

Not so. It is off Faraday Street – and quite somedistance from Grattan Street.

• Page 94: SC writes that she is “retrospectivelyamused by the fact that the star of the Monash LaborClub was future Liberal deputy leader Peter Costello”.(SC enrolled at Monash University in 1980).

Not so. Peter Costello was never a member of theextreme left Labor Club at Monash University. Hewas a member of the Evangelical Union and later theMonash Association of Students. As Shaun Carneydocumented in his book Peter Costello: The NewLiberal (2001), Costello led the opposition to theextreme left on the Monash campus. He was bashedby a leftist thug while a student.

• Page 99: SC claims that “in retrospect it seem [sic]clear that Manning Clark’s History of Australia: TheMusicalwas one of the first victims in the culture wars”.

Not so. This was a dud production which faileddismally at the box office. That’s all. If theMelburnian lefties had booked seats, it would havebeen a stage success.

• Page 144: SC looks back in happiness on what shecalls “Burke Street” in Camberwell.

Not so. It’s Burke Road – and it’s a major arterial roadin Melbourne’s east. Even Fitzroy residents shouldknow this. By the way, Bourke Street is in theMelbourne CBD.

*• Page 185-186: SC writes: “Garner’s first novel,Monkey Grip, was published in 1976. WhileMelbourne was rapidly changing, the establishmentwas still stuffy – as headlines like this one for theHerald show: ‘Head Prefect of Tammy Fraser’s oldschool at the centre of storm about junkies and thecounter culture’.”

Not so. Monkey Grip was published in 1977. Therewas no such headline in The Herald, the thenMelbourne evening paper. The article referred to isby Jan McGuinness – it was published on 27December 1977. It had three small headings – whichlead to the main heading “HELEN THE STIRRER”.Here is how the heading looked:

Head prefect at Tamie Fraser’s old school –

Teacher in the centre of a storm about afrank talk on sex –

Author of a controversial book aboutjunkies and the counter culture –

HELEN THE STIRRER

In other words, the focus of The Herald’s heading wason Helen Garner’s controversial comments on sex –not on the fact that she went to the same school asTamie Fraser, The Hermitage at Geelong.

• Page 213: SC refers to Davis McCaughey as “aPresbyterian minister, vice-chancellor of theUniversity of Melbourne and the governor of Victoriafrom 1986 to 1992”.

Not so. Davis McCaughey was never vice-chancellorof Melbourne University. Thanks to Peter Pierce’sreview in The Weekend Australian on 6-7 August 2011for drawing attention to this.

v v v

ALL NUDE – EXCEPT FOR THESANDALSFor much of the year, Melbourne is a cold climate.However, according to Sophie Cunningham, a bit ofhot weather is all that is needed to get the Sandalistasto disrobe – down to their sandals.

Page 252. According to SC, “nude Scrabble-playingwith cold beer” is one of her “fonder New Year’smemories.

Page 269. At the James Button/May Lam wedding,“filmmaker Tony Ayers reminded people ofsharehouses in St Kilda and Fitzroy” where thosepresent once lived. According to SC, “we all laughedwhen he talked of times that seemed to involve aninordinate amount of nudity and running undersprinklers”.


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HEARTBURNShelley Gare

When a group – a gobble? – of internationallyfamous food writers gathered in Key West, theyturned out to be driven by one thing and itwasn’t haute cuisine as Shelley Gare writes.

Americans are different. They eat more. Bad food,good food. Add some cheese please.

“We eat more because we’re bigger than most peopleand we start out bigger,” New Yorker writer CalvinTrillin explained to an audience of 399 Americans andone Australian who had gathered to explore the roleof food in literature at the San Carlos Institute on KeyWest’s Duval Street, early last year.

Trillin, a small, trim man in his mid-seventies with anintense stare and fierce black hair rimming a baldhead, may have been daring his literary seminarlisteners to laugh.

Or maybe not.

This is a man who once wrote that he has beentalking about being hungry from the moment helearned to talk. If he could, he would eat Chinese foodwith a tablespoon. “The last piece of food I left on myplate - that was in the fall of 1958, as I remember – hada bug on it.”

A serious news journalist, he gradually began to writeabout food when The New Yorker sent him on theroad for 15 years to turn out regular pieces onRegional America.

He discovered that sometimes, the fastest way to geta bead on a town, was by asking the hotel desk clerkthe best place to eat: not the restaurant the clerkwould take his in-laws for their 25th anniversary butthe place he’d go after 13 months in the army. And so,Trillin revealed America in all its complexities,divisions and paradoxes to his readers through thecrawfish festival in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana,country patties in Mississippi, and through Formica-table restaurants like Arthur Bryant’s in Trillin’shometown of Kansas City which serves beef cookedover a hickory fire, and was the first place in townwhere blacks and whites ate together because,according to Trillin who wrote it in capital letters, “IT IS THE SINGLE BEST RESTAURANT IN THE WORLD”.

Who knew?

If you want to understand business, follow the money.If you want to understand people, follow the food.

Who can better understand the mysteries, pretences,desires, fears, vanities and truths of humans than thetrue food writer? There is almost no subject he or shecan’t serve up: taste, cooking styles, agriculture, bigbusiness, government policy, eating habits, spendingpatterns, class differences, race, migration, the rise oftapas, the collapse of cheese cake. As our obsessionwith food, superstar chefs, elite restaurants, TVcooking shows, bake-offs and cookbooks has grown,so has the food-writer’s territory.

For all that – perhaps because of some of that - it hasbeen a slow grind since the 1960s to get food and foodwriting on the intellectual menu.

Pretty Key West bulges with restaurants, bars andfood specialties – conch chowder, key lime pie, pinkshrimp – and its most famous citizen was ErnestHemingway who ate and mostly drank his wayaround the island on and off from 1928 until his deathin 1961. When he came to write his memoir, he calledit A Moveable Feast.

But, when we think of Hemingway we think of wars,bullfights, death, hunting and steely, spare prose. Wedon’t think of: “The pommes à l’huile were firm andmarinated and the olive oil delicious.”

Three years ago, the organisers of the august KeyWest Literary Seminar – happy eaters all – lookedaround at the western world’s unceasing fascinationwith food and said, oh what the hell. Even The NewYorker was doing an annual food issue.

For 28 years, the seminar, held annually, had devoteditself to fiction, short stories, poetry, theatre withguests like Edmund White, Jan Morris, Paul Austerand Margaret Atwood, but last year, food got theguernsey: The Hungry Muse or food in literature.

Invitations went out to Trillin and to a host of chefsturned writers, journalists, foreign correspondents,political reporters, poets, novelists, academics whofor various reasons, from curiosity to greed, hadsettled on food as a way of writing about life.

The list included Indian cookbook pioneer MadhurJaffrey; Mark Kurlansky who wrote Cod, Salt and TheBig Oyster; Julia Child’s longtime editor Judith Jones,so diminutive that on stage her white head barelybobbed above the lectern; Ruth Reichl, whose Garlicand Sapphires described her time in mufti as The NewYork Times restaurant reviewer and who made it okayto take ethnic restaurants seriously; her successorFrank Bruni; and chef and former Times columnistMolly O’Neill who grew tired of writing “food porn”

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ten years ago and – shades of Trillin – took toAmerica’s byways and highways to produce acelebration of regional food One Big Table.

And so, 70 plus years after Californian M.F.K. Fishercompiled her first beautifully crafted collection ofessays on eating well; 60 years after Elizabeth Davidtransformed the English cookbook; 50 years afterJudith Jones rescued Julia Child’s manuscript, and 40years after French chef and author Jacques Pépinfound himself laughed out of school at Columbiawhen he suggested doing his doctorial thesis on thehistory of French food, this bevy of stellar food-writers happily arrived from the rest of freezingAmerica like a flock of heat-seeking hummingbirds,ready to talk seriously about two passions. Food.Writing.

On opening night, Reichl, whose c.v. includesrestaurant reviewing for The Los Angeles Times aswell as The New York Times, five books, and ten yearsas the last editor-in-chief of Gourmet, read aloud thefirst piece of food writing she’d ever loved:

“When you wake up in the morning, Pooh,” said Pigletat last, what’s the first thing you say to yourself?”

“What’s for breakfast?” said Pooh. “What do you sayPiglet?”

“I say, I wonder what’s going to happen exciting today,”said Piglet.

Pooh nodded thoughtfully. “It’s the same thing,” he said.

FOOD TALKSEarly in 2010, seminar guest Patrick Symmes whosebeat is Latin America, went to Cuba, on assignmentfor the monthly journal Harper’s, to live on themonthly average wage of $US20. “How is it possiblefor Cubans to live on this?” he had wondered tohimself. “I decided to gamble on my stomach.”

During his month, he discovered that the citizenshave had ration cards that keep them just abovestarvation level since 1962, that they depend onbarter and stolen goods to get enough to eat, and it iseffectively illegal to grow carrots in your backyardbecause – say the authorities - it would createdisparities and then dissent.

“It is a total lack of civil liberty because of the lack ofeconomic liberty. For Cubans who don’t have a littlemoney coming in from a brother in Spain or an unclein Miami, food was the pre-occupation.”

Who knew.

Symmes explained in some wonderment, “I can’tdeny, food often seems to explain a country to me

better than even a detailed study of the history andpolitics.”

Almost any human experience or emotion can beexpressed in terms of food. Poet Billy Collins read his2008 poem, Divorce:

Once, two spoons in bed,Now tined forksAcross a granite tableAnd the knives they have hired.Or, as Roy Blount Jnr, put it on stage:Okra's green,�Goes down with ease.�Forget cuisine�Say "Okra, please."You can have strip pokra,�Give me a nice girl and a dish of okra.

There were tales of fish-eye soup cooked by anindigenous Alaskan, blowfish testicles that taste ofcaviare and cream, and chicken sashimi in Japan that– surprise! – wasn’t lethal after all.

A poem by American poet Louis Simpson, based on areal incident in the life of Russian writer AntonChekhov, was quoted. In it, Chekhov’s guests tryhard to impress him with their conversation.Eventually he leans towards them and asks if theylike chocolate. “People may not know what theythink/ about politics in the Balkans/ … but everyonehas a definite opinion/ about the flavour of shreddedcoconut.”

If the subject is food, almost any question can beasked, and at the seminar, it was.

Why do Americans so love the formula “all you caneat”? (For answer, see Trillin above.)

How do men in Rome stay slim? (They eat smallportions, claims Frank Bruni whose food memoirBorn Round chronicles how a fat, young Italian-American child used to family lunches that began at10 am turned into a snake-hipped, food-happyjournalist.)

And the best of all – from Blount - which no-one evertried to answer: “How can a chicken eat all the timeand never get fat in the face?”

Trillin is all too aware of the frailties brought on bytoo much food and drink. He has discovered that theday after Thanksgiving is the busiest day in Americafor long distance calls. “People apologising,” heremarks, lugubriously.

“We forget how important food is: it’s a prism, ametaphor, for everything we do,” says chef turnedwriter Molly O’Neill.

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O’Neill, a tall, slightly scary and majestic woman, wonher cooking chops when restaurant kitchens werestill blue-collar, and she shucked oysters alongsidemale line cooks who were teamsters in the off-season. She grew up in Columbus, Ohio when it wasthe world’s number one test-market for the huge food conglomerates peddling new convenience andfast foods.

As a child who wasn’t allowed to eat junk food athome – her father thought it was a Communist plot –O’Neill regularly slipped down to the local grocer toscarf up free samples of fries, snacks and cereals. “Ifyou wanted to get your play on Broadway, you testedout in Peoria,” she says. “If you wanted to be the nextBig Mac, the question was: ‘will they eat it inColumbus?’ Columbus was the epitome of averageand the tongue that food marketers dream of isaverage.”

But tongues change as their owners are introduced tonew experiences, countries and people and thus, foodwriters can be the true chroniclers of our age, notingthe shifts that indicate subterranean changes. Theyspot demographic changes before the statisticiansfile their reports because they’re the ones who’vespotted an explosion of Cambodian – or Ukrainian orBrazilian - restaurants or the overnight success of achain of cheap bistros.

If you want to know about poverty, migration,aspiration, who’s saving and who’s spending, wherethe angst lies and how to find the sweet spot, look atwhat people are eating and cooking. Or not cookingand eating.

Here is one food writer’s small story that tells youalmost everything about the development of the food industry.

On a farm just south of Fresno in California, DavidMasumoto, a third-generation farmer turned writerwith a Japanese-American heritage, does his best toproduce sweet, succulent peaches. High-endrestaurants and hoity-toity fresh food markets can’tget enough of them. But Masumoto is driven by onemotive: in this age of carefully cultured, long-life,transported food that tastes of nothing so much ascommodification, he wants future generations toremember what a great peach tastes like.

“Who’s going to demand a peach they’ve never had?”he asks simply. The prospect scares him. And now hewrites about it; eight books in and more to come.

When another seminar guest, John T. Edge went tograd school in Mississippi, he wrote his mastersthesis about a polarising debate held in 1931 between

a newspaper editor and a politician; it was on thevirtues of dunking versus crumbling one’s cornponein the hammy broth called “potlikker”, the liquid leftbehind after southerners in the US boil their “mess ofgreens” – collard greens, mustard greens, turnipgreens.

The thesis subject sounds preposterous. In fact, itgave Edge, who is now director of the SouthernFoodways Alliance at the University of Mississippi, apath to understanding race relations in the deepsouth. While the wealthy whites ate the boiledgreens, their slaves survived on the potlikker, richwith nutrients from the vegetables.

(When, a little later, I came down with a vicious,throat-tearing cold, up in Savannah in Georgia, I wasassured by a plump African-American cook that Ishould have dosed myself, not on the sterile productsof the pharmacy, but with a good hearty bowl ofpotlikker.)

SERIOUS FOODFood writers are not entirely comfortable with thestatus they’re gradually acquiring.

Trillin’s 55-year old colleague at The New Yorker,Adam Gopnik explained the dilemma of being in thefirst generation of a number of younger men writingabout food. “It’s a complicated gender role and that’swhy you get this hyper-testosterone thing,” he says.“You know, ‘But I only write about sausages madefrom rattlesnakes. I’m not one of those food writerswho writes about cakes and sauces …’ ”

O’Neill, responded tartly: “A lot of the [food] writingnow being done by white, highly privileged, well paidmen was being written by women 20 years ago butnow it’s being spun with muscle and given legitimacyand an intellectual veneer.

“Forty years ago, Frances Moore Lappé wrote DietFor A Small Planet. She used to drive around in anold jalopy, trying to get people to eat arugula,dandelion leaves and no meat. A lot of people are nowon that platform” – she means writers like MichaelPollan (In Defence of Food, The Omnivore’s Dilemma)– “and they get $50,000 for one speakingengagement. She wouldn’t have seen that in one yearin her life.”

Then there’s M.F.K. Fisher. Publisher Jason Epstein,who also co-founded The New York Review of Books- there’s writing gravitas for you - gruffed about food-writing being taken seriously. White-haired, as roly-poly as a marshmallow and about as cuddly as a cat-fish after 60 years of dealing with the publishingfraternity, he extolled Fisher, the first great food

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writer of modern times, arguing, “She belongs in thepantheon along with Hemingway but she wasclassified as a cooking writer and that disqualifies herfrom serious attention. The people who make thesedecisions can’t believe that someone who cooks canwrite! Henry James wouldn’t have known how tocook an egg!”

Judith Jones, now in her mid-eighties and still a vice-president at Knopf where she has edited JohnUpdike, Anne Tyler and William Maxwell as well asmany of the key culinary names of the last 50 years –Child, Jaffrey, Claudia Roden, Marcella Hazan, JamesBeard - grew up in a house where to talk about foodor to say “yum-yum” was to be faintly disgusting. “Wewaved the cooking smells away,” she says, gesturing.She disappeared to Paris, just after World War II,returning over three years later, transformed.

It was she who rescued Julia Child’s manuscript in1960 when the “boys in Boston” – [Houghton Mifflin]- who had first option, rejected it. “No Americanwoman wants to know that much about Frenchcooking,” they pronounced. “But I did,” says Jones,by then working for Knopf, “and I thought there mustbe hundreds and thousands of women like me outthere and there were.”

Choosing a title was difficult. Jones was in New York;Child in Europe. Finally Jones came up withMastering the Art of French Cooking.

Child wrote enthusiastically, “I love the gerund!”

Publishing boss Alfred Knopf didn’t, declaring, “If abook with a title like that sells, I’ll eat my hat.”

The book has never been out of print since and, toJones’s delight, sales have quadrupled since therelease of the film Julie and Julia in 2009. “Julie’sbooks have gone down,” she remembered happily,loyal to the last to Child who was mightily upset byblogger Julie Powell whose fame grew with everyrecipe she cooked from the first volume of Mastering.

All those four-letter words, explained Jones.

“Julia was so upset by that blog,” recalled O’Neill.“She’d say,” putting on Child’s tones with theirswooping high notes and lavish drama, “‘Don’t I haveany rights. Or rather, should I say, ‘don’t I have anygoddamned rights?!!!!!’ ”

Child, said Jones (who incidentally also saved AnneFrank’s diary from American publishing’s reject pile),changed the language of food writing. “Recipes thenwere nasty short things. Julia’s language wasvisceral. She would ‘plop’ something in a bowl;‘massage’ something or ‘slap’ it on the counter. It

wasn’t about ‘combining’ something,” Jones said withas much of a sneer as someone so polite and precisecan bring herself to express. “Julia would say, ‘goahead and enjoy it. Rub the little chicken’s breast withbutter – he likes it. If you make a mistake, nevermind.’ Julia would say to me, ‘Joooodith! We wereborn at the right time!’ ”

BLIND TASTINGIt’s moot what the current time is.

There are food writing opportunities galore andplenty of competition for them. On the other hand,publishers want more pictures, far fewer words.“Three recipes to a page,” Jaffrey revealed withdisgust. Hold the chat.

Outside the San Carlos Institute building, itscomforting Victorian gloom, curlicues and spotlitspeakers, lurks the great hulking curse of Americanconvenience food, factory farmed, processed,pumped with preservatives, served in giganticproportions, almost everywhere you look, and notjust there in the fast food outlets on Key West’s Duvalstreet, or the rest of the United States, butincreasingly, everywhere.

Trillin remarked, “You’re in no danger of gettingsalad at salad bars. They’re basically an excuse forpresenting different forms of mayonnaise.”

On my way to the Key West seminar – almost 30hours of travelling time from Sydney – I ate floppysteamed fish and something flat and eggy on theairplane, and later a white bread sandwich stuffedwith what felt like more slices of turkey than any bird should have had to part with to feed one human-being.

We are the only animals which cook their food but,noted Reichl, “it’s ironic that just as people stoppedcooking, they started reading cookbooks. Researchshows that the average person uses just two recipesfrom each cookbook. We’re a nation that continues tolove reading about cooking but is unwilling to spendour precious time cooking.”

The paradox of our age is that while we have neverbeen so obsessed by food, the bulk of us arebecoming ever more distant from growing food,cooking food, knowing why it’s important to eat theright foods.

Then, again, triumph in adversity. Reichl only startedcooking in self-defence because her mother, Miriam,whom the adult Reichl later discovered was bi-polar,was so aggressively uninterested. Miriam specialisedin saving money at the expense of what went on the

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POLITICAL VIEWS -

A GAME OFTHRONESStephen Matchett

Dick Cheney, with Liz Cheney, In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir,New York, Threshold Editions, 2011 pp 565

Condoleezza Rice, No Higher Honour: A Memoir of My Years inWashington, London, Simon and Schuster, 2011 pp766

Donald Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown: A Memoir, New York,Sentinel, 2011 pp 815

E ver since Arthur Schlesinger jnr popularised theidea of the imperial presidency in the early

1970s commentators in every decade have offeredexamples of the White House taking power unto itselfin ways the Founding Fathers never intended.

It was, and is, an inane argument, at least in foreignpolicy. The checks and balances of the eighteenthcentury went out of whack when the Soviets acquirednuclear weapons. And they stayed out when the ColdWar ended but terrorists developed doctrines forasymmetrical warfare.

While there is nothing imperial about PresidentObama’s domestic agenda, what with the way hestruggles to get Congress to agree with him onanything, he still has the capacity to kill Osama binLaden on the other side of the planet - a fateundoubtedly noted by dictators around the world. Andwhile the economic ability of the US to fight a sustainedwar anywhere for very long is doubtful, it can stillproject more power than the next dozen powers.

GEORGE W BUSH’S POWERFULADVISERSIt is the unmatched military might and diplomacythat it supports which were the foundations ofGeorge W Bush’s foreign policy forays and which isthe subject of these three memoirs by his mostimportant foreign policy advisers.

Reichl’s dinner-table and was nicknamed the Queenof Mould.

One bright morning, Miriam asked Ruth’s father tosample something on a spoon. Obediently, he tastedit and then ran to rinse out his mouth, drinkingstraight from the coffee pot spout. “It was the worstthing he had ever had in his mouth. The first time hesaid that it tasted like cat toes and rotted barley. Thenas pigs’ snouts and mud and five years later he hadrefined the flavour into a mixture of antiqueanchovies and mouldy chocolate,” Reichl said,quoting her memoir, Tender At The Bone. “Mymother said, ‘Just as I thought, spoiled.’ ”

But, without the Queen of Mould, Reichl may neverhave become a food writer.

And Tender At The Bone, which so flummoxedbooksellers when it came out 12 years ago they hadno idea where to shelve it – “all those words” Reichlremembered - started an avalanche of food memoirsso that now, Reichl added, they are being publishedin their thousands. Novels and mysteries too, allbased around food. Reichl is working on a novel ofher own, Delicious.

Humans are endlessly resourceful and food isfundamental to us. “You can understand almostanything about a society by looking at what they’reeating,” said Reichl. Or as novelist Kate Christensenput it, “Our relationship to food is revealing of ourcharacter in a way that nothing else is.” There’salways one more lunch, one more dinner and asO’Neill so aptly once wrote, “Every meal, after all, isa new beginning.”

Reichl repeats Julia Child’s rule for cooking; itapplies equally to life, ambition and civilisation:“Nothing is too much trouble if it turns out the way it should.”

Next January, 2013, the subject for the Key WestLiterary Seminar, January 10 to 13, is “Writers onWriters”. See http://www.kwls.org/seminar31/. So far,the writers appearing include Edmund White, GeoffDyer, Judith Thurman, James Atlas and Phyllis Rose.Cost, which includes all speaking sessions plusbreakfast, two evening receptions and a farewell lunch, is $US545. There is also a separate writers’workshop program.

A version of this article appeared in Good Weekendmagazine in June, 2011

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As National Security Advisor and Secretary of State,Condoleezza Rice treated most of the world as unrulyAmerican protectorates or potential rebels. As Secretaryof Defence Donald Rumsfeld supervised an enormousarmed establishment manifestly beyond any individual’scapacity to control. And Vice President Richard Cheneyturned what is supposedly an insignificant office into themost bullying of pulpits for influencing and intimidatingthe foreign policy establishment.

The power they describe in their memoirs isspectacular. Rumsfeld ran a military bureaucracy ofstaggering size and reach. State had the resources tobrief Rice on any diplomatic problem on the planet, assoon as, or often before, it occurred and she had theauthority to intervene wherever she wanted.

While Cheney deployed no divisions, and directed nodiplomats, his decades in Washington gave him theguile to get his way across the foreign policy spectrum.Power without administrative responsibility foranything made him immensely influential. Just as KarlRove was supposedly “Bush’s brain” in domesticpolitics, Cheney was an eminence grise in foreign policy.

Just as important as their physical resources, theyhad enormous intellectual capacity at their disposal –they all had staff capable of producing a strategy onjust about anything. This gave President Bushendless options but also meant he had to choose one,which generally cancelled the others out. Imagine ifAustralia had three high-powered foreign affairspolicy teams instead of none, sorry one.

And the sheer size of the resources they commandedmade running their own agencies immensely difficult.In fact for Rice, certainly at State, and Rumsfeld atDefence it was often close to impossible to move thebureaucracies at all, let alone in a new policy direction.

One recurring theme in all three books is how hard itwas to get anything done. For Rumsfeld, officials werethe enemy – military bureaucrats had endless reasonswhy anything not done previously was impossible inthe present. Rumsfeld’s writing makes it plain hispersonality was a big part of the problem but even soit is obvious that the defence establishment was simplytoo big to easily change.

If Rice found her own department as difficult she istoo smart to show it but there is a sense in hermemoir that she did not actually supervise State, ifonly because she travelled too much to impose policyon anybody. And Cheney’s relaxed manner does notdisguise his fury with disobedient officials –including everybody at State and the NationalSecurity Agency, from Rice down.

All three books demonstrate another limit on theimperial presidency, one that comes from the conflict atevery court as the emperor’s officials pursue place. But

not favour. President Bush is not an overwhelmingpresence in any of the books, floating above the turfwars. Nor did he referee the policy fights that theintensely political Cheney and Rumsfeld waged againstfirst Colin Powell and Rice and then just Rice. Thisprobably kept him sane but trying to make policy whenthe three senior advisers were so divided must havealso kept him irritated indeed.

Inevitably, the departments of State and Defence, plusthe National Security Agency and the offices of thepresident and vice president all had their own ideas andagendas, which made some level of conflict inevitable.However, the Bush administration was virtually at warwithin itself, as much over ideas as authority.

And the absence of unity imposed an appalling price,the absolute catastrophe that was the earlyoccupation of Iraq, when the US having won the wardid not have a clue how to prosecute the peace.Despite what he writes (and he writes a great deal inhis own defence), Rumsfeld was to blame for the utterabsence of a security plan, to the extent that when thePresident decided he had to go not even Cheney, hisoldest pal in politics, could save him.

If State and Defence had not treated each other ashostile powers, and the CIA had not focused oncovering its own errors, the creation of a functioningIraqi state could have occurred years earlier. And evenaccording to his version it seems Rumsfeld, aninveterate plotter for power, started most of the fights.

George W Bush’s failing was not to try to establishdemocracy but to allow the people in charge of hisplan to fight among themselves, using the Iraqipeople as pawns.

Just how ambition eats itself is the message of thesethree not very good books. Rumsfeld is a boreobsessed with proving he was always right. Cheney’savuncular style does not disguise his delight inpolitical thuggery. Rice writes about everything shedid and in the process explains not much about what,if anything important, she actually accomplished.

However, for all their faults, in combination they offerthree salutary messages. First, the greater theresources the more institutional impediments exist toprevent their use. Second, without humility and asense of the limitations of power leaders areoverwhelmed by anger as their plans fail; this isespecially obvious in Rumsfeld and Cheney’s cases.And, without a reason to be in power, other than forthe pleasure of ordering the world about, policy isalways a distant second to egocentric administration.

In the end, the Bush presidency succeeded in its coreforeign policy ambition – to bring democracy, at leastthe start of it, to countries across the Middle East.Perhaps Condoleezza Rice can claim some success inthis but while it started to occur on Rumsfeld andCheney’s watch they were only observers.

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DONALD RUMSFELD IN DEFENCEIf Donald Rumsfeld did not exist, nobody wouldbelieve any such character could. In his tale of histime Rumsfeld presents himself as partisan pure,politically pragmatic an endlessly energeticadministrator who right-thinking people appointed toimportant positions. If his memoir was a work offiction, nobody would believe Rumsfeld was real andno novelist would dare offer up a character sooverwhelmingly ordinary.

Perhaps Ward Just would plausibly place Rumsfeld ina Chicago machine where he failed to equal hisfather’s achievement, (why not? the former writesabout Windy City pols and the latter is one). GoreVidal would burden him with ambition andalcoholism, plus (being Vidal) lust. But not the realRumsfeld who is either bland beyond belief or thinkshe can get away with presenting himself as so.

My money’s on the latter –making this a deeply cynicalbook by a man obsessed withsettling scores and proving,at least to himself, that he wasright and everybody else waswrong – all the time andabout everything.

Rumsfeld presents himself asan ordinary bloke (sorryaverage Joe) who workedhard all his life and got onwell with people like him,other average all-Americanfellas who just happened toend up running the GrandOld Party and the USA.

And his enemies, well goshdarn, it’s not that they are badpeople (except that Saddamdude), but they generally aremisguided or, and I hate to saythis about anybody, (but I willabout Colin and Condi and thatRich Armitage hombre) theyjust aren’t straight shooters.

Rumsfeld is one of those men who just know theworld is a dark place, who want to protect everybodyaround them and get very angry with people who justdon’t listen dammit! Alarming characteristics in anyhusband or parent, terrifying ones in a secretary ofthe US Department of Defense.

And that, for what it’s worth, is what this book is worth.Rumsfeld offers an insight into the way a generation ofRepublicans, obsessed with power but not interested inpolicy, worked. He occasionally refers to libertarianideas, like opposing the draft for Vietnam, and he

presents himself as suspicious of the entanglingalliances George Washington warned about.

But, in the main, Rumsfeld comes across as amainstream conservative Republican of the kind incontrol before the Tea Party turned up. He showshow men of great ability (although it is never ondisplay) confuse process for policy. He demonstrateswhy politics attracts people who love power but don’tmuch like people – especially ones who will not dowhat is best for them, even after they are told.

As a guide to the George W Bush administration,Rumsfeld’s recollections are suspect. He is writingfor the record and determined to get his version ofhistory on it. Even after hundreds of pages settingout his side of many, many arguments, he providesmuch more documentation on a supporting website.With this much to prove you can’t help but wonderwhat he has to hide, or at least what he wants to bury

beneath a barrow of briefingpapers.

The curious thing aboutRumsfeld is that he writes somuch but reveals so littleabout himself. There is, forexample, no illuminatingexplanation of how a man withno family connections went sofar. Certainly, getting toPrinceton on a scholarship isdemonstrable evidence thatAmerica rewards hard workand ambition. But the GOPdoes not hand out safe Houseof Representatives seats tounconnected unknowns unlessthey are immensely gifted or masters of manipulation.Perhaps he sees himself as a statesman with a right to be above the ruck, but it’s not to page 193 thatRumsfeld acknowledges howothers assume he is a politicaloperator.

Much of the book is about Rumsfeld’s post Congressclimb up the Republican power structure as amandarin at home, serving Nixon and Ford, and pro-consul abroad. He remembers, reports and replies toslights and fights from 30 plus years ago, includingdigs at Henry Kissinger and George Bush snr.

It’s a habit that stays with him in the most importantpart of the book as he explains why he was right overIraq and everybody else either wrong or rotten. Butfor somebody who presents as a policy administratornot a political activist, he does not have all that much

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to say that is in any way interesting about his firstterm as Secretary of Defense and his long period outof politics running a pharmaceutical company.

The book only picks up the pace when he describesthe disputes between the power brokers at the courtof the second President Bush. Rumsfeld comes alivein criticising Colin Powell as the prisoner of State. Hedelights in demeaning Condoleezza Rice as a snob,frightened of a fight. He abhors Rich Armitage, whobad-mouthed the Pentagon with “brazen” leaks. Andhe outright loathes Paul Bremer, charging him withthe catastrophe of the early occupation of Iraq:

Bremer’s arrival marked an unfortunatepsychological change in Iraq – from asense of liberation, with gratitude to theAmerican military and our allies, to agrowing sense of frustration andresentment that Iraq had come under therule of an American occupation authority.

There are many others at fault for the bad luck thatbedeviled the Bush Administration. There are thegenerals who blamed him for deploying too fewtroops at the start of the occupation of Iraq, despitehaving signed off on the plan: “In reality there was fulldebate and discussion but there was no disagreementamong those of us responsible for the planning.”

There is the intelligence community for reportingweapons of mass destruction that did not exist

In the run-up to the war in Iraq, we heard agreat deal about what our intelligencecommunity knew or thought they knew,but not enough about what they knew theydidn’t know.

And rather than disbanding the Iraqi army, it wasState’s inability to train police that reduced Iraq to ananarchy that US and British forces alone were forcedto fight, “for reasons still unclear, the trainingprogram was delayed for six months. As a result, thecountry was without any sort of internal securityforce for a critical period of six months”. He evenblames, albeit implicitly, George W Bush for idealismon what the invasion of Iraq was about:

When it came to the administration’s goalsin Iraq, my views were straightforward. Theywere to help the Iraqis put in place agovernment that did not threaten Iraq’sneighbours, did not support terrorism, wasrespectful to the diverse elements of Iraqisociety, and did not proliferate weapons ofmass destruction. Period. The aim was not to bestow on it an American-styledemocracy, a capitalist economy or a world-class military force. If Iraqis wanted to adapttheir government to reflect the liberaldemocratic traditions espoused by Thomas

Jefferson and Adam Smith, we could startthem on their way and then wish them well.

It’s a respectable point of view, but it gets Rumsfeldoff the hook on the hardest question about Iraq – waswhat the US accomplished worth the loss of life?

At times his attempts to blame everybody else makessense – he rightly blames the people on the groundfor Abu Ghraib. But, overall, he presents as an arse-covering egotist, determined to demonstrate that heis rarely wrong and regularly betrayed by everybodyaround him.

None of this disguises the truth of his book, that thebloke who let Rumsfeld down was Rumsfeld. For allhis ability to obfuscate, he presents himself as a manless uncomfortable with, than incapable of, acceptingopinions other than his own. The result is a memoirthat tells us a great deal about the man but very littlethat is worth trusting, especially about his role in theBush administration.

The only known unknown in Rumsfeld’s explanationof his career is whether he has any idea of how hepresents to the world.

VICE PRESIDENT DICK CHENEY On the other hand Dick Cheney is as self-aware andcynical as a sack full of senators. In his memoir,perhaps the master manipulator of his generation ofGOP politicos presents himself as a straight up anddown servant of the people, committed to doing theright thing by ordinary folks, like him.

But while he is good at pretending that politics wasjust a job and one that he did as best he could, devoidof ambition and free of guile, he is not that good. Theresult is a memoir where the pose of genial guile isobviously a Machiavellian masquerade. Want to knowwhy George W Bush’s administration was sodistrusted by ordinary Americans? Dick Cheney’sdescription of his role in it is the answer.

Not that Cheney gives anything away about his ideasor ambitions – his book describes a rise through theRepublican ranks without explaining how it happened.Certainly he does not disguise his early faults, hisdrinking, his getting in to Yale on a scholarship andthen getting thrown out. But neither does he explainhis successes, the way he won a House seat andbecame a power in the Republican machine.

Nor is he as fascinated by the machinery ofgovernment as Rumsfeld. Where Don goes on, andon, about bureaucratic battles won and lost and thechallenge of reforming departments, Dick doesn’t.Where Rumsfeld tried to reform Defence, in his twoterms as secretary, Cheney was more interested inpolitics than making the profession of arms workmore smoothly. One quote says it all:

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One of the first things I did at the Pentagonwas ask to see an organisational chart ofthe Department of Defence. When Ireceived it I unrolled it and watched it falloff both sides of the Pershing desk. I rolledit back up and never looked at it again. Idecided then and there that if I spent timetrying to reorganise the Pentagon, Iwouldn’t get anything done.

And what pray does “getting anything done” involvefor a cabinet minister if it is not improving the way hisdepartment operates, especially when it is the mostexpensive, important agency of government on theplanet?

From his youthful alcoholismand the way he was “happy toserve” but missed the draft,through to being relaxed abouta gay daughter and on tomultiple heart attacks there isnothing much about the privateman.

So what makes Dick Cheneytick? Who knows, indeed whocares? Anybody interested inhow the Bush administrationmade such a mess of foreignpolicy, that’s who.

There is a great deal todisappoint in this book thatpresents Cheney as either adill out of his depth or a playerwho spent so long inside thebeltway that he be cannotbothered with the rest of us.

Thus he glosses over invadingIraq to destroy weapons ofmass destruction that did not exist. Certainly the casefor removing Saddam wasoverwhelming, whatever was or wasn’t in his arsenal.But it is completely inadequate to excuse the greatestintel failure in a generation by suggesting that it washarder to work out what the dictator was up than itwas to count Soviet divisions:

Technology was on our side during theCold War but the situation has in someways shifted. Now it is possible for anindividual or a handful of people toacquire the technological means – a dirtybomb or weaponised anthrax – to kill on amassive scale.

This is not an adequate excuse for such a massivepolicy blunder and it rather ignores what intel canaccomplish when properly managed – Osama binLaden was killed, but not on the Bush-Cheney watch.

The same applies to his account of the outrageousmess Rumsfeld made of Iraq’s reconstruction.Cheney is completely correct to point out that theslaughter of civilians was the work of religiousfanatics intent on slaughtering other Muslims. Buthaving removed a murderous megalomaniac the USwas obligated to save the Iraqis from the hand ofother killers and Cheney does not adequately explainwhy years were wasted before the successful surgestrategy imposed order.

And, in speaking up for Rumsfeld, he does not explainwhy Bush sacked him, beyond suggesting “maybe hedidn’t have the best bedside manner in the world”. As an explanation of a strategy that failed to save tens

of thousands of Iraqis fromterror attacks, this is lessunderstatement than obscenity.

Cheney never sets out anycoherent foreign policy beliefs.While Rumsfeld has isolationistideas it is hard to say what thevice president who endorsedforeign entanglements stoodfor. And while Cheney plays theplain pragmatist in defendingwater boarding, he seems blindto the damage it did to the Bush administration’s reputation. But he does reveal the way he turned his traditionallyinsignificant appointment into abully pulpit for menace andmanipulation.

Cheney with his mateRumsfeld spent most of theBush administration badgeringfor a blue. If they could notinvade anywhere, then theywould argue with the enemywithin – the State Department.

He makes it clear ColinPowell is a dill, without the stomach for the foreignpolicy fight and accuses him, in concert with hisdeputy Rich Armitage, of all but outright disloyalty: “Ibegan hearing from a number of former and currenthigh-ranking government officials that SecretaryPowell and Deputy Secretary Armitage were not onlyfailing to support the president’s policies but wereopenly disdainful of them.” Which is code for sayingthe pair did not adopt the Cheney-Rumsfeld agenda.

That Armitage inadvertently helped sentenceCheney’s chief of staff to prison over the ValeriePlane identity leak, an action Cheney says Powellknew about, does not help.

And while he is easier on Condoleezza Rice, both asnational security adviser and secretary of state,

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Cheney reviles her department, playing the standardtactic of presenting himself as a tough common-senseoutsider stymied by the establishment:

In every administration, Republican andDemocrat, there is often an inclination onthe part of the State Department to makepre-emptive concessions to bad actors inthe hope their behaviour will change. Ioften wondered what historical lessons orexamples my State Department colleagueswere drawing on as they advocated suchpolicies.

Perhaps the lesson that the president should alwayshave policy choices, rather than endorsements ofstrategies to shoot first.

There is a sense throughout this book that whenCheney could not win an argument on its merits hetried to thug everybody involved into obedience. Thiscertainly explains its intellectual brevity. Cheney maybe a bully, but he is not blind to the way the worldsees him and appears to have decided that the less hesaid the better.

CONDOLEEZA RICE AT THE STATEDEPARTMENTCondoleezza Rice wrote the best of the three books,but this is faint praise indeed and not just becauseCheney and Rumsfeld’s records of the Bushpresidency are so suspect. Certainly, she seems lessintent on settling scores. Certainly, she is lessdesperate to demonstrate how right she was abouteverything – unless she understands what Rumsfelddidn’t – a desperate attempt to always appear right isa sure way of demonstrating error. Certainly, shewrites for the historical record as a whole rather thanto ensure her place in it.

Inevitably, she scores the occasional point but, ingeneral, presents disputes as mistakes among wellmeaning people on the same side. She is certainlymore correct in her treatment of Rumsfeld andCheney than they are of her.

Or perhaps she is simply smarter. Without makinganything of it, she gets on the record that the idea ofinvading Iraq was insinuated onto the agenda byRumsfeld and his loyalists when the rest of thegovernment was focused on Afghanistan. And whatRumsfeld did not do, Cheney did. Rice basicallyaccuses him of bureaucratic thuggery, based on hisaccess to the president and his deep understanding ofthe system, to make policy beyond his brief.

Where Rumsfeld and Cheney blame State for thecatastrophe in Iraq, Rice blames the Pentagon onlyrarely, and carefully, acknowledging her departmenthad a mind of its own. Thus the line, “the Departmentwas finally taking the charge seriously to fullymobilise for duty in Iraq” refers to events in 2007!

But, overall, her over-long book provides an immenseamount of detail about foreign policy under GeorgeW Bush and very little insight into what he and hishenchmen sought to accomplish. Rice is obviouslyimmensely organised, immensely disciplined,immensely capable – but what is missing from hermemoir is a sense of what she wanted to achieve forthe US and the world, beyond the routine wins of thediplomatic round.

This is not to demean her work; the routine wins weremore often than not concerned with keeping the worldsafe from rogue states, thuggish dictators and economicaggressors. But there is little sense of what the US isobliged to achieve in the world – coming from a womanwho served the most idealistic American presidentsince Woodrow Wilson this is a major failing.

George W Bush wanted to export democracy, as amatter of morality. So, it seems does Rice, but youhave to plough through pages aplenty to find herstating it. It is not until page 586 that she explainswhy the US is so often obliged to go it alone, insteadof allowing the UN to lead:

The UN is in the final analysis a collectionof independent states. … When the timecame to do hard things, it was exceedinglydifficult to align the interests of itsmembers. I therefore came to value morethe ad hoc arrangements, sometimescalled ‘coalitions of the willing,’ that couldactually get things done.

Thus I always bristled when the press orexperts accused us of unilateralism. Yes,sometimes it would have been better to bringthe international community along. Butexperiences such as Burma and Zimbabweexposed just how hard it was to get others todo difficult things. The United States wassometimes accused of “moralism”, but atleast there was real concern for the plight ofthose living under tyranny.

Inevitably, over-simplifying cynics will suggest this isall just code for US economic imperialism, just, asthey did over Vietnam and every foreign policy crisissince. They miss the point - the Yanks are motivatedby a sense of moral duty to export democracy, whichinevitably includes market economics.

For Rice to be part of an organised plot to use the StateDepartment as an agency of empire would haverequired two things she did not have – a plan to imposeneo-colonial control and the time to implement it.

There are two take-outs from this book: that theworld expects the impossible from the Secretary ofState and that Rice did her best to deliver. Unless sheis a bald faced liar, Rice worked incredibly hard andthe book is a schedule of endless aircraft trips as shetravelled across the world just about weekly andnever with enough sleep.

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But, in trying to record every vital trip and deal withevery important problem, the strategic objectives getlost in the practical detail. So does perspective. As Ricesees it, she was the world’s peacemaker and deal doer,the architect and arbiter of solutions and settler ofproblems all over the world, doing by force ofpersonality, plus power, what the UN cannot accomplish.

For Rice, this is a moral imperium, not imperialism, aburden reluctantly born and one gladly shared – shewrites of her gratitude to Australia for looking afterthe Pacific. But she has no sense of what her endlessinvolvement must look like to others, especially theEuropeans (before they went broke) and theRussians who rather miss the heft they used to have.

And, in her determination to get everything in, sheleaves out a sense of the great global themes that shesought to address, or didn’t. Only at the end does sheargue that democracy and the institutions it dependson take time to bed down but the US must continue toassist the cause around the world, as a matter of bothmoral principle and politicalpragmatism. It is only in theconclusion that she explainswhy she did the job:

The legacy of 9/11 is areminder that indeed ourinterests and values arelinked. That lesson wasnever more evident thanwhen the consequencesof the freedom gapexploded here at home.

If Cheney or Rumsfeld wrotethat, it would read as rhetoricdesigned to cover whateverrevenge they were seeking;but from Rice it rings true.

Rice’s book presents her as aforeign policy technician,always attempting to keep thevast engine of US diplomacyrunning in the hope it couldpull the world towards peace.But while she could read themanual she lacked the ability,or perhaps inclination, towrite a new chapter on thecare, maintenance and especially use of the machine.

If Rice can imagine a world where nations do nottremble or at least listen to the US she does notdescribe it. By avoiding the backbiting and mudslinging of her colleagues, she ensured she had thecredibility in this book to explain the way the world isbut not what she expects it to become.

Perhaps her failure is instructive, demonstrating theway the US, diminished by the difficult victory in Iraq

and burdened by the weight of recession, is stillcentral to global diplomacy but now acts its partrather than directs all the others.

REVIEWS (DAPHNE GUINESS, GREGSHERIDAN, CYNTHIS BANHAM) ANDNON-REVIEWS (LISA MILLAR)Reviewers were not much interested in these threememoirs, which might seem strange given the decadeof denunciations of Rumsfeld and Cheney in most ofthe media. But perhaps not. For a start, the days whenliterary editors controlled the commanding heights ofdebate and felt obliged to commission reviews of bigpolicy books that did not fit their own lit left agendasare gone.

Nor was there much to review in any of them – for all but the most obsessive of observers score settlingamong people long out of power is sad rather thansinister.

Whatever the reason, what isleft of the main media largelyignored these memoirs andthe few reviews were brief.

Daphne Guiness (SydneyMorning Herald, 5 November2011) nailed Cheney’s memoirsin a review that covered off thecontent while critiquing thecharacter. She pointed to hisungraduated contempt foreverybody who disagreed withhim or got in his way, be it Syriaor the Secretary of State. Andshe rightly suggested tone andcontent are not congruent:

This memoir is more aCheney self-vindicationwith happy, feel-goodsnaps than, as the blurb promises, “a no-holds-barred, must-readby conservatives andliberals alike”.

But Greg Sheridan (TheAustralian, 15 October 2011)was having none of it, calling

it “the most important memoir to emerge so far fromthe Bush era”. Sheridan began, as he so often does,by recounting his meeting with Cheney, in this casesome 20 years ago, before pointing out the bits in thebook he especially liked and which proved what afrank and family loving man the vice president is.And, while there is not enough on China, or religionfor Sheridan’s liking, he acknowledged Cheney’scase for waterboarding, although concluding “ I amnot fully convinced by his arguments” and adding:

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RIOTINGBRITAIN’SCULTURALMELTDOWN

Anne Henderson

T he riots in the UK in the first week of August2011 received world wide coverage in a high

definition, 24-hour media outpouring, complete withshots taken from helicopters hovering above thecarnage.

Who could forget the graphic scenes of High StreetTottenham, fires blazing in shops, the insides ofbuildings falling to rubble, the looting of small andlarge businesses, the thumbs-up cheek of the mobtaking charge, the slowness of police andgovernment to react and copy-cat repetitions of thismob rule soon after in other British cities likeBirmingham.

It was a surprise, however, during discussions inNovember 2011, to hear a somewhat mild reaction tothe riots and what they meant for the UK from aseasoned UK Labour MP, a former minister. His irewas directed more at those who had pointed to theseriousness of the riots in the longer term. This MPsaw the riots as a somewhat peripheral matter forBritain – press reports had been exaggerated andthere had been overkill on the part of manycommentators.

Such a reaction to the UK riots of 2011 could be ahead-in-the-sand approach. Or perhaps it reflects anattitude that has grown over time for Britishadministrators, those who seek to keep order andoperate an increasingly diverse community, onewhere order has been created, historically, above avery divided and class ruled social structure.

This MP’s opinion could also be seen as notdissimilar to those of people long since a part of anyexperience of an underdog culture, of those lookingvery much from the outside. These are the views ofthe majority class – that class of educated andprofessional management personnel, of average UKmums and dads, of citizens who own their housesand educate their kids and grand children instandard, stable communities. To them, the riotscame from another world.

Still this is a wonderfully readable memoir,well written, engaging, surprisinglyhumorous. Read it with an open mind. Youmight finish it and still hate Cheney, oryou might not. But you’ll certainly knowvastly more about American politics andforeign policy.

Cynthia Banham (Sydney Morning Herald, 2December 2011) less reviewed Rumsfeld and Rice’smemoirs than ticked them off for their “completeunwillingness – even as the authors fill pagesjustifying the worst excesses of the war on terrorism– to confront the long term consequences of thosepolicies”.

Banham has a point, just not a very strong one. Toargue that invading Iraq was an intervention in theaffairs of a sovereign state that would have unforseenside effects when the US “is not the solesuperpower,” rather misses the point. This isbasically what great powers have always done butunlike just about all others the US did it not to seizeterritory or resources - but to remove a dictator forreal crimes against his own people, before he had thechance to extend his attacks onto everybody else.

As for the ABC’s Lisa Millar - in the long tradition ofjournalists who think they are much more interestingthan any boring old man - she wrote a piece aboutRumsfeld before reading the book, concluding with amorally superior sneer:

Hindsight offers people an opportunity toassess what might have been, decisionsthey might have made had they known theknowns. After four years of reflection itappears Donald Rumsfeld has little usefor it. (The Drum, 9 February 2012 @ http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-02-09/reading-rumsfeld/1936222)

Known the knowns? How fortunate for Lisa Millarthat telling the audience what it wants to hear is whatmatters at the ABC.

For three authors so obsessed with their reputation,this absence of interest must make them wonderwhether it was worth all the effort that careers andbooks both took.

Stephen Matchett can be found at [email protected]

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Two Britons with hands on experience, however,have spoken out on the significance of the 2011 riots.They have not been so complacent in their reactions.Each embodies a certain canary in the coal minequality, their views being formed even before theriots took place.

At the time of the 2011 UK riots, educationist andauthor of To Miss With Love Katharine Birbalsinghbecame to “go to” spokesperson on what might liebehind the violence - the inner city (in particular)UK youth culture and the failure of governmentschools and educational standards in poorer urbanareas.

KATHARINE BIRBALSINGH ON RIOTAS FUNAn Oxford graduate from a West Indian family,Katharine Birbalsingh has taught not only in innerLondon but in schools around the world. In hercontroversial Conservative Party conference speechin October 2010, Birbalsingh had predicted amounting crisis for London’s dysfunctional inner cityareas with growing alienation among teenagers whotook little formal learning from their days in school.

For this, Birbalsingh was forced from her position asdeputy principal at an inner London high school. Shehas since begun work on founding a “free” school inTooting, due to open in September 2012. The schoolwill be called the Michaela Community school.

Commenting on the August riots for The Telegraphon 9 August 2011, Katharine Birbalsingh wrote:

Many of these mindless thugs involved inthe riots don’t think more than 10 minutesinto the future. They think that stealingtrainers is “fun”, not even considering thatit might be wrong. Many of them are, quiteliterally, unable to read and write: 17 percent of 15-year-olds are functionallyilliterate. If you de-educate an entiregeneration, if you constantly makeexcuses for their behaviour, if you neverteach them the difference between rightand wrong, then chaos is what you reap.These young people are just implementingwhat they’ve learnt at school!

DAVID LAMMY’S TOTTENHAMEXPERIENCEAcross London, another far sighted individual wasalso taking stock as Birbalsingh wrote her column. Inthe first week of August 2011, Labour MP forTottenham David Lammy had rushed back from ahard earned family holiday to watch calamity takingover his constituency.

Lammy, from a single mother home growing up on aTottenham housing estate, had broken the mould onpoor estates, care of a scholarship to a state choralschool at The Kings School in Peterborough. Hisparents were West Indian immigrants to the UK inthe 1950s. His father, a taxidermist, lost his businessin the 1980s recession and never recovered. Ahostage to alcohol as a result, eventually Lammysenior left the family entirely.

Lammy credits his mother and his chance to join achoir as the most important factors in his successfuleducation. Returning to London after Peterborough,Lammy studied law at London’s School of Orientaland African Studies (SOAS) Law School. He wasadmitted to the Bar of England and Wales in 1994 andwent on to become the first black Briton to study aMasters in Law at the Harvard Law School in 1997.David Lammy was elected MP for Tottenham in a by-election in 2000 and has retained his seat ever since.

Around the time of the August 2011 riots, DavidLammy was putting the finishing touches to a book –part memoir, part political commentary. His life storyand his constituency gave him particular insight intomany of the UK’s problems around gangs, housingestates and law and order generally. He was by thattime ready to give the public the benefit of his lifeexperience. And then the riots happened.

By December 2011, David Lammy’s Out of The Asheshad hit the bookshops. His memoir and politicalcommentary had taken on a new focus – the Augustriots. David Lammy had seen it coming.

Lammy had returned to his electorate in time tosense an uneasy calm after the first outburst ofgrievance over the 4 August police shooting of localidentity Mark Duggan. The police were trying toarrest Duggan. By 6 August, rumours werespreading about what had happened and hadescalated to report that the police had acted withoutcause, and that Duggan had been “executed”. Lammytried to separate hype from fact.

Then, following a peaceful protest march on Friday 6August, tensions got out of control. By 8.30pm, theTottenham police station was under attack and asquad car set alight. What followed was a rapidescalation of street violence, with cars, buses andproperty in flames. As Lammy writes:

I have reviewed the police footage ... Itcontains some of the most shocking, mostdepressing, most shameful behaviour thatI have seen.... the superintendent warnedme some of it would come as a shock. Itscarcely prepared me for what I was aboutto see.

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This shock, however, was not at the look of anger onthe faces Lammy witnessed on screen, not the angerat police or anger at the lives of poverty such youthsmight have been forced to endure. What Lammy sawwas something far more worrying – “happiness”. Heexplains this more fully:

As the unrest grew and police linesformed, individuals would begin toventure out from the pack to throw a bottleor brick. They would be goaded on by thegallery behind them, revelling in theentertainment. In one scene, a heavilyoutnumbered police line retreats slowly asit is pelted with debris from the street. Onerioter has picked up a fire extinguisherand is ready to throw it. He begins toshadow the police cameraman, whovisibly flinches as the rioter menaces himwith the red barrel. Each time the crowdcan be heard to laugh. Eventually a groupof rioters charges the police line and thefire extinguisher is thrown. It reaches itstarget and the policeman is knocked to theground. The gallery laughs once again.

Such actions in Tottenham were by no means simplylocal by the end of the week. Before long, the UK sawriots spread across its cities from Birmingham,where police reported they were fired on, includingthe police helicopter, and suffered fire bombs beingthrown at them, to Leicester, West Bromwich andWolverhampton, Bury, Liverpool, Manchester,Rochdale, Salford, Wythenshawe, Sefton and Wirralin the north-west of England. Three men were killedin Birmingham trying to protect theirneighbourhood, and a man in his sixties died ofinjuries in hospital.

The material cost was understandably huge - amassive number of business hours were lost, majorsporting fixtures were cancelled, property damageadded up to hundreds of millions of pounds, andcommunities had been left to fix things upthemselves. One positive move saw solidaritymovements spring up to clean the streets and attemptto re-establish order. In a month or so, it was hoped,things would be back to normal. But what is normalnow in the UK?

FROM BAD TO WORSEIf David Lammy is to be heard, things have gone frombad to much worse for the poorer Brit - forced to liveon city housing estates, if lucky, with one in 12Britons on the social housing wait list. Communitieswhere unemployment is high have youthunemployment even higher. Tottenham has thehighest unemployment rate in London.

These are communities where violent gangs operatewith impunity. Here, life’s stigmas are acute as are themountains to climb. And that is before the hardedged attitude among politicians and public servantswho administer such troubled communities. Lammydescribes his former Labour leader Gordon Brown ashaving a tendency to “see the world through a spreadsheet”.

As Lammy noted during the riots, a few hundredpeople had caused the chaos but in Tottenham alonethere are almost 40,000 people under the age of 25.The majority of good living people have beenhijacked, and are bullied and kept down by theactions of a few. Lammy saw the riots as an explosionof hedonism and nihilism and a sense that, for a fewnights, gangs of youth brought together with SMStexts and Blackberrys could do what they liked.

A HARRY BROWN MOMENTThe picture of the looters drawn in Lammy’s bookfrom the evidence he has compiled through work inpoor districts and from the aftermath of the riotspresents the dark picture film director Daniel Barbercaptured acutely in his film Harry Brown. In thisstory, the actor Michael Caine plays the role of HarryBrown - an aging pensioner with a past in the RoyalMarines that he has “tidied away” for the benefit ofhis wife Kath. After his wife’s death and following theslaying of his good mate Len by the estate’s out-of-control and in-control drug gang, Harry reinstatessome of the skills he has known as a Royal Marine.Then, he cleans up the gang, single handedly.

The moral ambiguity of the film is obvious but itblows open a pressing question that Lammy alsoposes – why have we reduced debate over right andwrong to what is legal rather than what is ethical? AsHarry Brown outwits a young female detective tocomplete his clean-up work on the estate, shepursues her hunch that he is the person responsiblefor the deaths of the gang leaders. She would put himaway for what he has done. Even as the law failed tostop the cold blooded murder and blackmail,alongside drug pushing, rape and menace for theinnocent inhabitants of that British community.

As Paul Byrnes pointed out in his review of the filmfor The Sydney Morning Herald, “The film’s mostcontroversial idea is that the place did not producethese kids or their violence; it’s integral to societybeyond the estate.”

REVOLUTIONS OF THE 1960S AND1980SThe backdrop to this sort of dysfunction that hasgripped large parts of the UK is explained in DavidLammy’s book. As he sees it, Britain has coped in

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some part successfully with two revolutions – and insome parts not. The revolutions he is referring to arethat of the social liberalism of the 1960s and theeconomic liberalism of the 1980s. These tworevolutions were built around notions of personalfreedom – but freedom needs personal boundariesand where those boundaries fall away what is left is adangerous nihilism.

For Lammy, “Popular culture provides fun andescapism for the middle classes, but in the inner cityit can feel like a call to arms.” He quotes the lyrics ofnumerous rap style popular songs to enforce what heis saying: “Eminem mocks spotty kids ‘working atBurger King spitting on your onion rings’”.

Absence abounds in the communities where gangsand violence have taken over. Absence of fathers,absence of community services and groups dedicatedto local needs. Lammy writes of the churches and thelike as being a sort of glue that once bound localcommunities together. Secular Britain has lost itslocal glue. One in five of those arrested for theAugust 2011 riots had gang links – they wereyoungsters looking for a group to bond with butfound instead a bonding without civil boundaries.

Policing has also become less and less local in the UK– central headquarters style policing often misses theimportant signals, misses the local culture and itssignificance. Action like this implodes when it does.As with Mark Duggan to some extent.

One of the most important glues for any localcommunity used to be its schools. And still, forordinary middle class Brits, this is what the UKgovernment education system provides. Yet all hasnot been well for schooling across the board inBritain for some time – if real estate and news reportsare anything to go by.

UK real estate advertisements and promotionsincreasingly describe homes as being in the right“catchment areas” for good government schools.And, since the state school culture is so dominant inBritain, if a family cannot afford to move to the rightarea, the local school is the principal social influenceon a suburb’s growing youngsters. Enter KatharineBirbalsingh.

The schools and education standards debate hasbeen around a very long time but it has taken anOxford graduate of UK immigrant background to nailthe complex problems that abound in British publicschools. And she has linked this education failurewith far wider implications for the UK’s future.

CLASS DIVIDE NOT JUST RACIALThe class divide in Britain is only in part racial. Giventhat black children are most likely to end up in thepoorest neighbourhoods, they are the most likely to

attend the most troubled schools. But the divide is farmore complicated – and this is the divide betweengood and bad education. Katharine Birbalsingh haspointed the bone at the UK public system for itsintransigence and lack of competition, as much as forits lack of rigour and high standards.

In her Sir John Cass’s Foundation Lecture 2011,Birbalsingh gave the increasingly depressing statisticsfor British schools globally – in the 2009 PISA report,UK students were 16th in the world for science (downfrom 4th in 2000), 28th for maths (down from 8th in2000) and 25th for reading (down from 7th in 2000).Meanwhile, 17 per cent of UK 15-year-olds areilliterate. But Birbalsingh is passionate about thedisadvantaged and her mission is to make educationequal – the very reason public schooling began:

People say the reason the recent riotshappened is because there are no jobs, butif one isn’t even equipped with basic skillsthat would allow one to apply for a job, howis one meant to get one? Of course, whatbreaks my heart is that while all of us in thisroom are literate in ways that so many ofour young people could only ever dreamabout, the illiterate 17 per cent of our 15-year-olds come from our poorest and mostdisadvantageous families. They areprecisely the children that the educationsystem is meant to equip with thenecessary knowledge and skills that wouldallow them to change their stars.

For all the notions of liberal rights and freedomsespoused by what Birbalsingh terms “so-calledprogressives”, it is the inequality of standards withinthe public system that is dividing off the haves andhave nots in British society. Birbalsingh, from herteaching for years in inner London public schools, haswitnessed the corruption in schools of standards andethics - developed in a vacuum of middle classtolerance. “Ordinary people don’t realise just how littlesome of our kids know,” she told her audience. And toillustrate her meaning she offered her reaction to anarticle on Carla Bruni from a recent newspaper, wherethe problem she saw was as follows:

To understand just the title and subtitle,one would have to know who she is; thatshe is married to Nicholas Sarkozy, that heis the president of France, and what beinga president means. Indeed you would haveto know what France is. Is it a city? Is it acountry? Is it in Europe? You may laugh,but I have, as a teacher, had conversationswith 14-year-olds who simply don’tunderstand the difference between Franceand Paris. ... I can’t tell you the number of

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times I’ve had conversations with kidsabout Winston Churchill where they thinkhe’s “that dog” off the insurance advertfrom TV.

Listening to Katherine Birbalsingh’s stories from hertime as a teacher can often be very funny. Herfictional To Miss With Love is also filled with momentsthat leave the reader chuckling. Her account of a tripto Oxford with a bus load of students from innerLondon is hilarious until one realises what chasmsthere are in the knowledge of these teenagers.Oxford is Oxford Circle to them; a cow in a field thatis real is a surreal experience. Birbalsingh is notexaggerating.

PUSH-BACK TO “FREE” SCHOOLSKatherine Birbalsingh’s attempt to establish a freeschool – an action encouraged by new school laws inBritain – has come up against strident oppositionfrom groups on the left. She has been pilloried for notbeing qualified to head a school, most recently by anarticle in The Observer, in spite of having an Oxbridgedegree and the required National Qualification forHeadship (many heads have neither). Meanwhile,Michaela Community school volunteers, handing outleaflets to advertise the new school, have beenordered away from the gates of local governmentschools by teachers.

What Birbalsingh’s treatment has shown is that UKstate schools are fixed with a monopoly view ofeducation, and a misguided belief that competition isbad. This, in spite of the Michaela Community schoolopening in an area that admits to being the worst hitfor secondary places. And, while many of the schoolsin this area are selective, Michaela Communityschool will not be selective in any way. It is in factmaking sure that its intake will be a trulycomprehensive one.

FAILURE OF PREVAILINGINTELLECTUAL CULTUREBoth Lammy and Birbalsingh are critical of theprevailing intellectual culture in the uK – one whichhas been in place over at least two decades – where,as Lammy puts it, “politics has been miles away frompeople’s daily concerns”. Those politics are not justforced by politicians, but also by the chatteringclasses and those who demand certain politicalagenda take precedence over pragmatic needs.

For Lammy, it’s a case of the very needy being by-passedby centralised and bureaucratically encumbered stateauthorities, too far removed from local communities tocare or even understand real problems or solutions thatcould be tried. Parents no longer feel sovereign in theirown homes and are criminalised for a smacking their

children. Meanwhile, children are left to die frominjuries inflicted by incapable parents and guardians.One in four children grow up with no fathers in theirlives. For many, the only freedom is the freedom to bepoor.

For Birbalsingh, it’s sitting in front of an audience ofpredominantly black Britons, in inner London, at aninformation evening for a free school:

All of them were black working class people,all wanting to change the fate of theircommunities, desperate to find a solution tothe gang violence, grateful for finally beinggiven the opportunity to make a differencethrough setting up their schools.

SAJID JAVID’S EXPERIENCEDuring an address to The Sydney Institute in 2011,UK Conservative MP Sajid Javid recalled his Bristolcomprehensive high school experience at a meetingwith the careers adviser. What did he like, he wasasked. He replied, watching TV. The careers advisersuggested he opt for a job as a TV repairman.

As Sajid Javid went on to muse, such a suggestionwould have meant he would now be unemployed.Instead, Javid went on to study politics andeconomics at Exeter University, work for the ChaseManhattan Bank and become its youngest ever vice-president at 25. He also joined the Conservative Partyand is now Parliamentary Private Secretary to theChancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne.

Students like Javid and Lammy find their own way outof the pit of comprehensive, teach down schooling.But they are the few. For most, if schooling offers thelowest common denominator – one getting lower ascommunities are devoured by poverty and socialstructures that dismiss them – there is not a lot toprevent nihilism and alienation taking over.

The UK riots of August 2011 said much about Britainin 2011. They also reminded those who watched thescenes of chaos that sores can fester in modernsociety only to bandaged over by government andnever to heal if only the symptoms are treated and notthe causes.

For David Lammy and Katharine Birbalsingh, andthose they come in contact with, it’s time to tackle someof these causes. The cultural dilemma is not peripheral.

Anne Henderson is the Deputy Director of The SydneyInstitute

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BOOKREVIEWSJohn McConnell

BLACK DOG DAZE: Public Life, Private DemonsBy Andrew RobbMelbourne University Press2011, pb, $34.95ISBN 978 0 522 85857 0

F or more than four decades, Andrew Robbstruggled daily with a problem. Each morning, a

black mood placed his persona in its grip. During this“morning funk”, he felt insecure and lacked theconfidence to make decisions;he was reluctant to engage inconversation with others.

A few strategies providedlimited relief - long hotshowers, sunshine, sneezingand activities providing anadrenalin rush. Then, whenhis depressive mood lifted, hebecame a different person.

Andrew Robb’s life followedthis daily pattern for 43 years– an extraordinarily long timefor anyone but especially sofor someone involved in thecut and thrust of daily politics.Eventually, a couple of matterscoincided to force him to seekhelp. His “morning funk” waslengthening. The “little blackdog” was growing in size.

Increasingly, the depressivemood was inhibiting hisability to perform tasksproperly. And then, AndrewRobb received an approachabout standing for the leadership of the federalparliamentary Liberal Party.

How could he contemplate such a demanding role, heagonised, while struggling each morning withpersonal depression? He was wary of going publicabout his condition. What if this stigma was seen as acharacter weakness? What if people decided that hewas likely to be unreliable in a crisis?

Despite these uncertainties, Andrew Robb decided toconfront his personal demons.

For the past 18 months, a prescription has rectifiedwhat had been a chemical imbalance in the morningsfor Robb. The cause of the problem has beenidentified - a serotonin deficiency. The little black dogis out of sight and out of mind.

If only Andrew Robb had known earlier that hiscondition was so treatable. Black Dog Daze conveysthis important message to readers and includesadvice about where to seek help for mood disorders.The book celebrates Robb’s release from the “littleblack dog” and declares his political attitudes andambitions.

Andrew Robb lived on farms during his earlychildhood until the family relocated to the Melbourneworking-class suburb of Reservoir about the time hemoved into secondary education. After completinghis secondary education, Andrew Robb attendedVictoria’s Dookie Agricultural College. Subsequently,he joined the Department of Agriculture and studied

economics.

Robb went on from there tohold senior positions with theNational Farmers Federationand the Cattle Council beforeserving as chief of staff toAndrew Peacock during the1990 federal election.

During the 1993 and 1996federal elections Robb wasfederal director of the LiberalParty, acting as campaigndirector. At the 2004 federalelection, he entered theHouse of Representatives as member for the Victorianseat of Goldstein. Since then, Robb has had a range of portfolio responsibilitiesincluding industrial relations,immigration and multiculturalaffairs and foreign policy.

In his memoir, Robbdiscusses his political viewsand involvements together

with his time spent in private enterprise including aperiod working for the Packer family. He includessome interesting observations on John Howard,Kevin Rudd, Malcolm Turnbull, Paul Keating, JohnHewson, Andrew Peacock and Ian McLachlan.

The word “ruthless” appears in relation to more thanone character. Robb refers to his attempt, before the2007 federal election, to persuade John Howard (“athoroughly decent person”) to relinquish the primeministership. Howard’s “resolve, determination,

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persistence and strength of character underpressure,” he notes, “also turned out to beweaknesses, because all of these qualities meant itwould be very hard for him to give up anything.”

John Hewson, writes Robb, could be a difficult personto work with at times. Hewson also lacked anawareness of the importance of the party base – theparty membership and the party organisation.

Also revealed are Robb’s strong family values, hisreligious upbringing (Catholic), his parents’ politicsduring his youth (Democratic Labor Party), hisattraction to people “who make things happen” and apenchant for seeking responsible and challengingpositions.

Robb remains sensitive to personal injusticesexperienced in his past and emphasises theimportance he now places on critical thinking (“I hadlong confused uncritical thinking with respect forauthority.”)

With commendable honesty, Robb also discusses“the unlosable election” of 1993, admitting he wasone of the architects of the loss. It was his firstnational campaign as Campaign Director. ReleasingFightback!, the party’s election manifesto, too earlyamounted to a “big strategic mistake”. He placesresponsibility for the early launch of Fightback! on hisown inexperience as well as on the inexperience ofJohn Hewson and, to a lesser extent, Peter Reith.

Launching Fightback! 17 months prior to the 1993election helped Paul Keating seize the primeministership from Bob Hawke. The extended pre-election period also provided Paul Keating with timeto demolish the complex policy package.

Andrew Robb argues convincingly the important linkthat exists between migrants gaining work, learningEnglish and integrating successfully into Australiansociety. He lists the characteristics desirable inpolitical leaders and signals his own leadershipambitions: “When you are sounded out to stand forleader of your political party, there can only be oneanswer,” he states, both at the beginning and end ofhis book. He would now have no hesitationresponding in the affirmative, he announces in thebook’s concluding sentence.

Elsewhere in the book, Robb reveals an impatience toclimb career ladders (“I have always been in a hurryto get to the next stage.”) The essential message isclear.

Whether this declaration of interest will assistAndrew Robb to realise his leadership ambitions, orsimply raise doubts about his reliability as a team

player, remains to be seen. However, by writing BlackDog Daze, Andrew Robb is encouraging others tobreak free of their private demons and realise theirpotential.

TO MISS WITH LOVEBy Katharine BirbalsinghPenguin Books2011, pb, $29.95ISBN 978 0 670 91899 7

British teacher and writer Katharine Birbalsinghdelivered the inaugaural Jim and Janette BainOccasional Sydney Institute lecture on 20 September2011. Judging by the podcast available on The SydneyInstitute’s website, it was quite a performance.

Katharine Birbalsingh’s talk was lively, forceful andchallenging. Her topic on the night was LondonSchools and the London Riots – Too Much NannyState? The riots, she insisted, were no surprise toBritain’s teachers.

Katharine Birbalsingh taught in five inner-citycomprehensive schools in London over a decade.Indeed, she attended a comprehensive school as astudent before graduating from Oxford Universitywith a degree in philosophy and modern languages.

Katharine Birbalsingh, whose family background isJamaican, feels a deep commitment to providing thebest possible education for Britain’s underprivilegedchildren. “The kids I’m worried about,” she states,“are the working classes, the ethnic minorities.”

Such is Birbalsingh’s deep dissatisfaction with inner-city comprehensive schools, she began publishingher observations on an anonymous blog. In late 2010,she addressed a Conservative Party conferenceabout her concerns. Her public criticisms of stateschools catapulted her into controversy and she losther job.

It is not an uncommon dilemma: speak out and incurthe wrath of officials and bureaucrats; remain silentand betray the very people who need help.

Katharine Birbalsingh chose to speak out. Her book,To Miss With Love warns that the majority of blackchildren in London and other large British citiesattend:

“...chaotic schools where there is no orderwhatsoever…There is no order becauseteachers are scared of being accused ofracism. There’s a refusal to exclude blackkids who deserve it.”

Written in diary format, To Miss With Love coversevents in “Ordinary School” during a school year.

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The diary format is engaging. The issues are real.There is nothing in the book, the author insists, thatdidn’t happen during her ten years of teaching inLondon’s inner-city schools.

Katharine Birbalsingh creates composite charactersand situations. Colourful - mnemonic - names areassigned to the characters. Students includeDeranged, Seething, Cavalier, Munchkin andFurious. Teachers include Ms Sensible, MrGoodheart, Ms Alternative, Mr Hadenough and MrSporty. Her own character - Snuffleupagus/Snuffy –is dedicated to improving the education and lives ofunderprivileged children.

The characters’ interactions illustrate the author’smajor areas of concern. Birbalsingh targets loweducational standards, a breakdown in authority,associated behavioural problems among studentsincluding intimidation and violence, lack ofaccountability and personal responsibility, adevaluation of knowledge, anexcessive elevation of groupwork where teachers becomefacilitators and entertainers,and a reporting system thatfocuses on individual goals tothe exclusion of competitiveassessments.

Desks in rows, competitionand grades are frowned upon.Bureaucratic regulations stifleteaching, rewarding thoseteachers who prepare theirlessons according to theprescribed formula: Use aninteractive whiteboard andbegin lessons with objectives?“Shazam! You’re an excellentteacher” Homework? Inappro-priate. Marks? They stifleacademic progress. Bored,disruptive students? Blamethe teachers.

Katharine Birbalsingh claimsthat “20 per cent of youngpeople are functionally illiterateand do not know the difference between right andwrong.” Her own students struggle to distinguishbetween Paris and France. Names puzzle them. Who was Winston Churchill? What is OxfordUniversity?

The point is that students require knowledge tounderstand the world in which they live. They needbackground knowledge to make sense of articles inthe media. It’s easy for students to get bored,

Birbalsingh insists, if they’re not being taughtanything.

The best possible education is being denied tounderprivileged students (calling them pupils isregarded as patronising). Instead of promoting socialmobility, Birbalsingh argues that comprehensiveschools in inner-London and other British cities areperpetuating the nation’s class system.

To Miss With Love unveils a blistering attack oneducation in British state schools. It identifies seriousconcerns with the education of underprivilegedchildren in Britain. However, Katharine Birbalsinghcould have given more recognition to the differingways that different students learn and theimplications thereby arising.

In the book, her character, Snuffy, replies to amember of the class who questions why she cares: “Icare,” she replies, “because I know that some of youwill go from Year 8 through to 9, and then through to

10 and finally 11, and thenyou’ll fail your GCSEs.Because nothing in oursystem will stop you fromdoing this. You can’t fail untilyou get to the end.”

Birbalsingh links hereducational concerns to socialissues such as family values,absentee fathers, parentsunable to tolerate criticism oftheir children, parents whoare quick to allege racism,problems generated bywelfare dependency and asense of entitlement in ananny state.

“How do we teachers,” Snuffyasks, “build robust enougharguments in favour of ‘doingit properly’, ‘having dignity’.‘pursuing a sense of personalresponsibility’, when some ofwhat the welfare state doesproves all our argumentswrong?”

Katharine Birbalsingh entered teaching with a left-wing orientation. After teaching for just over a decadein comprehensive schools, she now embracesconservative values and favours a traditionaleducation.

John McConnell is the author of several economics textbooks

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DOCUMENTATIONUNIVERSITY OF NSW GOES ALL POST-MODERN & FACT-FREE

I n September 2011, Senator Stephen Conroy (theMinister for Broadband, Communications and theDigital Economy) announced the establishment ofthe Independent Inquiry into Media and MediaRegulation – to be headed by Ray Finkelstein QC.The Independent Media Inquiry focused on printmedia regulation, including online publications.

The Independent Media Inquiry has considered the role of newspapers and on-line publications. But not books, including e-books. Yet these days,most newspapers and online publications publishcorrections where necessary. Not so bookpublishers – when if errors are made they remainuncorrected for the life of the manuscript.

The following correspondence between GerardHenderson and Fred Hilmer – President and Vice-Chancellor of the University of New South Wales,which encompasses UNSW Press Limited – providesan interesting case study of the unwillingness of somepublishing houses to ever acknowledge, let alonecorrect, errors in their books. The full correspondencehas been published in Gerard Henderson’s MediaWatch Dog, which can be located on The SydneyInstitute’s website. The following correspondence isthe complete exchange between Gerard Hendersonand Professor Fred Hilmer. Note that UNSW Presspublishes under the imprint New South.

GERARD HENDERSON TO FRED HILMER –8 JUNE 2011

Dear Professor Hilmer

I have attached a copy of the correspondence whichpassed between me and Nick Dyrenfurth and TimSoutphommasane (the editors of All That’s Left) andKathy Bail and Phillipa McGuinness (at theUniversity of New South Wales Press). All That’s Leftwas published by New South in 2010. Due to a senseof frustration, I published this correspondence in arecent edition of my Media Watch Dog blog.

As Vice-Chancellor of the University of New SouthWales, I assume that you take ultimate responsibilityfor the publications of the University of New SouthWales Press Ltd.

As the correspondence indicates, in the“Introduction” to All That’s Left the co-editors makecertain allegations about my political and economic

beliefs. Since the book contains neither footnotes norendnotes, none of the assertions are documented.

I have written to Dr Dyrenfurth and DrSoutphommasane on several occasions requestingthat they provide evidence to support their claimswith respect to me in All That’s Left. So far, neitherhas responded.

As I understand it, the standard contracts signed byauthors require that the authors assure theirpublishers that the material in their books is correct.In my view, Dr Dyrenfurth and Dr Soutphommasane– not New South – are responsible for the claimsmade about me in All That’s Left. However, both MsBail and Ms McGuinness appear to support thestance taken by the editors of All That’s Left not toprovide evidence to back-up their (undocumented)assertions.

Apparently New South is concerned that I mightpublish the responses by Dr Dyrenfurth and DrSoutphommasane. This is puzzling – since the claimsmade about me are published in a New South book.

There is a serious issue here. I have been a publiccommentator for decades and avoided exaggerationand hyperbole. Yet the editors of All That’s Left trashmy reputation by claiming – for example – that Iregard the modern Labor Party as “socialist”. WhenI ask the editors to provide evidence for their claim –they lack the courage to reply. Moreover, theirevident cowardice is apparently supported by theUniversity of New South Wales Press.

I know how busy you are. However, I would begrateful if you could arrange for one of your staff toreview the issue.

I have always enjoyed a good relationship with NewSouth and some of its authors have addressed TheSydney Institute over the years. On this occasion, allI am asking is that the editors of a New Southpublication provide evidence to support their claimswith respect to me – or acknowledge that they haveno evidence. This is not an unreasonable request –especially concerning academics who mark downtheir own students for failing to provide evidence tosupport allegations.

On another note, Professor Herbert Huppert who, asI understand it, is a friend of yours – will beaddressing The Sydney Institute on Tuesday 12 July2011. You and Claire are most welcome to attend histalk – which, as I understand it, will include anexperiment or two.

Best wishes

Gerard Henderson

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FRED HILMER TO GERARD HENDERSON –8 JUNE 2011

Gerard

In europe until end of month. Have fwdd to execassistant

Regards

Fred

GERARD HENDERSON TO FRED HILMER –10 NOVEMBER 2011


I am writing to you in your capacity as President andVice-Chancellor of the University of New SouthWales. As you are aware, the University of NewSouth Wales Press Limited – and its various titlesincluding UNSW Press and New South – is a part ofthe University of New South Wales.

I am genuinely concerned about the indifference ofthe University of New South Wales towardsUniversity of New South Wales Press Limited and itspublications. I am also surprised at the refusal ofsenior management at the University of New SouthWales – along with UNSW Press Limited’smanagement – to enter into discussion about UNSWPress publications or ever to answer correspondence.It is as if both the University and its publishing armaccepts no responsibility for the content of bookswhich it publishes.

As you will recall, in 1993 you were the principalauthor of Strictly Boardroom: Improving Governanceto Enhance Company Performance (which waspublished by Information Australia in associationwith The Sydney Institute). Among the findings ofStrictly Boardroom was the conviction that“executives have primary responsibility for managingthe corporation”. This letter is directed to you in yourcapacity as the chief executive of the University ofNew South Wales in the light of your responsibilityfor managing the University of New South Wales,including UNSW Press Limited.

I know that you are familiar with this issue. I also knowthat you effectively passed the matter on to ProfessorRichard Henry (UNSW’s Deputy Vice Chancellor,Academic). And I know that Professor Henry refused todeal properly with the issue – and subsequently declinedto answer correspondence. I would be surprised if you– and UNSW’s Council – would describe such behaviouras amounting to good governance.

For the sake of clarity, I briefly repeat the key facts.In the introduction of their co-edited book All That’sLeft: What Labor Should Stand For (New South,2010), Nick Dyrenfurth and Tim Soutphommasanereferred to members of “the Right” and continued:

Whether it is Gerard Henderson, JanetAlbrechtsen, Andrew Bolt or ChristopherPearson, there is only carping and invective.To be on the Right is to believe that Laborhas returned to its socialist ways: thateverything is symbolic and hollow; thatpolitical correctness has run riot; and, ofcourse, that Judeo-Christian values areunder threat. Such poor emulation ofAmerican neoconservative strategies – thecrass pseudo-populism of the tea-partypatriots, the vapidity of Sarah Palin and theblathering of the Fox News demagogues –diminishes not only conservatives but alsothe wider public debate.

The fact is that I have never written or said (i) that“Labor has returned to its socialist ways”, (ii) or that“everything is symbolic and hollow”, (iii) or that“political correctness has run riot”, (iv) or that“Judeo-Christian values are under threat”.

Dr Dyrenfurth and Dr Soutphommasane just madeall this up with respect to me. All That’s Left is repletewith such abusive terms as “blathering” and“vapidity” – but contains neither footnotes/endnotesnor a bibliography.

The co-editors have not been able to provide anyevidence to document their assertions with respect tome. In their one and only (belated) response to me,Dr Dyrenfurth and Dr Soutphommasane simplyresorted to abuse and denial. Borrowing a term fromMark Latham, they accused me of suffering from“pathological corresponditis” and alleged that I hadtrashed my “own reputation”. They also denied thatthey ever made the claims about me which appear onPage 9 of All That’s Left.

You may be interested to know that, in their letter tome, Dr Dyrenfurth and Dr Soutphommasane claimedto be speaking in defence of UNSW Press. As Iunderstand it, neither is an academic at theUniversity of New South Wales. I am not certainwhether the University of New South Wales needs tobe “defended” in such a way.

As you are aware, no one at UNSW Press is preparedto either defend the claims about me in All That’s Leftor require that the book’s co-editors producedocumentation in support of their assertions. KathyBail and Phillipa McGuinness have advised me that itis completely up to Dr Dyrenfurth and DrSoutphommasane whether they even acknowledgecorrespondence concerning the contents of All That’sLeft. Professor Henry, on behalf of the University ofNew South Wales, has supported the co-editors’tactic. As previously mentioned, Professor Henryhimself now refuses to enter into correspondenceconcerning this matter with either myself or others.

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So, we have the situation where the principal author ofStrictly Boardroom is now the chief executive of ataxpayer subsidised university which has a publishingarm that refuses to document assertions or correcterrors. To me at least, this seems inconsistent with theconcept that corporate governance entails thatexecutives accept responsibility for managing allaspects of a corporation.

When Kathy Bail phoned me on 29 July 2011, sheexpressed no concern about whether All That’s Leftcontained undocumented assertions and errors. Allshe cared about was that I had involved you andProfessor Henry in the dispute. I advised Ms Bailthat I had no alternative – since UNSW Press hadindicated that it chose not to exercise quality controlconcerning its publications.

Traditionally, I have enjoyed good relations withUNSW Press Limited. Anne Henderson’s biographyJoseph Lyons (New South) was launched recently byJohn Howard and has received very good reviews. LastTuesday, the Institute put on Geoffrey Lehmann andRobert Gray discussing their excellent AustralianPoetry Since 1788 (UNSW Press). Both events werepodcast and filmed by Foxtel/Austar Channel 648.Unlike All That’s Left, both books were fact-checkedprior to publication and contain documentary material.

I am surprised that you, in your capacity as UNSWPresident and Vice-Chancellor, appear unwilling tobecome involved in this matter in any way – beyondpassing my correspondence on to Professor Henrywho passed it on to UNSW Press who passed it on tothe co-editors of All That’s Left who went into denialand abuse mode.

I would have thought that the University of NewSouth Wales would insist on UNSW Press Limitedexercising the highest of professional standards withrespect to all of its publications.

As I have explained to Ms Bail and Professor Henry,the matter is easily resolved. All the co-editors of AllThat’s Left have to do is to either produce evidence insupport of their assertions or acknowledge that theymade an error in attributing positions to me that I donot hold.

I would appreciate hearing your views on the issuebefore taking the issue further. When you were chiefexecutive of Fairfax Media, the company had a processof promptly handling any false claims made in itsnewspapers. It would seem to me that the standards ofthe University of New South Wales with respect toevidence should be no less than those that applied whenyou were the chief executive of Fairfax Media.

Best wishes

Yours sincerelyGerard Henderson

PS: For convenience sake, I have attached a copy ofthe entire correspondence concerning this matter.Most of this has been published in my Media WatchDog blog which appears on The Sydney Institute’swebsite each Friday afternoon.

GERARD HENDERSON TO FRED HILMER –12 JANUARY 2012


Many thanks for your email of 15 December 2011extending your “best wishes for the Festive Seasonand for 2012”. Your electronic greeting was muchappreciated.

While on the topic of 2012, I wonder if there is anychance that anyone at the University of New SouthWales will reply to my letter to you dated 10November 2011. So far, I have not even received anacknowledgement. I have attached a copy of my(unanswered) letter and have also forwarded a copyof this email by post in case UNSW has a problemreceiving my emails. Just to be sure, to be sure.

I understand how busy you are. However, I would begrateful if you – or your office – could answer thefollowing questions:

• Does UNSW have a policy of deliberately ignoringcorrespondence which raises inconvenient truths?

• Or am I the only person with whom UNSW willnot enter into correspondence?

As you are aware, Professor Richard Henry hasdeclined to reply to my correspondence. And now youappear to have ignored my email of 10 November 2011.

I wonder how you would respond if, say, MelbourneUniversity Press published a book which contained(undocumented) false statements about you, refused toacknowledge the errors and then went into avoidanceand denial by refusing to even discuss the issue.

Well, this is what happened to me with respect to theeditors’ chapter in the book What’s Left (UNSWPress, 2010) which was edited by Nick Dyrenfurthand Tim Soutphommasane. I recognise that KathyBail was not managing director of UNSW Press whenWhat’s Left was published in 2010. However, sheseems unconcerned that What’s Left was publishedby UNSW Press without going through a fact-checking process.

So my question remains: Will you – or someone onyour behalf – respond to my letter of 10 November2011? Over to you.

All the best for 2012. Regards to Claire.

Yours sincerelyGerard Henderson

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FRED HILMER TO GERARD HENDERSON –18 JANUARY 2012

Dear Gerard,

I am writing in response to your letters dated 12 January2012 and 10 November 2011, both relating to an email tome back on 8 June 2011 and the subsequent responsefrom Professor Richard Henry two days later. I do recallcalling you on this, but you were away and I was thenoverseas so we didn’t connect.

I am advised that the “All That’s Left” publication yourefer to does not directly quote you. The commentsmade are the editors’ personal interpretation ofpublished columns by you and others. I supportProfessor Henry’s earlier response and suggest thatfurther debate be with the authors who are notUNSW staff.

Regards,

Fred

Professor Frederick G Hilmer AOPresident and Vice-ChancellorThe University of New South Wales

GERARD HENDERSON TO FRED HILMER –8 FEBRUARY 2012

Dear Fred

It was great to catch up last night.

I refer to your email of 18 January 2012 in reply to myletters to you dated 8 June 2011, 10 November 2011and 12 January 2012. I appreciate that you are busy.However, this seems a long time not to reply tocorrespondence which warrants a response.

It’s true that you did phone me on this – at 4.42 pm on8 July 2011. I was temporarily out of the office andthe staff member (who took the call) advised that Ishould not ring back since you were about to go intoan appointment and that you would phone me later.Her message reads as follows: “Fred Hilmer – don’tcall now, he’s at the dentist. He’ll call you.”

As you know, you never called – and last night was thefirst opportunity I had to discuss this matter with you.

In your email of 18 January 2012 you wrote:

I am advised that the “All That’s Left”publication you refer to does not directlyquote you. The comments made are theeditors’ personal interpretation of publishedcolumns by you and others. I supportProfessor Henry’s earlier response andsuggest that further debate be with theauthors who are not UNSW staff.

You are the President and Vice-Chancellor of TheUniversity of New South Wales. Yet you accept no

responsibility for the content of books published byUNSW Press which is attached to the University ofNew South Wales. In fact, neither UNSW nor UNSWPress will accept responsibility for material publishedby UNSW Press.

As you will be aware if you have read thecorrespondence, I am not seeking “further debate”with the authors of the “Introduction” to All That’sLeft – who also happen to be the editors. All I amasking is that they provide evidence for theundocumented assertions they made about me in AllThat’s Left – or withdraw the allegations. DrDyrenfurth and Dr Soutphommasane refuse toprovide evidence or withdraw their claims – withoutevidence there is nothing to debate.

In the introduction to All That’s Left, Nick Dyrenfurthand Tim Soutphommasane made the following claim:

Whether it is Gerard Henderson, JanetAlbrechtsen, Andrew Bolt or ChristopherPearson, there is only carping andinvective. To be on the Right is to believethat Labor has returned to its socialistways: that everything is symbolic andhollow; that political correctness has runriot; and, of course, that Judeo-Christianvalues are under threat.

I cannot speak for what Dr Albrechtsen, Mr Bolt orMr Pearson may have said or written. However, Ihave never said or written that (i) Labor has returnedto its socialist ways or (ii) that everything is symbolicand hollow or (iii) political correctness has run riot or(iv) Judeo-Christian values are under threat.

According to your email and what you said last night,I should accept what the authors/editors wrote in AllThat’s Left because I am linked with “others”. Thereis no logic to such a claim. Also, I have a differentwriting style from – and do not necessarily agree with– the three people mentioned above.

As President and Vice-Chancellor of UNSW, you arerationalising unprofessional behaviour – wherebyacademics can make wild unsubstantiated assertions.You would not have tolerated such unprofessionalismwhen you were chief executive of Fairfax Media.

It is true – as you say in your email – that All That’sLeft “does not directly quote me”. That’s theproblem. UNSW Press has published a book whichdoes not have endnotes or footnotes or a bibliography– and which was not fact-checked.

You rationalise the claims made about me in AllThat’s Left by the authors/editors on the basis that“the comments made are the editors’ personalinterpretation of published columns” by me and

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others. You do not say what the alleged “publishedcolumns” are and where they can be identified.

How can the authors/editors of All That’s Left cometo an “interpretation” which is based on no evidenceof any kind? I understand that you have concludedthis correspondence and, in the tradition of ProfessorRichard Henry, will not answer the question. Youhave told me to take the matter up with theauthors/editors knowing that they have refused toprovide evidence to support their claims.

In conclusion, I offer some (gratuitous) advice:

• UNSW Press should engage a fact-checker.

Anne Henderson’s latest book Joseph Lyons (UNSWPress) has been praised by the likes of RodneyCavalier, David Day, John Howard, Michelle Grattanand Barry Jones – among others. Anne had a goodeditor and Anne herself arranged for her biographyto be fact-checked.

Sophie Cunningham’s Melbourne (UNSW Press) wasreleased shortly before Joseph Lyons. Melbourne islittered with factual errors. Clearly UNSW Press didnot engage a fact-checker for Melbourne – just like itdid not engage a fact-checker for All That’s Left. Inmy view, university publishing houses should sethigh standards for accuracy. On some occasions atleast, UNSW Press fails this test. A fact-checkershould resolve this problem.

• Non-fiction books published by UNSW Pressshould be documented or the publisher should advisethat authors/editors will provide documentation onrequest. Alternatively, documentation could be placed– at relatively little cost – on UNSW Press’ website.

One final point. I am genuinely surprised that in yourrecently acquired Vice-Chancellor persona you havegone all post-modern and now seem to hold the viewthat facts do not matter – and that “personalinterpretations” based on no documented evidencewill do. Fancy that.

Last night, you suggested that I had no alternativebut to publish corrections to All That’s Left in some ofThe Sydney Institute’s publications. I will do so – butit is no substitute for an acknowledgement by theauthors/editors or by UNSW Press – that there is no evidence for the claims made about me in AllThat’s Left.

Best wishes

Gerard Henderson

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The inaugural issue of Gerard Henderson’sMedia Watch was published in April 1988 –over a year before the first edition of theABC TV Media Watch program went to air.Since November 1997 “Gerard Henderson’sMedia Watch” has been published as part ofThe Sydney Institute Quarterly. In 2009Gerard Henderson’s Media Watch Dogcommenced publication as a weekly e-newsletter – it appears on The SydneyInstitute’s website each Friday.

BEST OF THE MEDIA WORST IN 2011:AND THE WINNERS ARE –

S ince “Media Watch” commenced in 1988 –journalists, producers and commentators alike

have been trying mightily hard to get a run in theseprestigious pages. Sometimes it appears that mediatypes exaggerate, proclaim howlers or contradictthemselves just to get a run in “Gerard Henderson’sMedia Watch”.

In view of this, it has been decided to award efforts bygiving out gongs on an annual basis. So here we gofor 2011 – in what was a very competitive field.

WORST ATTEMPT AT HUMOUR – GUY RUNDLECrikey’s house comedian Guy Rundle scooped the poolin this category – with an attempt to make fun of theshooting of the United States Democratic politicianGabrielle Giffords. Ms Giffords suffered terrible braininjuries following an attack by deranged gunman JaredLoughner in Tuscon, Arizona – who killed six peopleand injured many more.In an entry in Crikey on 23 December 2011 titled“Rundle: goodbye 2011, and Knut who died fromcoke and hookers”, Rundle wrote:Democrat congresswoman GabrielleGiffords was shot during a public meeting,sustaining serious brain damage thatdoctors said would oblige her to changeher life, or at least her party.

Pretty funny, don’t you think? Ms Gifford’s braininjury is so serious that she will have to become aRepublican – as in Republicans are brain damaged.Get it? Guy Rundle is a faux Marxist. Get it?

BIGGEST SUCK-UP TO ACTORS –DAVID WILLIAMSONWriting in Crikey on 10 June 2011, David Williamsonstood up for actors and endorsed their left-liberalstance. Here we go:Anyone who has listened to actorsdiscussing a play in the first daysof rehearsals would, I think, realise howmuch thinking they do about character andsocial forces. The insight into the motivesof their characters and other characters inthe play is usually at a very high level ofperception and the discussion of the socialand psychological forces operating at thetime and place the play was written is alsousually very well informed. Actors researchthe characters they play, often verythoroughly, and in so doing research thesocial conditions and often the inequities ofvarious societies at various points of time.

Far from their vain, chattering stereotype,most actors I know, as a result of theircontinuing research about character andsociety, have a deeper knowledge ofhuman motivation and the power of socialforces than the general population....

Okay then, Judy Davis for prime minister, “Carbon”Cate Blanchett for treasurer and the late CharlieChaplin for minister for youth affairs. All thinkingtypes – and all left-liberals.

“DID I MISS THAT?” AWARD – AUSSIE THEATRE REVIEWERS REDON PARTIES ONWhile remaining on the topic of actors, did anyonenotice a problem with the cast of David Williamson’splay Don Parties On which commenced its run inMelbourne in January 2011. It was the sequel inDon’s Party, which was first performed in 1971.Don’s Party was set in Eltham, Melbourne on thenight of the December 1969 Federal election – whenthe Coalition led by John Gorton defeated GoughWhitlam’s Labor Opposition. According to DavidWilliamson’s published script, most of the cast wereaged in their thirties. In the published version ofDon’s Party, the following comment appears underthe list of characters: “All characters are in their earlyto mid thirties, with the exception of Susan who is inher early twenties.”

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Don Parties On was set in Eltham Melbourne on thenight of the August 2010 Federal election – whenLabor led by Julia Gillard finished equal (in terms ofseats won) with the Coalition led by Tony Abbott –and subsequently formed a minority government.Same place. Many of the same characters. Accordingto David Williamson’s published script Don PartiesOn, most of the cast were aged in their mid-sixties –i.e. Don, Kath, Mal, Cooley and Jenny.Since some four decades passed between December1969 and August 2010, it was a remarkableachievement that such characters as Don, Kath, Mal,Colley and Jenny had only aged 30 years during this40 year period. Well done David Williamson – yougot away with this. Otherwise some of the actorsmight have been on frames.And what an achievement that no theatre reviewerspicked up on this. They deserve a gong for beingasleep in their theatre seats.

SNOB OF THE YEAR – MARGARETSIMONSOn 11 November 2011, Margaret Simons wrote anarticle for Crikey following the decision of J.B. Fairfaxto sell his remaining shares in Fairfax Media.In a convoluted writing style, Ms Simons firstconsidered what Fairfax Media is not doing – beforewriting about what it is doing. Still with us? In anyevent, this is what Margaret Simons wrote :Two alternative and directly contradictoryexplanations for the Fairfax family sell-upwere floating around this morning. Onlyone of them is right. The incorrect one isworth canvassing, because there is aserious body of opinion among investmentanalysts that this is what the Fairfax boardSHOULD be doing, even though it isn’t.This theory is that the Fairfax board, led bygrocer Roger Corbett, is intent on realisingthe value of Fairfax sooner rather thanlater, by breaking it up and selling the bits.This theory rests on the assumption thatCorbett can see that the mastheads areworth more now than they will be in a fewyears, when their lack of profitability willbe evident to all concerned. Therefore,selling them now makes sense.

So there you have it, Fairfax Media’s chairman RogerCorbett – according to Snob Simons – is a “grocer”.Which raises two points.First, what’s wrong with grocers? Why should beinga grocer disqualify a person from becoming chairmanof a publicly listed company?Second, on what basis does Ms Simons depict MrCorbett as a “grocer”? According to Who’s Who inAustralia, Roger Corbett’s employment backgroundincludes stints at Grace Bros, David Jones, Big W andWoolworths (where he was chief executive officer from1999 to 2006). Roger Corbett has been a member of theboard of the Reserve Bank of Australia since 2005.

Come to think of it, MUP would have been welladvised to employ a grocer, rather than journalistMargaret Simons, to co-write and research MalcolmFraser: The Political Memoirs (see below). Many a grocer is aware that George Orwell’s book1984 targeted the communist dictatorships inEastern Europe in the 1940s, including the SovietUnion. Yet, believe it or not, Simons and Fraserclaimed that it was Britain in the early 1950s “thatinspired George Orwell’s 1984 – a place wheregovernment control was total”. A grocer like AlfredRoberts, Margaret Thatcher’s father, would neverhave written such ahistorical tosh.

MOST INAPPROPRIATE COMPARISON– DAVID MCKNIGHT ON TONYABBOTT AND VLADIMIR LENINFormer Communist Party member and one-timeoccasional defender of the Khmer Rouge, DavidMcKnight seems to see the image of Bolshevikleader Vladimir Lenin when others see – well, notvery much at all.This is how Dr McKnight (for a doctor he is)commenced his article in The Age on 2 June 2011.His target was Liberal Party leader Tony Abbott’sappeal to lower income groups.The Australian working class was onceoppressed by big business. Today itsuffers under the yoke of actors andactresses. Is it just me, or have othersnoticed that the Liberal Party under TonyAbbott has become the party of class war,class envy and class hate?In an astounding rhetorical trick, CateBlanchett is attacked as a symbol of wealthand power for speaking out on climatechange. Yet dollar for dollar, she barely ratesagainst genuinely wealthy Australians -such as mining heiress Gina Rinehart, whois a supporter of the climate sceptics.When Abbott stands at the dispatch boxand channels Vladimir Lenin - speakingpassionately about Australia's ''workingpeople'' and his plan to save them - theworld has gone topsy-turvy. Yet this is notnew. Conservatives first discovered theworking class in early 1980, when RonaldReagan's campaign for the US presidencybegan in earnest.

What arrant nonsense. There is considerableevidence that many low income earners – includingmembers of the working class – supported suchAustralian conservative leaders as Joseph Lyons inthe 1930s, Robert Menzies in the 1950s and 1960s,Malcolm Fraser in the late 1970s and John Howard inthe late 1990s and early 2000s.Also, Margaret Thatcher obtained a significantnumber of working class and lower-income voters tosupport the Conservative Party at the 1979 generalelection in Britain. In other words, Ronald Reagan’svictory in November 1980 came after conservatives

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in Australia and Britain had succeeded in winning asignificant part of the working class vote. The USRepublican president Dwight Eisenhower alsoobtained significant working class support during hisvictories in 1952 and 1956.Dr McKnight is an academic – and quite adept atinappropriate comparisons.

MOST EGREGIOUS COMPARISON WITHHITLER AND/OR STALIN – BEN ELTON,JOHN PASSANT & MICHAEL SAMARASCOMPETEOnce again, the short list in this category wasunnecessarily long. Serious contenders included:Ben Elton Does WellBritish comedian Ben Elton – who attempted to wardoff suggestions that his Channel 9 show Live FromPlanet Earth should be dropped because of poorratings. Declared Elton:If numbers are what matters, and first-timemedia reaction is what matters, then Hitlerstands vindicated.

Leftist John Passant Does BetterBen Elton is a leftie. So is John Passant who wrote to theAustralian Financial Review complaining about a critiqueof the Greens by the late Peter Ruehl - whose columnswere not always totally serious – on 5 April 2011. So Peter Ruehl (“Seeing red over a darkshade of green”, April 5) is going to adoptthe News Ltd approach to the Greens andindulge in slander and personal attacks.Wingnuts, kooks, mental cupcakes, goofy,screwballs are just some of the insultsRuehl throws at Lee Rhiannon and otherprincipled Greens.This is a classic Stalinist tactic. Impugn themental capacity of those with whom youdisagree without actually dealing with theissues they raise. After all, you’d have to bementally incapacitated to question theutopia that is now Australia, wouldn’t you?

So there you have it. The late Peter Ruehl was knownto attack a bottle of Gin – or more. But not anythingelse. Yet according to the Canberra-based JohnPassant, Peter Ruehl was engaged in Stalinist tactics.Josef Stalin was a mass murderer. Peter Ruehl was agin consumer. John Passant can’t spot the difference.

Michael Samaras Wins By A Knock-out, In TheAustralianBut the winner in this category is ALP memberMichael Samaras, who convinced The Australian torun his op-ed piece titled “If You Go Down To TheAWU, Better Not Think Aloud” on 25 February 2011.Mr Samaras is opposed to the influence in the LaborParty of people like Australian Workers Unionnational secretary Paul Howes.According to Michael Samaras, Paul Howes is mostlike – wait for it – the Stalinist dictator of Romania,

Nicolae Ceausescu. It seems that Samaras was nottoo concerned about Ceausescu’s human victims.Not at all. Rather, where Ceausescu resembledHowes was in the former’s addiction to killing bears:Nicolae Ceausescu was an appalling tyrantand a keen bear hunter. His Romaniandictatorship lasted from 1965 to 1989 andduring this time he was able to employ all theresources of the state towards satisfying hisenthusiasm for shooting bears.

There followed a few paragraphs on the Romaniandictator’s bearcide. Then Michael Samaras turnedhis attention to Paul Howes:The killing [of bears] met no definition ofhunting other than Ceausescu’s own. Itwas a savage mockery. Ceausescu andhis poor bears sprang to mind on readingPaul Howes’s recent speech to the SydneyInstitute... After a day of hunting,Ceausescu retreated to his chalet wherehe and his comrades would feast andregale each other with tales of theirhunting prowess. They had the carcassesto prove it. After a conference Howesretreats to a Chinese restaurant where heand his comrades regale each other withtales of their oratorical power. They havethe votes to prove it.

Michael Samaras – step forward as the proud winner in2011 of the most nebulous link between contemporaryAustralia and Nazi and communist totalitarianism.

THE “LOOK AT ME” AWARD FORCOMPELLING NARCISSISM – TONY KEVINOn 4 March 2011, retired public servant taxpayersubsidised superannuant Tony Kevin wrote to Crikey insupport of Bradley Manning, who is currently awaitingmilitary trial in the United States for leaking secrets –presumably to Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. TonyKevin analysed Bradley Manning’s motives and declared:This is the same moral judgement writtenabout approvingly by Benjamin Franklin, afounder of the US Republic, in 1792: “…anation as a society forms a moral person, andevery member of it is personally responsiblefor his society.” Martin Luther King made thesame point in his struggle: “Our lives beginto end the moment we become silent aboutthings that matter.” And Assange has made asimilar point on his website — that if weignore state evil, we become part of it. Ibelieve it too, which is why I wrote my bookon SIEV X, despite some (really very minor,compared to the horrors Manning is goingthrough now) risks and costs to myself.

How about that? Like him or loath him, BradleyManning is facing the prospect of life imprisonmentin the US. Martin Luther King was murdered by awhite supremist for his views. And Julian Assange

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faces at least some risk of going on trial in the US asa consequence of the WikiLeaks revelations.But Tony Kevin? What were the “risks and costs” tohimself that he has ever experienced? The thesis ofTony Kevin’s A Certain Maritime Incident: TheSinking of the Siev X was that, on the instructions ofthe Howard Government, the Australian Navy hadallowed the Siev X to sink – with the loss of hundredsof lives. And what evidence did Tony Kevin have forthis most serious allegation? Answer: Zip. None.So what about the “risks and costs” to Tony Kevin asa consequence of him writing Siev X? What mightthese have been? They are impossible to find. TonyKevin won a literary award for his unsourcedassumptions and he has been a hero of the leftistsandal-wearing-literary-festival-attending class sincethe publication of Siev X. Also, no one has touchedMr Kevin’s tax-payer subsidised superannuation.Tony Kevin – tops for narcissism in 2011.

MOST INCOHERENT COMMENT ONQ&A IN A CALENDAR YEAR –LACHLAN HARRISThis is a highly competitive award. However, in 2011,Sunday Telegraph columnist and one-time KevinRudd staffer – the one and only Lachlan Harris – wonin a canter.Let’s go to the tape to hear what Lachie Harris had tosay on Q&A (15 August 2011) in response to aquestion by Tony Jones as to whether the Londonriots were amplified by social media. Here we go toLachie’s five-star incomprehension:

Lachlan Harris: I don’t know. I mean,sometimes I find it compelling butotherwise I think it’s kind of blamingTwitter – is a bit like blaming umbrellas forbad weather. You know what I mean? Like,I mean, it was going to happen and what, isthere kind of armies of lesbian mothers inthe UK teaching their kids subservienttweeting courses? Like, I mean, there’s –how did the French Revolution happenwithout Twitter, you know? I just think –

Yeah, I mean, we know. It’s like umbrellas and theFrench Revolution. Know what I mean? And lesbianmothers – know what I mean?

SOFTEST INTERVIEW – LEIGH SALESRE JUDY DAVISOn 15 September Leigh Sales interviewed actor JudyDavis on 7.30. Earlier in the year, actor CateBlanchett had been criticised for supporting acarbon-tax – while having a large carbon foot-printdue to her international travel and movie starlifestyle. Let’s go to the transcript:

Leigh Sales: Do you follow politics veryclosely?Judy Davis: I don't know about very closely.But, you know, like everybody else.

Leigh Sales: 'Cause you've been an activevoice in some political issues in the past -the republic and East Circular Quaydevelopment. Do you still get involved inissues that you care about?Judy Davis: The last thing I became involvedwith was the Iraq War and the sort ofdesperate and obviously futile attempt to tryand get enough people aware to then putpressure on the Howard Government to backoff - he was never going to. There's always acost, you know, with that sort of thing.Leigh Sales: To getting involved?Judy Davis: Yeah. And one would only do itif it was really a serious issue.Leigh Sales: What did you think of the heatthat Cate Blanchett took over the “Carbon”Cate [issue]?Judy Davis: Well, I mean, it's just ridiculous.She's a member of the community and she has a right to be heard. Nobody in ademocracy, at any rate, has the right tostrip somebody of their citizenship and therights that go along with that. It doesn'tmake any difference what job they do. So,yet another disgrace.Leigh Sales: Do you think that Julia Gillard'sgetting a fair go?

How about that? Leigh Sales did not bother to correctJudy Davis. Nobody – but nobody – ever said thatCate Blanchett should be stripped of her Australiancitizenship on account of the fact that she supportedthe Gillard Government’s carbon tax. In any event, itwould be impossible to deprive Ms Blanchett of hercitizenship. Ms Davis just made this up. And Ms Salesjust let her get away with it.

BIGGEST ALIENATION TURN-AROUND:GARY STURGESSOn 11 November 2011 The Australian published anop-ed piece by Gary Sturgess – who was described asthe NSW Premier’s Australian and New ZealandSchool of Government Chair of Public ServiceDelivery. Yep – that’s Mr Sturgess’ title – and itsounds like a tax-payer funded job.Gary Sturgess used his taxpayer funded chair toargue that taxpayer funded public servants should bemore productive. Really. It was a confusing piececontaining many uses of the first person pronoun andconcluded as follows:Governments need to make more use ofcontractual models in delivering publicservices, without necessarily using theprivate sector. They also must appointquality people to front-line management andlearn to trust them. They must change therisk-reward ratio, identifying and honouringthose who succeed, while protecting thosewho take measured risks and fail. We mustencourage innovation in front-line servicesthat is systemic, rather than heroic.

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Politicians tell us we need to raise nationalproductivity. Physician, heal thyself.

That was it. Reading Mr Sturgess’ lecture in TheAustralian reminded this publication that it was not solong ago that Gary Sturgess advised the AustralianFinancial Review that no company in Australia couldafford his talents. This is what Gary Sturgess told theAFR’s Geoff Kitney, as reported on 22 February 2006:There is no doubt that one of the reasonspeople like myself go overseas is that youget to the top of the ladder in whateveryour discipline is in Australia and there area limited number of positions you can goto. There is no company in Australia whichcould afford to have someone of mybackground working at the level that I amworking. The larger size and much morevigorous market in the private provision ofpublic services here is of a differentdimension.In some ways, it is another life for me. Thework is a continuation of what I was doingin Australia but I am obviously working ondifferent problems or similar problems butin different ways. But the breadth of thewhole experience of working and livinghere, the cultural life, is on a differentscale. There is a depth and a subtlety tothe experience of living here [Britain]which you simply cannot get in Australia.

That was in February 2006. Just over four years later,Gary Sturgess is back in Australia in a taxpayerfunded job advising the cardigan set in the publicsector how to become more productive.During his ego-centric conversation with Geoff Kitney,Gary Sturgess contemplated the difficulties of returningto Australia. Believe it or not his assessment was basedon just one anecdote as told by one journalist. Just one,of each:Here is Gary Sturgess:Re-entry to Australia is a tricky issue.Australian friends who have been here andgone back have cautioned me that theyfound it a real problem.

And here is the anecdote, as told to Geoff Kitney:But he [Sturgess] says he is also aware ofAustralian sensitivity to suggestions byexpatriates that pastures are greenerbeyond Australian shores. He recalls thestory an Australia performer told aboutreturning to Australia for a tour after a longcareer away, to be asked by a reporter ifhis return meant that he was now “washedup” overseas. Next time he returned hedecided to emphasise that he was onlyvisiting Australia before going back to hisoverseas career, only to be asked: “So youthink you are too good for us?”

With alienated logic like this, is there any wonderthat Gary Sturgess has found a post at the Universityof New South Wales.

PASTA IN THE EYE AWARD FORNAIVETY – MICHAEL BRISSENDENThe ABC has so many reporters covering United Statespolitics that it is difficult to keep up with them. However,the star performer in 2011 was the public broadcaster’sNorth American correspondent Michael Brissenden.On 8 November 2011, 7.30 carried a report fromBrissenden concerning the (then) Republicanprimary contestant Herman Cain. The point was thatCain’s campaign was being hindered by allegations ofsexual harassment during his business career.Brissenden linked these allegations, along with thetendency of the Cain camp to run unorthodoxadvertisements, to suggest that Cain was a bit of ajoke – so to speak. Let’s go to the transcript:

Michael Brissenden: Until now, the Caincampaign had lived by the maxim "nopublicity is bad publicity", enhanced by acreative - some might say unusual -advertising strategy deliberately designedto attract Internet hits and media coverage.There is now the infamous "smoking man"ad and, weirder still, this one: Rich Lowry, Journalist: Rich Lowry here,chief economic adviser for Herman Cain.Government must get off our backs, out ofour pockets and out of our way. (Eats abowl of pasta).

Just weird? The “advertisement” depicted Cain’s“chief economic adviser” as depositing most of thebowl of pasta over his head and face.

In any event, Michael Brissenden took the“advertisement” seriously. But, of course, it was ahoax. So, the following day, 7.30 presenter LeighSales had to deliver a correction. This suggests thatintrepid 7.30 reporters don’t learn about parody atmedia school.

MOST UNDESERVED LEFTIE LITERARYFESTIVAL AWARD – MARY KOSTAKIDISSTANDS UP FOR DAVID HICKSJournalist Mary Kostakidis is one of the leading leftieluvvies of our time. So she is well qualified to be amember of the advisory panel to the Sydney PeaceFoundation.On 25 May 2011, Ms Kostakidis wrote an article in theSydney Morning Herald in praise of David Hicks, whopleaded guilty to providing material support forterrorism. She described how Hicks had received anS.O. – as in Standing Ovation – at the leftist-luvvie-love-in which takes the form of the Sydney Writers’ Festival:Sitting in the last row of the dress circle, Ihad a bird's eye view of the Sydney Writers'Festival event where David Hicks spokepublicly about his experiences for the firsttime. The session sold out shortly aftertickets went on sale. The public clearlywanted to hear what Hicks had to say fromthe man himself. The mood was not one ofjubilation or adulation, but of attentivenessand reflection. No one leapt up at the end ofhis talk, swept up by a moment. People rose

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to their feet gradually and with a sense ofpurpose and obligation.

Mary Kostakidis went on to explain the motivationfor the S.O.Hicks did not understand what bin Ladenwas implicated in nor was he able toanticipate how events would unfold. Did hebreak any law? No. Did he harm a singleperson? No.

In his letters to his family – which were released byhis family – David Hicks wrote of firing at people fromthe Pakistan side of the Kashmir line-of-control. Soyou can only accept Ms Kostakidis’ claim that Hicksdid not harm a single person if you assume that he isa bad shot – and missed his targets on the Indian sideof the line-of-control. Still, Ms Kostakidis believeswhat she wants to believe and reckons that DavidHicks is deserving of an S.O.

MOST UNBALANCED LETTERS PAGE –THE AGEOn 12 November 2011 the lead item on The Age’sLetters Page was titled “US Bases”. The AustralianAmerican Alliance has bipartisan support – as doesAustralia’s commitment in Afghanistan. PresidentObama’s visit to Australia was well received and hewas warmly welcomed by Prime Minister JuliaGillard and Opposition leader Tony Abbott.Yet 100 per cent of the letters published in The Age on15 November criticised the Australian AmericanAlliance – and generally reflected the stance of theGreens, which receive about 10 per cent of the votesat the Federal election.

JOURNALISTS KNOW BEST AWARD –MARK KENNYOn 9 February, The Advertiser’s Mark Kennyappeared on the Sky News PM Agenda program. TheOpposition had called for tanks to support theAustralian Defence Force in Afghanistan. MarkKenny did not think that tanks in Afghanistan was agood idea and declared:

Mark Kenny: Tanks in Afghanistan havebeen shown to be pretty stupid even goingback as far as the Russians.

Er, not really. On 19 December 2010 The SundayTimes in London had announced that the BritishArmy planned to send 16 battle tanks to Afghanistan.

MOST SELF-SERVING ABOUT-FACE ONTHE GREAT WAR – JONATHAN KINGOn 11 November 2011 Jonathan King wrote an articlein The Age urging that Australians pay greaterattention to the performance of the AustralianImperial Force on the Western Front in the finalyears of World War I. This has been a familiar call byJonathan King in recent years – after the feats of theAIF became fashionable. This is what Mr King hadto say in The Age on Remembrance Day 2011:The Western Front was many times moresignificant than Gallipoli. Five times asmany Australians fought there: 250,000not 50,000. They fought five times more

battles, many of which they helped win,and well over five times as many werekilled. As Australia's last Gallipoli Anzac,Alec Campbell, stressed: ''Gallipoli was afailure, but tell 'em we won the fighting onthe Western Front.''[General John] Monash also reported:''Although the five Australian divisionsrepresented only 10 per cent of BritishAllied Forces, they nevertheless capturedapproximately 25 per cent of enemyterritory, arms, ammunition and prisonersof war.'' It was a feat he hoped would ''re-echo throughout the world and live foreverin the history of our homeland''. But it has not, because Australians remainpreoccupied with Gallipoli....

Jonathan King has yet to explain why he changed hisposition on the AIF in the Great War. In his 1978book Waltzing Materialism (Harper & Row), Kingdescribed World War I as one of “other nation’sbattles” which Australians have fought. The chapterin his book, where this claim is made, was mockinglytitled “Our glorious Anzacs”. In 1978 King arguedthat Australia’s involvement in World War I was notjustified. Now he criticises others for not appreciatingjust how justified it was.

GREATEST POLITICAL FUDGE INSUPPORT OF THE GREENS – GREG JERICHOFormer professional Commonwealth public servant andcurrent amateur blogger, Greg Jericho had this to say onthe ABC’s The Drum Opinion on 9 November 2011:The Greens are not the ALP-Far Left. SureLee Rhiannon might have had parents whowere members of the Communist Party, butif your criticism of The Greens is focussedpurely on that you might as well give upnow, be like Gerard Henderson and startposting missives on the web pretending tohave been written by your dog.

What a fudge. The criticism of Greens Senator LeeRhiannon does not turn on the fact that her parents –W. J. “Bill” Brown and Freda Brown – were membersof the Communist Party. Not at all.Sure, the Browns were members of the CommunistParty of Australia from the second half of the 1930suntil they broke away and formed the Socialist Partyof Australia in 1970 – when they argued that the CPA(led by Laurie Aarons) was not significantlysupportive of the communist dictators in the SovietUnion and Eastern Europe.Rather, the point about Lee Rhiannon (who was bornLee Brown, adopted the married name of LeeO’Gorman and became Lee Rhiannon by deed poll)turned on her own involvement with the pro-Moscowcommunist movement in Australia up until sheturned 39 when she joined the Greens.Greg Jericho knows this. He also knows that GerardHenderson’s critique has been done in writing in hisown name and in correspondence. That’s why MrJericho has won Media Watch’s gong for the GreatestPolitical Fudge in Support of the Greens in 2011.

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39

“WE’LL TAKE THAT AS A FANTASY”AWARD – TONY JONESWhat a stunning performance by Q&A presenterTony Jones who told his audience on 20 June 2011:

Tony Jones: Well, I've got to tell you that Iwas involved in a generation that went outin the streets, turned cars over during theVietnam War. So maybe there were othergenerations that were involved heavily inpolitics and street demonstrations.

Australia sent combat troops to South Vietnam in1965 – all of whom were withdrawn by the end of1971. In 1971 Master Tony Jones was in Year 9 atNewington College in Sydney.It was put to Tony Jones that it was a bit much to ask usto believe that – at age around 15 – he was overturningcars in the streets of Stanmore, while dressed in hisNewington College uniform. Tony Jones respondedthat, sure, he was too young to be “demonstrating onthe streets” during the Vietnam War and that he wastalking about his generation – so to speak. Here isTony Jones’ comment – as reported by CarolineOverington in The Australian on 27 June 2011:Yes. Too young to be in the streetsdemonstrating by a few years, that’s true.But I never said I did such things myself. Isaid I was in a generation where peopletook to the streets to demonstrate againstthe Vietnam War. My memory is that peoplejumped in front of cars when they had LBJon board and turning police cars over andburning them came somewhat later, whenthousands of people rioted in protestagainst the closure of the Star Hotel inNewcastle.

And now for some facts. L.B. Johnson visited Australiaon two occasions when he was US president. Namely,October 1966 and December 1967. There is noevidence of any cars being overturned as part of ananti-LBJ demonstration on either occasion.So what about the riot outside the Star Hotel inNewcastle? Well, cars were overturned on thisoccasion. But the riot took place in 1979 – someyears after the end of the Vietnam War. Moreover, thecrowd demonstrated when police closed the hotelsome 30 seconds before the official closing time. Inother words, this was a riot induced by a denial ofbeer. Not quite the storming of the Winter Palace in1917 (if such a storming ever took place).Tony Jones – tops for fantasy in 2011.

BIGGEST LITERARY HEIST – MALCOLMFRASER AND MARGARET SIMONSIn May 2011 it was announced that Malcolm Fraser:The Political Memoirs – written by former LiberalParty prime minister Malcolm Fraser and leftistsandal-wearing freelance journalist Margaret Simonshad won a total of $50,000 in the NSW Premier’sLiterary Awards. They won two prizes – the DouglasStewart Prize for non-fiction ($40,000) and the overallprize for Book of the Year ($10,000).

According to the judges, Malcolm Fraser: ThePolitical Memoirs is “outstanding for the way in whichthe issue of moral leadership is powerfully workedinto the narrative fabric”. Translated into literaryspeak, this means: “Isn’t it great that Malcolm Fraserbecame a bit of a leftie in old age – now, hisleadership is of the moral genre”.Malcolm Fraser was reported as saying in the SydneyMorning Herald on 17 May 2011:It means a great deal to win. For a longtime I had nothing but contempt forpoliticians who wrote books that werethoroughly self-serving.

Can you bear it? Malcolm Fraser: The PoliticalMemoirs is littered with historical errors. There arealso key omissions concerning important events inMr Fraser’s political career. Indeed, this is the mostself-serving political memoir published in Australiaduring the past decade.For the full details of the howlers and omissions inMalcolm Fraser: The Political Memoirs see The SydneyInstitute Quarterly - Issue 37, July 2010.

WORST MEDIA HISTORIAN IN 2011 –NICK DYRENFURTHIn a comprehensive field in this category, Dr NickDyrenfurth won through. At Page 209 of his bookHeroes & Villains: The Rise and Fall of the Early LaborParty, the learned doctor wrote concerning the WorldWar I conscription debates in Australia.The left-wing mythology of the “anti” sidebravely defending individual liberty basedon the principle that the State had no rightto compel an individual to fight is...amistaken one. The broad Left coalitionconsisting of the ALP, unions, civillibertarians and peace groups, aided byCatholic Archbishop Daniel Mannix, in factwaged a scurrilous campaign. Instead ofprosecuting the liberty case, the “anti” sidespuriously argued that pro-conscriptionistswanted to destroy White Australia,inaugurating a Prussian-style militaristsociety that Australia was ostensiblyfighting against and thus undermining thehard fought wages and conditions ofAustralian workers.

Sure, Archbishop Daniel Mannix was a prominentopponent of conscription for overseas service. However,Dr Mannix: (i) never argued that pro-conscriptionistswanted to destroy White Australia, (ii) never argued thatpro-conscriptionists wanted to inaugurate a Prussian-style militarist society in Australia and (iii) never arguedthat pro-conscriptionists wanted to undermine the wagesand conditions of Australian workers.As Nick Dyrenfurth admitted in private correspondence(See Media Watch Dog, Issue 108), he had no evidencefor his claims about Daniel Mannix. In other words, DrDyrenfurth made it all up. Heroes & Villains had sold166 copies as at the end of July 2011 – which suggeststhat (potential) book purchasers have a good sense ofhistorical lemons. Dr Dyrenfurth is a taxpayer fundedacademic at Monash University.

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