Notes of an old Cranbrook boy

The older I get the more clearly I see things, I never understood when I was young – barely a teenager, then barely a man – how unhappy life made me. Now that I’m a pensioner I search for ways to alleviate the pain of existence of a world where there is little effort made to know why events unfold the way they do. It seems to me, now, that there is an unending supply of suffering and that everyone is putting all their effort into alleviating the resulting pain apart from the obvious, which is to be kind. Why we cannot do so seems to lie squarely in the lap of the gods.

We fear them so we don’t risk being kind to those around us, it’s too dangerous to put on the line the small guaranteed source of pleasure we might have at any given moment. Better to seek out more pleasure, even more, even more.

Even now life gives me reasons to hate it. When I was young I was an actor, trying to fit in because, having seen what life had done to my brother, who was bullied at school, it was safer to run with a pack. I was so good at deceiving those around me that, when I not so long ago said how unhappy I was when I was at school, someone from those days unfollowed me on Facebook. 

Is that the right word, “unfollowed”? Is it not “unfriended”? I don’t think either word is accurate, there is nothing remotely friendly about social media, the way that people conduct themselves, although it has helped me to understand the species. It frightens me.

In fact James was once my friend but on Facebook he was something else, just a participant in an endless evolving costume drama where we package ourselves for public consumption like directors on a fashion shoot. Our public personae have little to do with our real selves, so Facebook is profiting from the same fear that caused the Cranbrook boys to mercilessly persecute my beloved brother – who was always to good to me – and that causes people on Twitter to say the most appalling things about journalists, people they don’t know but whom they patronise inexcusably when they don’t say the right things. They want the reporters, show hosts, weathermen, interviewers, and other professionals, people with years of experience, to be performing monkeys mouthing platitudes that satisfy a community grown accustomed to the mediocrity of Netflix and Stan. They don’t want the truth, they want the same comforting lies that make people post pictures of glasses of wine, on a table, in a restaurant, with a pleasant backdrop framing the whole. Along with the quick line of carefully composed text the image says, “Envy me.”

I didn’t go to the recent school reunion (delayed by Covid, it should’ve been held two years ago) partly because of James’ actions but also because I didn’t want to stand in a room full of loud men – grown up children, really – boasting about what they’d achieved in life. 

I have better things to do with my time so in my old age I am devoting my life to the thing that was taken away from me when I was 17, which is art. I have time now to do what I want, time that I should’ve had during the 25 years I worked in offices, but that my school and my father – both of whom should’ve known better than to tempt fate, because their actions almost destroyed me – deprived me of, out of a sense that the world doesn’t care about art.

I think it does but it needs to be told what is good, whereas I have never needed such instruction, having an innate curiosity that enabled me to understand what was good and what was merely fashion. It’s even better now that I’m ageing. Old enough to start forgetting why I entered a room, though not quite old enough to go out without my socks on. Still young enough to fear.

Universities should issue ‘journeyman’ certificates

When I worked in the education sector I was in the IT department of a major Australian university, one of the Group of Eight. One day near the middle of my tenure a senior manager, who was also an academic, visited my workplace to meet people. She was shorter than me and had dark hair and a polite mien. She shook hands and heard what my name was then she moved dutifully onto the next employee. I eventually signed a workplace agreement to govern my role with the institution and she was the respondent in that process, signing the document on behalf of the university. After that time that I met her the agreement was the only time I had anything to do with her.

But she was on the record promoting the university in the community as a place where learning could be pursued throughout an individual’s life, and not just at the beginning of their time in the workforce. The message was that people could benefit from continuous learning opportunities that institutions like hers could offer them, giving them a way to upskill so that they would be more able to compete for higher-paying jobs, for example, or to change career and move into an area of the economy that offered more employment opportunities.

The problem with this scenario is that the barrier to entry to university is still quite high. A diploma that you pursue part-time still takes a full year, depending on the one you undertake. And often the coursework you are given to complete is stuff you already know because you have been working for a long time in a role that uses that knowledge. You might even know more about your field than the teachers who are employed by the university.

To accommodate this kind of person, universities should establish a “journeyman” program, allowing people in the community to they get guidance from an academic in a chosen field of study for a limited duration, say three or six months, during which time the consumer researches a topic and writes an essay that can then be published on a website like The Conversation.

To qualify for the program the consumer would have to show evidence to the university of prior knowledge. It could be a personal hobby or it could be something related to their career, about which they are evidently much better-informed than the average person in the street. The university could charge a fee for the service and, if the product of the program were of sufficiently high quality, the consumer could then go on to enrol in a doctoral program with a view to completing a longer essay of thesis length.

UPDATE 16 December 2018: I was in a cab coming back home from the city when I heard an ad on the driver's radio about "bespoke" courses being offered by the University of New England. I looked it up when I got home. They are courses where students can pick units of study to undertake from undergraduate and postgraduate lists. You can choose two, three or four units (presumably to study part-time over a period of a year or more):

One option is to design a Bespoke Course using only ‘Fundamental’ units from a degree. A second option is to select only ‘Advanced’ units. In a third option, you can choose a combination of fundamental and advanced units from a degree to create a ‘Critical Content’ Bespoke Course. The last option allows you to combine units from entirely different degrees and disciplines—you can do this as part of a ‘Mix and Match’ Bespoke Course.

Private-school education promotes social mobility

I had a Twitter to-do last Friday with a couple of people who object to the government funding private schools. The day before, the prime minister had announced a package of new money for private education to the tune of $4.6 billion. I told the women I was communicating with on Twitter that I had gone to a private school and that people I know had chosen to send their kids to Catholic schools (even those who are not Catholics) because of concerns about educational quality.

I put up a review of a book that had been published this year by someone I used to know back in my undergraduate days, and that I had especially enjoyed reading. The review was published on 25 July and the book’s title is ‘Saint Antony in his Desert’. It's a work of fiction and it is full of wisdom, humanity and intelligence. The writer had gone to a Catholic school when he was growing up before moving to Sydney to attend Sydney Uni. But this example was written off as a mere anecdote not deserving of a response. I could have listed all the men I know who now write who went to the same school I attended but I didn't.

I also pointed out that a third of secondary school students in Australia go to a private schools, but I was confusingly asked by one of the women I was talking with what the relevance of this statistic was. The point was that funding private schools was popular because so many people sent their kinds to private schools for their secondary education. But the lady was not for turning. The standard left narrative goes that private schools are only there to make the children of the wealthy feel superior, and that they are part of a system of oppression that keeps some people poor and some rich. But social mobility is much better in Australia than in the UK or the US, where private schools do not get government funding.

In fact, according to 2012 research conducted by the Sutton Trust, a UK-based foundation established in 1997 to foster social mobility, in Australia and Canada social mobility is twice as good as it is in the UK or in the US. This information is illustrated by a chart produced by the independent Conference Board of Canada. In Canada, about seven percent of secondary school students attend a private school. But there, private schools receive a government subsidy on a per-student basis that is a percentage of the total amount of funds that public schools receive per student. The rate varies by province and in some provinces private schools receive no such subsidy.

In the UK, only seven percent of secondary school students go to a private school, and there is no public money for the sector (and private schools consequently do not need to make their students follow the state curriculum), although private schools do not pay tax as they are treated by the government as charities. In the US, around 10 percent of secondary school students attend a private school and there are some scholarships for students from low-socioeconomic backgrounds. There are also scholarships for such students in the UK, where they are called “means tested bursaries”.

Something that often gets overlooked in all these debates is that not all private schools are the same. The one I went to, Cranbrook, is among the most expensive in the country but there are many other independent schools that are much less costly to attend. Fees for Catholic systemic schools are also not as high as those charged by the most elite independents. There is a range of options for parents who want to send their child to a private school.

One more important factor in the whole debate is that having a strong private education sector lifts the game for everyone because it can serve to offer competition for public educators. By giving parents an affordable alternative for their children, the very existence of private schools in Australia keeps public teachers focused on achieving good outcomes for their students. Any marked lapse in the quality of education will quickly be punished, with parents being able to move their children to the other side.

One of the women I was talking with admitted that Bill Shorten, if he wins the federal election that will be held next year, will not take money away from private schools. I had pointed out that Mark Latham's promise, voiced in September 2004, to take money away from private schools so that it could be given to public schools had, in my mind, lost him the election that was held that year.

In the end another one of the women I was talking to on Twitter flatly said that she would not read my blogpost once it was published. “I for one won’t be reading it. Thanks for highlighting your embedded class beliefs. Your privilege is screaming. Private education makes you better? Seriously.”

All of this does not lessen the need for good-quality public education, which is essential for the proper conduct of a democracy. I have written before about another urgent need: to make tertiary education free for the student in order to improve the quality of the populace.

What the present debate does demonstrate however is that there is a pressing need in general for more education, not less. The kinds of rebarbative, and sometimes even abusive, behaviour you find on social media tells us that we need to spend more money teaching young people how to think and reason properly. People’s emotional responses to things they see online could then be better tempered by wider reading and by taking more care in the formulation of their ideas. 

Tertiary education has to be free for the student

A couple of years ago a story appeared on the ABC’s website about the study of Indonesian at secondary schools in Australia, which had fallen to levels that were lower than they had been 40 years earlier. In the same year, there was a story in the Sydney Morning Herald about dismal numbers of students studying Chinese at Australian secondary schools.

This kind of story will continue to be read on news websites that Australians use as long as we continue to treat tertiary education as a place where you go to get a qualification for a job. Both sides of politics are as bad as each other in this regard but the Labor Party started it with the Dawkins reforms in the 1980s which saw fees for university reintroduced after a sublime period when tertiary education had been free for the student.

University should be a place where you go to learn how to think and to reason, not just to get a qualification for employment. With the exception of a few jobs – such as medicine (including veterinary science, psychology, and dentistry), law, accounting, and engineering – where you need to know certain concrete things in order to profess competence in your job, for most jobs you just need to be able to think effectively and interact meaningfully with colleagues.

Languages will never be treated as being equal in value to a business degree (which is arguably useless) until fees are removed from the equation and the bias toward getting a qualification is moderated in the system of education we use.

All knowledge comes from the arts. In the Renaissance, where science and technology has its roots, all we had to progress the development of knowledge was the vernacular, moveable type and (in certain countries) a male population that was taught to read and write. The last of these innovations was adopted in countries where Protestant denominations were predominant, so that men could read their Bibles in the vernacular.

The process of nominalisation took care of the rest. Nominalisation is where sentences and phrases and distilled into nouns that can then be deployed in other sentences. This process led to the explosion in scientific discoveries after the publication of ‘Novum Organum’ by the English statesman Francis Bacon in 1620. The popular journals in England that flourished in the 18th century disseminated the new knowledge to the furthest corners of the realm. The industrial revolution (that started in the 18th century in England) and the invention of the steam engine was a direct result of the Humanist project that started in the 14th century in Italy.

A d the entertainment industry tells us how badly we need better-educated consumers. While Millennials are quick to complain about the fact that they now have fewer options than they had in the past when it comes to late-night drinking in Sydney, they flock to see the schlock that giant Hollywood corporations spew out year after year. Such as the Star Wars franchise, which has well-and-truly jumped the shark, where you have proven tropes decorated with tiny modifications designed to mimic originality. A better-educated populace would be less likely to mindlessly consume rubbish like this. It might also be the only thing that stands between a successful, pluralist democracy and the disaster of autocracy and totalitarianism. Capital and the demagogues it funds love nothing more than exhausted, stupid and ignorant workers.

More time dedicated to learning how to express yourself might result in more people ending up being more discerning consumers of popular culture, instead of mere cashed-up drones the big studios love to milk. Undertaking study in written expression might help in this regard, as well as making people happier by giving them ways to achieve the agency that they seem intent on regretting as they consume illicit substances that serve to dull the nagging pain of existence under a soul-destroying capitalism.

The standard postcolonial narrative inhibits development

This blogpost delves back into the distant past to make its points. Or the relatively distant past, I should say. Memory takes me back to a Jane Austen conference that was held in Melbourne in November 2007 that was organised by La Trobe University. Germaine Greer made an appearance at the event, but there was also a man named Harish Trivedi, a professor at the University of New Delhi, who gave a talk that really annoyed me. The complaints about colonialism were heavy with learned purpose but I found the experience alienating and left the lecture hall he was talking in before he had finished addressing the gathered delegates.

Outside on the walkway, I told one of the other delegates what had happened and she and I talked about Trivedi’s talk a bit. I couldn’t square the content of his talk with what I had learned as a result of my readings around Austen. The thing is that she had a family connection with India. Her cousin Eliza Hancock was also her sister-in-law, marrying Henry Austen in 1797. Eliza was the goddaughter of Warren Hastings, the first governor-general of India.

The British had been trading in India since around 1600 when the East India Company was first established in London. By the middle of the 18th century (or 150 years after trading began) there was a need felt in London that relations between Britain and the local potentates who rules different parts of the subcontinent, should be rationalised because of the complexities inherent in conducting and protecting trade with Europe. Hence the step to appoint Hastings as GG, which took place in 1773. He had already served as the governor of the presidency of Fort William (Bengal).

Hastings was an interesting man who had risen up through the ranks in the East India Company from being a trader at a factory (what they called the trading depots that the company maintained in these locations), assessing the quality of cloth and making sure it was safely stored and despatched to England by ship. He spoke Hindi and made the decision as GG to use local laws as the basis for legislation that was passed through Parliament in London to regulate the conduct of people living in areas under his dominion. This was the first time that such laws based on Hindu texts had been codified for use in India.

The first British monarch to be labelled “emperor” of India was Victoria, who ascended the throne in 1837 but didn’t take this additional title until 1876. So it took another 100 years from the time a governor-general was appointed for India until the country was even formed as a part of the British empire. In the meantime, trading that benefited the locals as well as employees of the East India Company continued unobstructed.

The history of the British in India is a long and varied one, and aggressive condemnations of things that happened over the centuries based on the jottings of latecomers with a partial understanding of the truth such as Mahatma Gandhi are simply not helpful. But India now has tens of thousands of intelligent academics who are busy teaching their students about the ravages of colonialism and politicians there borrow strength from the debates that result in order to continue to conduct themselves corruptly while in office, to the ultimate detriment of the Indian people. Those academics are also used to provide guidance for politicians as they go about their official business, further compounding the problem.

Trivedi and I had an occasion to talk about the things that separated us, however. One day near the end of the conference, there was a dinner organised as part of it at a restaurant far out in the suburbs to the east of the city. I drove my car to get there, and some of the people at the conference made sure that the Indian academic got a lift back to the city with me in my car. I dropped him off at his Ormond College lodgings later, but I also told him about the non-fiction of Orhan Pamuk who, I felt, had a more nuanced understanding of the significance for the developed world of western civilisation.

The conference's tagline was, ironically, '"I dearly love a laugh": Jane Austen and comedy'.

Conservatism’s ugly side can only be cleaned up through education

Vandalism of the impromptu memorial set up in the Melbourne park where Euridyce Dixon was murdered last week was quickly suppressed by authorities. Police on patrol discovered graffiti on the grass at around 4am yesterday morning and someone then called the firies. A video on the ABC website yesterday morning showed a man dressed in a firefighter’s fluoro-yellow protective outfit using a high-pressure hose to wash away white markings from where they had been made on the lawn, so we will never know what had been written there.

Which is a pity, because we need to bring attention to the problem of male entitlement that is so solidly entrenched in our society. We know, for example, that about 40 percent of the population routinely vote Liberal at elections. (The swing voter in the middle is the one who decides their outcomes.) And the Liberals have plenty of help in their crusade to keep things just the way they have always been. In Sydney, many people read the Daily Telegraph or listen to Alan Jones on the radio. There’s plenty of money to be made peddling messages animated by bigotry and other manifestations of conservatism. There are any number of media outlets that cater for people who feel they have a right to continue to do whatever it is they have been advised by experts it is probably better they stop doing. In America, such people voted the demagogue Donald Trump into office.

The ugly conservatism that underpins Australian society is at the root of the problem of male entitlement, which is why it is important that signs of it, such as the overnight graffiti, should be displayed publicly. Discussion in the community about the ugly conservatism that animates so many unthinking and often dangerous people who live among us is needed if we are to improve society for the common good. Which is just what such people don’t want. They want things to stay the same. They find any suggestion that they have been doing the wrong things not just implausible, but offensive. Hence the graffiti and hence dismissive remarks from men that started to appear on social media yesterday.

Tony Abbott perfectly embodies the ugly conservatism that lies just beneath the skin of modern Australia. His elite education is belied by the down-home accent he bungs on in order to appeal to the ignorant and entitled Daily Telegraph reader. He leveraged the latent fascism of the electorate, expressed for example through xenophobia, to get his extreme policies, which only benefit the big end of town, through Parliament. One Nation is a party of the same ilk as Abbott’s Coalition government, which has thankfully been replaced by Turnbull’s.

At least Turnbull is honest enough to not hide his roots behind a false ocker accent. But the Liberal Party continues to produce policies animated by the same impulses that drove the Nazis into office in German in the 1930s. Support for big business is part of the policy mix in the party’s bid to capture the vote of the entitled bogan who is the swing voter in certain electorates. But so is the attempt to stiffen language requirements for migrants. The shabby treatment of offshore detainees who came to this country legitimately seeking asylum, is another facet of the fascist right’s appeal to the ugly side of ordinary Australians who have been deprived in recent years of access to the profits of productivity gains by a managerial class the Liberals want to benefit with their antisocial tax policies.

(You can’t make this stuff up. More recently, of course, impartial experts tell us that labour unions need to be given more power to bargain collectively for pay rises for ordinary workers in order to offset the effects of decades of neoliberalism, which has led to profits from productivity rises being quarantined by the managerial class the Liberal Party supports.)

Returning to the other face of unchecked male entitlement, there will be more women like Eurydice Dixon murdered by entitled men who live freely in the community unless we revamp the entire education system to make boys more pro-social. And the effort needs to be made at each age in different ways. From the very earliest days at kindergarten, boys must be taught how to respect girls and treat them as equals. Might is not right. We know that behaviour is not always the same for children and that it changes with the stage of life they are going through, so there is no quick fix and the curriculum has to be adapted at each step in the road to maturity in order to make sure that the message gets through the native impulses and the hormones and the larrikin need for free expression.

The word “larrikin” itself is a signal of how bad things are. In the 19th century, larrikins were street toughs who dressed in a flamboyant style and frequented public houses and were often rowdy, and sometimes deadly. They flouted the constraints of authority but also killed people in violent abandon when roused to anger. They were feared by citizens and police alike. But now the word has a positive connotation, entirely cleansed of the taint of the brown shirts it used to possess. We encourage a larrikin to misbehave by rewarding him with a laugh, but on the other hand the same man might decide to obey the larrikin streak inside himself by sexually assaulting a woman he sees walking home alone in the park late at night.

My father, whose father was an immigrant, grew up during the 1930s and 40s in Melbourne and saw the ugly side of the Australian character close-up. Called a “wog” by other kids without compunction due to his name, he also saw his father openly mocked in the street for his poor English. Dad worked for a time as a labourer on building sites and was dismayed at the harsh treatment his workmates sometimes meted out to people they didn’t like or who didn’t “fit in”. Dad eventually went to night school and got an engineering degree from Melbourne University, then forged a profitable career in corporate management. He maintained a deep-seated loathing for such icons of popular culture as Ginger Meggs because of the treatment he had been subject to as a boy and as a young man by local larrikins. Course behaviour of any kind upset him and made him very strict about personal conduct when my brother and I were young. It was one of the reasons he was keen for us to get tertiary educations.

A final note for educators: we don’t need to turn our schools into Japanese educational institutions exactly, but merely take the best ideas they have developed there that help to make children more pro-social. Japan has other problems such as a high suicide rate and a low birth rate. And rigid labour laws like Europe’s disincline agile employers there from hiring workers. There is also a deep strain of xenophobia in Japan, and a deeply-embedded distrust of foreigners, and so they have virtually zero immigration, something that might conceivably help the country loose the grip that recession has held there for the past 20 years. So we don’t need to be “turning Japanese”, just learn to be more pro-social in general. Especially more empathy, and less entitlement, for men.

Getting to be Virgin Australia's group chief advisor just “a whole string of accidents”

Peter Cai holds a senior position at one of Australia’s largest airlines and I was fortunate to be able to hear him talk about his career at the Urban Land Institute’s Young Leader’s Summit earlier this month.

“I started off just like any other diligent, good-natured Asian kid: I did advanced maths, chemistry, physics at high school. My only act of rebellion was I did modern European history on the side.”

When he completed high school in England he tried to get into medical school but was refused.

“The medical school designed an admission test that’s supposed to weed out socially-awkward Asians. So, I didn’t get into medical school, nor dental school. So, I went for kind of the third respectable option: to become an engineer.”

Before starting his tertiary studies, however, he decided to visit Germany with a student exchange program, which turned out to be a life-changing experience.

“I come back, I realise I don’t really want to be an electronic engineer, so I opt for a very bright future in German studies, specialising in the Counterreformation movement in Medieval southern Bavaria.”

At Oxford University, he completed his history studies then enrolled in a postgraduate law degree hoping to get a qualification that might lead to a good job. While his classmates were applying for positions with investment banks, Cai came up against a brick wall and so he took the next-best option and enrolled in a PhD. “I thought, ‘If I’m ok with study, [I’ll] probably just go down that path.’”

While he was attending a conference, someone invited him to Canberra for a research fellowship, and he became the research assistant to an economist there.

“And my background, as you know, is in history, so it was quite a challenge [to] try to even understand what he was talking about,” Cai told the room.

“It was like learning a new language once again in my life. If there’s anything I can draw out of my life up to that point, is this capacity to learn new things is actually quite important. You can be a specialist in Medieval German history but if you have to edit a paper on [the] Asian Development Bank you have to transform yourself into a role quite quickly, too.”

That job led to a position in the Treasury – the Australian government department responsible for economic policy, fiscal policy, market regulation, and the federal budget.

“I was the only historian they recruited that year. I found another Arts graduate in my cohort and she studied French literature, so she ended up in [the] international tax division, so power to her.”

While there, he visited Beijing and met the China correspondent for Fairfax Media – the oldest media company in Australia – whose name was John Garnaut.

“I don’t know why, [but] I said something to him over [a] hotpot meal during a very cold winter. He asked me what I want to do, probably I just tried to flatter him; I said, ‘Actually, I want to be a journalist.’ So he actually remembered what I said. So, about a year-and-a-half later he said, ‘Fairfax [has] got a new position, would you like to give it a go?’”

The company gave him a plane ticket to Melbourne for the interview and he got the job, which suited him because he thought with his history experience at least he knew how to write.

“I was terribly mistaken. When I joined the paper, within a couple of weeks it was quite clear to me I couldn’t write.”

Daily meetings with the subeditor enabled him to get his first story published after two weeks but he was also fortunate to have veteran Fairfax journalist Ross Gittins take him under his wing.

“He really mentored me and sat me down and really changed my copy and told me how to be a good journalist.”

His life took another turn when respected finance journalist Alan Kohler asked him to join a new start-up, The Constant Investor, a subscription website for financial news.

“I did [take] that job and it’s become I think one of the most amazing job experiences in my life. You run a website, you write the editorial – remember, it was only my second year, third year as a journalist – [to] start writing editorial like a columnist usually would take about 15 years. He probably saw something in me, I still don’t know what he saw in me. But I just took the chance.”

Then things changed again when he took a position as a researcher at the Lowy Institute, an Australian think tank he had applied to for a position when he was still back at university. “So I actually get paid to do something I always wanted to do.”

One day the CEO of Virgin Australia phoned him.

“When he called me, I was really surprised because a long time ago I did write a story about Virgin, and that was like 300 words. You don’t usually get a call from the CEO about a 300-word article. And he invited me to have coffee and he just offered me a job.”

Cai told the room that he thinks that having curiosity and an ability to constantly learn was important.

“Nowadays, we just change jobs so often, at least I think. So I think to maintain that curiosity and ability to adapt, to learn I just think is really important.”

But he thinks that maintaining relationships in his new role is what takes up most of his time.

“I just think so far managing relationships is so important because a lot of [the] time what makes or breaks [an] agreement on a very important initiative is not really whether you get a 7.6 percent discount or a 7.7 percent discount, what really bridges the last centimetre is really whether someone will trust you, whether they believe you are a good partner, so [having] an honest face is important.”

Photo by Andrew Bell of Established ID.

Literature is the thing that best prepares you for life

It has long been my belief that reading good books fosters empathy: the ability to appreciate how others feel. I don't know why I got this idea but it has long seemed logical that exposing the mind to a wide variety of disparate situations in this area of erzatz (though rich) experience would make people better able to feel how others feel. Empathy is a particularly important asset in a modern, pluralistic society that functions in a globalised world because it is crucial to be able to make good choices periodically - for example within the political cycle - that accurately reflect the individual's best interests. So it's a very practical thing. Yes, it can make your son or daughter a better friend. But it also makes them better citizens, and this, in the collective, is a crucial element of their lives well beyond the time that they will regularly come to you to help them solve their problems.

The thing that I want to point out here is that I was right all along. A study undertaken by researchers at the New School for Social Research in New York, and published in the journal Science in September, found "that after reading literary fiction, as opposed to popular fiction or serious nonfiction, people performed better on tests measuring empathy, social perception and emotional intelligence."

These are "skills that come in especially handy when you are trying to read someone’s body language or gauge what they might be thinking".

The researchers say the reason is that literary fiction often leaves more to the imagination, encouraging readers to make inferences about characters and be sensitive to emotional nuance and complexity.

We know from other studies that reading activates the same parts of the brain as when a thing is experienced directly, so that a rich metaphor that exploits a physical sensation lights up those parts of the brain usually used to reflect the actual sensation itself, for example touch or feeling cold. In a real sense, then, reading literature enables our brains to directly experience what is described in the words on the page. The study merely shows that literary fiction provides a richer experience for the brain because it tends to challenge the reader to infer conclusions about situations, while other forms of writing are less ambiguous. We can go a step further and claim that this ambiguity inherent in literature helps the reader to become a better person, because it forces him or her to make up his or her own mind in any given situation. That ability to make good decisions is the crucial thing when it comes to being a good citizen. Not only that, but it is also important to be able to cope with complexity, to hold multiple ideas in the mind simultaneously.

In the digital era new experiments are being devised to help us to understand how reading actually functions, such as this one involving a Dutch writer based in New York who is writing a book while wired up to measure brain activity. Once he has finished writing the book, researchers will wire up a group of readers, whose responses will also be gauged while reading the same book. A comparison can then be made between brain activity for the writer and brain activity for the reader, at exactly the same points in the narrative-to-be.

It is exciting times for those interested in the soft arts. These areas of endeavour are often overlooked when it comes to addressing social issues but it should be remembered that everything comes from the arts. In writing, in creating new ideas, in nominalising - making a whole sentence be represented by a single word, which has happened time and time again throughout recorded history, for example with the word "selfie" - lie the roots of every science we participate in today. And writing remains a central part of every science project, not just in order to further it on a technical level but also to communicate it to the broader community. And that is a key ingredient of the work of all scientists, as they will readily tell you if you ask.

Some reporting failures are due to a lack of resources

Police at a Sydney school in 2008.

After listening to musician Dave Grohl's keynote to the SXSW conference - in which he talks about finding your individual "voice" - I had a look at some of the stories I worked on when I had just started out as a freelance journalist but that didn't make it to print. One was about payback violence in schools which began a year earlier as a blog post. I worked on the story in early 2009 and research included visiting a courthouse to observe proceedings following another, similar, violent attack in Sydney's west.

Working on the story made me contact many stakeholders including the New South Wales Department of Education as well as specialists in children's issues, even three regular parents of high school kids who I knew. And I found that it was a big issue, with many involved stakeholders and many different points of view. Not the sort of story the Daily Terror would be interested in, although I met with one of their reporters at the courthouse and we talked about the issues. Eventually he stopped answering my emails. He was looking for an interview with one of the youths who had been involved in school payback attacks - and there have been many over the years, although we seem not to hear of them nowadays - not a heavy "issues" piece filled with quotes from experts. That's not his newspaper's style. They want something to justify a shrill headline.

The government had to be coaxed into releasing information about violent attacks at schools, and even when they did, the reports were heavily redacted to remove information that might enable the discovery of the identity of the children involved. The police would not comment. The people who were most willing to talk were people working with organisations with charters aimed at providing services to help children cope. One of these people was Joe Tucci, who heads the Australian Childhood Foundation. Another was Maree Faulkner, head of the National Association for the Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect. There was also Rey Reodica, CEO of the Youth Action & Policy Association. My understanding was that people like these look for ways to work with the government to improve outcomes for children because often the children who are involved in the kinds of crimes the Daily Terror so energetically runs have come from backgrounds that have conditioned them to react to certain situations in certain ways. We talk for example of dysfunctional families. Tucci said:

They probably have experienced some level of violence themselves. And definitely some level of obstruction in their development. So I think they have to make sense of some life events that generally have got some trauma in them. A lot of these kids that have been really violent in school environments have experienced abuse and neglect. I think that that’s the missing link that we tend to blame young people and focus on them as being responsible for the violence. You can track it back to their childhood and that childhood is one that’s full of disregard and a sense that they don’t have any kind of adult relationship that they can rely on. I think that if we really wanted to do something about violence in schools - and in particular payback violence - we would start much earlier.

Each interview spawns the need for further interviews. Like a Russian doll there's always a new line of inquiry encapsulated within the one you've just covered. As Jay Rosen said at a UK conference last year, this is a wicked problem. Do you stop at parental neglect? Do you go on to look at the issue of poverty? What about the ethnic background of the boys I saw in the courtroom - the same ethnic background as the boys involved in the 2008 attack - do you then go on to look at how multiculturalism works? Is there an element of racism? Where do the leads terminate?

I tried to do enough research but there was no topical hook to hang it on and no editor was interested in taking it. I was an untried quantity as well. The story was too long and not well-written enough. I spiked it and moved on after having worked on it happily for a couple of months. But I look back now and I know that my instincts were right. I just didn't have the exposure to the issues I needed. I had no guiding conversationalist in an editor to help make sense of it all. I didn't understand the ethical issues involved in reporting on children - especially crimes committed by children - properly. I was under-resourced but I basically knew what I was doing although I'd only just started out as a freelancer.

Watching the mainstream media nowadays, four years later, the lack of stories about payback violence at schools worries me because I strongly suspect that it's still happening. The stories are not being reported and I wonder why. I wonder if the police, the education departments, and the journalists have agreed not to cover such stories. Has the Daily Terror had a change of heart? Or is it just that there are not enough resources, now, in the mainstream media, to enable journalists to cover such stories at all? I wonder if this lack of coverage is just one concrete sign that economic realities are leading to a system failure in journalism.

Media literacy should be taught in secondary schools

The blogging fad that started to grow momentum in 1999 when Blogger was established has now reached massive proportions. Newspapers that were once delivered once or twice a day to doorsteps across the country are now pushing out thousands of pages a week, or every day. Search engines such as Google try to give you relevant content each time you type in a search term but the results of your search will usually contain unreliable, uselessly commercial, or inaccurate data. And we can now easily read stories published in dozens of countries around the world, or more depending on how many languages we are proficient in.

The public Internet now houses over 630 million sites, a number that is growing each month. And each of those sites can have thousands or millions of individual pages (CNN.com, for example, has over 47 million pages indexed on Google, and adds thousands each day).

In the vast haze of information that exists out there in the digital landscape we stumble on often on exhausted feet looking for what we need or want (does anyone ever bother to go to the second page of results?). And it's not always easy to find, say teachers in the US surveyed recently. The story these quotes come from is on Mashable, a US website that focuses on the digital world.

According to a recent Pew study, 83% of teachers feel that the amount of available information is overwhelming to students, and 60% think that finding credible sources among that flood is difficult. That's why it isn't surprising that over 90% of teachers surveyed agreed that some form of media literacy education should be included in every school's curriculum.

I agree, and there's room for more subjects in that teaching curriculum as well. Because it's not just as consumers that we use the internet nowadays, by any means. We are all publishers now whether we like it or not (we obviously like it; there are 2 million Twitter users in Australia alone).

On the production side (since each tweet is a publication, for instance) there are laws that everyone should be more knowledgeable about in order to avoid difficulties down the track. Political speech is free in Australia (under a clever bit of High Court reasoning) but there are laws against things like defamation that are easy to break in the heat of the moment. Then there's libel, too. You get taught these things at university if you do a media degree there but the number of people who do so is tiny compared to the number of people publishing things every minute of every day.

And what about the ethics of the media these days? How would people feel if they knew, for example, that the Huffington Post - a popular website that operates on two continents today - does not pay contributors for the stories they publish? How does a big media company such as News Ltd really work? What kind of influence does a proprietor have on the content of the stories published by the company he or she owns? Does it matter? What about the different ways that large entities like government departments filter the information that journalists are given access to? How does that fit in with the public's right to know?

And, further, what does the process of news-making really look like? What is a deadline and how does that affect the quality of stories published each day? Who works in a normal newsroom? How do journalists develop story ideas? What is a freelance journalist and - a big question, I think - are they necessary? How does a journalist conduct a telephone interview? Are there laws for that? How can it affect a story if a journalist lets an interview subject vet quotes before the story is published? What are the laws regarding freedom of information and do they work? What kinds of information is the government allowed under statute to stop the public seeing? What does "on the record" mean? What is an unattributed quote?

The media is something that we are in daily contact with. We make comments on websites. We tweet our indignation at stories we consumed a few seconds previously. It would make the whole business more meaningful if both journalists and editors and consumers were reading from the same scoresheet, or if they had a common set of cognates to deploy in their numerous online communications. At the moment the production of news media is a bit like the production of sausages: invisible (and, according to many, no doubt, better left that way).

It's all so confusing but also liberating at the same time. The media revolution that began in 1969 with the launch of the internet is fiercely underway. But we can see how it can be a problem for people in the community under special circumstances, for example the case of the young man who was arrested in a violent manner by police at last Saturday's Mardi Gras parade in Sydney. We see the policeman in the YouTube video the ambling cameraman was shooting tell him to stop filming, and the cameraman - a man trained in how the media operates - refusing. A few days later we hear a senior police officer tell assembled reporters that it is not NSW Police policy to stop people taking vision in public places. (In fact it is lawful to do so in Australia.) The officer in this case was "naive". 

Well, maybe. But the bigger point is that, as the senior cop said on Wednesday morning, everyone these days has a mobile phone that can take vision. "And they will." The next day a special video put together by Fairfax journalists about the public's rights in this regard made it to the top of the most-viewed list on the Sydney Morning Herald website. So we do want to know. And we need to be informed about how the media operates. Best to start early.

International students can help Australia to prosper in the 'Asian Century'

Overseas students at an Australian university.

Asia is looming large economically and it seems that there's a certain level of fear in government and business circles that Australia might miss out on the opportunities the region can offer. A story that appeared this morning in the Business section of Fairfax websites points to a new study being prepared for the federal government by a team led by Ken Henry. Apparently “[Julia] Gillard announced the decision to commission [an] Asian century white paper on September 28 last year” and the study is due to be published “as early as this month”.

The Fairfax story has a lot of Asia experts here in Australia saying that we don't have enough people with knowledge about doing business in Asia, and this situation is hurting Australian companies financially because they are not able to do deals in the region. Looking more broadly, outside of this story, there have been some big news stories lately focusing on Asian investment in Australia that are certainly getting the attention of politicians and businesses. Just recently, a Chinese-controlled consortium purchased an enormous cotton growing property in southern Queensland called Cubbie Station. The property’s owners had been looking for a buyer for 3 years and couldn’t find an Australian company that wanted to buy it. Then this Chinese company stepped in and said, “We’ll take it.” A similar thing happened in 2010 when Singapore’s Wilmar International bought Australia’s biggest sugar producer, Sucrogen. No local buyer wanted it.

The question must be, “Why can these Asian companies make a profit out of assets that Australians show no interest in?” How is it that Wilmar can say, “We can make money out of Sucrogen even if Australian business people cannot”? Cubbie Station is the same. What is the reason that Asian business people are able to invest in big assets here, in Australia, while local business people just show no interest at all because they do not see the financial rewards that can derive from these assets? Is it because they have the expertise for doing business in Asia that many Australian companies do not have, or do not have enough of?

The answer, according to the Fairfax story, is "Yes".

In a national strategy paper released last month, Asialink listed language proficiency as just one of 11 ''critical capabilities'' linked to business success in and with Asia.

Others included the ability to adapt behaviour to Asian contexts, work with governments, gain work experience and form relationships.

It might sound basic, but Australian companies are yet to cotton on. Large groups, including ANZ, Rio Tinto and Leighton Holdings, describe attracting and retaining ''Asia-capable talent" as their ''single most pressing challenge''.

And while the lack of true Asia-focused talent has long been lamented, less attention has been afforded to the scarcity of depth in Asia-capability within the Australian public service, which is at the forefront of this country's Asian engagement and policy implementation.

''Australia's public service needs to lift its game in this respect,'' [Ken] Henry said.

It is a view echoed by Andrew MacIntyre, an Asia-Pacific expert at the Australian National University, who said more people were interested in Asia but a smaller proportion had deep knowledge.

''We are fortunate to have a number of people high up in the public service who have got really good Asia expertise,'' he said. ''The trouble is, there are not many of them, and it is not clear what is coming through the ranks behind them.''

Now the answer to this conundrum - it takes time to build capacity in terms of human resources - might be close at hand. According to the ABS, in 2010–11 there were 282,000 student visa applications lodged in Australia and while this is 23% less than the peak of 2008–09, it's still a lot of potential recruits coming through our education system. The problem that is perceived by the business community, however, is language proficiency. I wrote a story about international students back in 2010 and had the chance to talk with Dr Bob Birrell of Monash University about what employers expect from recruits. “At the university level it is not lack of familiarity with the labour market (especially for accountants) but rather lack of English language communication skills that is the problem,” he told me.

In a 2008 study, Dr Birrell and co-author Ernest Healy show that students from mainland China and Hong Kong have a particularly low level of English.

The study looks at how shortages of qualified jobseekers in the workforce cannot be filled by tertiary-educated international students who are vigorously recruited by universities.

It finds that some firms ask for proof of English-language proficiency on the basis of a far higher test result than is required for university admission.

For example, to apply for a job at Ernst & Young, a leading accounting firm, graduates must have minimum International English Language Testing System (IELTS) scores of 8 for listening, 8 for speaking, 7.5 for writing and 7.5 for reading.

The popular IELTS scores people in four bands, where a score of 9 indicates native competency.

Not only do universities require lower IELTS scores than this (the score required depends on the course you are applying for), but the federal government asks for a score of "four 7s" for people who want to use language proficiency as a credential when they are looking to acquire permanent residency in Australia. So business has the problem that they can't find enough people with the skills necessary to do business in Asia, and overseas students graduating from Australian universities - many of whom are Asian - have the problem that their English language skills might not be high enough to get them in the door of a local firm. Securing employment locally is important for many overseas graduates, because work experience - like language proficiency - counts towards getting PR.

But a lot of those young people from Asia who come to Australia are highly motivated. They also innately possess many of the Asia-centric business skills that Australian businesses need to grow as Asian countries develop their economies this century, the 'Asian Century'. As well as adopting measures that can instil knowledge of Asian customs, values, and interpersonal relationships in young Australian people, perhaps the government can work with the business community to find ways to leverage the already existing skills of the many overseas graduates coming out of Australian universities every year. In my mind that's a huge untapped resource. Helping those young people to improve their English language skills might be a better option for businesses, and some strategic investment now might allow them to prosper more energetically in future.

News Limited attack on academics deeply self-interested

A student like this at university risks
becoming infected by dogma, says The Oz.

The Australian never gives up. And it hates anyone who thinks they know better. Associate editor Cameron Stewart's long piece dated yesterday, which nimbly negotiates the borderland between reporting and opinion, demonstrates these truths. Or at least they're true when the academics in question are not saying the things that The Australian wants them to say. We're talking, of course, about the Independent Media Inquiry, and those academics who agree with the recommendation of its head, Ray Finkelstein, which is to institute a new news media regulator.

Stewart knows how to write a compelling piece, which means focusing on one point and using all available resources to affirm, again and again, that single point until it appears unassailable. And that point, in this case, is the distance, as Stewart tells it, between realistic, feet-on-the-ground, working journalists (like him) on the one hand and out-of-touch, Left-leaning, theory-obsessed academics (like those who support the inquiry's recommendations) on the other. And the point that Stewart goes back to, again and again, is the kind of point that will appeal to the masses. It's all of a piece with News Limited's traditional Right-leaning agenda. Attack the ivory tower and you bring the great unwashed along with you. Never fails.

But it's deeply flawed, as is the story. I am a working freelance journalist who has spent two years at one of the journalism schools Stewart criticises for potentially infecting the next generation of young reporters with Left dogma. I wrote about the Media Inquiry's findings earlier this month because I find nothing suspicious and nothing dangerous about them. The regulator is needed because of the way newspapers like The Australian operate, and of course nothing that the paper says that is at variance with the inquiry's findings can be taken at face value. I'm not a journalism teacher, yet I believe that News Limited operates unethically and in a way that is against the best interests of the Australian people. We are not being well-served by this company, it is too big, and needs someone to hold out a guiding hand to make sure it behaves itself. Stewart is part of the problem. Taking his story at face value is like taking something Tony Abbott says in criticism of the government and holding it up as truth.

In my two years at university studying journalism as a mature-age student I met a wide range of teachers, most of whom had extensive industry experience. As well as this, they often relied on interesting and challenging texts that attempt, in good faith, to grapple with the complex problems that are associated with the media in contemporary societies, like Australia today. The rigid dichotomy that Stewart sets up and that I mentioned at the start of this piece is deeply flawed and, in addition, the way that he does it is deeply dishonest. As though any taught topic that is not directly and intimately related to churning out mediocre stories in the newsroom's heated environment is suspicious and not to be trusted. The fact is that, once you leave school and enter the workforce as, say, a journalist, you have little time to think about the sometimes difficult concepts you learned about at university. So that intensive focus on sophisticated ideas is therefore a necessary counterweight to the compromising environment you find yourself in once you start writing stories.

Journalism schools try to help you respond better in the workforce when you are confronted by complicated situations in the real working world. What you learn is designed to keep you out of jail, to help you see different angles in a story, to assist you in deciding when you have enough information to truthfully cover a story, to make sure you live up to the highest ideals of a profession that is, to me, very important. Journalism is critical to the functioning of a democracy. Without journalism no democracy can survive. In the absense of the ability to see differing viewpoints, to understand the real situation, to recognise and appreciate corruptions of all kinds the world as we know it would simply be run by the powerful with narrow, vested interests, at the expense of the interests of the regular citizen.

News Limited is, unfortunately, one of the powerful, vested interests that the news industry should be questioning. Because it controls so much of the media in Australia today that is unlikely, however. What Finkelstein and his colleagues have done, with their report, is to help us understand how society at large can make sure that this powerful, vested interest can be counterbalanced so that it does not simply accrue more power to itself.

Ivanhoe Girl's Grammar School in Melbourne's leafy north a good destination for your child? Possibly, as I shall explore. But one same-sex attracted young person found that the school did everything possible to thwart her natural inclinations earlier this year when it prevented her from bringing her partner to the school formal because the partner was also female, as we learn from a story by The Age. Sixteen-year-old Hannah Williams subsequently left the school so that she could be with her girlfriend, 15-year-old Savannah Supski. They both now attend a state school.

While this disturbing scenario enhances one's faith in the public school system while also engendering in one a deep suspicion of the underlying ethics of a school, like Ivanhoe, which advertises its Christian bias, at least in part Ivanhoe has lived up to its goals, among which are the following choice items:

• enables girls to practise independent, critical thought ...
• enables each girl to explore and develop her own spirituality ... while affirming tolerance and appreciation of other beliefs
• fosters responsibility ...
• develops leadership ...
• fosters healthy attitudes which enable girls to respect one another, develop resilience, enjoy school life and approach the future as responsible, caring citizens

Hannah's choice in this case was to stop pursuing her complaint with the state's Equal Opportunity Commission. She did this because the process was too upsetting for her, and she didn't want the issue to interfere with her studies.

The school's principal, Heather Schnagl, says she is "very upset" that Hannah feels discriminated against. There's something deeply complacent and unaware in Schnagl's stance vis-a-vis Hannah Williams and her case. Hannah says that she "had meetings with principals" to try to resolve the impasse and that her friends out of solidarity with her put up posters around the school protesting the decision but that "the teachers ripped them down". Hannah's perception is that the school was intransigent: "They kept on making up excuses," she says.

Christian organisations have recently been granted exemptions under EEO laws in Australia and it appears, from reviewing the Hannah Williams case, that Christian schools are prepared to weather further criticism in the public sphere in order to maintain the purity of their vision regarding the life choices their students make.

On the one hand, you have to applaud Ivanhoe Girl's Grammar for having produced a student with as much determination and such strong convictions as Hannah Williams. On the other, it is easy to condemn the school for being small-minded and unbending in the face of the earnest wishes of one of its own.

Staff at Currimundi Special School on the Sunshine Coast have voiced their frustration at the lack of information about the death of 13-year-old student Cameron Todd, who died last Monday. I asked similar questions last Sunday on this blog.

A staff member at a Sunshine Coast high school said many parents had phoned after learning of the death of a boy, 13, wanting to know if the student attended their child's school.

The staff member said the school was frustrated with EQ after it refused to release details of the case, citing privacy concerns.

An EQ spokesman said under the Protect Phase, QH was no longer routinely following up all confirmed cases of the disease.

"The protect phase recognised that Human Swine Influenza was not as severe for the general population as originally envisaged," he said.

"Most people are making a rapid and full recovery."

But the Parents and Citizens Council of Queensland says that rather than relying on government guidelines, school principals should be charged with deciding whether to release details of cases of swine flu at their schools to parents.

Cameron’s mother, Gold Coast nurse Rebecca Casey, now wants to know why parents weren’t information about the disease earlier.

"They (authorities) are obviously not doing enough. He got it. He wasn't taking risks with his health. He was so well looked after. It's really serious and people have got to start taking it seriously.

Cameron was evidently staying with Anna Miletic on the Sunshine Coast so that her son could attend the Currimundi Special School, where Miletic’s own son is also enrolled.

Miletic also wants answers from authorities.

Mrs Miletic said she was disgusted Queensland Health did not advise Currimundi Special School officials that Cameron Todd, who died last Monday, had contracted swine flu.

“It’s unbelievable. It’s criminal negligence,” she said.

“I was horrified and terrified when I read in the paper the child that died from swine flu was a student at the Currimundi Special School.

“What happens if another kid gets it? Someone has to be held responsible.

“This shows a total disregard and a breach of duty of care to the health of Sunshine Coast residents, especially the kids attending the school.

“All the kids at the school are considered in the high risk category of catching swine flu.”

Mrs Miletic said the oversight by health officials made her “mind boggle”.

In another Sunshine Coast Daily story yesterday, titled ‘Flu victim’s family requests privacy’, no words from Cameron’s family requesting privacy are found. A Queensland Health official says that details of the boy’s underlying health condition, which contributed to his death, were not released due to privacy laws.

Yesterday Kevin Hegarty, chief executive officer of the Sunshine Coast-Wide Bay health district, said the boy did have an “array of other complex health issues”, but would not confirm the teen suffered from cerebral palsy.

Nor would Mr Hegarty release the name of the boy’s school to “ensure the family’s privacy”.

“The boy’s medical history is protected under legislation,” he said.

“He was admitted to the Nambour General Hospital several days before he passed away.

“Our sympathy goes out to his family, who are managing their son’s death as they see fit.”

Clearly the government has a case to answer in terms of informing the public about health liabilities associated with swine flu deaths. Cameron’s mother, a clinical nurse, was not aware of the dangers to her son, and never imagined he would be struck down.

Ms Casey said she is a clinical nurse and worked in the community and thought swine flu was a "beat-up".

"When they said it (was swine flu), I was dumbfounded. Had he not have gotten it he would still be here," she said.

The boys raised their right arms, fingers pointing outward, as they left the dock via the door in the wood panelled wall to return to the cells. The magistrate stood, we stood, and the court cleared - through the swinging doors back into the waiting area. I chatted with The Daily Telegraph's reporter for a few minutes on the steps outside the building. A group of dark men pulled their sunglasses over their eyes as they marched past toward George Street.

The 15 year old boys will stay in jail for at least 18 months as they are due for release on parole in late spring next year. The salutes were a type of defiance in the face of a harsh justice system but they should have known it would end up like this when they took an axe and a machete into Trinity Catholic College a month ago and smashed the place up.

One of them, seated closest to me, sports a mullet and a short goatee. He was wearing a red T shirt, which contrasted with his dark skin and long eyelashes, high cheekbones and powerful nose. But regardless how grown-up the boys look they were treated like children, in a children's court and using children's justice.

Magistrate Gary Still read his decision to the court, where members of the boys' families sat on the side opposite the reporters, among whose number I sat. One boy among them wore a shell ankle bracelet and his right earlobe carried a stud.

Both boys are of Tongan descent, like the boys who had attacked Merrylands High School a year earlier. They were, apparently, happy that their attack had made the media. A copycat crime, it fetched its perpetrators a slightly stiffer sentence, possibly in consideration of the similarity. The major difference was that at Merrylands there was no axe.

Stateline‘s long Michael Booth segment on Friday 20 June was awash with slow footage of sandstone - it blamed the University of Sydney, and especially its VC, Gavin Brown.

But if you want to piece together a sequence of events, you need to do your own research.

The ABC’s story follows a much shorter print story by The Sydney Morning Herald‘s Harriet Alexander. The sole focus of the 28 April story is Booth’s misuse of blood samples.

But on 3 May, Alexander adds (‘Whatever you do, don’t rock the boat’) the sort of details the ABC includes. Still, dates are scanty. It’s hard to construct a timeline.

But in the story Alexander implies that researchers are pushed to publish conclusions that suit the government that provides the money.

We must rely on the ABC’s version for details. Which are:

• Tony Cunningham, director of the Westmead Millennium Institute asks Booth to let him use blood samples to be collected, for herpes research
• Booth “received verbal permission from the [ethics] committee chairman” to alter words on “parent information sheets”
• “No such letter could be found”
• Booth promoted to associate professor
• Booth’s SPANS finding was that “over-eating and not lack of exercise” caused children to be overweight
• In April 2006 Booth was “asked to discuss these findings at the NSW diabetes summit”
• He gets written approval “three days later” to go ahead
• Reporter Nick Grimm says “John Hatzistergos had had Michael Booth’s report in his possession for eight months”
• But the health minister “had not yet officially released it”
• Receives email about “extreme dissatisfaction” over “early release of this information” without ministerial consent
• An “ethical misconduct case against Michael Booth” “dormant for five months, suddenly ramped up”
• The university investigator “Helen Colbey of the NSW Internal Audit Bureau” (according to Alexander, ‘Uni academic denied natural justice: review‘) says “Professor Brown wrote … expanding my role to deal with … allegation[s] … that Dr Booth prematurely released the SPANS results by participating in press releases”
• In April 2008 a “retired Supreme Court judge” found the sacking to be “unreasonable” due to a lack of “procedural fairness”
• As soon as Stateline told the university it was doing the story, Booth “received a settlement offer from his lawyers”
• Booth refuses to accept the offer

The ABC could be said to have distorted the message to create drama, and accompanied it with acres of sandstone, to create a compelling, David and Goliath frame of reference for Friday night viewers.

This image should not be used against government. We know that universities have been being squeezed for some time. But the problem will not go away, especially now that notions of 'spin' and brand management are so visible.

In The Australian on Wednesday 18 June David Rowe and Kylie Brass paint a familiar picture of university spin doctors eager to stay on-side with the mandarins in Macquarie Street and elsewhere.

“Speaking beyond disciplinary peers to broader publics is a necessary - and necessarily risky - business.” But outcomes are “difficult to script”. Institutional “damage limitation” is the inevitable result when feisty and intelligent - and well researched - teachers enter the public sphere.

Bringing the university into disrepute is the risk. But what is the alternative?

Back in the late middle ages before Luther used the new technology of printing to disseminate his ideas of authenticity against corruption, it was John Wyclif who stood firm.

But Wyclif was fully protected by his employer - Oxford University - which refused to let him become meat for the cats, the inevitable result. A few generations later Jan Hus was assassinated by the church for the same heresy.

Luther, later, would be protected by a sympathetic ruler. Nationalistic and religious issues were almost always connected in the early modern period. Anti-German feeling helped the utraquists in Bohemia gather support among notables.

If Oxford had surrendered Wyclif the university’s reputation would, now, suffer.

Merrylands High School has been in the news since Monday's machete attack. On that day, the news reported that "men" had attacked the school using baseball bats and machetes.

Today it's revised to "youths" and "teenagers". The five are:

Two 14-year-old boys from Carramar and Auburn, two 15-year-old boys from Merrylands and Seven Hills and a 16-year-old boy from Merrylands.

Because they're minors, names are not released. When I heard about it yesterday, I immediately thought of a specific ethnic community, because of the choice of weapon (machetes).

One boy broke bail conditions stemming from an armed hold-up (knife, replica gun) earlier this year. The Sydney Morning Herald put Arun Ramachandran on the story (among others). We learn nothing about ethnicity until halfway down today's front-page story.


We learn that "former students" said that "there had been tensions between the school's Pacific Islander students and other student groups for many years".

We also learn that a 16-year-old Merrylands High School student said that "the gang was made up of students from neighbouring Granville Boys High School" (see pic).

The distance between Granville Boys High School (right dot) and Merrylands High School (orange dot) is about three kilometres.


The boys, who will attend Parramatta Children's Court on 22 May, "will remain in custody". They apparently gave themselves up to police quietly.

In overall Sydney-scope, the attacks took place in the area marked with orange.

Michael Specter started working for The Washington Post in 1985 and became a staff writer with The New Yorker (cover is of the 3 December 2007 issue) in 1998. In between he worked in Europe for The New York Times.

'Darwin's Surprise' in this issue is about endogenous retroviruses which, Specter tells us, "infect the DNA of a species [and] become part of that species". Unlike regular viruses, retroviruses reverse the 'flow' of genetic code from DNA to RNA:

A retrovirus stores its genetic information in a single-stranded molecule of RNA, instead of the more common double-stranded DNA. When it infects a cell, the virus deploys a special enzyme, called reverse transcriptase, that enables it to copy itself and then paste its own genes into the new cell's DNA.

In this way, 'endogenous' retroviruses "alter our genetic structure" and it is a scientific fact that disabled retroviruses "make up eight per cent of the human genome".

Specter shows that the success of a species in one generation may cause it to be susceptible to a new retrovirus in a later age. In fact, the propeller-heads have shown this to be true. Our current problem with HIV is, they say, the result of our success in combatting another virus, called PtERV, four million years ago. Gorillas and chimps, who died in large numbers at that time due to this virus, are now immune to HIV.

But he goes further, noting, with gravitas conveyed by a researcher at the Institut Gustave Roussy, near Paris, Thierry Heidmann, that "without endogenous retroviruses mammals might never have developed a placenta, which protects the fetus and gives it time to mature";

That led to live birth, one of the hallmarks of our evolutionary success over birds, reptiles, and fish. Eggs cannot eliminate waste or draw the maternal nutrients required to develop the large brains that have made ammals so versatile.

Heidmann says that retroviruses, being "two things at once: genes and viruses", "helped make us who we are today just as surely as other genes did." It is a fascinating story.

Also in this issue is a piece, also long (in traditional New Yorker style), by Geraldine Brooks. It chronicles the entwined destinies of two families of Serbs, one Muslim and one Jewish.

It is a story of redemption and really is worth reading, although the odd-sounding names make it hard to follow at times. In it, a kindness given by a man in one generation, is returned in the next by a woman, and finally rewarded by the entire state of Isreal in the next. It ends in the mid-nineties when the war in that part of Europe was sizzling across our TV screens.

It is a war, as this story shows, for which the statute of limitations, in terms of the stories it may produce, is nowhere near ended. For this reason, we should study such authors as Dubravka Ugresic, whose experiences in Croatia during and after the period of turmoil, make good reading.

Pollution stories are discouraged by the Chinese government, says my classmate tonight. Well, she didn't say 'pollution' stories exactly, but rather 'negative' stories. A report in The Sydney Morning Herald buttresses her words.

I'll call her 'Sandy' (because that's what she calls herself -- it's common for Chinese students to do this, adopt an Anglo name while living here). Tonight's class is again mainly made up of female Chinese students.

She tried England but, she says, she didn't like the weather. Also, her good friend is also here. In China, she worked for a Beijing TV station doing a fashion show. Her work didn't attract official opprobrium but, she asserts, it's hard for reporters to write about things that reflect negatively on the nation.

The news report says that Chinese authorities "lobbied the World Bank" to tone down data on pollution. Later the government said it was "cancelling plans to publish" a report about the cost of pollution to the economy.

Like many news stories, this one ends with a quote, here by an environmental academic. He says that including the real cost of clean technology would push down growth "in some areas".

"Many areas still place GDP above all else," he says. A page for Mitchell Landsberg, the reporter ("in Beijing"), is on the Los Angeles Times Web site. Seems it needs updating, because it shows him as a metro reporter.

The same issue reports that Fairfax managers will roll out Earth Hour in other Australian cities, and in New Zealand. Anywhere Fairfax has papers, basically.