The Australian has stripes in the game of public advocacy in this country and most media watchers know that its allegiance lies toward the conservative end of the political spectrum, which makes it no surprise that the paper today brought a big gun onside - British sociologist Frank Furedi - in its campaign to ensure that Australia's marriage laws are not tampered with. Furedi says that support for gay marriage is a mere pose, a way to differentiate oneself from the Great Unwashed, a self-serving item of garnish whipped out from the cabinet of the elitist conformist and dabbed on the persona like parseley in a butcher's display, saying "I'm better than you, sod off".

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Although born in the US, Martha Gellhorn lived in the latter part of her life in London, and the prize named after her - for "journalism that challenges secrecy and mendacity in public affairs" - is awarded by a judging panel appointed by UK-based organisers. The international nature of the prize is fitting. Gellhorn garnered fame for reporting from all corners of the globe, most notably in Spain during the civil war (1936-39) and in Europe at the close of WWII. Gellhorn earned her stripes through connections to the Roosevelt White House and by reporting on poverty in America but she subscribed to universal values of human dignity and justice. And like Julian Assange, who has just been awarded the prize, she was controversial. She was married a number of times, most notably to the author Ernest Hemingway.

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

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

The UK's The Telegraph is reporting an important case involving Twitter releasing details of some of its accounts to a UK-based plaintiff on the order of the Superior Court of California in the San Mateo County.

Twitter has released the name, address, email address, telephone number and geographical location of the users behind five accounts. Twitter says it notified the defendant and that he declined to contest the order. Zee, a blogger at The Next Web, says that this is "key".

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

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

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

According to the BBC:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

O the enduring power of stories to enhance the features of things obscure, things half-understood, things kept out of view by the powerful entities that surround us and that suppress evidence of their power by gaming the media. Questions such as the one many are asking in light of the continuing silence of WikiLeaks, that hactivist posse of outlaw data handlers that has disconcertingly hit the deck following the emergence of multiple attacks on its integrity and the personal safety of its founder: 'Who is Bradley Manning?' A 20-minute video produced by 10 reporters at the Guardian lifts up the cover on this particular tome of secrets and goes some way toward explaining why Manning released classified military information to WikiLeaks and why he then gave himself away to the lurking presence in this drama: Adrian Lamo. Like Lamo, Manning is not a particularly heroic figure and one who is likely to be viewed by society as deeply flawed and slightly unpleasant.

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

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

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

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

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

Jay Rosen, the news commentator, turns his gaze on his blog onto what he calls the "neurotic" relationship between the mainstream media and bloggers. The MSM, he says, "others" bloggers and in so doing tries to defend its ancient prerogatives. But people aren't listening, it seems. The media continue to be in financial trouble. Circulation continues its downward slide. Alternatives proliferate. And social media more and more allows what were formerly faithful readers to talk to one another. And Rosen underscores the cause of his dismay by linking to a pithy cartoon which, he says, illustrates exqusitely what the problem is.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And I just sigh inwardly.

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

No, not a bit of it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

And unlike opinion, it's not cheap.

Bob Gould is dead. A hundred tender feelings and a thousand distant memories crowd the mind at hearing the news that one of Sydney's most famous booksellers has passed away. Bob Gould was really a one-off of a human being. He was totally unique. And he occupied a signal station in my personal record beginning - as so many stories that we read seem to do - when I was an undergraduate. I was living in Glebe just behind the big Grace Bros store which is now a Mirvac shopping centre. Then, there was no gargantuan parking station with its lofty pedestrian bridge leading back toward the front door of Glebe's legendary food strip. In those days there was a printing shop owned by a bloke who sailed at my dad's club, a low-rise parking area, and mostly-empty streets that echoed down to Ultimo like the chambers of doom. You could hear people walking from two hundred metres away.

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

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

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

Pic credit: candytrip.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh dear.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I've never understood the story of Lot's Wife who, fleeing Sodom, turned back to reflect on the destruction meted out by God on the mortal inhabitants of that fabled place, or that of Eurydice who, saved from Hades by Orpheus, her husband, is returned to that place when he looks back at her face before they reach the upper world again. These travel stories seem to tell us to merely obey, or to avoid counting chickens until they're hatched, or to be humble in success. Or something. But all of these surmisings are highly proscriptive and unsuited to the era of enquiry in which we now live. Inquisitiveness is a virtue, right? So, then, reflection must also be favoured by the gods. Some evidently think it is, especially at this time of year when the media is filled with lists of the "ten best" and nods in the direction of fulfilled destinies - the past - whence we have ventured like the lost souls we possibly are.

It's funny, too, that in all these old stories from antiquity and from Christian writings it's the woman who is chastised by the gods for transgressing. We all know that women have better memories than men, just as we know that men have a better spatial sense (a better sense of direction in the physical world). Is a woman who remembers a past slight a Harpie to be judged with a stern lens, turned into stone, returned to the infernal realm? And what about Pandora's box? Always, it seems, men have written the script for all of us to act out. Women have been demonised for centuries. Is it now time for them to take the their place in the front rank? Perhaps.

One woman who came out of left field to take a place of prominence - in the field of sport - this year was Jessica Watson who, at 17, became the youngest person to circumnavigate the globe unassisted and without making landfall in a sailing boat. Another woman who made headlines this year in Australia was Julia Gillard, whose superior negotiating skills came to the fore when she successfully convinced unaligned members of parliament who had been given a secondary franchise after the August election, which returned a hung parliament, to side with Labor in preference to the other side of politics. There are no doubt other stories available in which women came out ahead in the mainstream lists, reorganising, at least partially, our concept of the world we live in. But regardless, we know that men still earn more than women for identical work and that women are underrepresented on corporate boards. The die are still loaded.

They're falling in propitious arrangements for me, albeit with an unassuming shift. This is a conclusion I could come to if I were to look back on the past year, during which I published about 30 stories commercially having taken the plunge and gone freelance. Many of the editors I have dealt with over the year have been women, and they're certainly not retiring when it comes to giving an opinion. But the two editors who take most of my work currently are both men.

So, it's been a year of goals reached and expectations rewarded by some tokens of general regard (including the baseline reward of money) despite the fact that I have limited myself to stories of a certain nature (it's necessary to do this as a freelancer in order to conserve one's focus; a too-broad net, if cast, can leave you exhausted and confused) that place me to one side of the mainstream. It's impossible to avoid locating yourself somewhere along the ideological spectrum; the mere fact of your topic choices does this for you.

I don't know what awaits me in the new year arriving but to prepare I took some time off at the end of this one: a couple of weeks during which I put other parts of my life in a better state of order than they had been in before. Banzai!

Review: The Sixties, Jenny Diski (2009)

This articulate and thoughtful little primer on the historical period reaching from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s contains more dress label names and album covers than dates and the names of important people. But it's easy to read. It's not comprehensive (it doesn't pretend to be). It's more of a sketch than a compendium, but it's no less satisfying for that.

Diski, a writer born in 1947, muses on the reason for the rise of alternative lifestylers in the 60s. The war had ended but the world was in more trouble than ever with a frightening Cold War in train, unrelenting economic hardship in many countries, and then the debacle of Vietnam. The state, in the UK, had decided to provide the means of support in the form of generous social security payments so that young people didn't have to work if they didn't want to. There was money and there was the occasion; it was practically inevitable after the optimistic 1950s and amid the post-war economic boom.

Relying on the method of memoir more than history, Diski attempts to describe what it was like being part of the new generation who dropped out, tuned in and turned on. Her personal journey included involvement in protest rallies, stints in mental institutions to treat depression, and then a reaching out into the field of teaching in an attempt to find a way to really change the way people thought about their lives and so change the very structure of society. By addressing the problems of youth, Diski thought, a real change was possible for the future. So in a sense this is a fairly personal account of the period, but I see no reason why that makes it any less cogent for a contemporary reader.

Diski also spends quite a lot of time reflecting on "what went wrong". Specifically, why did the Thatcher era of rampant materialism and individualism result from the 60s. Here, she asks many questions but does not come up with a solid answer. The reason might be that the impetus to reform became entrenched and made its way into the modus operandi of those on the conservative side of politics, thus leading to neoliberalism. But Diski leaves the question unanswered, for now.

This book is refreshing, modest, anecdotal and thought-provoking, and so comes highly recommended.

Review: Collapse, Jared Diamond (2005)

This book has been available for a number of years. I first heard about it while travelling in the Sydney CBD: it must have been on the car radio in 2006, an interview with the author perhaps. A few years later I decided to change careers and become a journalist and I have concentrated on a small number of subjects including the environment. So it was natural for me to buy and read this book. Many people have done the same thing. But I was surprised at how impressed I was once I started.

Briefly, Diamond sets out to expose the reasons behind a series of societal collapses that have occurred at various times in history beginning with the Easter Island society. They cut down all the trees and their culture imploded. He then moves on to the Norse settlement of Greenland which collapsed for similar reasons. No trees equals loss of topsoil which leads to crop failure and starvation. There are other cases including the Maya and the Anasazi, a culture that prospered in the south-eastern United States a thousand years ago. They all collapsed for the same reason: no trees equals starvation.

So far so good. The best parts of the book enable you to look in detail at how these untoward events occurred. Surprising, too, is the number of insights Diamond gives into how our own society is faring on planet Earth. We, too, are chopping down trees at a great rate. Are we doomed to societal collapse, too? That remains to be seen. There is no doubt, however, that generalised changes in society's thinking since the 1980s especially in the area of environmentalism have begun to throw out promising tendencies. It remains our challenge to promote them so that we may cope with the significant challenges that lie ahead in the current century.

What seems likely is that Diamond's book will continue to attract attention from commentators of the left who will use it as a warning against complacency and greed. Short-sightedness in the face of looming catastrophe was a characteristic of former civilisations that ultimately failed and so we should be wary of falling into a similar trap. Rather than merely taking into account the economic advantages of a proposal - be it a government policy or a new enterprise - it seems that we need to also take into account its impact on biodiversity. That's why Diamond's book seems to endorse such initiatives as The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity, a UN initiative, which is currently attempting to bring into public focus biodiversity as a valuable resource. Without it we might just follow the societies Diamond chronicles and stop functioning. Chaos is the only likely result.

Northern Mexico is the locus of a modern media echo chamber where global press outlets constantly practice their synchronised routines in condemning drug-connected violence as, almost daily it seems, another slaughter occurs under the noses of local civil authorities. Remarkable this October was news that a 20-year-old student named Marisol Valles was the only candidate willing to take up the position of police chief in the town of Praxedis. But the war on drugs is simply not working.

Back in 2009, the Cato Institute, a libertarian think-tank based in Washington DC, released a report it had comissioned on Portugal's decriminalisation of drug use. Several press outlets covered the paper but there was little traction in the broadsheets, let alone the ghastly tabloids.

In 2011 I think it's time to take another look at the options available, keeping in mind that, in Portugal, the nightmare scenarios predicted by the chorus of conservative doom-sayers just did not eventuate. Switzerland and Holland also have liberal laws regarding drug use. In the US, the standard-bearer for the War on Drugs, live 25 percent of the world's criminals, despite the fact that the country only has five percent of the world's population. Trillions of dollars have been spent in the battle for supremacy against the drug barons, but there has been precious little to show for all the expense. And a lot of dead bodies. It's time to take the trade away from dealers and put it into the hands of corporations.

This is a sight further than even Portugal has ventured but it is, I believe, the only way to stop the carnage, the jailings and the pain. Drugs are certainly not to be recommended: rational speech is. (There are other, better ways to minimise the pain of living.) By continuing to allow dealers to run the trade, the authorities are merely pushing the money underground. People will always want to find a way to reduce existential pain. So let's remove the stigma attached to drugs and talk rationally about the problem. Our children will thank us.

Whatever else the end of the year has in store for residents of south-east Queensland there's one thing for sure: it's going to keep on raining for the forseeable future.This picture shows the Bureau of Meteorology's map of the country for today, and they predict it will continue to rain until Thursday. Friday is New Year's Eve so it might get fine before the end of the year, but going by the current charts that outcome seems doubtful right at the moment. More likely, we'll see continued rain into the beginning of January.

I was driving in the rain today because I decided to get in the car and shoot out into the hinterland to visit Maleny, a small alpine town set in the Blackall Ranges about 45 minutes' drive south west of my home. There was a big traffic jam on the Bruce Highway due to a fatal crash on the road south of Beerwah. I negotiated the heavy traffic off the highway and headed west where I was surprised by the steady stream of traffic advancing in the opposite direction. These were northward-bound cars that had been diverted off the highway by the police to bypass the crash site.

Once you pass Lansborough, you start going up a steep hill into the ranges and the fog sets in. I was a little dismayed by the limited visibility as the fog closed in, especially when the terrain close to the car told me I was driving around the side of a steep incline with precipices on either side of the road. I slowed down well below the speed limit and took it carefully all the way through the upland pastures and up and down a series of small hills that lead you into the township, which is modern, cosy and compact. I had a sandwich and a cup of coffee in a cafe near where I parked then got back in the wet car and headed home.

The streets around my place are largely deserted due to the continued rain that has lashed the landscape for over a week. Picnickers are staying away from the parks and beaches. So I took out a video and plan to spend a quiet evening at home, having eaten some leftovers from Christmas lunch washed down with a glass of inexpensive white wine. It may be wet, but it's still warm and dry inside the house. My thoughts are often occupied by images of homeless people left to cope with Christmas at shelters and in doss-houses. For them, I give a small prayer as I change my bedsheets or place a new towel on the rack in my bathroom. May I always have such small, domestic things to do on rainy summer evenings.