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- Contents Category: Letters
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- Article Title: Letters - November 2003
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Ali Ismail Abbas
Dear Editor,
Chris Goddard has written a powerful letter (ABR, August 2003) arguing that the photograph of Ali Ismail Abbas should not have accompanied my essay ‘Only As a Last Resort’ (ABR, May 2003). To tell the truth, I don’t know whether or not he is right. I am writing only to clarify the record. Peter Rose graciously accepted all responsibility for publishing the photograph (ABR, August 2003) and, thereby, all responsibility for whatever criticism its publication provoked. He did, however, consult me about the photograph, and I readily agreed that it should accompany my article, without, I’m now ashamed to say, thinking as much about it as Goodard has shown that I should have.
Raimond Gaita, St Kilda, Vic.
More cock-ups than spin
Dear Editor,
As a former propagandist with the British government of some twenty years’ standing, I think Mick O’Regan, in his review of Bridget Griffen-Foley’s Party Games (ABR, September 2003), overstates the importance of spin doctors and of their influence on the media. As Margaret Thatcher’s press secretary Bernard Ingham was wont to say: ‘There are more cock-ups than conspiracies in government information work.’ The media like to play along with the fiction because it makes them feel more important, but the fact is that government information work is a complicated job where departmental policy makers have more influence on the final outcome than any information officer working in the minister’s office.
What I find more worrying about the tone of O’Regan’s review and, presumably, the content of Party Games is the damage that was done to one of my teenage political heroes. H.V. Evatt was an intellectual giant of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s in Australia. As a jurist, historian and politician, Evatt had no equal. During the founding of the United Nations, the New York Times hailed him as one of the world’s most important smaller power leaders. The London Daily Mail described him as the outstanding personality of the Paris Peace conference. Very little of this got back to the anti-Labor Australian press. R.G. Menzies knew that he had met his match in Evatt, and resorted to every dirty trick in the book to wrong-foot him. Menzies was a failed war leader who had to reinvent himself to get back into politics. The fact that the press of the day went along with this had more to do with their publishers’ politics than any attempt by the Menzies political machine to manipulate them. David McNicoll, in his memoirs, often mentions his trips to Canberra running errands for Sir Frank Packer. The media scene in those days, as I recall, was conformist and predictable.
I suspect that one of the problems for people such as O’Regan and Griffen-Foley is that they have no personal experience of the times they are writing about. Instead, they rely on archival records and television footage. The repeated revision of our recent past – events that took place within living memory – is, to my mind, one of the most worrying aspects of the current state of Australian scholarship.
Val Wake, Port Macquarie, NSW
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