Calibre of the year

Dean Biron and Moira McKinnon are the dual winners of the 2011 Calibre Prize for an Outstanding Essay, the fifth to be presented by ABR in association with Copyright Agency Limited’s Cultural Fund. The judges – Jane Goodall, winner of the 2008 Calibre Prize, and Peter Rose, Editor of ABR – considered almost 300 essays, by far our biggest field to date. The other shortlisted entrants are Peter Barry, Bruce Grant, Evelyn Juers, and Kim Mahood, whose essays will appear in ABR in coming months. All nineteen longlisted essays are named on our website. We congratulate all of the authors.

Certain themes soon became apparent during the judging. Mortality and the complexities of familial life remain the most common ones, but the judges were struck by the number of essays on or referencing Bob Dylan. Life writing is a major spur to Calibre entrants. As in 2010, Indigenous subjects prompted several of the most compelling entries, including those by Moira McKinnon and Kim Mahood. Overall, the judges were impressed by the enquiring nature, the erudition, and the stylistic diversity of the essayists.

Moira McKinnon is a public health physician who has worked in northern Australia and northern Canada. Her essay, ‘Who Killed Matilda?’, is based on her years as the main adviser on communicable diseases for the Australian Department of Health and Ageing. On learning of her win, Dr McKinnon commented: ‘I wanted to aim at the high standard of the Calibre Prize-winning essays in order to convey Matilda’s story as effectively as I could, and to highlight the question of humankind’s lost connection with nature. Thank you ABR and Copyright Agency Limited for making this possible with the Calibre Prize.’

Dean Biron, who has written for ABR several times, lives in Brisbane and has a PhD from the University of New England. A former police detective, Dr Biron is currently employed as a senior analyst with the Queensland Children’s Commission. In his essay, ‘The Death of the Writer’ – more polemical than most Calibre entries – Dr Biron opposes a culture that inflames literary ambition and self-identification. He remarked: ‘Often the hardest part about writing is finding the motivation to, as Beckett put it, “fail better”. CAL and ABR deserve the highest praise for motivating individuals to apply themselves to the underappreciated essay form.’

‘The Death of the Writer’ appears in this issue. Moira McKinnon’s essay will appear in the July–August issue, after the Art issue.

ABR remains most grateful to CAL for enabling us to present Australia’s major prize for an original essay and for advancing the cause of essay writing in this country. We hope to be able to present the sixth Calibre Prize later this year.

ABR heads to Clunes

We’re off to Clunes in mid-May for one of Victoria’s most original literary gatherings. Back to Booktown brings together countless antiquarian and second-hand booksellers, and presents a wide range of literary soirées and masterclasses. Peter Rose will lead separate classes on reviewing and on poetry. ABR staff members look forward to meeting readers and bibliophiles at our stand throughout the festival.

Different lives

The judges, from a field of almost sixty titles, have shortlisted six books for this year’s National Biography Award. They are Alan ‘The Red Fox’ Reid: Pressman Par Excellence (Ross Fitzgerald and Stephen Holt); Grand Obsessions: The Life and Work of Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin (Alasdair McGregor); Macquarie (Harry Dillon and Peter Butler); My Father’s Daughter (Sheila Fitzpatrick); Piano Lessons (Anna Goldsworthy); and Playing with Fire: The Controversial Career of Hans J. Eysenck (Roderick Buchanan). The winner – who will receive $20,000 – will be announced on May 16, during the Sydney Writers’ Festival.

Oscar and Astrid

Shaun Tan is the winner of the 2011 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, the world’s largest prize for children’s and Young Adult literature. The jury’s citation lauded the ‘masterly visual storyteller’ for combining ‘brilliant, magical narrative skill with deep humanism’. Tan also won an Oscar this year for the animated short film of his book, The Lost Thing.

Pursuit of ideas

Conversation always goes up a notch when Patrick McCaughey returns to Australia. The former director of the National Gallery of Victoria was in Melbourne recently, and spoke with his usual flair at a private gathering of ABR Patrons. Patrick McCaughey was in Australia to launch the program of the Pursuit of Identity: Landscape, History and Genetics, Melbourne University’s Festival of Ideas, which he is directing for the second time. The dates are June 13–18. Admission is free, but many sessions have filled up already so be sure to register your interest.

Art issue

Patrick McCaughey, one of a stellar group of contributors, will also write for us next month. Other contributors to the Art issue will include Gerard Vaughan (Director of the NGV), Frances Spalding, and Daniel Thomas – on MONA. Galleries and publishers wishing to advertise in the June issue should contact Mark Gomes to reserve space: (03) 9429 6700.

CONTENTS: MAY 2011

Starched collars

Dear Editor,

Stuart Macintyre’s review of my book, Curtin’s Empire (April 2011), shows that on many of the substantive issues relating to the wartime leader’s world view we are on common ground. Macintyre notes that Curtin’s 1941 ‘Look to America’ statement was not in fact the first time that an Australian leader had appealed to the Americans to come to Australia’s defence; that Curtin’s depiction of Australia as a ‘citadel for the British speaking race’ was far from the only time that he defined the country in those terms; and, further, that the concept of Australia as part of the ‘British world’ is a difficult one for contemporary Australians to grapple with.

Nevertheless, at a certain point Macintyre’s review parts company with the argument and the evidence presented in Curtin’s Empire, particularly as it relates to high strategy and domestic politics. Given the high costs that Australia paid for American assistance during World War II, it ‘was hardly surprising’, he contends, that Curtin should ‘look to the Empire as a counter-balance’. Although intended as an aside, it is an important aside. It reiterates the arguments presented by previous studies that Curtin’s Britishness was merely a pragmatic ‘makeweight’ to American hegemony. Yet, as I argue in the book, this misses the point that Curtin’s efforts to secure closer imperial cooperation into the postwar era were a serious expression of his idea of Australia. He believed that the war had only made the case all the more compelling. As he explained to the Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference in London in May 1944, the call to the United States at a moment of national crisis had done nothing to diminish Australia’s deep sense of ‘oneness’ with the United Kingdom.

Similarly, Macintyre contends that the book ‘underestimates the political constraints on Curtin’, particularly in light of his dependence on independents until the 1943 election. Yet the government’s political position in the lead-up to that poll did not compel Curtin to put his plans for the postwar empire on ice. Indeed, he started to outline his Empire Council proposals well before the election, and with no serious dissent from his party. Caucus did not treat Curtin with the same respect over the issue of conscription. Further, Macintyre argues that Curtin had to ‘put up with ministers and backbenchers who had little British race patriotism’. At first glance, this suggests that Curtin was just using British race language out of political expediency; that it was not the ‘real’ Curtin speaking. But this would imply that Curtin’s British rhetoric was an understatement of his real convictions – kept in check so as not to antagonise these party firebrands.

Macintyre stresses Curtin’s concern for achieving coherence and credibility as he became Labor leader in the 1930s, even pointing to his new-found concern that his colleagues wear properly ironed shirts. But equally it might be added that Australian Britishness was not merely some starched collar respectability. Just as Allan Martin and Judith Brett have shown that Menzies did not consciously don the garments of Britishness to curry favour with the electorate, the same might be said of Curtin. Britishness was never the exclusive preserve of conservative loyalists. Curtin’s might have been a rhetoric of Britishness less saturated with the longing for ‘home’ or nostalgia for an English rural arcadia, but it was no less a powerful way of articulating Australia’s attachment to the wider British world.

James Curran, Sydney, NSW

Stuart Macintyre replies:

James Curran thinks that I underestimate John Curtin’s Britishness because I emphasise the constraints on him as a war leader and the pragmatic considerations that guided his proposal for an Empire Council. On the contrary, I think his book exaggerates the significance of Curtin’s ‘British race patriotism’. We are in agreement that Curtin understood Australia as British in its composition, character, and loyalty – in disagreement about the implications of that ancestral sentiment after it became apparent that Australia could no longer rely on Britain to ensure its national survival.

A few weeks after his ‘Look to America’ statement, Curtin said that he was ‘shocked and amazed at allegations in certain quarters that disunity exists among the people of Australia and Britain’. So he was, but meanwhile he was exchanging angry cables with Winston Churchill over the return of two divisions of the AIF for home defence.

As had Australian leaders before him, Curtin realised that Australia had little purchase on British strategy. Advice from Stanley Bruce, who as high commissioner in London was persistently rebuffed by Churchill, made this clear. As others had done before him, Curtin wanted a machinery for imperial consultation that would overcome this problem – and, as James Curran knows, his attempt to secure it in 1944 met with summary dismissal.

The question at issue is not whether Curtin retained an attachment to Britishness, but how Australia should pursue its national interests in the postwar world. It became apparent at Hot Springs and Bretton Woods that Australia would maximise its economic prospects through maintenance of the sterling bloc, and Ben Chifley did so at a considerable political cost. It became apparent at San Francisco that Australian expectations of the international order differed from those of the major powers, a club that Britain was both unwilling and unable to leave, but the benefits of which Australia still hoped to share.

Thus the imperial relationship entered its final chapter, but the current vogue for cultural identity sheds little light on how it came about. Following the fall of Singapore, the ABC dropped ‘The British Grenadiers’ to introduce its news bulletins in favour of ‘Advance Australia Fair’. A year later, Curtin rebuked Arthur Calwell, his Minister for Information, for requesting movie theatres to adopt the local tune, and insisted, ‘Our anthem is God Save the King’. This was a consequence, and not a cause, of the prime minister’s determination of national policy.

On 30 July 2010, WikiLeaks uploaded a file named ‘insurance.aes256’ to the Internet. The file was 1.4 gigabytes in size – large enough to hold a mountain of leaked documents – and encrypted with a 256-character key strong enough to have the US National Security Agency’s approval for use to secure classified documents. It was also copied to dozens of USB sticks and mailed out to a cadre of WikiLeaks supporters around the world. In a letter enclosed with the USB sticks, WikiLeaks said that ‘insurance.aes256’ contained an encrypted archive:

Distribution will make sure that no matter what happens, this information will be disclosed to the media and consequently the general public. It will also serve as insurance for the well being of our project and us. If anything goes wrong, a second mechanism will make sure that the keys for this material will be distributed publically, enabling you to decrypt the archive and help make sure it wasn’t all for nothing.

The ‘insurance.aes256’ file was uploaded four days after the WikiLeaks publication of the Afghan war logs and five weeks after the arrest of Private Bradley Manning, the US Army soldier alleged to have leaked those and other military and diplomatic secrets. Wiki-Leaks has not detailed what secrets are locked away behind the AES256 algorithm, but the signal broadcast by the posting of ‘insurance.aes256’ is crystal clear: if you bring down WikiLeaks, the encrypted file, together with all its contents, will be released into the wild.

Ten months on, ‘insurance.aes256’ remains under encrypted lock and key, orbiting cyberspace like an information bomb awaiting activation.

Is it any wonder that Julian Assange – the founder and editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks – has been called everything from the ‘James Bond of journalism’ to a ‘cyber-terrorist’ to the L. Ron Hubbard of online media to an ‘alpha-wolf’ with a messiah complex to ‘the most dangerous man in the world’?

Judging by past WikiLeaks actions, Assange’s opponents – primarily the US government, with what appears to be the tacit support of the Australian government – should take the threat of ‘insurance.aes256’ seriously. Since WikiLeaks went live less than five years ago, Assange has consistently shown himself to be a man unlikely, perhaps unable, to walk away from a fight. Just ask the Church of Scientology.

In 2008, WikiLeaks published a cache of Scientology memos and documents detailing the church’s heavy-handed public relations methods. The church’s lawyers – who have earned a fierce reputation in media circles – promptly wrote to Assange, demanding the removal of the leaked documents and the release of Internet logs relating to the upload of the leaked documents. WikiLeaks didn’t flinch. It labelled the Scientology correspondence ‘attempted suppression’, and published several thousand more pages of leaked Scientology material in retaliation.

At times it is difficult to know whether to admire Assange’s brinkmanship or be vexed by his lack of judgement. Either way, arguments about the merits of Assange’s crash-or-crash-through style of leading WikiLeaks, or the motivation behind the Swedish attempt to extradite him from Britain, or the bona fides of the sex charges he faces, are peripheral. At its root, the battle over WikiLeaks is all about information – who owns it, who controls it, who needs it – and about one man’s idea to free it through the creation of an electronic commons.

This tug-of-war over who controls our information has repercussions beyond the confines of cyberspace. Every day, the users of electronic communications leave behind an El Dorado of data. Last year, YouTube users uploaded thirty-five hours of video every minute; during the popular uprising in Egypt in February more than twenty-three million photographs were uploaded to the Web from Cairo’s Tahir Square; and by 2013 it is estimated that Internet traffic will hit fifty-five exabytes per month – the equivalent of ten billion DVDs of information. In this age of corporatised nations and multinational corporations, that data will not only be closely monitored and mined, it will also be stored for as long as there is enough electricity to power a hard drive. What we are facing is a digital future that is both tantalising and troubling.

For ‘tantalising’, consider the case of University of Western Australia archaeologist David Kennedy. Kennedy made headlines earlier this year when he discovered two thousand potential archaeological sites in Saudi Arabia by sitting in his Perth office, logging onto GoogleEarth, and carefully studying the information contained in the satellite imagery.

For ‘troubling’, consider the virtual omnipotence of Google. As Kennedy’s virtual forays into Saudi Arabia illustrate, the secret of Google’s success is the elegant way it retrieves and presents the treasures of the digital world, covering everything from video to images to webpages to books to email to satellite maps. However, as Siva Vaidhyanathan points out in his new book, The Googlization of Everything (2011), Google’s core business is all about consumer profiling. ‘Google,’ Vaidhyanathan concludes, ‘is a black box. It knows a tremendous amount about us, and we know far too little about it.’

Make no mistake, our daily lives are being recorded and turned into information that could – without proper controls and safeguards – become nothing more than tools for commerce and control. The trouble is, as Marshall McLuhan pointed out in 1962, we are yet to come to terms with the possibilities of electronic communications:

We are today as far into the electric age as the Elizabethans had advanced into the typographical and mechanical age. And we are experiencing the same confusions and indecisions which they had felt when living simultaneously in two contrasted forms of society and experience.

If our age truly is all about information, we must realise that our personal information is now a commodity; that, as science writer James Gleick puts it in The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood (2011), ‘information is what our world runs on: the blood and the fuel, the vital principle’.

Of course, the desire to access and control information is not new; as Sir Francis Bacon wrote in 1597, ‘knowledge itself is power’. What is new is the changing nature of information itself. Just as the invention of the Gutenberg press transformed Western civilisation from an oral to a predominantly written culture, the Internet – through the ubiquity of video – is in the process of transforming our global civilisation from a written to a hybrid written-oral-visual culture. What could once only be passed on via word of mouth or handwritten proclamation or the printed page can now be broadcast instantaneously via text, audio, or video – and stored for a digital eternity.

What is also new is that at present – unlike during the Vietnam War – the media seems unable to fulfil its democratic role of finding the stories that need to be told, and telling them. For instance, it is likely that at least one journalist, Washington Post reporter David Finkel, saw the raw vision of a US Apache helicopter shooting more than a dozen people, including two journalists, in Iraq in 2007. That raw vision later became WikiLeaks’ ‘Collateral Murder’ video. Why, then, did Finkel report only from the perspective of the US soldiers? What did Assange see that Finkel missed? Has the mainstream media become so embedded that it can no longer see the story?

The point I am driving at is this: WikiLeaks has not come out of the blue. It is a product of our time and would not have succeeded without the climate created by the corporatising of information and the ‘war on terror’. Governments increasingly want to control information, corporations increasingly want to own information, and the media is increasingly unable to give the public the information that they need. WikiLeaks, as an electronic commons for free information, is a way around that undemocratic information lock.

My interest in information stems from the six years I spent living in Northern California. I arrived in 1995, at the start of the Internet boom, and departed in 2001, just after the tech bubble burst and before the terrorist attacks of 9/11. During my time there, I spent the weekends with my wife in a one-bedroom apartment on the sixth floor of 2414 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, overlooking Peoples’ Park – and the days and evenings across the Bay in San Francisco’s Multimedia Gulch, working on a string of start-up Internet enterprises.

Berkeley and San Francisco had distinct cultures. Berkeley was the epicentre of the free speech movement and the New Left of the 1960s and the 1970s, and the residual liberalism of that time was strong enough to permit public nudity, conspicuous drug consumption, a humane approach to homelessness, and what, for the United States of the Clinton era, passed for radical politics. San Francisco was different. Although still famed for the Beats and the Haight-Ashbury and Castro districts, the city was moving on from the counterculture and embracing the next big thing – the Web.

A gold-rush mentality prevailed. San Francisco in the 1990s was the kind of place where venture capitalists gambled millions of dollars on ideas that came with a dotcom strategy attached; where company founders hired their friends and acquaintances as vice presidents and board members; where people ate free pizza on Fridays and sometimes slept under their desk on Sundays; where New Wave musical pioneers Devo played ‘Whip It’ at million dollar parties; and where it seemed that almost everyone had stock options. I recall sitting in the office of a vice president one day (the one who vacationed at the same Hawaiian resort as Tom Waits) while he told me we were all going to be rich (it turned out we were not).

In this overheated climate, it was easy to overlook the connections that existed between the countercultural radicalism of Berkeley and the countercultural materialism running rampant in parts of San Francisco. However, the connections did and do exist. Silicon Valley, an hour’s drive south of San Francisco, might be the home of the computer industry – not to mention a by-product of the Cold War as a consequence of the parallel races to beat the Soviet Union to the moon and prepare for a nuclear holocaust – but it was also the birthplace of that love child of the counterculture and cybernetics, the computer hacker. As Kevin Poulsen, a Wired journalist and former hacker, says in Kingpin: How One Hacker Took over the Billion-dollar Cyber Crime Underground (2011):

The first people to identify themselves as hackers were software and electronics students at MIT in the 1960s. They were smart kids who took an irreverent, anti-authoritarian approach to the technology they would end up pioneering ... and so was phone phreaking – the usually illegal exploration of the forbidden back roads of the telephone network. But hacking was above all a creative effort, one that would lead to countless watershed moments in computer history.

Numbered among those hackers and phone phreaks were the co-founders of Apple, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Ironically, as Poulsen points out, one of the fruits of the hacking labours of Jobs and Wozniak – the iconic Apple II personal computer – would be used by many teenage hackers to crack into the world’s growing electronic networks. ‘From that point on,’ Poulsen writes, ‘the word “hacker” would have two meanings: a talented programmer who pulled himself up by his own bootstraps, and a recreational computer intruder. Adding to the confusion, many hackers were both.’

Julian Assange may not have been in the first wave of those teenage hackers, but he wasn’t far behind. Operating from his outer suburban bedroom in Melbourne in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the teenage Assange, answering to the handle ‘Mendax’, formed a hacking group called the International Subversives with two other Melbourne teenagers, wrote software programs that other hackers used to crack into thousands of computer accounts, and received a suspended sentence in the Melbourne Magistrates’ Court for breaking into the Melbourne-based computer system of telecommunications giant Nortel. By the time he launched WikiLeaks in 2006, Assange had stopped hacking, but he was still known and respected within the hacker world. This helped open doors and attract supporters, including former WikiLeaks spokesman Daniel Domscheit-Berg.

The exploits of the young Assange – together with other members of the Melbourne hacking cohort – are brilliantly covered in Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness, and Obsession on the Electronic Frontier (1997), the cult book written by Suelette Dreyfus and Assange, and re-released to cash in on the notoriety of the WikiLeaks founder. Unlike most of the slew of Assange-related books released in recent months – particularly Domscheit-Berg’s poisonous Inside WikiLeaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World’s Most Dangerous Website and WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War On Secrecy, a rewriting of history by Guardian journalists and former WikiLeaks collaborators David Leigh and Luke Harding – the Dreyfus and Assange book makes no attempt to settle scores. Instead, Underground is a time capsule of the Australian hacking scene in the 1980s and 1990s, before the rise of truly criminal hackers, when often socially isolated young men (and, sometimes, women) hacked their way into computer networks not to cause harm, but to map the boundaries of the fledgling electronic world and to create a new community.

One of the strongest impressions I had after reading Underground is how – via electronic bulletin board systems and chat-rooms – hackers from Australia, Europe, and the United States would congregate electronically to discuss technical and personal matters, and, in the process, created a virtual counterculture. Unlike the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s, this virtual counterculture would not be defined or limited by geography. Instead, the hacking culture of the 1980s and 1990s – which, in effect, educated Julian Assange – was defined by an ethic.

That hacker ethic, as recorded by Steven Levy in his seminal book, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (1984), covered six core values: access to computers should be unlimited; authority cannot be trusted and should be decentralised; hackers should be judged by their ability to hack; beauty and art can be created on computers; computers can change lives for the better; and ‘all information should be free’.

These values – especially those concerning authority and information – are undeniably countercultural, which is why Stewart Brand, publisher of the hippy ‘how to’ manual, the Whole Earth Catalog, immediately saw hackers as kindred spirits. In 1984, Brand – who had once likened the mind-expanding possibilities of computers to LSD – hosted a three-day hacker conference in the Bay Area’s Marin County, attended by luminaries such as Apple’s Wozniak, free software pioneer Richard Stallman, Internet pioneer Ted Nelson, and legendary computer programmer and phone phreaker Ted ‘Captain Crunch’ Draper. Ever the promoter, Brand also took the time, in the Whole Earth Review, to laud hackers for liberating a technology and for ‘reorganising the information age around the individual’.

I cannot agree with Brand’s utopian belief that the information age is organised around the individual. Not the important information, anyway. Admittedly, my point of view is shaped by my experiences in politics and government. I have, on and off over the past twenty years, worked as both a departmental and political media adviser and speechwriter for Victorian governments led by four premiers: Joan Kirner, Jeff Kennett, Steve Bracks, and John Brumby. In that time I have become intimately acquainted with the ways in which journalists and political leaders work with and around one another. Generally speaking, it is a game of cat and mouse: the leader tries to ‘get up’ his or her story of the day, and the journalists try to advance their own. The leader might front up to a radio interview or media conference and have to answer whatever questions come along, while endeavouring to wheel back to their preferred issue. All too often, the exercise has nothing to do with informing the public.

Most of these interludes between politicians and journalists have no shelf life, but then there are some that just won’t go away. 2 December 2010 is a case in point for Julia Gillard. That was the day the prime minister had a quick-fire radio interview with 4BC’s Gary Hardgrave, during which she was asked about the Global Financial Crisis, the National Broadband Network, the structural separation of Telstra, Mark Latham, paid parental leave, the family tax benefit, the 2022 Soccer World Cup, and WikiLeaks. Here is the entirety of what Gillard had to say about WikiLeaks:

Hardgrave: Wikileaks, what should we be worried about? You’d have had the briefing by now. What are they telling you we should be waiting for?
Gillard: Look, I have been receiving briefings and we have a whole process to go through all of this information, I mean, millions of pieces of information, and assess the implications for us. So, we’ll work through that, and I absolutely condemn the placement of this information on the WikiLeaks website. It’s a grossly irresponsible thing to do, and an illegal thing to do.
Hardgrave: It’s going to be interesting to see where that ultimately goes and Queensland’s claiming Mr Assange and his mother’s a little bit terrified and disappointed and worried about him. Australia, I guess, will have some say when people catch up to him as to what happens to him. I would hope we’d have some say.
Gillard: You can always understand a mother’s love and anxiety about her son and I do understand that, but the wrong thing’s been done here.

In hindsight, that interview was Julia Gillard’s Bill Henson moment. Like Kevin Rudd’s attack on the noted photographer over the depiction of a partially nude teenager, Gillard had seriously overreached. In striving for a good sound bite, she had branded WikiLeaks an illegal operation. Given her position and the fact that WikiLeaks is, in fact, a media outlet, those words amounted to an attack on the freedom of the Australian press from the prime minister. Gillard has been on the back foot ever since over WikiLeaks.

By far the most interesting WikiLeaks-related questioning of the prime minister has come from Assange himself. On 14 March, Gillard appeared on ABC TV’s Q&A. During that appearance, Gillard was asked once again about her ‘an illegal thing to do’ comments. Gillard stepped around the issue by stating that Assange was being supported by the Australian government ‘in the same way we would support any Australian citizen who got into legal trouble overseas’. She also went on to say that she didn’t see the ‘moral force in it’.

After some parrying with host Tony Jones the next question was called for – and it came, via invitation from the show’s producers, from the head of WikiLeaks:

Assange: Prime Minister, you just got back from Washington, but what Australian citizens want to know is which country do you represent? Do you represent Australians and will you fight for Australian interests, because it’s not the first time that you or a member of your cabinet has been into a US government building and exchanged information. In fact, we have intelligence that your government has been exchanging information with foreign powers about Australian citizens working for WikiLeaks. So, Prime Minister, my question to you is this: when will you come clean about precisely what information you have supplied the foreign powers about Australian citizens working or affiliated with WikiLeaks and if you cannot give a full and frank answer to that question, should perhaps the Australian people consider charging you with treason?
Jones: Take the treason part first, if you like.
Gillard: Well, of course, as prime minister of this country I represent this country all day, every day. You don’t have an accent like mine and get confused with being someone from another nation, so let’s just put that to rest. On the exchange of information he’s talking about, I honestly don’t know what he is talking about, so I’m afraid I can’t help him with full and frank disclosures. I don’t know anything about exchanging information about people who work for WikiLeaks.

What Assange may have been talking about is contained in by far the best book written about WikiLeaks: investigative journalist Andrew Fowler’s The Most Dangerous Man in the World. Fowler’s book comes up with a number of exclusives about the Australian government’s hands-on approach to WikiLeaks and Assange. In May 2010, Fowler writes, the Australian Federal Police delayed Assange’s entry through immigration at Tullamarine Airport so that Immigration staff could file a report on the WikiLeaks founder’s travels:

He’d been picked up by what is known as a Stop Alert. It involves a polished act of deception. The trick is to tell a person who is on the watch list that there is something wrong with their passport … When the passport is taken away it is photocopied – providing a list of every country visited that still stamps passports, and there are many of them. Linked with electronic records of travel, it gives a near complete record of a person’s cross-border movements. This information might have been of little direct use to the Australian Government, but in the United States there were people who were far more interested.

What Fowler presents is at least circumstantial evidence that elements of the Australian government have colluded with US authorities over WikiLeaks. Which elements? Fowler believes he has the answer: ‘I have been reliably told that ASIO played an active part in the investigation into Assange, trawling through his life and activities in Australia. But what must be just as worrying for him, and has also never been revealed before, is the fact that the inquiry also included officers from ASIS, Australia’s overseas intelligence agency, which has strong ties to the US.’ If what Fowler says is true, ASIO and ASIS are in dangerous waters. Assange is a journalist who has done nothing more than what any investigative journalist would have done – namely, find a story that someone didn’t want told, and tell it. As such, he deserves the protection of Australia’s intelligence agencies, not a witch-hunt.

Fowler’s book is also notable for taking the cudgels to Assange’s critics in the media. Australia’s media – aside from the occasional knocker, such as a condescendingly bitchy piece John Birmingham wrote for The Monthly in October 2010 – has been largely supportive of Assange, considering him one of their own. He is seen as a slightly disreputable muckracker, much like the pathfinder of countercultural journalism, San Francisco-based Ramparts magazine, which took as a badge of honour a criticism from Time magazine that there was ‘a bomb in every issue’. Unfortunately, American journalism has changed a great deal since the halcyon days of Ramparts and the Vietnam War. New York Times journalist Eric Schmitt, who worked with Assange as part of the coalition of willing journalists enlisted to sort through the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs, clearly didn’t consider Assange his equal. Fowler finds that Schmitt took an instant dislike to Assange, pooh-poohing his dress sense, undermining an offer he made to work with the White House to redact contentious names from the Afghanistan war logs, and, finally, once he no longer needed WikiLeaks, denying that the New York Times had ever had a journalistic partnership with Assange.

‘This was a source relationship,’ Schmitt says. If the New York Times–WikiLeaks relationship was purely a source relationship, that makes what happened next all the more unforgivable. As a source, WikiLeaks should, as a bare minimum, have received even-handed coverage from the New York Times. What Assange received, instead, was what Fowler calls ‘an exceedingly unflattering report’ from journalist John F. Burns that ‘had the look and feel of a tabloid-style hit’.

The New York Times was not alone in its disdain for Assange. According to Leigh and Harding’s book, WikiLeaks was ‘a project of astonishing boldness, which stood a good chance of redefining journalism in the Internet age’, but Assange missed his chance because he was an anarchic cross-dresser who hailed ‘from the land of coarse jokes about the one-eyed trouser snake’. The real credit, the Guardian contends, belongs with WikiLeaks’ mainstream media partners – the New York Times, Der Spiegel, and the Guardian – because they did the journalistic heavy lifting.

One source unearthed by Fowler for his book unmasks the Guardian’s arrogance. As Fowler reports, ‘one witness to a discussion between Assange and senior Guardian staff including its editor and deputy editor said they were conceited and dismissive … describing it as “shitting on the goose that had laid the golden egg”.’ What is different about the New York Times, as Fowler points out, is the question of whether or not its decision to ‘cut Assange adrift’ was designed to protect itself from criticism and possible prosecution under the US Espionage Act. Whatever the case, Fowler writes, ‘as an act of bastardry’ the New York Times’ treatment of Assange ‘takes some beating’.

Such unseemly behaviour from the newspaper that broke the Pentagon Papers story at the height of the Vietnam War – courtesy of documents leaked by Assange’s hero, Daniel Ellsberg – should come as no surprise. The world’s media is in the middle of a prolonged identity crisis brought on by the rise of the Internet, fracturing audiences, and falling revenues. Over the past decade – just as the world has faced a series of economic, social, environmental, and political crises that demand informed reporting – the quality of news coverage has declined as a result of job losses, increased workloads, and an over-reliance on stories generated by the public relations industry.

Newspapers – which are the backbone of the global media industry, employing the most people and producing the vast majority of the original content – are haemorrhaging. According to the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance’s December 2010 report, Life in the Clickstream: The Future of Journalism, Australia’s newspapers and magazines shed around seven hundred jobs in 2008 and 2009. In the two years to 2009, the US newspaper market fell by thirty per cent, losing one-hundred and sixty-six mastheads and thirty-five thousand jobs. In the United Kingdom, newspapers declined by twenty-one per cent. In its 2010 report, The Evolution of News and the Internet, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development made a dire assessment: ‘The economic foundations of journalism have to be rethought.’

Although Australia’s newspaper industry has fared relatively well, with a decline of just three per cent in 2008 and 2009, quality has suffered. According to a 2008 survey of Australian journalists themselves, half of our reporters and editors believed news reporting was worse than it was five years before.

The media’s identity crisis may be partly to blame for the fact that it missed the lesson of WikiLeaks. Why haven’t the major media organisations established their own versions of WikiLeaks, online platforms where whistleblowers can anonymously upload leaks? Assange’s former deputy, Daniel Domscheit-Berg, has already done so, launching a WikiLeaks copycat called OpenLeaks.

The irony is that Julian Assange – a man who has made it his mission to take information out of the hands of the money changers – has himself become a commodity. Hollywood has decided to give the WikiLeaks founder a double dose of the Mark Zuckerberg treatment, with not one but two motion pictures in the pipeline. It is difficult to say how those movies might end: with legal vindication in Britain or Sweden – followed by a long flight home to the bosom of inner-city Melbourne; or with a sex offence conviction, followed by a one-way ticket to Camp X-Ray at Guantanamo Bay? The stakes are that high, the alternative third acts that contrasting.

Judging by the books upon which those films will be based, Assange can expect two vastly different portrayals. One production house optioned Fowler’s even-handed The Most Dangerous Man in The World. However, Steven Spielberg’s studio, DreamWorks, has optioned two anti-Assange books – Domscheit-Berg’s Inside WikiLeaks and Leigh and Harding’s WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy. As WikiLeaks tweeted when it learned DreamWorks’ plans: ‘This is how bullshit ends up being history.’

Principal books mentioned in this article:

Daniel Domscheit-Berg with Tina Klopp, Inside WikiLeaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World’s Most Dangerous Website, Scribe, 2011
Suelette Dreyfus with Julian Assange, Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness, and Obsession on the Electronic Frontier, Random House, 1997, 2011
Andrew Fowler, The Most Dangerous Man in the World, Melbourne University Press, 2011
David Leigh and Luke Harding with Ed Pilkington, Robert Booth, and Charles Arthur, WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy, Guardian Books (Random House), 2011
Kevin Poulsen, Kingpin: How One Hacker Took over the Billion-dollar Cybercrime Underground, Crown Publishers (Random House), 2011

The deeply troubled Francis Webb, a magician with language, is still one of the two or three most remarkable poets Australia has produced, if nation-states can be said to produce creative artists. His life proved dark and painful, wherever he was located, but he worshipped language, in parallel with his worship of the Christian trinity. And his poetry has affected many of us, profoundly.

On 18 February 2008, Joyce Carol Oates’s husband, Raymond J. Smith, died unexpectedly of cardiopulmonary arrest. Smith was eminent in his own field as editor of the Ontario Review, but quietly eminent. Now he has become famous, a household name in international literary circles – as his widow’s spouse. It is an odd state of being, or non-being. But this is an odd book, alternately brilliant and bizarre.

In January this year the New York Times ran a controversial review article titled ‘The Problem with Memoirs’, in which staffer Neil Genzlinger praised ‘the lost art of shutting up’. He heaped scorn on ‘our current age of oversharing’ and on the accompanying glut of memoirs on every imaginable aspect of human experience. But he reserved particular scorn for what he identified as the latest trendy topic: ‘books by parents, siblings and teachers of people with autism.’ He advised, ‘If you’re jumping on a bandwagon, make sure you have better credentials than the people already on it.’

If developments in relation to music and the Internet are any guide, writers and publishers will increasingly be addressing the opportunities for self-management on the Internet. For writers, there is a well-established path for sharing copyright works without charge. This is known as the Creative Commons, which publishes generic licences for use by authors in the exchange of copyright materials. These licences are intended to promote an orderly exchange of copyright works, without charge, but within the framework of copyright licensing. By using the Creative Commons licences, writers can facilitate the copyright usage of their work gratis, but in a way which protects legal rights. Blogs and other webpages are enabling self-publication for royalty-free purposes. There has never been a better opportunity for the exchange of ideas online.

In February 1878 in Marseilles, France, Józef Teodor Konrad Nałęcz Korzeniowski, a twenty-year-old Polish seafarer tormented by depression, lifted a revolver to his chest and pulled the trigger. The suicide attempt failed: the bullet, whether by chance or design, penetrated the young man’s body without disrupting any vital organ. Korzeniowski recovered quickly and, only a few weeks later, took to the waters again aboard a British steamer bound for Constantinople.

Michael McKernan states in his introduction to his short book on Gallipoli that he is dissatisfied with much writing on military history. He writes: ‘Military history is often presented as a thing of maps and statistics, a brutal narrative based on the deployments and motives of commanders with a score sheet of those who performed well and those who failed. In this book I have tried to go beyond that ... to show that somewhere for each life lost, there was long mourning and deep grief.’

Why do you write?

Because I like to eat.

Are you a vivid dreamer?

During the day. I love reverie. It’s underrated. As T.E. Lawrence put it: ‘The dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream, to make it possible. This I did.’

Legionary Ants

Holiday

In recent months a significant part of Australia has been subject to deluge and flood. As the continent recharges its waterways and water tables, we are like an ant nest into which a curious child has thrust a hose – rushing about rescuing and shoring up, patching and rebuilding, behaving as if this upheaval is an aberration, and as if building towns and cities on flood plains is sensible.

One feels greatly conflicted while reading The Ottoman Motel. While Christopher Currie’s début novel certainly shows promise, it would have benefited from further editorial development prior to publication.

Something happened to the Australian suburban novel while Georgia Blain was trying her hand at memoir in Births Deaths Marriages (2008) and Young Adult fiction in Darkwater (2010). Put it down to The Slap juggernaut. The working family is now angry, high, horny, and mad about tattoos. Gone are the scenes of inarticulate loss at the kitchen table or transitory escape among the drying sheets, told in recherché prose. Where there was once self-immolating resignation, there is now full-blown resentment. The pit bulls of racism, sexism, and class conflict have leapt the back fence. Get cut off by an Asian taxi driver: pop a vein. See some young girls at the beach: cue pornographic daydream. Visit a friend with a Danish sofa: apply her face creams in the bathroom.

Elizabeth Stead’s fifth novel is set in 1948, when newly independent women, who kept the wheels of industry turning during World War II, were resuming full-time household duties. Stead, who married a naval officer in the 1950s, would have seen this domestic dynamic played out around her. The Sparrows of Edward Street tells the story of a family – a widow and her two teenage daughters – who set out, under the leadership of the elder daughter, Aria, to take charge of their world and set it to rights.

What do we really know about other people, even those closest to us? In one of Chekhov’s most famous stories, the supreme adulterer Gurov takes the view that authentic life is always lived in secret (though, of course, he would say that). Marriage offers no ready access to another person’s history, as a young wife discovers in Ian Reid’s début novel, The End of Longing. Her problem of knowledge has graver implications than most, since her husband’s closet of secrets might well include a murder or two.

Mandy Sayer has been winning awards since the start of her career more than twenty years ago. Her first novel, Mood Indigo (1990), a pacy, absorbing account of a remarkable and rackety childhood, bagged the Vogel in 1989. Its autobiographical origins become clear when read in conjunction with her memoir Velocity (2005), which covers Sayer’s early life in more harrowing detail. Velocity also won a couple of major prizes. So I was expecting Love in the Years of Lunacy to be a mature, original novel; perhaps, given the title, with a nod in the direction of the great metafictionists. In an article in the Sydney Morning Herald in October 2009, Sayer named Gabriel García Márquez as her favourite author: ‘He’s had a profound influence on contemporary literature and has had many imitators but I don’t think anyone has been able to match him as a storyteller.’

Sometimes you can get away with judging a book by its cover. Even without knowing the sub-title, a cursory glance at Mardi McConnochie’s latest novel suggests high romance, with its picture of an elegantly coiffed woman kissing her paramour against a seascape backdrop. Indeed, The Voyagers unashamedly plays with the emotions, tugging at a heartstring and releasing it momentarily before pulling at another tautly strung chord.

Applause

Jay Daniel Thompson

The Indignities is the sequel to Vanity Fierce (1998). In this new book, Graeme Aitken provides another provocative perspective on love and other catastrophes in Sydney’s gay male community.

While the stories in The Kid on the Karaoke Stage vary thematically, they are predominantly realist in style, with plenty of seemingly serendipitous through-lines. Georgia Richter, who has edited the collection superbly, says that she was interested in ‘the way we turn to writing to crystallise moments of realisation’. The authors all have links to Western Australia, but their ‘moments of realisation’ are refreshingly global, particularly in the later stories.

Set in an imminent Tasmanian ghost town, B. Michael Radburn’s first novel departs from his previous work as a horror short story writer. This murder mystery unfolds in the rural town of Glorys Crossing, which is being consumed by a hydropower dam, and which all but the most stubborn townsfolk are leaving to make a life elsewhere. Told through the eyes of park ranger and chronic sleepwalker, Taylor Bridges, the story traces the disappearance of a young girl under circumstances that mirror Bridges’s own daughter’s disappearance on the mainland one year earlier. Plunged into a world of redneck vigilantes, apparitional Tasmanian tigers, and an oppressive winter, the book’s opening chapters are unrelentingly bleak. Bridges is coming to terms with the loss of his daughter and with the ensuing failure of his marriage. He also becomes aware that he may have been unwittingly complicit in the latest vanishing because of his uncontrollable nocturnal wanderings. As a result, he pursues the investigation alongside his more (or less) qualified peers.

100 Australian Poems of Love and Loss is the companion volume to Jamie Grant’s 100 Australian Poems You Need to Know (2008). The title of the new anthology shies away from its predecessor’s imperative mode, but remains a marketer’s dream. What is poetry about if not love and death? What is poetry’s purpose if not to offer powerful articulations of those things that make us speechless?

In 1967, eleven schoolgirls and their teacher take a field trip to the public gardens in Sydney. There, Miss Renshaw and her young charges meet the teacher’s friend and possible paramour – a gardener and a poet. The charismatic Morgan takes them to a nearby wet, low-roofed cave, ostensibly to see some sacred Dreamtime paintings. The girls are both giddy and alarmed at this unauthorised excursion, but are warned of its secretive nature. After a brief exploration the girls retreat to the rocky shore, leaving Miss Renshaw and Morgan behind in the cave, never to be seen again.

In 2010, some 272,461 pilgrims received a Compostela (a certificate of completion) upon reaching the city of Santiago de Compostela in north-west Spain. The great majority of these had arrived by walking, having covered at least one hundred kilometres on foot in order to qualify. Most, however, had travelled considerably further, using the network of medieval pilgrim routes that cobweb across southern Europe to this remote city. The number receiving a Compostela substantially understates the pilgrim traffic on these paths; many walk sections of the routes without reaching Santiago and claiming their credential.

Anyone who remembers Julie Taymor’s 1999 version of Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare’s first published play, will not be expecting a reverential treatment of what is reputedly his last, but Taymor’s new film does move more or less inexorably to the play’s final wisdom: ‘The rarer action is / In virtue than in vengeance.’ The Tempest is a difficult play, fraught with tensions that resonate perhaps even more forcefully in our time than in Shakespeare’s, but overall it is pervaded by a sense of ‘lastness’, of moving almost painfully towards resolution of what may have seemed irreconcilable conflicts, as if its author shared with Miranda her view of a ‘brave new world / That has such people in’t’.

The concept of ‘documentary’ is a slippery customer. It may start with John Grierson’s ‘creative treatment of actuality’, but, like holding water in your hand, it bleeds across media from film into television and digital media, and across modes in one direction into news reporting and in the other into docudrama. Documentary’s privileged relation to the real world, in opposition to fiction, raises another conceptual problem: that of who is speaking, and by what right. The technological media at issue here are always multi-vocal, no matter how determined a claim a director may make to authorship. But, in the documentary field, human subjects can also make claims to speak for themselves, and in a digital world even the audience has some opportunity to provide one aspect of the documentary voice.

There is too much Percy Grainger for one person. Having studied the man for twenty-five years, I still cannot account for his ability to achieve so much in so many fields. The thousands of lengthy letters he wrote alone constitute a lifetime’s work, irrespective of the music, the concert performances, the teaching, the publishing.

Andreas Gaile presents his Rewriting History as Peter Carey’s biography of Australia. Before he gives us the facts of that biography, however, he suggests why Carey cannot write a biography of Australia: ‘there is no “real” Australia waiting to be uncovered. A national identity is an invention.’ He elaborates this by a series of excursions into postmodernist theories of narration and discussions of magical realism. He demonstrates that Carey uses the techniques of these theories and fictional modes, even though, in the matter of post-structuralism, he tells us that Carey denies any knowledge of it. Nonetheless, we are treated to such sentences as this: ‘transgressions of narrative levels ... manifest themselves in “any intrusion by the extradiegetic narrator or narratee into the diegetic universe (or by diegetic characters into a metadiegetic universe, etc.), or the inverse”,’ which seems to mean that shifting narrative techniques prevent any story from being true; therefore, mythistory replaces history. Consequently, ‘Carey’s fictions – even if they are not true – still are meant to replace an older, even more untruthful version of the past.’ ‘Not true’ and ‘more untruthful’ present readers such as myself with a logical problem. But not Gaile, because for him ‘There is no representation, only construction’. So Carey constructs a biography that is supposedly truer than, say, Robert Hughes’s The Fatal Shore (1987), which is as revisionary a history as Carey’s mythistory; indeed, more astringently so.

Those wanting to understand better the radical changes in Western thought and social mores since World War II could benefit from revisiting Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80). Of course, one can sympathise with Jonathan Rée in his critique of much of Sartre’s work as ‘slap-dash’, ‘long-winded’, ‘carelessly profuse’ (Times Literary Supplement, 26 November 2010). It is true that by the time Sartre became famous, much of his best writing was behind him. Nonetheless, Sartre lived and worked on what we can now identify as a temporal seismic fault-line between then and now. His voluminous and variegated work – short stories, novels, plays, essays, movie scripts, journalism, autobiography, and correspondence, as well as philosophy proper – remains a rich site for investigating the thirty or so years between the mid-1930s and the mid-1960s, that period when, as Thomas Pynchon puts it, ‘a screaming came across the sky’. To re-engage with Sartre is to re-enter the zone of the epicentre, where broken twists of what was once continuous tradition mingle with new developments – some of which we already know to have failed, while others have become familiar features of our present landscape.

Given Stephen Sondheim’s well-known fondness for verbal games and puzzles (as a diversion from his day job, he has devised crossword puzzles for the New York Times), it seems appropriate to begin this review with a short quiz based on some of the ‘attendant comments and grudges’ referred to in the subtitle of, and dotted throughout, Finishing the Hat. Match the author’s critical judgements to the selected lyricists listed below:

While explorations of Australia at war have never been short on ‘male stories’, the prevalence of the masculine frame may yet increase in coming years as part of the ongoing examination of competing forms of manhood in this country, as evidenced by the upcoming symposium ‘Embattled Men: Masculinity and War’ at the Australian National University. The publicity surrounding the recent awarding of the Victoria Cross to Trooper Mark Donaldson for his actions in Afghanistan highlights the lasting currency and influence of the Anzac tradition, with its valorisation of the myths of mateship.

Gaining a Sense of Self is the record of Wilson’s first twenty-five years, a story that obviously took great courage to revisit, recreate, and publish. Born in 1942 to a couple whose marriage was already disintegrating, Wilson had a childhood of poverty, hunger, and abuse. Her father, initially absent because of his work in the navy, left the family when Wilson was six years old, and she rarely saw him after this. It was from her mother that Wilson suffered physical and psychological abuse. This appears to have started when Wilson was very young: she describes being battered by her mother when she accidentally broke a doll at the age of two.

The ten tales in Margo Lanagan’s Yellowcake offer an eclectic glimpse behind the slender veil separating the everyday from the fantastic. The collection is peopled by monstrous gods and godly monsters, by scavengers, drifters, and fascinators. Its landscape incorporates hellish war zones, apocalyptic streetscapes, and haunting carnivals. There is hope and madness, betrayal and revenge.