MICHAEL MULLINS’ TINY LETTER

After taking an overnight flight from Sydney and transiting at Kuala Lumpur for four hours, I arrived in Penang at 8:00 am yesterday.

I told the bus driver that I wanted to go to Penang. He obviously gets it regularly from tourists, but laughed and was intent on correcting me. I was already in Penang – the name of the island - and headed for George Town, the island’s city that is Malaysia’s second largest and one of Southeast Asia’s most famous cultural and gastronomic hubs.

Within George Town, I am staying in a historic no frills bungalow hotel on the edge of the 108 hectare World Heritage zone, which was inscribed in 2008. UNESCO recognised the city for its 'unique architectural and cultural townscape without parallel anywhere in East and Southeast Asia'. George Town contains one of the largest collections of pre-World War II buildings in Southeast Asia and is considered an architectural treasure.

That description leads me to expect the kind of picture perfect vistas that we associate with many urban precincts in Europe. But my first impression was that George Town is just as dilapidated and functional as Jakarta and Ho Chi Minh City and many of the other Asian cities I’ve visited, complete with the odours of an inadequate sewerage system.

I enjoyed my day long ‘discovery walk’ along the broken and uneven and obstructed footpaths. There’s a lot to see, but what stood out for me was an attraction much less grand than most. It is the historic photographic display and memory collection point on the ground floor of the Star newspaper building.

In particular I liked the ‘What’s your Penang story?’ corner where visitors were invited to type a letter to share their experience of Penang. I don’t know how many people have actually typed their story, but I appreciate the symbolism of publicly holding up the value of listening to and recording people’s stories. Until they see a display like this, many people think that nobody wants to know about their past.

I’ve long been interested in ways of preserving the past, since I did my Applied History postgraduate degree at the UTS Sydney in the 1990s. Coincidentally, on Sunday I was talking to a member of an oral history collection group that had a stand at a fair in Newtown in Sydney. He is currently doing a postgrad degree in history at UTS.

Understandably Penang will want to capitalise on its World Heritage site status. I noticed many of the hundreds of restaurants in the city use heritage as a selling point. My photo depicts promotion of ‘Penang Tradisional Famouse Food’ and ‘Dessert Old Time Delight Shop’.

I like this. But I suspect that commercial reality will probably see the transformation of the heritage zone into a sanitised theme park so that tourists will visit in large numbers and generate renewed wealth for the city.

That will probably mean the creation of even footpaths and the elimination of sewerage odours. These enhancements will make for a more comfortable visitor experience, but I think it will also be a less authentic representation of Penang’s past.

Last night we were having a conversation about naïve travellers. The kind of person who is not particularly seasoned as a traveller and doesn’t think much of the Australian Government travel warnings on the DFAT website.

These people have the best time. They’re wide-eyed and fully immersed in the experience of discovering new and strange things. They’re not constantly on guard. They don’t miss out on experiences because they’re too busy exercising a high degree of caution.

It is obvious that this type of traveller is statistically more likely to come to grief. It goes without saying that it is highly irresponsible of me to disparage the travel warnings. I am tempting fate and potentially leading others into danger.

But we need perspective.

If DFAT says ‘don’t travel within 10 kilometres of the Iraq border’, I can accept that. But I will baulk at advice to stay away from political demonstrations. That’s where I’m likely to discover what really matters to the citizens of the country I’m visiting.

I am thinking of a beautiful travel vignette I read a few months ago on the ABC Open website. It was from Oliver Jacques, a young Sydney writer who had been backpacking through Iran for three weeks.

I was intrigued by the title: ‘The Persian woman who wanted my wallet’. He begins: ‘The woman in the lime green hijab leaned across into the men’s section of the crowded bus and told me to give her my wallet.'

He speculates that DFAT must have a warning about handing over your wallet to strangers in developing countries. But he’s clearly glad that he didn’t follow it.

What transpires is on one level just another of the dozens of intercultural exchanges you have every day when you visit these countries. But it was one of the most affecting travel stories I’d read in a long time.

He took a calculated risk and was richly rewarded.

If I’m out and about, I sometimes listen to music through a streaming service. The data it uses is free. It does does not eat into my monthly quota. That’s because my mobile phone service provider Optus gives free data to many of its customers using Spotify or certain other music streamers it has commercial deals with.

What’s not to like about that?

At home, Optus includes a FetchTV set top box and 35 pay channels with my broadband internet access at effectively no cost to me.

What’s wrong with that?

These apparent acts of corporate generosity are back door means of getting around the net neutrality rules. Free data for Optus' Spotify users is killing the 'free internet'.

Most users are not bothered enough to get their head around ‘net neutrality’. But it’s important, because it underlies the principle of the ‘open internet’. It guarantees consumers access to the content they want, not the content that big business wants them to access.

Without net neutrality, corporations would be free to throttle or perhaps block sites they did not want us to visit. We’d have effective access only to content that suits our provider’s commercial or ideological interest.

My FetchTV box gives me a handful of news channels. One of them is ChannelNewsAsia, the mouthpiece of the Singapore Government. The Singapore Government is the majority owner of Optus’ parent company Singtel. When I had FetchTV with my previous provider iinet, I had Chinese and Indian news channels. The Singapore Government wants us to see the world through its eyes, so it removes the Chinese and Indian channels from its particular offering of FetchTV.

Optus can do that because Fetch is just a box attached to my TV. Strictly speaking, it’s not a violation of the net neutrality rules. But they couldn’t block or throttle my access to Chinese or Indian news sites that I access through the world wide web on my computer. Not yet, anyway.

Net neutrality - i.e. the ‘open internet’ - has always been cherished as a basic consumer right. It was vigorously upheld by the Obama administration. Much of corporate America wished this was not so. But now their prayers have been answered with President Trump pick of an enemy of net neutrality - Ajit Pai - to lead the Federal Communications Commission regulating body.

The New York Times reported earlier this month that Pai has already ‘aggressively moved to roll back consumer protection regulations created during the Obama presidency’, taking a ‘first swipe at net neutrality rules designed to ensure equal access to content on the internet’.

Meanwhile Europe’s telecommunications regulator strengthened net neutrality rules last year by closing a few loopholes that allowed service providers to create ‘fast lanes’ for ‘specialised services’.

Will we follow Europe or the US? As yet, it’s unclear. What is clear is that we should expect more tricks from internet service providers keen to exploit loopholes. After floating the idea in 2015, Optus would still like to charge Netflix a fee to offer consumers ‘the best customer experience’ of Netflix. We can presume this means the worst customer experience of what other content providers have to offer.

Last night I went to the Australian Institute of International Affairs in Kent Street Sydney for the launch of Tony Kevin's Return to Moscow (UWA Publishing). The book explores the complexities of Russian history and identity in an attempt to understand Putin's aggression towards the West.

Tony is a former diplomat in Moscow and Ambassador to Poland and to Cambodia. When I was editor of Eureka Street, I would always rely on him to quickly produce a quality article on international affairs or Australian Government asylum seeker boat rescue (or non-rescue).

That was the subject of two of his previous books, Reluctant Rescuers (2012) and A Certain Maritime Incident (2004). Last night he nearly got sidetracked into talking about Australian Government atrocities when challenged on why he didn't devote more space in his book to addressing Russian atrocities.

He was making the point that 90% of our media makes a sport of demonising Putin, and in the process we miss the true story of Russia's attempt to regain self-respect after the monumental disaster of the Communism of the 20th century and the impotence of Boris Yeltzin after the fall of Communism.

To counter our media's line on Russian aggression in Ukraine, Tony talked about 'regime change' by the US and NATO, in their efforts to prop up the anti-Russian nationalists who look to the West.

My imagination produced absurd thoughts of Trump attempting regime change in Australia by propping up Pauline Hanson. Then I wondered how many US attempts at interference in the complex affairs of other nations are in fact just as stupid. I had just been chatting with my friend Jan about clumsy US mis-steps to create the perfect regime in Afghanistan, where she'd worked. 

Tony's message is that we must treat Russia with respect and study Russian history and culture. In this he was warmly supported by the Russian consul Sergey Borisovich Shipilov, who said that there is so much to learn that he is still studying Russian history at the age of 62.

During the height of the Cold War, I remember listening to an old Jesuit who was fixated on the excesses of Russian Communism to the extent that he visited Moscow when he got the opportunity. But with a closed mind. 'I knew what I'd find and I found it,' he would say. Tony's return to Moscow last year was of an altogether different order.

At the weekend, when I stayed with my aunt and uncle at Robina on the Gold Coast, I was within ten minutes walk of Bond University.

Walking through a university campus has long been part of my lifestyle, having lived within ten minutes walk of Sydney University for almost 24 years. I have welcomed the proximity as if, through some process of osmosis, it conditions me to be a more questioning, reflective and ethical person.

But with Bond University, the feeling is more ambiguous.

It is certainly one of the most beautiful modern university campuses I have walked around, and I have noted that the privately owned not-for-profit institution is one of Australia's best performing universities.

But I can't quite get over the reality - for me at least - that the university is a gigantic monument to one of Australia's most notoriously dishonourable businessmen, Alan Bond.

In Australia, Bond was synonymous with the corporate excess of the 1980s. He was one of the central figures in the WA Inc scandals of the time. A few years later he was declared bankrupt, with personal debts approaching $2 billion. Then he was jailed after being convicted of fraudulently appropriating $1.2 billion.

It's a long time since Bond University severed links with Bond and Bond Corporation. But it is perverse that it appears to have the discipline of business administration at its core, with the Bond Business School one of the university's more prominent and successful entities.

The obvious question is what kind of implicit or explicit inspiration does the School take from Alan Bond the man of business. Is it at all proud of Bond's legacy in business? What kind of business ethics does it teach?

Try putting bond business school business ethics into Google and the search result will point to the 'truly personalised educational experience' and - almost comically - end with the search engine indicator: 'Missing: ethics'.

I would guess that this gives a wrong and unfair impression. But so does the university's name. In recent days, I've read with interest about Yale University's decision to rename one of its undergraduate colleges because its name has honoured the white supremicist and slavery advocate John C. Calhoun.

The Yale University statement said that having one of its colleges named in honour of such a person 'fundamentally conflicts with Yale's mission and values'.

Yale's action could be a trigger for Bond University to examine how its name sits with its mission and values.

Over the last few days I've been travelling in northern NSW and over the Queensland border by train and bus.

I wanted to attend a funeral in Ballina and also visit my uncle and aunt on the Gold Coast hinterland. But I also liked the idea of travelling at a slower pace that allowed me to see more of the countryside and the towns and the people.

I appreciate the stories that you hear from people in the country. This time there were two in particular that stayed with me. One was from my AirBNB host in Lismore and the other the waitress at Curry House restaurant in Casino.

My AirBNB host welcomed me about 8:00 pm and invited me into her backyard for a BBQ sausage and a beer with her husband and her medium term boarder.

She had a large vegetable garden and complained that her neighbour's goat would sometimes get into her garden and eat the plants. When she'd mention it to him, he would nonchalently reply that the goat must have been hungry.

My host was very patient with him because he was always very kind to her and to everybody else he'd come across.

He drove a taxi, and one night picked up a woman living with mental illness who was estranged from her family. The woman said she didn't have anywhere to go, so he took her home to stay the night in his spare room. That was a year ago, and she's still there.

A few days later I found myself in Casino, which is as far as the north coast train goes, since former NSW Premier Bob Carr closed the service to Murwillumbah in 2004. I had a few hours to fill in because the train that connected with my bus from Robina was running late due to the heatwave.

It had been 46 degrees earlier, but in the cool of the evening it was a more bearable 38 degrees. I'd enjoyed the curry I'd eaten in Lismore and was pleased to find a simple Indian restaurant in the main street the town. The waitress wasn't Indian, and she was just there helping out her friend the owner, who was.

I was the only customer, and she sat down to talk with me while I waited for my beef korma (Casino calls itself the 'Beef Capital'). The heat was the main topic of conversation but she got around to telling me about the woman with a mental illness whom she'd taken in until the woman could find better permanent accommodation than the tent in the caravan park that the Salvos had provided. That was many months ago.

My waitress's mother had passed away early last year and she had a spare room, and most likely the need for companionship. The woman with the mental illness was 'no trouble'.

She would leave the house every day at 8:00 in the morning and return around 6:00, with her dog. But the dog was 15 and died of of old age some time after she moved in.

My waitress told me that her boarder was distressed and didn't know what to do. So she took the initiative and went to Bunnings to buy a pot and some potting mix in which to give the dog a dignified burial. The woman was very grateful and now the pot with the dog's remains is her most treasured possession.

There have been many unanswered questions since late last year, when ABC Managing Director Michelle Guthrie began to spill some beans about her plans for a 'full overhaul' of the organisation.

The Australian reported that she's embarking upon 'the most far-reaching overhaul in the organisation's 84-year history'. It said that this 'could see the ABC collapse the television, radio and online departments into one single [digital] division, organising content by genre in a horizontally integrated structure'.

Guthrie needs to spill more beans before we can be sure, but I would speculate that we are going to see a severe reduction - or even the end - of the Corporation's TV and radio 'stations' as we know them. There could be no more ABC TV, ABC2, Radio National, Classic FM or Triple J. It would be just ABC Digital. All or most of the content would be delivered exclusively via its website.

Perhaps this is why the Director of Television has left, and - according to The Guardian's media columnist Amanda Meade - the current Director of Radio '[does] not have Guthrie's ear'. It seems to me that Guthrie wants new managers who - like her - think in terms of digital distribution rather than radio and TV stations. She came to the ABC from Google and has never worked in a radio or TV station.

Eliminating 'over the air' distribution of content would save the ABC about $200 million a year in transmission costs. Much of that amount would be channeled into program making or returned to the Federal Government. In addition, the Government would have its eye on revenue windfalls from selling the spectrum to the telcos who are struggling to satisfy the demand for mobile data.

The Government has already told community TV stations that they must leave the airwaves and use the Internet instead. TVS Sydney has gone and the other stations will follow in coming months. It has stopped funding for community radio DAB+ digital radio transmissions.

In addition, any rollout of DAB+ beyond the five mainland capital cities has stalled, and abandoning the platform was touted by the Government when Malcolm Turnbull when he was Communications Minister. This has happened overseas, with some countries such as Singapore discontinuing digital radio and others such as Canada and New Zealand rethinking plans for digital radio and opting for digital distribution as the replacement for FM and AM.

Earlier this week I had a conversation with a former ABC radio presenter whom I knew when I worked there in the 1990s. It seems that management is already commissioning podcasts featuring high profile presenters, that are not intended for airing on Radio National or any of the other existing stations.

The question is how much it will matter, and I can really only answer for my myself. About 90 per cent of my radio listening is to podcasts, and I choose them by genre and reputation rather than the station from why they originated, if they originated from a station. I also use platforms such as iView and SBS On Demand more than the TV 'stations'.

So I guess Guthrie's plans - if I've guessed them correctly - won't make much difference to me. But for others - especially for older people and those who are not digital natives - the ABC's abandonment of stations will mean the abandonment of them.

I was interested in the Australian Catholic Church's release yesterday of data revealing the relative percentages of child sex abusers in the various dioceses and religious orders between 1950 and 2009.

What was most significant for me was that there were no mention of names of individuals - it was just dioceses and orders. In addition, there was a large disparity among the dioceses and also among the orders. For example, 40.3 per cent of the St John of God Brothers were subject to complaints while the figure for the Dominican Friars was only 1.5 per cent.

This tells me two things. The first is the recognition that child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church is primarily a cultural problem - it has less to do with rogue priests or religious. The second is that child sexual abuse is a significant part of the culture of some dioceses and orders and not others.

It is the first time I can recall names of particular offenders being left out of the equation. I interpret this as a statement that the Church itself is the offender - and not rogue individuals.

This is qualified by the statistics that reveal that some dioceses and orders are over-represented. The Church is a confederation of cultures, some more conducive to child sexual abuse than others.

I think it is regrettable that until now, individual offenders and alleged offenders have been portrayed by the media as monsters, and punished as such. In my view, the media have played into the hands of the Church by demonising particular offenders and occasionally individual bishops and heads of religious orders.

Monster portrayal makes for better media stories and more effective community awareness of the problem. But as a result, the rest of the Church has got off lightly and the 'cultural' aspect of sexual abuse has been underplayed or even ignored.

Perhaps the best expert witness the Royal Commission didn't have - because he died in 2008 - is Professor Greg Dening. He was an ethnographic historian - Professor of History at the University of Melbourne - and for some years a Jesuit. His honours seminar History and Anthropology in 1985 was a highlight of my Arts degree.

In parallel with his academic research and writing, he wrote a number of histories of religious institutions - including Xavier College, Melbourne, and the Jesuit Parish of North Sydney - from the point of view of culture.

I would summarise culture as the range of practices we as a community do without questioning.

Dening explained in his North Sydney parish history that pre-Vatican II Catholics would hate themselves without questioning what they were doing. After Vatican II, the culture shifted to encourage them to love themselves humbly.

With reference to sexual abuse, it seems the St John of God Brothers would take sexual liberties with minors without questioning whether what they were doing was right or wrong. It was just the done thing. Sanctioned by the order's culture. For the Dominicans, the 'done thing' would not have included sexual liberties with minors.

I think the implication for this cultural view of child sexual abuse within the Catholic Church is that the punishment of individual offenders should receive less emphasis. And the Catholic Church as a whole, correspondingly more (with possible variations according to the level of offence within particular dioceses and orders).

The nature of the communal punishment is less relevant than the principle, but it could include property confiscation or loss of tax breaks and other privileges that were granted on the assumption that the Church would maintain its place of honour in the community.

I made a snap decision to do a day trip to Canberra yesterday. It turned out that eight hours in an air-conditioned train was a good way to beat the heatwave.

Last May I visited the National Portrait Gallery in London. I liked it, but essentially it just made me more determined to see our own National Portrait Gallery in Canberra. I'd heard about ours but had never visited. It was established in Old Parliament House in 1998 and moved to its present dedicated building next to the National Gallery of Australia in 2008.

I'd sometimes wondered why it was necessary to have galleries dedicated to portraits. I don't know whether this Wikipedia list is exhaustive but there are National Portrait Galleries in London, Washington DC, Edinburgh, and Mariefred (Sweden). Then there's the Portrait Gallery of Canada in Ottawa.

Why don't they have a National Still Life Gallery or a National Landscape Gallery?

My theory is that it is an effort to define ourselves as a nation by our people. We want to highlight images of Australians whose achievements and presence in our midst we have valued materially and spiritually, and cherish emotionally.

If we don't focus on the people, we default to abstract and potentially dangerous notions of nationalism, or the use of particular legends or stories that some Australians feel more at home with than others.

Recently I was talking with a friend who is a foreign-born non-Anglo Australian citizen. I asked him whether he felt Australian. He said no. I felt sad and did not want to dwell on it by asking him to elaborate.

But I don't think Waltzing Matilda means much to him, let alone the Anzac legend. On the other hand, a visit to the National Portrait Gallery, with its representation of the images and stories of Australians of diverse cultures, might make him reconsider his answer to my question.

Years ago, somebody I regarded as a mentor told me that he had a strong dislike for flags of nations. I didn't fully appreciate what he meant until the Cronulla Riots of 2005 and I saw the Australian flag as a symbol of ugly nationalism. Since then I have taken the position that we should not change the flag to lose the outmoded Union Jack. Instead we should minimise its use.

I did not notice an Australian flag at the National Portrait Gallery, and there it is no Australian flag on the Gallery's website.

The ABC's Australian Story TV program has done a great job over 20 years putting people at the centre of various preoccupations. Tonight the program begins its 2017 season, the first without its own mentor figure and contributor Caroline Jones. If I was disappointed by anything at the National Portrait Gallery yesterday, it was that they have in their collection two portraits of Caroline but neither is on display.

A few weeks ago a friend sent me a scanned page from a new large format book titled Greek Cafés & Milk Bars of Australia.

It was published last year by Photowrite, a Sydney-based two person team that includes documentary photographer Effy Alexakis and historian Leonard Janiszewski. They have been researching Greek-Australian culture, amassing a huge documentary and oral history archive.

Of particular interest to my friend was the story of Mattie and George Veneris. He knows their grandson James, who is from Albury, where his maternal grandfather ran the Hume Weir Café and his paternal grandfather the Riverina Café.

In the book, James' grandfather recalls their purchase of the Riverina Café in 1954. 'We served American style food - milkshakes, sundaes, burgers ... We stayed until 1977 ... There were about 13 Greek cafés in Albury from the 1950s to the 1970s'.

The Riverina and the Hume Weir are both long gone, but I remember them well from when I was growing up. My family had a dairy farm and our own 'milk run' business, Wodonga Milk Supply, which operated until 1970.

We would deliver 'bulk' (non-pasteurised) milk, which has the purest taste and was still legal in those days. I remember my father telling me that our 'bread and butter' customers were the local cafés.

The Greek café I remember best was the Rose Marie. As was the norm, our father could not cook, and he would always take us to the Rose Marie when my mother was away.

In contrast to today, 'Greek' referred to the ethnic identity of the owners, not the cuisine. At the Rose Marie, I can only recall beef steak and lamb dishes with 'three veg', and desserts including banana splits and sundaes.

I love the memories but would not wish to go back to eating from the Greek café menus of the 1960s. I very much appreciate actual Greek food and that is what I want and expect when I go to a Greek café or restaurant.

I had an interesting experience in November 2015, when I visited the town of Lockhart, an hour's drive from Albury into the Riverina. I'd been told about the Blue Bird Cafe, which was an attempt to recreate something of a café there that was once also owned by the Veneris family. I did a postgrad degree in Applied History in the 1990s and I am very interested in how we try to preserve the past.

The Blue Bird is a family museum that celebrates the past. It sells basic food such as sandwiches, pies and cakes. Although it has shop fittings from the era, is not a recreation of the café like the shops and businesses at the Sovereign Hill gold mining history theme park in Ballarat. It's more piecemeal, and the family wouldn't have the resources for a theme park. Nor is it a café business run on the old Greek café model. It couldn't be. The past is past.

What fascinated me most was the contrast with the rundown Olympia Café in Stanmore, near where I live in Sydney. The Olympia has been operating continuousy for many years, and the publicity shy octogenarian owner is famous for chasing away journalists and documentary makers who try to feature his cafe. A article published last year in the Sydney Morning Herald suggests the Olympia has built its own, very different, mythology, more akin to a horror display in a fun park side show.

'Some imagine something sinister here in the dust and decrepitude, in the gold-toothed gruffness of an elderly proprietor who objects to photographs and only turns a light on his tarnished vintage kingdom when customers rather than rubberneckers visit'.