MICHAEL MULLINS’ TINY LETTER

An earthquake registering 6.3 on the Richter scale devastated the centre of Christchurch at 12:51 pm on 22 February 2011. It was one of a series of earthquakes that struck the city within a twelve month period, with a death toll of 185.

Of those who fled the city seeking refuge elsewhere, some were too traumatised to return, and Christchurch lost its status as New Zealand's second most populous city to Wellington. Those who did come back were very much determined to reconstruct the city, and their efforts are only beginning to take shape.

Walking around the city centre on Sunday, I could see that much of the area was fenced off and yet to see significant reconstruction activity. I could sense the panic and suffering that took place in this area and was struck by the relative lifelessness there is today.

The 'green shoot' that was most evident to me was the Transitional Cathedral of the Anglican Diocese of Christchurch, better known as the Cardboard Cathedral.

The NZ$5m A-frame structure was designed by Japanese architect Shigeru Ban and opened in August 2013 on a site located a few blocks from the original cathedral that was destroyed by the quake.

My visit transformed what was for me quite a desolate experience of the city centre. I appreciated the beauty of the construction, the welcome of the volunteer guide, and the pervading hope that the whole city centre will one day come back to life. There was the very unusual and mesmerising architecture, and also simple touches such as the flowers in the garden beds in front of the main doors.

I can't recall ever visiting the scene of a natural disaster in the interim period between clean up and major progress in reconstruction, and I did feel quite paralysed by the experience. But it was a Sunday, and I imagine that it could be a much more optimistic feeling if I go back there today when where will be more activity.

It did make me think about the concept of disaster tourism, which is defined as the act of travelling to a disaster area as a matter or curiosity. This can include 'rubbernecking', or travel with the specific intention of paying respect, or something in between.

I remember being in New York in December 2001, a little more than three months after the 9-11 terror attacks. I had no thought of going to Ground Zero but I did talk to a local who said that residents were disturbed by tourists visiting the scene to take a look. In time Ground Zero has become a destination for those wishing to honour the victims of the disaster.

Two Australian media takeovers have caught my attention this summer. They were both predictable and representative of changes in media culture and values that have evolved over the past decade.

But they are revolutionary in that, over this time, both organisations have, as I see it, made a 180 degree switch from objective reporting to a firm control of the message.

The media outlets of the organisations are the pay TV channel Sky News Australia and the Catholic church news service CathNews. The extent of the parallels is interesting, and perhaps chilling.

The ownership of Sky has shifted to Rupert Murdoch from Australian News Channel, a consortium established in 1996 that already included Murdoch. That of CathNews has moved to the Catholic Bishops Conference from Church Resources, a consortium established in 1997 that already includes the Bishops.

Most Australians do not consume either and have probably never even heard of them, especially the latter. But they do have a very large and loyal following within their respective niches - politics nerds and serious Catholics.

I could go on with this cute comparison, and I will. But first I should mention that I was the founding editor of CathNews in 1999 and continued in that role until the beginning of 2006.

The Jesuit entrepreneur Father Michael Kelly had asked me to devise a mechanism to allow his group buying co-operative Church Resources to communicate regularly with its constituency. CathNews did this daily and turned out to be quite successful. When I moved to Eureka Street, the professionalism of CathNews was enhanced by bringing in experienced personnel from Fairfax (Christine Hogan and Michael Visontay).

But by this time, the Bishops had started to realise that CathNews was effectively competing with them in shaping opinion about Catholic news and current affairs. From the beginning, CathNews' philosophy had been to uphold the values of objective reporting that were evident in the content of overseas Catholic publications such as the London Tablet and the National Catholic Reporter in the US.

However the Australian Bishops' desire was more for a 'corporate communication' model, where they controlled the message. The Vatican used to call this 'propaganda', approvingly. CathNews' editorial policy and practice was subsequently brought into line with these values.

Meanwhile the journalism of the various outlets in the Murdoch empire had evolved from the objective reporting that had long dominated secular media, towards 'campaign' journalism. This is a form of corporate communication where the opinions of the owner are given priority over objective truth, and their publication is sustained and coordinated in order to mould and control public opinion.

In recent years, the content and style of Sky News Australia has evolved to echo Murdoch's The Australian newspaper by day and his US FoxNews TV channel by night. With the change of ownership, the comparison will become more pronounced.

It is not entirely coincidental that the term 'post-truth' has become so prominent at this time. What is most worrying is that what it represents has come to be normalised and that these changes in ownership don't appear to be causing too much alarm.

This week the ABC's 'local' capital city radio stations have been rebranded.

The station that has been known since 2000 as '702 ABC Sydney' has become 'ABC Radio Sydney'. '774 ABC Melbourne' is now 'ABC Radio Melbourne'. And so on around all the capital cities. Except Adelaide.

In a David and Goliath battle, the community station 'Radio Adelaide' secured an injunction to temporarily block the ABC from using the name 'ABC Radio Adelaide'. This is because of its similarity to Radio Adelaide and the potential for listener confusion and infringement against the Radio Adelaide brand.

For at least the next four months, the ABC's station will be known simply as 'ABC Adelaide'.

We'll know if this chink in the ABC's radio brand armour is permanent after the court trial that has been scheduled for April. If the order stays in place, I will regard it as an important marker of difference in an increasingly monocultural mainstream media branding landscape. In any case, I think it's good to see the homogenisation of Australia's media landscape encountering road blocks.

I'm also pleased that there's hope for justice for the smaller, community-based station in face of the might of the national broadcaster.

Coincidentally a similar rebranding has just taken place in commercial radio, though unfortunately it is without any court challenges. The rebranding has affected 60 regional stations owned by Southern Cross Austereo.

The stations have become known as either 'Triple M' or 'Hit'. Names with local resonance have disappeared, as have callsigns that were established as early as the 1930s. Examples include the FM station known as The River (in Albury, proudly situated on the Murray River) and 2GZ (Orange). Now they are both known as Triple M, in conformity with the original 1980 branding of the Sydney station 2MMM.

This is not without precedent. In 2000, the ABC ditched all local callsigns such as 2BL (Sydney) and 3LO (Melbourne) that had been in use since the 1920s.

My personal interest in these matters derives in part from my four year involvement in branding at ABC Radio in the 1990s. I worked in the Marketing department as Localisation Coordinator and also editor of an internal audience research newsletter titled Listener Friendly.

While helping to implement the various see-sawing policies of Radio Management, I was keenly aware that homogenisation removes history and identity that have been part of people's daily lives, in some cases for nearly a century. Branding enables us to identify a product or a service but it is essentially ephemeral until it has built up many years of resonance with local communities.

The loss of local names is an issue that has concerned me since the 1990s, when I was doing my Applied History Masters at the University of Technology Sydney and arguing that heritage orders should be placed on the identity of certain media outlets.

As an idea, it is probably fanciful. But who knows? It would see callsigns and titles familiar to many generations of consumers remain in use in media environment, in the way that heritage protected buildings continue to be part of our built environment. We would still have 2BL, 4QR and 2GZ.

Fairfax Media has reduced the use in its content of longstanding brands the Sydney Morning Herald (1832) and The Age (1854), but at least it seems committed to retaining the branding for as long as the publications themselves remain viable.

My ultimate fear is that, within a decade, international media homogenisation and convergence will kill not just regional Australian identity, but any Australian identity at all in the media we consume. That's a big regulation challenge that the Turnbull Government's Minister for Communications has and must face.

Yesterday Fairfax published an unlikely article by columnist and occasional Catholic Joel Meares. It was titled 'Growing up gay, Catholic school was a haven for me'.

He was thanking the lay teachers at his Catholic school for 'nurturing [his] difference'.

He said: 'These people put into quiet practice so much of what is beautiful about the religion, and did very little preaching as they went.'

With some degree of understatement, he then acknowledged that his story was not everybody's story.

This reminded me of the blog I wrote last month in which I mentioned my personal recollection from 1980s of 'a retired Jesuit preparatory school principal boasting of "sending out" his students to bully peers who were homosexual'.

I put that in the context of a Fairfax report from 2015 that revealed the Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne Denis Hart had buried a 2007 report aimed at protecting LGBTQI students in Catholic schools from homophobic bullying.

I don't live in Melbourne and I've only met Archbishop Hart once or twice, but I've heard him characterised as a doctrinal hardliner who is capable of empathy with marginal Catholics.

This is obviously not true of all clerics. Fairly or unfairly, Hart's erstwhile colleague Cardinal George Pell is often regarded as a narcissistic hardliner not capable of showing empathy to marginal Catholics.

Pope Francis has famously shown signs that he wants to 'include' LGBTIQ and other marginal Catholics in the life of the Church. That's what he was about when he proclaimed 2016 the 'Year of Mercy'. But he's also made it plain that he does not intend to change the doctrine.

In other words, the lives of LGBTIQ Catholics will still be 'objectively disordered' in the eyes of Catholic doctrine. But in practice, he wants LGBTIQ Catholics to be encouraged and affirmed, as Joel Meares was in his Catholic school.

Understandably many angry LGBTIQ ex-Catholics are not impressed by this wondrous contradiction. They ask why the Church's doctrine cannot be brought into line with its pastoral practice. They will have nothing to do with the Church until it is, and they will be waiting a long time.

My answer to them is that they should allow themselves to enjoy the blessed duality that is the Catholic Church. The supportive 'haven' Meares' Catholic school was for him as he grew up. Let the actions of the Church's quiet pastoral achievers hold sway over its loud clerics and the declining relevance of particular sections of doctrine.

Recently I read Peter Singer's review article 'The Empathy Trap' on the Project-Syndicate.org 'opinion page' website.

Singer is the Australian philosopher most famous for applying John Stuart Mill's 19th century utilitarianism principles to modern ethical dilemmas. My study of ethics and moral theology in 1980-81 coincided with the publication of his classic text Practical Ethics. Singer was the bête noire of my teachers and I have since regarded his thinking with both interest and suspicion.

I was captivated by the social justice advocacy and activism of the time, which also featured prominently in the secondary school religious education curriculum. I remember Wendy Poussard's school text book Walk in My Shoes, which was used to teach students empathy with the poor.

Poussard's text represented the view that there were particular values that were non-negotiable. They could not be subjected to any kind of utilitarian calculus. The argument against this is that the ethics of empathy can be extraordinarily subjective. We can put ourselves in the 'shoes' of whales, but what about other animals or human beings? As Singer argues, 'empathy makes us kinder to [beings] with whom we empathise'.

He says: 'Trump, in his campaign speeches, made use of the tragic murder of Kate Steinle by an undocumented immigrant to stoke support for his anti-immigrant policies. He did not, of course, offer any similarly vivid portrayals of undocumented immigrants who have saved the lives of strangers, although such cases have been reported.'

Singer's review article relates to the the book Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion, written by Yale University psychologist Paul Bloom.

He supports Bloom's argument that our ability to reason has a crucial part to play in ethical decisions, and empathy is just as likely to lead us to do the wrong thing. 'Animals with big round eyes, like baby seals, arouse more empathy than chickens, on whom we inflict vastly more suffering'.

I notice that The Conversaton has today begun a series on empathy, including the question of whether doctors and other professionals need more empathy, and when it can be counter-productive. It gets into questions of how empathy can be measured and contained, and whether it should be.

In December The Conversation had an article on Matthew Flinders' encounters with Indigenous Australians. It looked at genuine evidence for his feelings of empathy and sense of morality but concluded that they were always contained by his sense of duty, which was to explore and map the Australian coast and keep his ship's company safe.

If Flinders' empathy was relative to his sense of duty, Singer's empathy is subject to his own particular kind of rationalism. In other words, Singer's rationalism is limited in the way that economic rationalism is subject to the principles of free market economics. He can't pretend that his is the king of all rationalisms. I think that we need to agree with him about the absurdities that he points out regarding the manipulation of empathy, but use art and spirituality to supplement the dominant rationality in our society.

There has been an epidemic of people drowning in backyard pools and public swimming locations this summer. There have been almost as many water deaths as car fatalities. Governments are being challenged to spend money to encourage more people to learn to swim.

For me it brings back childhood memories of the Melbourne Herald newspaper's learn-to-swim campaign that was founded in 1929 and continued for five or six decades. Young Victorians were given their 'Herald' certificate if they could swim 25 yards (22.9 metres).

The campaign's longtime chairman was the legendary Sir Frank Beaurepaire. He the program enabled many thousands of people anually to 'hold their own in the water'. Learning to swim, he said, was 'a great step in developing self confidence, and once learned, the ability to swim is never forgotten'.

The ability to swim was an article of faith in my family, as it was in many families in regional areas. We all got our Herald certificate with no trouble at all. In fact we considered 25 yards was nothing. We could easily swim the 50 metre length of the local Olympic pool (54 yards) and would set our sights on 10 lengths.

For me the temporary stumbling block was diving. For a long time I couldn't do it, no matter how hard I tried. I remember the breakthrough happening as an eight year old in 1968 when my uncle visited from New Zealand. Somehow he instilled in me the necessary confidence.

But confidence comes and goes. I remember adult authority figures affirming me as a slow but strong swimmer. That was enough to encourage me to train to become faster so that I might compete. However that quickly came to an end when I went to boarding school in the city and one of the teachers joked that I swam like a whale. While nobody unlearns how to swim, this destroyed my confidence and any ambition I had to do swimming as a competitive sport.

Sometimes I think of the Herald learn-to-swim campaign as quaint and belonging to another era. I'm not sure when or why it ended but am curious. Sadly nothing has replaced it.

I imagine that it was considered lacking in coolness. Last year's ABC TV miniseries on the Christos Tsiolkas novel Barracuda might have changed this, but it was too fleeting and made for the wrong audience. Probably it would take a reality TV event to make learning to swim a must for young people.

I also think about the nature of campaigns run by media organisations. They used to be about public service, but now it's more ideology. Perhaps the Herald learn-to-swim campaign ended around 1987 when Rupert Murdoch purchased the paper. For in recent years, his papers have campaigned against public safety for young people, on ideological grounds, with their opposition to the government Safe Schools anti homophobic bullying program. No doubt that is a sign of the times.

I recall attending a late afternoon history lecture in one of the large theatres at Melbourne University. It was 1983 and the lecturer Dr Donna Merwick interrupted her delivery and glared at a student sitting in one of the tiered rows towards the back of the room.

He was indiscreetly holding up and reading the afternoon broadsheet newspaper The Herald while listening to her lecture in the background. She asked him for his undivided attention and quickly got it.

In 2010 I was doing sessional teaching at Sydney University and faced a similar, but by then impossible, battle for the undivided attention of my students.

Most of them had their laptops open, ostensibly taking notes. But it was obvious that they were listening to me in the background while focusing on whatever online activities they would be engaged in if they were somewhere other than in this room attending a compulsory class.

Short of having mirrors installed on the wall behind them, there was not a lot that I could do about it. And in any case, it was the age of multitasking, and it had become normal for anybody - not just students - to focus their attention on several activities at any given time. What was regarded as insolence in 1983 had become de rigeur by 2010.

I am thinking about divided attention in the context of hyperlinks on web pages. Earlier this week I wrote a piece that referred to an online article in The Guardian. I linked to that article in my first paragraph. One of my readers told me that he didn't get beyond my first paragraph because he clicked on the link and read the Guardian article instead.

The next day - yesterday - I also referred to an article online. But I didn't link to it, instead including enough information about it to make it easy to Google. The reader suggested that I should have provided a link to the article, but I was unmoved. 

In fact I will isolate myself from the flow of information around the web if I don't provide links. This is because Google rewards links with higher rankings in search results with its increasingly sophisticated search algorithms. This has led to the fragmentation of our attention on an industrial scale. Back in 1983, the idea of linking was more or less confined to footnotes in academic articles. Even with footnotes, it was necessary to go to the trouble of consulting the card or microfiche catalogue in the library before your attention was diverted.

Lack of focus is a major explanation for why governments can no longer do anything substantial. With the release of Keating era Cabinet papers at New Year, we were reminded of Paul Keating's ability to command attention and how this made him able to achieve significant economic and other reform.

Certainly Keating's magnetic personality had a lot to do with it, but the real reason it could be done then and not now is that 1992 was several years before widespread use of the Internet arrived and changed everything.

When I was in my first year of secondary school, my mother was unimpressed with the quality of the education I was getting from the Christian Brothers.

She wasn't alone. Other parents were pulling their sons out of that school and sending them to one of the government high schools, where the education was believed to be better. She went further, and sent me to the city to boarding school. To the Catholic school with the best reputation for academic excellence.

She didn't like it that almost all schools in regional areas had given up teaching the structure and rules of English Grammar. She wanted me to be taught English Grammar. In addition, there would be Latin, and - if I ended up in the top stream - Ancient Greek. It was a matter of pride that my school was one of two schools in the state that still taught Ancient Greek.

I remember learning the rules of English Grammar in Year 8, in a very methodical manner from a teacher named Mr Harrison. He taught us how to write and structure the Queen's English but definitely not how to speak it. Behind his back we mimicked him giving us the instruction 'Get out your Pendlebury' in his very broad Australian accent. Our 'Pendlebury' was the class text, A Grammar School English Course by B.J. Pendlebury.

I never completely understood why some schools taught English Grammar and others didn't, until the other day when I read an article in The Conversation titled 'Things you were taught at school that are wrong'.

It's quite a good article, more balanced than the clickbait title suggests. It talks about the prescriptivists, who wrote rules prescribing how sentences must be structured, and the descriptivists who compiled guides describing how English was used by different people for various purposes.

Now I know that, in 1972, my mother was taking me out of the hands of the descriptivists and entrusting me to the prescriptivists.

The writer Misty Adoniou makes the not entirely tongue in cheek suggestion that the prescriptivists made up rules to ensure that literacy stayed out of reach of the working classes.

This is beyond the scope of the article, but it seems to me that the teaching and enforcing of language rules and exclusions has proved to one of the most effective tools of social engineering. In particular the assimilation of indigenous and migrant populations into the dominant culture.

But I can't agree with Adoniou's easy dismissal of the prescriptivists, and, in the end, I think the article is misleading and wrong. That is because teaching grammar has a lot to do with educating us to think logically and argue rationally. I know that this would have been my mother's motivation. She was definitely not a class snob.

I remember being taught not to begin a sentence with 'and', 'but', 'or' or 'for'. Now I do not hesitate to do that if it adds to the effect of what I'm writing.

Aside from its help in faciliating clear thinking and rational argument, I'm pleased that I was taught the rules of grammar so that I can pick and choose which ones to accept and ignore. It's a lot like being taught religious doctrine using a catechism. Or studying comparative religion. You're equipped to make informed and rationally argued choices.

I woke up early this morning with plans to write about the rules of English Grammar. But I looked at the home page of The Guardian and was affected by a beautiful article on summertime loneliness and depression in inner city Sydney.

It was written by a Sri Lankan Australian - Gary Paramanathan - and what he describes is familiar. 'There is a non urgency to summer, everyone slows down, everyone is having a good time. Everyone it seems but me.'

Except I don't want to have a good time, if you're talking about the kind of thing they have at Christmas parties and on New Year's Eve. I don't think I went to any Christmas parties, and I was very happy to be in bed by ten o'clock on New Year's Eve.

I haven't been lonely. I have company. But that's not entirely the reason for my contentment. Rather, it seems that my heightened sense perception on the hot sticky days and nights we've been having, combined with the current quietness of my neighbourhood, has made me more than usually present to myself.

It's almost as if this part of my summer has spontaneously turned into a spiritual retreat and my experience has been one of quiet consolation. On retreat you get away from the busyness of everyday life and open yourself to unexpected shifts of spirit. That's what has happened to me. Gary could also be on retreat and, like me until now, doesn't know it. His contentment is yet to arrive.

He's lying in bed restless, thinking: 'When you wake up, you can only hope your head is clearer.' Like mine. He's feeling desolate in the 'emotionally void streets of Sydney’s most dense and overwhelmingly white suburb'. Like I do from time to time, even without his race selfconsciousness.

I can feel to some extent at one with the other people who walk the streets of my area of Newtown, even though our steadfast gaze is mostly away from each other's eyes. But there's more, if I want it. Gary writes that he was 'spoilt' growing up in Colombo, where eye contact and richer human connection are the norm.

He finds it a challenge in Sydney. But I know it is possible because my friend John has made an artform of it. Recently I was moved as I walked with him along his Kensington street and witnessed him making not just eye contact, but exchange of words, and warm and genuinely friendly conversation, across racial and other cultural boundaries. John's human contact is not my human contact, but he shows me that the familiar faces in the streets of our neighbourhood need not remain strangers.

I remember when I was a Jesuit novice in the late 70s, that we would drive around Sydney in an orange VW Kombi van. When we needed a car parking space, two of the seven in my year believed we would find one if we said a prayer to St Gerard Majella. Two - including myself - thought that was rubbish, while the other three were somewhere in between.

We would always get a park in the end, and it remained a moot point whether we had St Gerard to thank. I was never convinced. I'm less hard line in my skepticism these days, though I believe that intercessory prayer works if it is not seen as a 'get out of jail free' card but more akin to the power of positive thought and initiative. We don't expect St Gerard to do the heavy lifting for us. He's there more to encourage us.

Oprah Winfrey said: 'The greatest discovery of all time is that a person can change his future by merely changing his attitude.' She would have been referring to major life goals and not trivial matters like car parking. But, according to her doctrine, if we believe we can find a park, and look in the right places, we will. The key is that it will be a result of our own actions.

My previous rejection of intercessory prayer was probably more in line with the reformed Protestant Calvinist doctrine of predestination, which rejects intercessory prayer out of hand.

I've always found it hard to understand how predestination is any different to fatalism, which is defeatist and undermining of human possibility. It's like the Filipino bahala na 'leave it up to God' laid-back attitude that could be responsible for that country's perennially poor economic performance.

This is in contrast to that of the US, where it was the father of free enterprise Benjamin Franklin who said 'God helps those who help themselves'. The paradox is that this self-seeking attitude contradicts the selflessness that is at the heart of the message of the Christian Gospel.

My thoughts about intercessory prayer were prompted by a friend from many years ago who wrote to me on Saturday about the tough time she's had in recent years. Sadly her Catholic faith has not delivered at her time of need. She said: 'I have stopped praying as not one prayer has been answered'.