Trump's death-tweet a lesson for Turnbull

One reader of yesterday's TinyLetter hit reply to the email and suggested the 'spineless' Turnbull reference could have been a bit personal [replies are always welcome]. She said she regretted doing the same to John Howard in something she wrote a few years ago. 'Better to criticise his policy rather than his character'. 

The free advice I would offer the current PM is to lose his sense of humour for a while - in order to enhance the dignity of his office - and not be too generous in assisting the media with its lazy portrayal of him as the hapless lame duck.

​Yesterday there was an element of playful self-deprecation in his trying it on with the selfie at APEC in Lima. Wouldn't it be nice for Turnbull if basking in the reflected dignity of President Obama would increase his stocks? Obama's dignity is legend, but it was too hard for Turnbull to exploit the outgoing President's star power and too easy for the Australian media to make him look pathetic.

Self-deprecation does not belong in a PM's playbook. Or at least not in this PM's playbook at this time. Rather than gift the media with opportunities to undermine his authority and trivialise the office of PM, he needed to take his cue yesterday from Trump rather than Obama.

Donald Trump was shamelessly trying it on with his calculated humourless slap down of Saturday Night Live performer Alec Baldwin's satire that targeted him. 'Totally one-sided, biased show - nothing funny at all'. Of course it was funny, but the President-elect wanted to short-circuit Baldwin's attempt to undermine the dignity of the Trump presidency before it begins.

Malcolm Turnbull is a good sport, and he would have paid Baldwin the compliment of laughing at the skit, even though the comedian was trying to trash his office. Trump, on the other hand, is an ungenerous control freak who won't give credit where it's due. But this time there's more to the death-tweet. Its gravitas is a likely attempt to make himself presidential. 

Constructive outrage

Outrage is on my mind. It’s not that I am feeling outraged. But I’m wondering if outrage can be constructive. Will it help to preserve the world that I cherish and want to see prosper?

The context is a mild mannered piece I wrote last week about the axing of John Cleary’s Sunday Night ABC specialist religious radio program and its replacement by comparatively bland lowest common denominator programming.

A friend emailed me saying that she was ‘outraged’ by ABC management’s staged dismantling of specialist religious broadcasting. What is at stake is a deeper understanding of the role religion plays in politics, culture, war and peace. This is necessary to counter the rise of religious fundamentalism.

I asked myself how I can be comfortable to sit by and let this happen.  


​I was also thinking over the weekend about the Rohingya asylum seeker who attempted to set fire to a suburban bank in Melbourne, injuring scores of customers. Many people will be citing this as a justification for Australia’s cruel policies towards refugees. In fact the incident in the bank is a result of the policies, and mental health issues caused by our treatment of refugees today will cause havoc in the future.

It makes sense. The 21 year old was anxious that he would be deported to Myanmar and his mental health had deteriorated. Refugee advocate Sister Brigid Arthur said of people in his situation: ‘They’re scared about the process itself. I know many who are just collapsing under the weight of it.’

My point is that we need such cool headed and rational explanation to complement the vocal outrage of others. Vocal outrage is useful in that it calls attention to the muted rationality that identifies the purpose of protest action. But vocal outrage alone achieves nothing constructive.

It resorts to name calling and character assassination without follow through. There’s no point in shouting ‘Turnbull is spineless’ if we don’t, acting together in an unthreatening manner, also provide a set of thought out policy proposals that might help Turnbull develop spine.

The darkened movie theatre of the post-truth world

This morning I was listening to the radio and heard a quote from Steve Bannon, chief strategist and Senior Counsellor for the Presidency of Donald Trump. He told the Hollywood Reporter: 'Darkness is good ... Dick Cheney. Darth Vader. Satan. That’s power.'

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There’s a lot we’re hearing at the moment that is intended to make us fearful. It’s life in the ‘post-truth’ world. People say things to get a reaction. During the election campaign, Donald Trump said a lot of things that he didn’t mean in order to get elected. It worked.

I think that the truth in Bannon’s comment is that real political power comes from turning off the lights to create darkness in a metaphorical movie theatre. The intention of this is to hijack our imagination and overwhelm our rational thought patterns with all kinds of grotesque images for the purpose of creating fear.

Fear paralyses our rationality. It makes us captive. It's the new slavery.

In a climate of fear, we make bizarre interpretations of human behaviour that drive us off course. Last Monday, I was walking north along Pitt Street in the Sydney CBD. There was a young man walking next to me at a similar pace who was moving his hands erratically. Suddenly he said in a slightly raised voice: ‘It’s time’.

My immediate thought was that he was indicating that he was about to unleash some kind of terrorist mayhem on what was one of Australia’s busiest pedestrian thoroughfares. So I discretely crossed the street and walked in a completely different direction, away from the where I was heading for my appointment.

Most likely he was talking on his phone using a hands-free device that was not immediately obvious. Probably he was listening intently to what his friend had to say, moving his hands as many people do, and exclaimed ‘It’s time!’ in response to something his friend had said.

That was the truth of the situation, yet in the darkened movie theatre times we live in, I am conditioned and compelled to fear the worst and take myself off course.     

The demise of ABC Radio's Sunday Night with John Cleary

Yesterday I was catching up with a friend who spent many years in religious media. We discussed the week’s news of the axing of John Cleary’s Sunday Night religious talk program on ABC local radio stations. As an old timer, I was prompted to think back to the program’s early days in the late 80s.

John presented the program for much of its 28 years, though it did begin with a team of three presenters - ABC head of religion David Millikan, Movement for the Ordination of (Anglican) Women convenor Patricia Brennan, and Sydney northern beaches Baptist pastor John Hirt.

The program was a tribute to Millikan’s vision and negotiating skills. He had earlier been a key player in establishing the still existing Compass program on ABC TV, and now he identified the unloved late Sunday night timeslot on the metropolitan and regional radio network and persuaded higher management that a religious program belonged there.

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As the program’s first producer, I was as inexperienced as the three presenters. It wasn’t long before it was thought that the veteran broadcaster and Sydney Anglican Kel Richards should be brought in, with John Cleary and myself both producing.

However it wasn’t going to work having a headstrong presenter in Richards and a headstrong producer in Cleary, especially with Kel wanting to evangelise and John seeing the program as a forum for intellectual debate. So within a month or two, John was the presenter and I was the producer, and we lasted together for most of the rest of my three or four years in the Religious Department, which I left in 1992.

As was the case with many radio programs at the time, it was the presenter who called the shots. I thought the program should have music and variety so that it would fit in better with other programs on what was the ABC’s popular network. John held sway with his commitment to a more serious intellectual discussion of a single topic for the program’s then two hour duration from 10:00 to midnight. I think he was right. It made for very stimulating listening, and it survived so long because management did not consider the ‘graveyard’ of late Sunday night worth worrying about.

I had mentioned to David Millikan the name of former Melbourne priest Terry Laidler, whom I’d worked with in my first ever media involvement, which was a religious discussion program with Melbourne University students on FOX FM Melbourne, that was actually not too dissimilar to Sunday Night. Terry ended up as presenter of Sunday Night before going on to present the Drive and Evenings programs on what was then 3LO in Melbourne. Later, ABC religious radio EP David Busch presented what was by then called Sunday Night Talk, for a number of years until the return of John Cleary.

The program gradually acquired more variety, including the much loved Inquisition quiz at midnight, which mirrored the 25 Question Quiz in the midnight timeslot on Nightlife on weeknights. But management seems to want much more homogeneity on the stations, and Sunday Night is finishing.

I have not tuned into to the program regularly for many years because I found it too stimulating and I could not get to sleep if I listened to it. I always listen to radio when I’m going to sleep, but I deliberately opt for much more bland content.

It was often said that the program was more suited to the more serious spoken word station Radio National, and indeed it was funded out of Radio National’s budget. But as far as I know, there were never any moves to shift Sunday Night from the local stations to Radio National, as had occurred with the long running documentary program Encounter, back in the early 1980s.

Instead of moving Sunday Night to Radio National, they are commencing a new program with the working title God Forbid and the very talented and engaging younger presenter James Carleton.

As far as I know, James has no specialist knowledge of religion, though he will ensure that, as much as it can be, it is a very good program (hopefully with a better title). There’s no doubt that effectively replacing Cleary with him represents not just generational change, but one of the final nails in the coffin of genuine religious expertise at the ABC and in Australia’s mainstream media in general.

The head of ABC Radio Michael Mason says the Nightline program that will replace Sunday Night will include some coverage of religion. But, as is the case with the press, where there are no longer any journalists specialising in religion, the lower level of expertise in those asking the questions will lead to less scrutiny of the fundamentalism that seems to be increasing in most areas of Australian religious life.

 

David Hockney's celebration of eccentricity

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Yesterday I went to the David Hockney 'Current' exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria. I don't often go to these blockbuster events but I had a free afternoon in Melbourne and I was interested in going to the gallery, as I had not been there for so many years. 

I found it unexpectedly entertaining, a bit like the Grayson Perry exhibition I visited at the MCA in Sydney at the beginning of the year. It has something to do with the quality of eccentricity, which is often associated with the British. It's strange that eccentricity thrives in a culture that is also known for being mannered and repressed, the opposite end of the scale from the spontaneity of the Latin cultures. 

On the one hand, I don't warm to his vocal advocacy of smokers' rights, which he mentions in interviews and features in quite a number of his whimsical works. It seems like the railing against political correctness that you get from Senator David Leyonhjelm or from the opinion and letter writers in The Australian newspaper. At the same time, he is determined to push the boundaries of his medium, in terms of both aesthetic theory and in using the iPad or a video camera for most of his recent works.

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What I found particularly fascinating was his rejection of the 'single-point perspective' in the creation of images, in favour of his own way of doing what amounts to 3D. Increasingly, a single image doesn't do the job for him. He has quite a number of stitched together composite works, some of which are displayed using banks of video monitors. Others are stitched together photographic prints. Initially you think that the stitching together is done poorly, but then you realise that it's intentional and purposeful.

That is his serious work, though there is a playfulness in it. I also enjoyed the whimsy and humour in the large number of paintings and iPad slide shows. He also provides something of a role model for those of us who are growing old in that he doesn't seem to care what the rest of the world thinks of him.

Letter from leafy South Yarra

I'm in Melbourne for 48 hours to attend a funeral. Thanks to the generosity of family, I have a beautiful apartment all to myself, in leafy South Yarra. I should be grateful. But I don't like South Yarra. I use the word 'leafy' in a derogatory sense. I've long referred to the 'leafy North Shore' of Sydney with a sense of disdain. 

In the 90s, a friend of mine was house-sitting for me in Newtown. His mother, who lived in Mosman on Sydney's leafy North Shore, was worried that something sinister might happen to her son while he was staying in what she referred to as a 'Newtown shanty'. I had a vague sense of what she meant, but I'm getting a much clearer picture from the novel I'm reading at the moment.

It's the recently published Dark Fires Shall Burn by Anna Westbrook. The setting is Newtown in 1946, when it was one of the seediest neighbourhoods of Sydney. What fascinates me is the familiar places and the streets that are described. I walk those streets every day with little idea of what was going on in them 70 years ago.

There is the St Stephen's Church and the historic cemetery near my house before it was cut in half for the Camperdown Memorial Rest Park, which was the scene last Sunday of the annual Newtown Festival, which perhaps shows off present day Newtown more than anything else. A murder in the cemetery, I discovered from the book, is the reason the cemetery was reduced in size. 

I have nothing against leaves. In fact my street is one of the leafiest streets in Newtown. It's just where the leaves are located. What it is about the leafy North Shore and leafy South Yarra is that I feel alienated. They are full of families and private school students, and it's as if the norm is to live in a big house or nice apartment, have a family and children, and be able to afford to send them to private schools. None of that is me. 


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Instead, my norm is more offbeat. I quite like the values and politics of a lot of the population of Newtown, although that is changing - not for the better - with gentrification. I've been living in Newtown since 1993, so - while I'm not exactly an old timer yet - I've seen part of the transformation. 

Reading Dark Fires Shall Burn, I am pleased that it is not Newtown 1946. But part of me does feel nostalgic for Newtown 1993. Often I walk down King Street and look for shops and businesses that I can remember were there in 1993. Sadly there are not many.

This is a theme that I could write a lot about. But I'm in Melbourne now, a bit pressed for time, and making plans for today and tomorrow. Tomorrow I have asked a friend who lives in Yarraville if she is free for lunch. I am hoping that she is free because it is a long time since I have seen her, and also because I might get to go to Yarraville, which I regard as not too dissimilar to Newtown.

In 1985, when I was at Melbourne University, I did a history subject called Approaches to the Built Environment, which was taught by Dr John Lack in a Footscray Council building not far from Yarraville. We talked a lot about the history of Yarraville and surrounding suburbs. In those days they were very working class and a bit seedy, whereas today Yarraville in particular is a hipster mecca like Newtown.

This morning I am going to a funeral home in Brighton. The nearest train station is Bentleigh, a suburb that fascinates me at the moment. Recently I spent some time with a friend who grew up in Bentleigh when it was one of those forgettable suburbs that nobody would consider travelling to. A few weeks later, I read an article by the demographer Bernard Salt about hipsters on the move. In Melbourne, they're moving from Fitzroy to what he calls the 'Hills Hoist heartland' of East Bentleigh.  So I'm rather pleased that Bentleigh is on my schedule for today.  

Sharing my story at the child abuse Royal Commission

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Yesterday I had my private session at the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. It was about 'Sharing your story' and open to those who felt they had something to contribute to the Commission's findings and registered before the September deadline. 

I'd always thought that my experience of sexual abuse was too slight to be considered at the Royal Commission, but a staff member I know encouraged me to participate, and it turned out that I had much to tell the commissioner about the aspects of institutional life that fostered sexual abuse, and he and his team were certainly interested listeners to what I had to say in the one hour that I was allocated.

I spoke about the 'culture of disrespect' of the institutions I attended as a child in the 1970s, and how it takes a lifetime to get over the poor self-esteem you can have when you emerge from the institutions. I was part of the culture, which means that not only was I was bullied, but I too bullied when given the chance. Teachers and fellow students alike participated in the intimidation. 

I noted that there was very little actual sexual abuse I knew of at my Jesuit boarding school, although the effects of the bullying and other disrespectful behaviour could be just as traumatic and enduring as those we hear about in the horrific stories in the media. That was my experience. I was the only student I know of in my class who was at the receiving end of what can be technically classed as 'sexual abuse', although I feel that I was much more affected by the non-sexual abuse I experienced at the time. 

Paradoxically my abuser - whom I feel inclined to call my 'so-called' abuser - was also the teacher whom I feel treated me more respectfully than any of the other teachers during my years at school. However I'm open to the possibility that I have subconsciously edited my memory of the (one-off) event because I liked the priest who abused me and at times I've felt he was treated harshly in action taken against him by his other victims and their advocates. 

But I can also accept that it's just as likely that I have let him off lightly because any sexual abuse is a serious matter that cannot be excused at all. I bought the line of the Jesuit official whom I first mentioned it to, who minimised the incident by calling it 'low-level sexual abuse'. However a few years later, another high-level Jesuit argued that there are not degrees of sexual abuse and that I should treat the incident as a very serious matter.  

I also told the commissioner about a Christian brother from my primary school years who is currently serving a prison sentence for child sexual abuse. I described my feeling of elation when I heard of his conviction, a sense that justice had been done for me as well as all the other victims of his sexual and non-sexual abuse. There was nothing sexual about what I experienced, but his cruel and sadistic behaviour towards me had diminished my fragile self-esteem, and I'm not sure that I have ever recovered from it.

The Commission is encouraging me and the hundreds, or perhaps thousands, of others who have shared their stories to write a brief account for a book to be placed in the National Library as a permanent memorial. I'm very much supportive of this, and I note that it flies in the face of the 2008 statement of the now Archbishop of Sydney Anthony Fisher, who castigated those who were 'dwelling crankily ... on old wounds' caused by sexual abuse in the past.  
 

My first Tiny Letter

I don't know how many Tiny Letters I will write. Perhaps only a handful. Or it may turn out to be something that lasts a long time. I've been retired for over a year now and it is starting to concern me that I am not doing any writing when writing and working on other people's writing was my job until a bit over a year ago. 

In a way, that's the way I want it. When I retired, I decided that I wanted to turn my life on its head and forget about sedentary activities for a while, and instead moving and exercising, for the sake of health and well-being, and change for the sake of change. 

So I've been using my Fitbit to reach my goal of 20,000 steps each day. Now I want to tweak that a little and do a tiny amount of writing each day, and perhaps let that morph into something that might strike a balance between self-indulgence and writing with a social purpose. I came across Tiny Letter in the New York Times at the weekend, so today I'm writing a Tiny Letter.  As I see it, it's a bit like The Morning Pages, but it's not private. 

I was introduced to that during a workshop I did earlier in the year, but it did not appeal to me because it was completely public, and I would like what I write to serve at least a tiny social purpose. So here it is. It's a little bit public, and potentially a lot public - or at least up to 5000 readers can sign up to the daily email. It's not my goal to be big, but to reach out beyond myself to anybody who is interested. 

It's significant that, in contrast to the thousands of email newsletters I published in my working life between 1994 and 2015, I don't care how many subscribers I have. It's a bit like, in retirement, I don't care how much money I earn. I'm off that treadmill and on another - quite literally, the treadmill in the gym. 

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So what's on my mind today? It's my birthday. Normally it wouldn't be on my mind, but when I went to do a Google search, I noticed that 'Big Brother' Google knows it's my birthday and wants to rub it in that it knows it's my birthday. I don't especially like that, but it's a fact of life. I could write a lot about that, but I won't, for now. A few months ago I decided that I wanted to reduce the role of Google in my life and wanted to switch my email to Fastmail, a very robust Australian service with values that are much closer to my own. In theory 

I could have done that quite easily and kept the same email address, as I have a paid Google account that uses an email address from my own mullins.id.au domain. But Google wouldn't let me do that without also losing all my other Google services including all the Android mobile phone apps that I had paid for over the years. So I am learning to accommodate Google in my life in much the same way that the world is having to learn to accommodate Donald Trump in their lives. 

I have a view about that which I will just touch on. It is that Donald Trump's election is not something that freedom and democracy lovers should protest against. If it could be demonstrated that the election was rigged, that would be another matter. But democracy has done its job and revealed that something is broken with the system. We might not like what it produced, but the way to react is not to slap down Trump and the 'deplorables' that voted for him, but to reach out to them in some way or another. Working out exactly how to do that is the challenge for those of us who wish that Trump was not the president elect. Protest is very much consistent with democratic principles, but protest against democracy is not.

Heartfelt story articulates grief

A Bird on my Shoulder by Lucy Palmer (Allen & Unwin 2016) $29.99


​Lucy Palmer tells other people's stories for a living. As founding director of TheMemoirMakers.com.au, she has helped her clients bequeath their story to future generations as a possession more valuable than material inheritance. She has done the same for former Papua New Guinea Prime Minister Sir Julius Chan, as ghost writer for his memoir Playing the Game, which was published earlier this year by Queensland University Press.

Now she has recorded her own story. It is a gift not only for her own family but for anybody who has grieved – or is grieving – a loved one, which is effectively all of us. Its focus is meeting and marrying and – after only five years of marriage – grieving her partner Julian Thirlwall. 

To understand A Bird on my Shoulder, it's worth noting the difference between autobiography and memoir. Autobiography is a chronology of our life in a manner as objective as we can manage. A memoir, on the other hand, is a poignant and often humorous interpretation of an event or sequence of events that made us the person we are. It is the meaning we have found in our own lives through making sense of what has happened to us.

It's not surprising that Lucy has enjoyed a professional and personal friendship with Caroline Jones since working alongside her at the ABC nearly 30 years ago during the heyday of Caroline's radio program The Search for Meaning. Recently Caroline attended Lucy's book launch and wrote a review of the book in which she observed that 'like its author, the book has become [her] good friend'. That is testimony to the fact that – like our children – our story begins with us, but has a life of its own.

There is a depth – and indeed a sacred quality – to stories that come from the heart and have not been created merely for a commercial purpose. But that does not take away from the entertainment value of our stories that can use devices such as self-deprecation to offer insights into who we are. Lucy relates advice given to her by her best friend Mary-Louise during the early of her courtship with Julian in Port Moresby: 'You've got to get rid of that dress... It makes you look like a sofa.'

Lucy's story is at once grounded in the school of hard knocks and an openness to surprise. We get an insight into this when her superficially hard hearted father visits from England and unexpectedly bonds with Julian, even though their personalities could not be more different. Lucy observes later in the book: 'The people I have loved who have left this physical life have become a part of me; I carry them, embody them.'

Lucy has a certain self-awareness of these assets bequeathed to her, and is determined to use them to help her and her loved ones get ahead and work through life's adversities. The most difficult of these is the subject of the book. That is Julian's terminal cancer diagnosis just five years into their marriage, and the challenge to their young family of his slow physical and mental decline.

Always in command of the moment, Lucy is not one to be intimidated, even when she visits the 'unnatural scene' at the funeral home to see Julian's body. She senses 'life moving slowly in the presence of death', but also a certain quirkiness. Julian is lying in his coffin. adorned with clothes and accessories with his characteristic fastidiousness. Lucy gets it into her head that it's not quite right that they have him lying there with his shoes on. Mary-Louise is by her side and squeezes her arm. Lucy is 'transfixed by the absurdity of it all; the quietness, the awful piped music, the contrived stillness'.

It is as if the funeral directors' gaudy sideshow is actually a careful orchestration of deliberate inadequacy on their part that is meant to give strength to the grieving family. The effect is to put us in charge of the main game, to challenge us to find a determined peace in a space that for most people is beyond words. A Bird on my Shoulder is testimony to the fact that Lucy has a rare ability to match that peace with words.

- first published in Dialogue, print publication of W.N. Bull funeral directors

Eureka Street's journalism of empathy

Last week I foreshadowed further discussion of the 'journalism of empathy', which Eureka Street has aimed to practise during my ten years as editor. I thought it was a term I'd invented, but it turns out that it's used in journalism schools, particularly in the US.  

Journalism academics recognise that many of the best fiction and non-fiction stories eschew hard facts and egocentricity in favour of imagining the world through other people's eyes.

Objectivity is really not what they're about. Journalists get paid for accurate reporting of events, and indeed there has been a number of journalistic fact checking initiatives in recent years. But that's not where it ends.

The news is produced for consumption in a human context by readers who often care deeply for the wellbeing of other people. Media consumers will turn off or react negatively when there is insensitive reporting. For some media it's a commercial decision, but for us it's a matter of mission.

We learned a lesson in our early days online when we were feeling our way and insensitively used the death of 'Crocodile Hunter' Steve Irwin to implicate him in the exploitation of animals for the entertainment of humans.

Over the years we have received many quality articles analysing the dynamics of national and international politics that have overlooked the human dimension. We've often declined or sent them back to the writers for revision. Our main interest in Australia's taking part in bombing missions in Syria, for example, is not whether we're likely to contribute to the 'taking out' of ISIS, but in how our actions affect civilians on the ground.

Obviously our approach has been affirmed by Pope Francis' resolute adoption of mercy as his modus operandi, which involves less emphasis on teaching doctrine in isolation from human need. It underlies our decision to give so much space to addressing the situation facing asylum seekers and how they are received by the countries that they hope will welcome them.  

I was also prompted to think about empathy by some recent political events, including the Abbott Government's decision to take 12,000 Syrian refugees in addition to the regular quota. Whether or not the motivation was political, it's actions that count. Which was indeed the case with the Immigration Minister's display of negative empathy in his joke about the precarious climate plight of Australia's friends who live in Pacific Island nations.

I won't be part of the future of Eureka Street but I know there will be continuity in its carrying out of its mission, largely because its direction over the past decade has been a function of our team as much as it has been from me as an individual. I like to think that the secret of our success is that we all like each other and our personal ambitions are modest. We are only to happy to share this with politicians from the parties that struggle to maintain unity.

The current members of our team are myself (editor 2006-15), Tim Kroenert (assistant editor 2007- and acting editor from Monday 21 September), Andrew Hamilton (consulting editor, 1991-), Fatima Measham (consulting editor 2015-). Past Eureka Street online team members are James Massola (2006-07) and Ray Cassin (2013-14).