Media

You can’t have me: why I said no to Crikey

Media / / 9 minutes of reading

Nearly 20 years ago, my first piece of journalism was published. For a music fan, it was an auspicious beginning: I saw a young You Am I supporting rock behemoths the Beasts of Bourbon at the Mansfield Tavern, one of those great suburban beer barns that gave up on live music long ago. One band was at its peak; the other scaling theirs. My review appeared in a Brisbane street paper, and I was paid $35.

My path was set. Before the cheque had cleared I had spent it, down to the last cent, on an anthology of rock & roll writing. In it, I was introduced to all the greats of the genre: Nick Kent, Lester Bangs, Deborah Frost, Ellen Willis, Greil Marcus and the godfather of music criticism, Crawdaddy! founder Paul Williams, who had a significant personal impact on me. Collectively, these writers taught me everything I knew.

I could always string a decent sentence together, but it still took me years to find my own voice. Like most writers, musicians and artists, I derive little enjoyment from looking back at early work. There can’t be too many rawer forms of growing up in public, and while I still enjoy writing about music, it’s not often these days that I write straight reviews of records or shows, as I did with this piece on Television.… Read more..

You can’t have me: why I said no to Crikey Read More »

Brisbane will go on without you, Bridie

Media, Qld Politics / / 4 minutes of reading

It was Tex Perkins who put it best – and most bluntly. “Brisbane you have to leave,” the singer known to his mum as Greg told the Australian edition of Rolling Stone. “You come out of your mother, you go to school, and then you think, oh shit – what am I doing here?” That was 20 years ago.

Young people have been leaving Brisbane for as long as they’ve been coming out of their mothers, to use Tex’s ever so delicate vernacular. It was almost compulsory during the Joh Bjelke-Petersen years – a musician friend of mine remembers the police telling him, point blank, that people like him weren’t welcome in Queensland.

That sort of harassment goes back a long way. Matt Condon’s book Three Crooked Kings, which describes how corruption was allowed to take root in pre-Fitzgerald Queensland, remembers how police commissioner Frank Bischof used to hand out starched and collared shirts and ties to the local bodgies and widgies in the 1950s.

Now, apparently, the writers, musicians and (gasp) hospitality workers are all leaving again, according to the recently decamped Bridie Jabour. I can’t blame her: after all, I too left Brisbane for Sydney when I was 25.… Read more..

Brisbane will go on without you, Bridie Read More »

The price of outrage

Australian Politics, Media / / 4 minutes of reading

Sometimes a story moves so fast it’s hard to keep up with. Such has been the case with the saga of Alan Jones. I wrote an open letter to 2GB on Saturday evening, shortly after news of Jones’ intemperate remarks to a gathering of Young Liberal students in Sydney broke. I then slept in on Sunday, prior to working my night job.

By the time I’d woken up, I’d already missed half the fun. Jones’ press conference yesterday, purportedly to apologise to the Prime Minister, has already been much discussed, and derided, for its transparent insincerity. To say Jones “doesn’t get it” doesn’t cover it. I shook my head, went to work, and after getting home at six in the morning, I slept late again.

While I was blearily shoving cereal down the hatch at midday, a petition launched by change.org to remove Jones from his duties was collecting over 30,000 signatures. I would guess that very few of them listen to 2GB, but that didn’t stop sponsors from withdrawing from Jones’ program: luxury car maker Mercedes-Benz; supermarket oligarchs Woolworths; tea-makers Dilmah; Freedom Furniture; the list goes on. The moral question for them now is whether or not they’ll resume their support for Jones when the opprobrium abates.… Read more..

The price of outrage Read More »

Dear 2GB: an open letter regarding Mr Alan Jones

Australian Politics, Media / / 4 minutes of reading

Dear 2GB,

First, an apology for wasting your time. I don’t listen to your radio station. I don’t even live in Sydney. And no, I’m no fan of Alan Jones; have even had a pop at him in print on the odd occasion. Given the respective size of our audiences, you could safely accuse me of pissing in the wind there.

Still, I feel compelled to write to you. And maybe I’m not even being fair, because Mr Jones didn’t suggest our Prime Minister’s father “died of shame” in his own daughter in the normal course of his duties on your radio station. He was freelancing, as it were, speaking to a gathering of about 100 Young Liberals in Sydney. Apparently they thought it was a brilliant speech. Perhaps I should take it up with them.

But the fact is that 2GB employs Mr Jones. He represents you – and your advertisers. And, as you would well know, he has form. It wasn’t that long ago that he suggested – repeatedly – that the Prime Minister be put in a chaff bag and dumped at sea.

I know, I know. The Australian Communication and Media Authority decided we shouldn’t take Mr Jones seriously there.… Read more..

Dear 2GB: an open letter regarding Mr Alan Jones Read More »

Calling out trolls from the cave

Media / / 4 minutes of reading

Amid all the brouhaha about trolling, trolls and what is to be done about them, one simple fact has been mostly overlooked. And that is at least in its more extreme forms, trolling is already illegal. You only have to look at Part 10.6 of the Criminal Code.

That part of the code provides that a person may be guilty of an offence if they use a carriage service to menace, harass or cause offence. This is defined by the “reasonable person” test: that is, what a reasonable person might find offensive “in all the circumstances”. Sounds a bit nebulous, doesn’t it?

Most reasonable people, though, would find the behaviour of Bradley Paul Hampson offensive. Hampson was sentenced to three years’ jail in March 2011 (later commuted to six months) for defacing the Facebook pages of two murdered children with child exploitation material.

A year earlier, a woman was handed a suspended sentence for a similar offence. The trolls who buried Charlotte Dawson’s Twitter feed under an avalanche of invitations to commit suicide might have cause to be nervous, as would the halfwit who taunted Wests Tigers’ captain Robbie Farah over his mother’s passing.

Then there’s James Vincent McKenzie. McKenzie is the nom de plume used by the person who has devoted years to systematically stalking/defaming writer Marieke Hardy on his Google-owned blogspot.… Read more..

Calling out trolls from the cave Read More »

It’s OK to steal, cos it’s so nice to share

Media / / 4 minutes of reading

In 2001, American alt-country singer Gillian Welch released a song that, in her ever-so-quiet way, excoriated the download generation. Everything Is Free made a crucial observation: that musicians, artists and writers would keep creating content regardless of whether anyone actually wanted to pay for it or not.

“Everything is free now,” she sang plaintively. “That’s what they say / Everything I ever done / Gotta give it away / Someone hit the big score / They figured it out / That we’re gonna do it anyway / Even if it doesn’t pay.”

That drive – the physical compulsion to create – has always been at the centre of the artist’s core. They don’t choose to live in penury as such: poverty is simply the most common by-product of the fact that one doesn’t really choose to be an artist, either. It’s something that more often chooses you.

Welch wrote the song just before file-sharing service Napster was taken to the cleaners in the courts, but the damage was already done. Who wanted to pay for anything they could get for free anymore? Loudon Wainwright III put Welch’s viewpoint more pungently in another song, Something For Nothing: “It’s OK to steal, ’cause it’s so nice to share.”… Read more..

It’s OK to steal, cos it’s so nice to share Read More »

Scroll to Top