Media140: Jay Rosen’s Ten Commandments

The keynote speaker on Friday’s session of Sydney’s Media140 was New York University’s Internet doyen Jay Rosen. The 53-year-old journalism professor appeared to his Sydney audience via a Skype hook-up from New York and his speech was a direct challenge from the Big Apple to Big Media. It took the form of an Internet Ten Commandments (all 140 characters or less) both from his own published views and the views of fellow travellers. Rosen is not Moses come down from the mountain but his points were a useful and digestable template for approaching the new media landscape. (photo by Neerav Bhatt)

#1 “Audience atomisation has been overcome”.
Rosen's first point is that media power is now widely dispersed. Rosen wrote about atomisation at his own Press Think blog in January this year drawing on work by Daniel Hallin. Journalists used to be able to define who and what was in the news conversation by virtue of their privileged place in the system. Audiences were atomised as they only talked to the media not to each other. But now there are many alternative networks and voices questioning the media’s right to define agendas. The sphere of legitimate controversy is expanding in both directions at the expense of consensus on one side and what was defined as deviance on the other. People are going around journalists for the news they want, overcoming the atomisation in the process.

#2 “Open systems don’t work like closed systems”.
Here Rosen is asking journalists and bloggers to accept each other's strengths. Again he wrote about this at Press Think in September 2008. Closed systems like the corporate press don’t operate the same way as open ones like free blogs. Closed systems bring editorial oversight and the authority of a respected brand while open ones crowdsource information and are easy to use. What both systems should have is trust and ethics.

#3 “The sources go direct”.
This point is from Dave Winer in May. Sources are a crucial part of the news, says Winer. They will continue to have things to say, even if there is no longer a big media there to listen. Sources already act as quasi-journalists so it is not too great a leap of logic to suggest they will either tell the news themselves or go tell a blogger. Nature abhors a vacuum, Winer is saying, and journalists will not be missed if they disappear.

#4 “When the people formerly known as the audience use the press tools they have to inform one another— that’s citizen journalism”.
This was Rosen in July 2008. It follows on from #3. Citizen, or open source, journalism occurs organically whenever anyone publishes news or information.

#5 “There’s no such thing as information overload, there’s only filter failure”.
This is a quote from fellow NYU professor Clay Shirky from December last year. Shirky is saying the problem is not with the vast amount of information available to us all. This superabundance is beyond the capability of any one person to fathom and we are all regularly confronted with too much information. What we do is filter the flow to make sense of the world. That means a patient process of continuous learning and unlearning. “If the twenty-year-olds aren’t complaining about information overload, it probably isn’t the problem we think it is,” says Shirky.

#6 “Do what you do best and link to the rest.”
This is the famous February 2007 dictum of Google economy advocate Jeff Jarvis. Jarvis’s message is a plea for specialisation: stop trying to become the media of record, and instead concentrate on what you are good at. You can still point to everything else thanks to the remarkable power of the hyperlink.

#7 "Half my advertising is wasted, I just don't know which half."
Unlike the first six recent quotes, this one is almost a century old. Rosen attributes it to Philadelphia businessman John Wanamaker (1838-1922). Wanamaker was talking about the eternal business quandary about whether to market products or brands. The problem has not gone away a hundred years later but perhaps it would be solved with a more integrated view of return on investment.

#8 “‘Here’s where we’re coming from’ is more likely to be trusted than ‘the View from Nowhere’”.
Not exactly a quote but wisdom distilled from an ironically anonymous July blog post at hyperorg.com. The post is summarised in the title “transparency is the new objectivity”. The claim of objectivity always hides biases. There may be nothing wrong with those biases but the audience should know about them in order to make an informed decision. The net benefit is twofold: trust, and a more nuanced understanding of the issue as presented by the author.

#9 “The hybrid forms will be the strongest forms”.
Rosen’s post from June 2008 is evolutionary praise for mongrel media. Adaptability is required to flourish in an era of two-way and many-to-many communication. New forms will emerge using the best of closed and open systems (see #2). They will most likely be pro-am using a distributed reporting model.

#10 “My readers know more than I do.”
This is a well-known 2003 quote from blogger and journalist Dan Gillmor. In many respects, this is a statement of the obvious. Yet it is one often forgotten - particularly by knowledgeable journalists who may know more about their issue than any other single person. It is in the journalists' interest to co-opt this knowledge otherwise they will be sidelined (see #3 and #4). Gillmor sees it an opportunity not a threat and a necessary adaptation for survival (see #9).

Rosen signed off with the instruction “you gotta grok it before you can rock it”. Sci-fi writer Robert Heinlein coined the word grok to describe the collective influence the observer and the observed have on each other. In this case it means intuitively establishing a rapport with the tools and the times in order to master them. “Be the media” appeared to be Rosen’s parting advice to the people formerly known as his Sydney audience.

Media140: Julie Posetti’s Revolution

ABC RN Breakfast presenter Fran Kelly kicked off the second session on Day 1 of Sydney Media140 on the provocative theme of “death or salvation of professional journalism”. Kelly’s panel included fellow Radio National presenter Robyn Williams, Fairfax Digital editor-in-chief Mike Van Niekerk, Crikey editor Jonathan Green and Crikey media writer Margaret Simons. But Kelly’s first guest, and the subject of this post, was the conference’s indefatigable editorial editor Julie Posetti. (photo by Derek Barry)

Posetti is a journalist and academic based in Canberra with over 20 years experience in the media industry in radio, print and online. Posetti is an avid Twitterer and has been engaged in eight months of active research into how journalists use the tool. Posetti’s theme was It’s a revolution not a war. The name took its cue from earlier speaker Mark Scott’s recent “end of empire” speech aimed at the legacy media barons such as Rupert Murdoch.

Posetti’s argument was there are three crises confronting journalism at the moment: dealing with the effects of new technology, the failure of the economical model and a loss of public trust. She said that the latter crisis is not getting the attention it deserves among all the clutter of the first two crises. Yet it is not difficult to see why the industry might not want to talk about it. News is becoming increasingly tabloid, trashy and truthier as it seeks ever wider audiences lured by the lowest common denominator. Editors and proprietors know that people love hearing about scandals and outrage, and they will bring it to them if it means having to manufacture them.

But as Posetti notes, there is a nasty side effect to the sensationalism used to sell such news: loss of reputation. Journalists pay the price as much as the media they serve in this interest. The professional consistently ranks low in most trust surveys of occupations. They gradually transform from guardians of the fourth estate into lackeys of corporate media giants prepared to stop at nothing to get their grubby story. Meanwhile the major issues of the day are either incorrectly reported or under-reported or both.

Posetti says that journalists should wake up to this danger. Social media is enabling many new practictioners and many more who fact-check others. If journalists didn’t engage with these new players, they would lack credibility in online communities. Posetti said such credibility was crucial to sustaining what ever model exists when the first two crises are solved.

This means that we need to pay as much attention to the public good function, if not more, than either to the death of newspapers or the lack of profits online. To do this, argues Posetti, journalists must endure with their most sacred functions: “shining a light in dark places; speaking truth to power and doing so without fear or favour, but with a commitment to accuracy, truth & fairness.”

This means having a wider definition what constitutes news reporting and the ditching of the over-blown notion of objectivity. The social age has blurred the line between journalists and citizens. This is particularly true in Twitter with its open discussions and crowd-sourcing of information between all manner of professional and amateur media players. Some of this will be serious, some will be playful (witness how tonight’s #pwnednudierun played out across television, Twitter and Youtube). But whatever it is, it is something to embrace not fear or resist. “It’s vital to accept that this is a revolution, not a war,” said Posetti. “A time for transformation, revitalisation [and] reinvention.”

Initial Thoughts on Media140: Memories of blogging

I’m just back from a Sydney two-day Media140 “news in the age of social media” conference. Due to Internet access issues and the vagaries of battery life, I didn’t get the chance to blog about it in Sydney. The conference generated a lot of discussion and argument (particularly between journalists and “new media” advocates) and I’ll add my take over the next few days. However, I wanted to begin with a comparison that struck me.

It seemed to me that the battles that dominated the backchannels this week reminded me of similar warfare waged two years ago. In September 2007 I attended the first (and to my knowledge, still only,) Australian Blogging Conference in Brisbane. Much of that conference focused on blogs and political reportage. Bloggers and academics lined up on one side of the argument describing how blogs were a crucial part of the public sphere. On the other side professional journalists reminded them that blogging was a practice as well as a platform and their craft skills were still needed to provide proper context to whatever information being made public.

The journalists had good reasons for their turf minding – they feared their role as sense-makers was about to be seriously diminished. Though the GFC was then unheard of, the media industry was already in crisis by 2007. As more and more people abandoned traditional media in favour of more disparate (and sometimes desperate) news sources online, it was becoming increasingly harder to harvest eyeballs for advertisers in sufficient quantities to justify the news expense of big media. That day in Brisbane, the argument raged back and forth over whether blogs would save journalism or walk all over its corpse.

With two years hindsight, it is obvious that blogging will do neither. The platform will continue as a popular venue of long-form thoughts for produsers, some of whom will be professional, some others amateur and more may be a mix of the two. All will likely continue to irk each other. But as the technology has matured, so has the argument. As blogging evolved, much of the heat went out of the battle. While a few journalists remain hostile, most are now either bloggers themselves or else see the blogs less as a threat than part of their arsenal of sources.

That hasn’t meant the journalists’ problems have gone away. On the contrary, journalists are move than ever under threat from corporate shareholder pressure to cut costs and demand thinner news rooms. The blogs are still eating away at audience along the long tail. Now more tools under the rubbery banner of “social media” are further muddying the waters. But thanks to the link economy, blogs and the social networks possibly bring as much traffic to old news sites as they take away.

Of the social networks it is Twitter that is causing the most professional angst. Twitter was a toddler at the time of the 2007 blogging conference and barely merited a mention. But its real time news function would prove irresistible and the subsequent explosion of growth and influence has pushed it to the centre of the argument. Ande Gregson coined the concept of media140 to launch a global discussion on what news in the social age means. I enjoyed the conference and the diverse set of speakers but the name riffing off Twitter’s character limit meant that the impact of Facebook (now 325 million users) did not get the attention it deserves.

What did come out was the same battle between new and old media proponents. The early adopters and academics showed how Twitter was changing the news landscape. The journalists asserted their right to provide an ethical, informed and contextualised take on the news in the new platform.

I suspect the outcome will be similar to the 2007 arguments. The (former) audience will be atomised into dialogues of the deaf and there will be less control and mediation. But journalists will prosper if they engage with Twitter, and carefully curate the data while showing a human and ethical face. Twitter, like the blogs, or Facebook, won’t hasten the demise of traditional media. As the wonderful fake Twitter account @BigHarto (based on News Ltd boss John Hartigan) pointed out late Friday afternoon: "In closing, I'd just like to remind #media140 participants that the future of journalism is whatever I fucking say it is." This may just be art resembling postmodernism. But it is also a reminder that real media power will not be tossed away lightly.

Australia’s federal parliament should move from Canberra to Sydney

[photo by Sam Ilic] I'm no great fan of the national capital even though I like its architecture. I’ve only been to Canberra a couple of times and the closest I’ve come to staying there was a night across the NSW border in Queanbeyan. I found the capital an elegant but cold and deadly dull place far removed from the mainstream of Australian life. Walter Burley-Griffin’s creation is a work of architectural brilliance but no soul. And in a country with such a dominant coastal culture, Canberra is an inland fish out of water. The site of the nation’s capital arose as a Federation issue and Canberra was the compromise between the then equal cities of Sydney and Melbourne. But in the last 50 years Sydney has outranked its Victorian rival by most major metrics of importance and is Australia’s only truly global city. If we were making the choice of capital today, Sydney would be the obvious choice (and we could get rid of the useless states while we were at it).

The only reason it won’t happen is the outcry of Canberrans whose city would suddenly be stripped of importance and relevance. Yesterday Peter Martin blogged about the old Keating and Fraser arguments about Canberra as the Australian national capital. Martin linked to a Laurie Oakes article in which Paul Keating left him in no doubt the capital should be Sydney. Fellow former Prime Minister but notably Melbournian Malcolm Fraser can’t quite bring himself to agree the winner is Sydney. However he did tell the veteran Nine newsman the new parliament house was his worst mistake as Prime Minister.

Oakes agreed with Fraser’s view of architecture but thought Keating was merely “possum-stirring”. According to the Australian Dictionary of Colloquialisms, possum-stirring means to liven things up, create a disturbance; raise issues that others wish left dormant. Oakes was right. These were definitely traits Keating had and there are plenty of plenty who wish the Canberra capital argument remain dormant.

Perhaps not surprisingly most of these people have a strong Canberra connection, including Laurie Oakes himself. Oakes, Nine’s federal political reporter, is not happy about the alternative. He said the main reason Sydney should not be the capital was because access to corruption and lobby groups. “Our federal politicians and senior bureaucrats would all then live among, mix with and be constantly influenced by the same log-rollers, urgers, developers, greedy business people, lobbyists, shysters, corrupters and crims who have made NSW politics such a cesspit,” said Oakes. True, perhaps, but hardly relevant. A mere 300kms of distance is hardly going to stop someone from trying to corrupt a federal politician.

Peter Martin (The Age’s Canberra correspondent) is also in the negative camp and said Keating and Fraser were wrong to call Canberra a mistake. He agrees with another of the capital’s journalists, former Canberra Times editor Jack Waterford who said recently “opposition to shifting the Australian capital to Sydney or Melbourne would be even more fierce today than it was 110 years ago.” But would it? It seems to me that no one really cares outside vested interests in Canberra such as Oakes, Martin and Waterford.

It is not just Paul Keating that thinks Sydney would make a good capital. He made the remark in a 2007 speech when John Howard was still in government. Keating noted that Howard had effectively moved the capital to Sydney anyway and “Canberra had an air of unreality.” His comments were supported by then NSW Premier Morris Iemma and Patricia Forsythe of the Sydney Chamber of Commerce who said Sydney was already nation's economic, cultural capital and transport hub. "When world leaders come to Australia they come to Sydney,” Forsythe said, “and if they have time they will go to Canberra."

Ever keen to distinguish himself from the man he followed, Labor PM Kevin Rudd did find time to go to Canberra. His home town Brisbane is too much of an outlying city to host cabinet meetings on a regular basis but it is not hard to imagine the next Sydney Prime Minister - whoever he or she might be, and which ever party he or she represents – going back to the Howard precedent and moving the capital back to the nation’s largest city. And Canberra need no longer be a waste of a good sheep paddock.

Australia is not alone in the misguided notion of quarantining the capital from the largest city. There are 35 such capitals worldwide at the time of writing according to Wikipedia and the list is growing. Abuja (Nigeria) and Astana (Kazakhstan) both became capitals in the 1990s. In 2006 Burma shifted its capital from Rangoon (Yangon) to the remote hillside town of Naypidaw so that its paranoid military rulers would feel more secure. Washington DC and Ottawa are closely related. But the capital Canberra has most in common with is Brasilia which arose from post-war presidential designs to inherit the Brazilian capital from Rio in 1960.

Brasilia turns 50 next April and its 101 year old architect Oscar Niemeyer hopes to be alive to see the anniversary. It is the only 20th century capital that UNESCO has given a heritage listing to and viewed from above, the city has elements that repeat in every building which gives it a formal unity. But not everyone was happy. Brasília was a city built for the car, not the pedestrian. And Simone de Beauvoir complained that the similarity of Brasilia’s partment blocks gave the city "the same air of elegant monotony.”

A similar cool air infects Canberra. Even Canberra supporter Frank Moorhouse says he likes the city and its culture because it has a “Scandinavian aesthetic rather than a Mumbai aesthetic”. But this, like the massive freeways of Brasilia, is a 20th century aesthetic. The museums can stay in Canberra but on environmental grounds alone we should be discussing when the parliament should move closer to the people it serves.

The trial of Gordon Wood

Rene Rivkin’s former chauffeur Gordon Wood has been granted legal aid for the murder trial of his girlfriend Caroline Byrne. The news comes six weeks his application for aid was rejected on the grounds his mother was funding his defence. Legal Aid NSW have now told Wood's solicitor, Michael Bowe that his client would now be funded "in a limited way." The former jetsetter Wood is alleged to have thrown Byrne off a cliff in Sydney’s Watson Bay in 1995.

The sordid story of Gordon Wood is one of the narratives which features strongly in Neil Chenoweth’s Packer’s Lunch, an extraordinary tale of the channels of money and power in Sydney in the 1990s. Wood was a minor player associated with the financial machinations of the mercurial stockbroker Rene Rivkin who was central to Chenoweth’s narrative. Chenoweth’s investigations sparked inquiries by several authorities, including ASIC's probe into the failed telco One.Tel and an ongoing examination of Swiss bank accounts and related business deals. It also touched on the long running saga of the inquest into the death of Caroline Byrne and the affairs of her boyfriend Gordon Wood.

Wood was born in 1962 in Bath, England and emigrated with his family to South Africa. In 1978 the Woods moved to Queensland. Gordon moved south to NSW where he gained a Bachelor of Economics at the University of Sydney. After graduation he had a variety of small jobs including bit parts in television, a stint as a ticket seller at the Opera House before becoming an aerobics instructor at Club World of Fitness in Sydney’s Castlereagh St. He also doubled as a personal trainer at nearby City Gym.

Wood’s tall, blond physique made him popular with female patrons. But while most people thought him good looking, some thought he was more interested in men than women. A colleague who worked with Wood later in the decade told Chenoweth he was very fastidious and always commenting on what the men wearing were wearing and never the women. Nevertheless Wood charmed the blonde model Caroline Byrne in 1992. She introduced her new boyfriend to her family on Christmas Day as a fitness instructor. Nevertheless, Byrne was cautious about Wood and insisted he take an AIDS test.

The relationship lasted until September of the following year. She complained to her father that Wood spent his time doing nothing and going nowhere. “There’s no future with Gordon,” she told her father. “He lies in bed until lunchtime [and] apart from a few gym classes he doesn’t work.” Although Wood was initially distraught over the break-up he quickly began a new relationship, this time with a man – Polish baker and part-time model Adam Baczynski.

Wood’s big break arrived a month later. Through his contacts at the gym, he heard that millionaire stockbroker Rene Rivkin needed a replacement for driver and gopher George Freris who was leaving to set up his own tattooist business. Wood got the job. It wasn’t a total surprise as he already knew Rivkin. Rivkin used Joe’s Café as unofficial office and the gym crowd also hung out here. The millionaire had taken half a dozen of them, including Wood, with him on a North Queensland holiday. Despite his rich appearances, Rivkin was deep in debt at the time to Rodney Adler’s FAI Insurance.

Rivkin’s “lucky break” came with the fire at the Offset Alpine printing plant in Sydney’s Silverwater after the Christmas Eve staff barbeque. The fire totally destroyed the premises, owned by Rivkin. Police found no evidence of accelerant or any sign the fire had been deliberately lit. The plant had been insured at replacement value ($53.2 million), more than three times its purchase price, and the share price skyrocketed from 70 cents to $1.85. As Kerry Packer (former owner of Offset Alpine) commented later, it was “a very good fire” for Rivkin.

A rising tide lifts all boats and Wood did well out of the affair also. With Rene’s advice, he successfully wooed his old girlfriend again and spent a second successive Christmas with the Byrne family. Once again the cautious Caroline insisted he be tested for HIV. The couple spent this New Year’s house-sitting the Rivkin mansion in Bellevue Hill while Rene and his wife were out celebrating.

Throughout 1994, Wood wrote a series of tacky love letters which were eventually published by Woman’s Day in 1998. In the letters, Wood described himself as “the packet of Tim Tams that never runs out” and called her “Miss All-Time Greatest and Most Beautiful Woman”. Rivkin also said he knew much Wood loved her. According to Rivkin, Wood “called her ‘Chicky Babes’ and she called him ‘Gordy’”.

Between them, Gordy and Chicky Babes had eased into the moneyed society of Eastern Sydney. Byrne resumed her modelling career and represented Australia in the Miss Asia-Pacific Quest in Manila. Meanwhile with the help of Rivkin, Wood was making his own foray into big business. He carried a share price pager and bought into the rejuvenated Offset Alpine at preferential rates. Wood told Byrne’s father the fire was a set-up and also had inside information the insurers would pay up, causing the share price to rise again.

He also convinced Rivkin to put down a ten percent deposit on a $270,000 apartment in Potts Point. He persuaded Tony Byrne (Caroline’s father) to lend him $150,000 with Rivkin then to provide the balance. But the affair went sour when Rivkin thought he was stumping up the 150 grand with Byrne providing the balance. This was an important distinction because if Wood got behind in payments it was the second lender who would lose out. Rivkin blamed Byrne who wanted nothing further to do with the deal and the whole thing fell through.

Eventually Wood persuaded Rivkin to provide sole finance so he would not lose his $27,000 deposit plus stamp duty. But Wood was now getting in very deep with Rivkin. The stockbroker was driven to despair as ASX investigators began to circle round him. Caroline worried that the failed deal with her father had influenced his mood. Several times Byrne complained to her father that Rivkin was trying to drive a wedge between the pair and said Rene wouldn’t come to the wedding if they got married. Rivkin was also worried by Wood’s possible indiscretion if his murky financial affairs were ever a subject of investigation.

In May 1995, both Rivkin and Wood received Section 19 notices from the Australian Securities Commission (ASC) requiring them to present for questioning. While Rivkin was grilled in depth, Wood’s interview was over within minutes. He claimed to know nothing of Rivkin’s Swiss shares and said nothing about the Offset Alpine fire being a set-up. Meanwhile Caroline was depressed and seeing a psychiatrist. She gave up her modelling and did not enjoy her new job in sales at a modelling agency. On Wednesday 7 June 1995, Wood rang her boss to say he was taking her to a specialist and she would not be in work the following day. This was the last day of her life.

Wood later told police Caroline was asleep at 1pm when he returned from work to take her to lunch. He said he noted five or six Rohypnol sleeping tablets missing from the bathroom, though an autopsy found no trace of the drug in her body. Wood left alone after ten minutes and met two friends for lunch. Wood never got to eat his meal. At the table, Rivkin phoned him and ordered him to pick him up immediately. However two Watson’s Bay restaurateurs would later claim they saw Wood and Byrne in their area at 1pm and again at 3pm.

Wood then told police he picked up his boss and his lunch partner and drove them to Rivkin’s office. The other man was former Labor powerbroker Graham Richardson. Wood then said he got a bite to eat and went home briefly at 4pm to find Caroline had left the house. He came home again at 7pm and fell asleep in front of the TV. He says he awoke at 12.40am concerned for Caroline’s whereabouts. Their car was gone so he took one of Rivkin’s and drove to the Byrne residence where there was no sign of the car. He then drove to Watson’s Bay where he spotted their car parked in a lane. The spot was near The Gap, a well-known Sydney cliffside suicide location.

He told police he ran towards the nearby clifftops calling out his girlfriend’s name. Earlier two fishermen who passed by Caroline’s car testified they heard a female piercing scream shortly after 11pm. They then said they saw Wood come by, asking if they had seen a young woman. When they told him about the scream, Wood said to them “Oh no, she’s done it, she’s done it” and ran off. Their timing of the incident does not align with Wood’s.

Tony Byrne received a call from Wood saying his daughter was missing. Byrne said he took the call around 1.30am. Wood picked up Byrne and Caroline’s brother and the three men returned to the cliff top using the fishermen’s torch as a searchlight. Wood thought he could see shoes at the bottom of a cliff. They called police who couldn’t immediately confirm the find. Eventually a rescue team spotted her body from a helicopter. Caroline was found nine to ten metres out from a thirty-metre drop. Her skull was shattered after she landed on a rock crevasse.

The death was initially written down as suicide. There was family history as her mother had also suicided in 1991 with an overdose of sleeping tablets after botched breast surgery. Caroline herself had taken an overdose that year. There was also the evidence she was due to see a psychiatrist on the day of her death. But there were also problems with this conclusion.

Firstly there was the conflicting testimony of the two restaurateurs who saw Wood and Byrne together near the site of her death that afternoon. Wood’s ability to spot his girlfriend’s body with a feeble torch was also noted as was the fact that he actually found her car at all in such a remote location. Wood would later claim he found the car due to a “spiritual communication” he had with Caroline.

Police also noted to the coroner how far out her body was from the cliff. Given that there was a fence on the clifftop, it would have taken a long jump of more than 2.5 metres in an onshore wind to land in that unlikely position. Sydney University experiments later concluded it was impossible for her to have jumped so far and they concluded that she was thrown by two men.

Wood told Rivkin the news of her death at 7.30am. Rivkin asked “who killed her?” and Wood replied that it was a suicide. In a police interview with Wood, they made the assertion that on the day of her death she had caught Wood and Rivkin in the act of sex. Wood said this was “absolute lies”. When the suggestion was reported by the Sydney Morning Herald and Channel Seven, Rivkin initially won $150,000 of damages from Seven. But when a jury dismissed libel against the Herald, the case ended up on appeal before the High Court which ordered a partial retrial. Rivkin finally dropped the action in 2004 after the extent of his Swiss frauds were exposed.

Three years after her death, the NSW coroner reopened the inquest into Caroline Byrne’s death. In a preliminary hearing Wood revealed his side of the story. At this point Neil Chenoweth revealed in the Financial Review that Byrne’s death occurred a day after Wood and Rivkin had been questioned by the ASC over a $40 million slush fund linked to politicians. Police canvassed the idea she was murdered because of what she knew about a financial deal. Days later Rivkin attacked Byrne’s character in a newspaper article saying she was “not a little angel” and was having an affair at the time of her death.

In 2001 Rivkin told Nine’s 60 Minutes he thought Wood might have been on the clifftop with her but suggested it was still more likely to have been an accident. He was also unable to shed light on Wood’s alibi that the two men were together that lunchtime. Graham Richardson also denied he was lunching with Rivkin that day and his diary had him elsewhere at the time.

Meanwhile Wood was trying to rebuild his life abroad out of sight of the media. He landed a $400,000 a year job at NatWest bank in the UK complete with a fictitious work history as a financial adviser. Wood got the job through an accountant named Glyn Harris who would not reveal who had recommended the Australian for the job. Wood got the reputation as a “shitkicker” and a “real bastard” and bought a chalet in the French Alps for one million pounds. But when he flew home to Australia for the millennium celebrations he was found out by the media forcing him to flee the country.

Detectives were closing in Wood after his Richardson alibi was found to be false. He disappeared in 2000. In 2004, the NSW Director of Public Prosecutions recommended that Gordon Wood be charged for murder. The Australian newspaper tracked him down to the French ski resort of Mageve. He was arrested in 2006 and extradited to Australia where he was formally charged with the murder of 24 year old Caroline Byrne. The trial is now expected to last three to four months.

the deconstruction of Sydney Harbour

This picture is a text. It tells a story of an Australian culture. One that is here and one that is gone. But to understand the story, we must first understand the cultures.

Raymond Williams tells us that culture is ordinary. He also sees it as complicated. But culture, like the picture, is a text. And Saussure provides us the textual means for an interpretation of that culture: the study of the sign. Semiotics provides us with a means of taking the temperature of the culture. The word culture itself is abstract, and packed of meaning, Culture,from French "colere", via German "Kultur", offers us a blueprint of what we do best as a group. And in the world of the sign, when the signifiers point to their significants we have a simple compass by which can circumnavigate all the denotations and connotations denote and connote at will with nothing more in the armoury than an icon, a symbol or an index. But the question is: how do we use it? What is this picture any good for?

What if, instead of examining the picture as signifier, we think of it as the signified? If instead of it being a vehicle to something else, we examine why it is a vehicle of meaning at all. And perhaps we can uncover a whole daisy chain of signifiers that point back to an antecedent signifier. Let’s ask then what backward connotations can we come up with? It shouldn’t be difficult to determine. People construct meanings using signifiers from an already existing structure over which individuals have no control. Why might this picture exist at all? Metaphor is the substitution of one signifier for another. A good starting point might be to substitute the picture with a code. it is a victorious parade of culture based on the white conquest of Australia. Here the denotation is easy enough. It’s a sunny day on Port Jackson. No humans can be seen directly, but it can safely assumed that they are present. They are the wealthy of Sydney, at play. They are busily bustling past the centrepiece de resistance, The Opera House. The "The Eighth Wonder" (the opera of that name tells the story of the building) is all three types of signs at once; a connection to the land of Sydney, an iconic sail, and a symbol of Australia.

The land of Sydney is Port Jackson. It was the home of the Cadigal, whom the Europeans called the "Eora people" (which meant “from this place”.) Cook looked in here but didn’t land. Philip instinctively preferred it to Botany. And so Great Britain offloaded in Sydney, the first, the biggest and most important city in Australia. With this importance came wealth and wealth needs to service its vanity in many ways. One way is to buy a boat and another is to inspire a unique cultural identity. Sydney could afford lots of each. The paradigm chosen to represent this city’s homage to culture was the sail. The Opera House is Jorn Utzon’s breathtaking vision which conjoins Sydney Harbour with the sea. It was a metaphor for culture, but it was also metonymy for a ship. The lonely building almost yearns to be in the harbour itself. And of course as a perfect simulacrum of something that doesn’t exist, it is supremely postmodern.

Postmodernity is laced with irony as it is a concept that it posits a reality existing in a timeframe later than now as well as reminding us of a more stylised version of the past. The beautifully sad Opera House aches to be among the pleasure crafts, also but silently bears witness to the death of the Cadigal. The code (parole) of this picture might be applied differently but the message (langue) exists independently of the people in it. The paradox is that if culture is ordinary, it exists without people. Britannia no longer rules the waves. The sea will reclaim her own.