Digital Storytelling

As stories go, this post is unoriginal.

It is the re-production of an essay I had to come up with for a digital storytelling course I did at QUT a few weeks ago. I've decided to leave the references in, because a) I can't be bothered taking them out and b) maybe they might be of some use to people studying in the field. Feel free to mark me with a fail in comments.

To the rest of you, all I can say is, once upon a time...

Storytelling has long been part of the human condition. According to the Storytelling Encyclopaedia, it is one of our primary defining characteristics as human beings. The oldest tale known in any language is the Epic of Gilgamesh which tells the story of the fifth king of Uruk who lived over four thousand years ago. In the skilful hands of Sumerian storytellers, the real Gilgamesh was transformed into a tragic fictional hero and a template for Oedipus, Lear and Hamlet. Such stories were passed on from generation to generation using whatever media was available at the time: speech, stone tablets, papyrus, paper, broadcasting and cinema. Now with the rise of digital media and the Internet, it is only natural that storytelling should colonise that environment too. Here it goes by the name of Digital Storytelling (hereafter DST). This essay offers a definition of DST and looks at how it developed and how it can be taught. There are four case studies; the BBC Capture Wales project, the Youth Internet Radio Network (Australia) project, the Kelvin Grove Urban Village project (also in Australia) and South Africa’s Sonke Gender Justice Network. The essay will conclude with a brief discussion of how DST fits in the innovation commons and discuss what role it has to play in fostering democracy in a global environment.

Democracy is about people and all people love a story. Everyone is drawn to storytelling because it is a process that involves relationships. The storyteller’s goal is to speak with directness and intimacy to build a bridge between the story and the audience (Leeming 1997, 14). Storytellers need tools to build those bridges. The visionary Marshall McLuhan (1969) said all tools were merely “extensions of man (sic)” but not everyone has access to the same level of extensions. The scant availability of storytelling tools meant that mass media dominated the form in McLuhan’s twentieth century global village. That traditional one-way broadcasting model is now breaking down as complex peer-to-peer communications network patterns begin to emerge (Hartley & McWilliam 2009, 3). Futurists such as John Perry Barlow (n.d) and Nicholas Negroponte (1995) offered utopian visions of possibilities in the digital realm. Whereas in space no one can hear you scream, in cyberspace there is a “resuscitation of voice” (Notley & Tacchi 2005, 75). The wildfire success of Youtube showed the potential of the Internet as an audio-visual medium while the extraordinary uptake of social networks demonstrated that broad hunger for human contact has not diminished (Hartley & McWilliam 2009, 4). The need for relationship bridges is constant – and DST is a powerful tool to build those bridges. Digital stories are “mini-movies” combining the age old art of storytelling with the use of modern technology (King 2008, 4). DST liberates its users from mass media’s practical monopoly on the mediated representations of the collective production of identity (Notley & Tacchi 2005, 75). It is a meta-tool using a variety of sub-tools including cameras, scanners, digital voice recorders, soundtracks, the Internet and computers with film editing programs (Lovett 2007, 76). And along with other similar textual systems such as blogs, it challenges the traditional distinction between professional and amateur production and radically changes the nature of the producer / consumer relationship (Hartley & McWilliam 2009, 4).

It is hardly surprising then, that many people see it as a powerful pedagogic tool. According to Cazden et al, the fundamental purpose of education is to ensure that students benefit from learning in ways that allow them to participate fully in public and community life (quoted in Fletcher & Cambre 2009, 110). The use of DST tools and techniques promotes learning which posits students as constructive agents, building rather passively receiving knowledge (Sadik 2008, 488). It has been used for numerous functions including preserving community and personal histories, engaging and motivating learners, creating digital portfolios, celebrating achievements and events, and presenting factual information (King 2008, 4). Because of its ability to construct a strong personal sense of place, identity and history (Burgess et al 2006, 9), it has also been enthusiastically embraced by students. What teachers and students alike are finding out is its remarkable adaptability and effectiveness in any capacity where there is a human story to tell.

One of the important markers for the development of DST was the BBC Capture Wales project. The project emerged in 2001 out of a partnership between BBC Wales and Cardiff University by adapting the folk culture model associated with the Berkeley Center for Digital Storytelling. The project amplified ordinary Welsh voices (Burgess 2006, 1) in an attempt to recreate the “bardic function” for the digital age. The bardic function originally described how television spoke for the culture at large and all the individually differentiated people within it (Fiske & Hartley 2003, 64). DST replicates this function by allowing a “performance of the self in the context of power” (Hartley & McWilliam 2009. 19). While the BBC stressed that each story was as individual as the storyteller, it imposed a strict uniform construction. They had to contain 250 words, a dozen or so pictures and be of two minutes length (BBC Wales 2009). These creative limits were crucial to its success. As the BBC stated “it’s the observation of that form which gives the thing its elegance (BBC Wales 2009). The constraints produced hundreds of offbeat and quirky stories of love, family and home in which the past and the present inform each other (Fletcher & Cambre 2009, 114). Capture Wales works in two ways. It is both an inter-cultural communication using a universal channel to tap into the world of the imagination, and it is also a mediated community that operates in a geographical space forming a community network (Burgess 2006). It has also become an important template for DST in the western world.

The BBC techniques were closely studied by Brisbane’s Queensland University of Technology (QUT). When QUT moved into its new campus at inner suburban Kelvin Grove, it partnered with the Queensland State Government to capture the rich mix of indigenous, military and educational history of the area it was about to inhabit (Klaebe & Foth 2006, 1). They launched a public history project about the Kelvin Grove Urban Village (KGUV) using themes of urban regeneration. The project’s groundbreaking ethnographic active research methodology added an action component of a community of contributors to the traditional practice of informed reflection (Klaebe 2006, 6). The four year Sharing Stories DST project aimed to capture local voices with a view to “inform, educate and entertain” (Klaebe 2006, 7). But as well as being a history lesson, the project also had a grand forward-looking aim. It wanted to “re-invigorate a more contemporary interpretation of community values in a networked society and enhance the capacity to interpret and engage with our urban environment by raising awareness of the socio-cultural background and heritage of new community members” (Klaebe & Foth 2005, 1). The success of the project’s digital stories depended on the Internet, that ultimate “network of networks” which Lessig called “one of the most important innovation commons that we have ever known” (Lessig 2005, 55). Klaebe and Foth cited Horrigan’s optimism about the great potential of the Internet and new media for government service delivery and community building in urban developments (Klaebe & Foth 2005, 2). The ulterior goal of the KGUV is to show that inner-city densification is the solution to South East Queensland’s urban sprawl. It is the mix of urban studies, public history and the connective potential of new media that gives Sharing Stories its explanatory power.

But connectivity alone does not ensure community. Another QUT sponsored project examined an application of DST out on the technology-poor edges of society. The Youth Internet Radio Network (YIRN) project was designed as an open access architecture platform to promote the propagation of digital content among young and marginalised Queenslanders. DST has a natural affinity with radio; they are both means to connect with, and imaginatively create, communities (Hartley & Notley 2005, 554). The researchers used the digital stories of the “peripheral” young people at YIRN not only to understand the different ways they constructed cultural affiliation, but also to explore their feelings of isolation, boredom and lack of opportunities (Notley & Tacchi 2005, 79). The subjects used their digital stories to subvert and challenge the way society saw them. The production of creative content on the Internet had the potential to bring these disaffected youths in from the periphery. It was the creation of “DIY Citizenship”, an outlet for people who are inventing senses of themselves and who seek a voice and form through which to narrate their lives (Hartley 2005, 112). DIY Citizenship is formed from everyday practices such as chat, photosharing and storytelling which constitute the threads from which the social fabric is knit (Burgess et al 2006, 11). This concept fits in with the founding vision of DST pioneer Joe Lambert - co-founder of Berkeley’s Center for Digital Storytelling (CDS) - who said that DST was rooted fundamentally in notions of democratised culture that was the hallmark of the folk activist traditions of the 1960s (Lambert 2002, 2). YIRN’s overall yearning, following the CDS, was appropriately grand. It was no less than an “exploration of the emancipatory and democratising potential of new media technologies” (Notley & Tacchi 2005, 75).

The CDS, meanwhile, is expanding its own role in democratising culture globally. It partners with organisations in 34 countries to develop DST initiatives tailored to meet local needs (Storycentre.org n.d.). One such organisation is South Africa’s Sonke Gender Justice Network. South Africa has the largest number of people in the world living with HIV, with an estimated six million people living with the disease (Sonke Gender Justice Network n.d., 1). The network aims to change gender relations which it sees as a “fundamental force” driving the rapid spread of HIV (Sonke Gender Justice Network n.d. 1). The network believes that giving a voice to those affected by violence and HIV is a crucial success factor in overcoming the problem. It partnered with CDS to produce the Silence Speaks initiative to train staff and conduct DST workshops in poor urban areas of Johannesburg and Cape Town (Storycentre.org n.d.). Organisers said the everyday stories that emerge from these workshops “tend to be in short supply” while media representations that do make news segments tend to encourage sensationalism and pity (Storycentre.org n.d.). For the Sonke project, DST not only offered a peer-to-peer communication channel to overcome the negative stereotyping of mass media, but was also a tool to foster agency among people that might otherwise be considered victims (Lundby 2008, 7). And while Lambert warns that DST does not function explicitly as therapy, he says we must recognise the emotional and spiritual consequence of its work (Lambert 2002, 95). The story, as the Sonke Project shows, is a safe place to be heard.

But if more outlier groups such as the “peripheral youth” of YIRN and the women of Sonke are to succeed with DST, then access to the technology is important. It must be as free as possible, but not be too easy. An important finding from the experience of a State Library of Victoria children’s program is that digital media which are rich in hands-on processes often deliver better outcomes than those that “do the hard work for you” (Curry 2008, 11). Creativity needs to be allied to hard work to achieve satisfactory outcomes and more research work needs to be done to understand the complex relationship between the process and outcomes of digital media. The role of storytellers themselves as cultural consumers of texts needs attention also. Following De Certeau, Jenkins framed consumers as textual poachers who integrate media representation of their favoured texts within their own social experience (Jenkins 2006, 39). While this is an alluring metaphor, it ignores the fact that real life poaching is illegal activity. Poachers can now become gamekeepers using Creative Commons licences legal under Australian law (Hartley & Notley 2005 559-560). Creative Commons allows users to access wide-ranging material without content creators having to give up copyright (Fitzgerald et al 2007, 6). Like any open source system, the Creative Commons attempts to act as a “viral spiral” – it just needs to become more common. Anderson (1991) described how newspapers acted as a glue defining “a national imagining” during the golden age of print capitalism, and now the distributed network environment of the Internet and the innovation commons is providing a new “global imagining”. But like the national one it is replacing, global imagining must be informed by human relationships. DST can play a large and powerful role in bridging the audiences with the stories of this brave new world.

references:

Anderson, B., 1991, Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism (revised Ed). London: Verso
Barlow, J., n.d. “The economy of ideas”, Wired, accessed 07/07/2009
BBC Wales 2009, A Guide to Digital Storytelling, accessed 07/07/2009
Burgess, J, 2006, “Hearing ordinary voice: Cultural studies, vernacular creativity and digital storytelling”, Continuum: Journal of media and cultural studies, 2 (20).
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Civic Engagement: A Cultural Citizenship View of New Media”, Proceedings
Communications Policy & Research Forum, Sydney.
Curry H., 2008, “Fossickers and freeloaders: the dance with digital media” FYI: the Journal for the School Information Professional; v.12 n.4 p.10-13; Spring 2008.
Fitzgerald, B., Bledsoe, E., and J Coates, 2007, Unlocking the potential through creative commons: An industry engagement and action agenda, ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation
Christopher, F. and Cambre, C., 2009, “Digital Storytelling and Implicated Scholarship in the Classroom”, Journal of Canadian Studies; Winter 2009; 43, 1
Fiske, J. and Hartley, J., 2003, Reading Television, London: Routledge
Hartley, J., (ed.) 2005, Creative Industries, Malden MA: Blackwell
Hartley, J., and McWilliam, K. (eds.) 2009, Story circle: Digital storytelling around the world, Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell
Hartley, J. and Notley, T. 2005 “User-led Content and Self-creating Communities: History Repeating Itself? Understanding "Internet Radio" in the Context of the Development of Radio” in Radio in the World: Radio Conference 2005; Healy, S., Berryman, B., Goodman, D., (eds.) Melbourne: RMIT Publishing
Jenkins, H., 2009, Fans, bloggers and gamers: Exploring participatory culture, New York: New York University Press
King L., 2008 “Digital storytelling: stories create a storm”, FYI: the Journal for the School Information Professional, v.12 n.4 p.4-6; Spring 2008
Klaebe, H., 2006, “Speculation and Innovation: applying practice led research in the creative industries” in Proceedings Speculation and Innovation: applying practice led research in the creative industries, Vella, R. (ed.) Queensland University of Technology.
Klaebe, H. and Foth, M., 2006 “Capturing Community Memory with Oral History and New Media: The Sharing Stories Project” in Proceedings 3rd International Conference of the Community Informatics Research Network (CIRN), Prato, Italy
Lambert, J., 2002, Digital storytelling: Capturing lives, creating community, 2nd edition, Berkeley: Digital Diner Press
Leeming, D., (ed.) 1997, Storytelling Encyclopaedia, Phoenix: Oryx Press
Lessig, L., 2005, “Commons on the wires” in Creative Industries, Hartley, J. (ed.) Malden MA: Blackwell
Lovett, N., 2007, “Family as Helpers: Using Digital Storytelling to Explore the Help-seeking Behaviour of Adolescent Girls” in Generations of Relationships and Relationships across Generations: Conference Proceedings; the Combined 7th Annual Conference of the Australian Psychological Society's Psychology of Relationships Interest Group and International Association for Relationship Research Mini-conference;. Pearce, Z. (ed). Melbourne: Australian Psychological Society
Lundby, K., (ed.) 2008, Digital storytelling, mediatised stories, New York: Peter Lang
McLuhan, M., 1969 (1964), Understanding media: The extensions of man, London: Sphere
Negroponte, N., 1995, Being Digital, New York: Vintage
Notley, T. and Tacchi, J. 2005, Online Youth Networks: Researching the Experiences of 'Peripheral' Young People in Using New Media Tools for Creative Participation and Representation Journal of Community, Citizen’s and Third Sector Media and Communication Issue 1 February 2005
Sadik, A., 2008, “Digital storytelling: a meaningful technology-integrated approach for engaged student learning”, Educational Technology, Research and Development; Aug 2008; 56, 4
Sonke Gender Justice Network, n.d., Sonder Gender Justice: Capacity Statement, downloaded 15/07/2009
Storycentre.org, n.d. Case Study: Sonke Gender Justice Network: Exploring Links Between Gender, Violence, and HIV and AIDS in South Africa accessed 15/07/2009

Russian human rights activist Natalia Estemirova murdered in Chechnya

Another human rights campaigner has been silenced in the time-honoured Russian fashion as Natalia Estemirova was abducted and then murdered in Chechnya. Four men seized the 50 year old Estemirova as she left for work in the capital Grozny yesterday morning. She shouted out "I'm being kidnapped” before the men dragged her into a waiting vehicle. Her body was found later that day dumped on a main road near the village of Gazi-Yurt in the neighbouring federal republic of Ingushetia. She had been shot twice in the head and chest.

Estemirova was an acknowledged expert on abuses in Chechnya where the long separatist war has morphed into a brutal counter-insurgency campaign. She documented hundreds of cases of torture carried out by Chechen security forces. In recent years, she focused on kidnappings that she believed had been carried out under the authority of the Chechen president, Ramzan Kadyrov. The 32 year old Kadyrov inherited Chechnya on the death of his father and runs the state as a personal fiefdom with the complete backing of the Kremlin.

Estemirova has had several run-ins with Kadyrov. In March 2008, after Estemirova criticised a law requiring Chechen women to wear head scarves, Kadyrov summoned her to his office and threatened her. Estemirova was so frightened she went abroad for several months. But she eventually felt compelled to return to fulfill her fate. Estemirova’s human rights group employers Memorial were quick to blame Kadyrov for her murder. Chairman Oleg Orlov put a statement on the Memorial's website where he said Ramzan had already threatened and insulted her and considered her a personal enemy. "I know, I am sure of it, who is guilty for the murder of Natalia,” Orlov said. “His name is Ramzan Kadyrov."

Kadyrov was also implicated in the murder of Estemirova’s close friend, the journalist and writer Anna Politkovskaya. Politkovskaya was an implacable critic of Russia’s policy in Chechnya and was shot dead outside her Moscow apartment in 2006. When asked whether he was responsible for that death, Kadyrov’s response was “I don’t kill women”.

No one has ever been charged for Politkovskaya’s murder and anyone who has tried to subsequently seek justice in the matter has been gunned down. Her lawyer Stanislav Markelov was shot dead in Moscow in January this year. A young investigative journalist named Anastasia Barburova was also killed when she tried to apprehend Markelov’s murderer. In a chilling postscript to the double murder, a party of Russian nationalists brought champagne to the murder scene the following day to celebrate the “elimination” of their enemies.

Russia continues to be one of the most dangerous places in the world for investigative campaigners, particularly journalists. In 2008 two died in Russia’s troubled southern republics (Dagestan and Ingushetia). The Kremlin has been of little help in solving any of the murders. Prosecutor-General Yuri Chaika blamed Politkovskaya’s death on people “trying to destabilise Russia from abroad”. The administration’s most implacable enemy, the newspaper Novaya Gazeta (co-founded by Mikhail Gorbachev) has been worst affected with four journalists murdered in eight years. The Reporters sans Frontieres Russia report for 2008 found that, independent newspapers shut down and journalists were imprisoned for attending opposition rallies. In a frightening reminder of Soviet practices, at least two reporters were forcibly sent to psychiatric hospitals for criticising local authorities.

Russian President Dmitri Medvedev has piously claimed to be “outraged” by the latest murder in Chechnya and has ordered an investigation. But given that Russian leaders have made similar unfulfilled promises in the past, there is little reason to believe this one will lead to anything substantial. Especially as it is extremely likely that the killers are either acting under the orders of the Russian Government or at the very least, have the tacit approval of Putin to remove unwanted critics of the administration. Russia remains a place where political murders are committed with impunity.

Newsy.com's report on the killing:

Meddling in internal affairs: Rebiya Kadeer, China and the MIFF

On the afternoon of 5 July internal affairs in the far north west of China turned violent and ugly. Thousands of angry citizens had taken to the streets of Urumqi, Xinjiang to protest the killing of two Uyghur workers in Guangdong. Suddenly there was a flashpoint and matters turned violent. Fights led to gunfire. Eventually 184 people died, and another 1,600 were injured. Both Han and Uyghur alike suffered amid claim and counter-claim whose fault it was. It was the worst ethnic riot in China in decades.

China was anxious to blame the separatist movement for the riot. “The violence was masterminded by the separatist World Uyghur Congress led by Rebiya Kadeer”, exclaimed the official state mouthpiece Xinhua. Though their nominated culprit was inconveniently located in North America at the time, the regime seemed happier to scapegoat her rather than scrutinise the role played by the thousands of soldiers it had sent in to the city.

China also scolded Muslim Turkey for expressing its anger over events affecting their ethnic Turkic brothers and sisters in Xinjiang. They were denounced, alongside all other foreign critics, in the time-honoured fashion of “meddling in internal affairs”.

Perhaps China now considers Melbourne as an internal affair. Last week it demanded the Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) censor a film about Kadeer. On Friday, Chinese consular officials telephoned Festival director Richard Moore and asked him to justify its inclusion of a film about the “criminal” Rebiya Kadeer in the festival. China urged Moore to withdraw the documentary "Ten Conditions of Love" by Melbourne film-maker Jeff Daniels about the exiled Uyghur.

Moore was nonplussed. “I didn't have any reason to justify the inclusion of the film in the festival,” the MIFF director told the consulate. Nor did he need one. The film will be rightly shown - its cinematic merit is justified on the subject matter alone. Melbourne will get the opportunity to see the documentary in a fortnight. Kadeer will be here herself to talk about it.

She currently lives in Washington State where the vastness of the Pacific separates her from China. Xinjiang is further away still. Rebiya Kadeer was a successful businesswoman and an activist for a people that were being swamped in their homeland by Han Chinese. In the 1990s she founded and directed a large trading company in north-western China. She was not only a champion for the rights of Uyghurs but became one of the most prominent women’s rights advocate in all of China. These activities came to an abrupt halt in August 1999. She was arrested and charged with harming national security. In a charge that sounds as disturbingly vague as that of Stern Hu affair, Kadeer was thought to be “providing secret information to foreigners”. Thumbing their nose at America, Chinese authorities waited until she was about to meet a group of US congressional staff on an official visit to China before making the arrest.

She was found guilty and got eight years. It was reduced to seven in 2004.

In 2005 she was released as part of a deal with the US on the grounds of “medical treatment”. Kadeer has now recovered. But the medical treatment that Kadeer really wants is the healing of her oppressed people.

The Christian Science Monitor interviewed Kadeer last week. She told them the riot wasn’t her fault. The Uyghurs were provoked by the police, she said. She also thought that plain clothed agents launched the riot as a false flag operation to give China the excuse to justify a larger crackdown. Maybe or maybe not - but it is no less plausible than saying she launched it.

Kadeer knows the old Chinese Communist state was bad. But the current model is worse: the Party has shred the last vestige of political philosophy in a naked grab to maintain power. It now relies on nationalism for fuel. China aggressively promotes its vision of Greater China and uses western mediatisation methods to enforce the vision on the homeland.

The most important skill China learned from the West was how to control your image. This is a primary consideration of politicians the world over. Former British civil servant Christopher Foster told in 2006 how media pressures had changed New Labour’s Cabinet meetings. The meetings were shorter and were no longer about decision making but instead reviewing the media impact of decisions already made.

The Chinese have also made a decision. Xinjiang is an internal province. But to the World Uyghur Congress the area is East Turkistan. With an articulate spokesperson like Kadeer on the loose, China knew it would be difficult to sell its message. Kadeer was careful never to attack the regime (she left that to her husband Sidik Rouzi). Instead her tactic was to get under their skin realising the Chinese were not leaving East Turkestan any time soon.

“I am extremely grateful for both Han and Uyghurs that protected each other in the riots,” she told CSM last week. “That should be the true relationship we should have with each other. But this Chinese government has created such a tragic situation, that it is not happening, generally, as it could.”

She is right. As state security, the Chinese Government were ultimately responsible for the deaths in Urumqi. This outcome is something they may repent in leisure. They may not be able to control ethnic tensions they have created even with their media sophistication.

The MIFF deserve praise for not buckling to the pressure. Kadeer is an important voice that speaks for more than just Uyghur values.

“Under Mao, during the Cultural Revolution, Uyghurs were badly treated.” Rebiya said. “But [at least] we could speak our language.”

Coagh and the Twelfth: A snapshot of Orangeism in Northern Ireland

One of Brisbane’s lesser known organisations is the “Somme Memorial – Brisbane” which meets every month in the city. It is a meeting of Orangemen, a Protestant fraternal order which takes its name from the Dutch-born British King William III. The Brisbane marchers gather at the Anzac War Memorial to commemorate the thousands of Ulster casualties in one of the First World War’s bloodiest battles. By wearing the sash and playing the fife, they follow a tradition that has been active in Australia since the earliest colonial days.

A sense of history is crucial to Orangeism and this applies as much to its farthest flung followers in the Sunshine State as much as does to its heartland in Northern Ireland. Brother William Wright, the former Grand Master of Australia, was in Northern Ireland to celebrate the Orange Order’s biggest day. This Sunday was 12 July, the 319th anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne which effectively destroyed King James II’s hopes of wresting away William III’s stranglehold on the British Crown. But because the battle took place north of Dublin and because James was a Catholic the event is primarily commemorated as a victory of the Protestant supremacy in Ireland.

12 July is a public holiday in Northern Ireland and a flashpoint for the tenuous relations between the religions in the province. This was true before the Troubles started and as events in Belfast showed is still true today after they have supposedly ended.

Outside Belfest, the event passed off peacefully. On Sunday, Brother Wright joined 10,000 people who lined the streets of the tiny market town of Coagh, Co Tyrone for the Orange Day parade. It was the first time in seven years the Twelfth of July parade had come to Coagh. It was the largest in the county with fifty-four bands, and an Ulster-Scots concert swelling the village that normally has 500 inhabitants.

It was a welcome change of fortune of a town that has seen its fair share of murder during the 30 year war. All sides suffered. Even in the midsixties, Coagh gave the province an ominous hint of what was to follow. In the winter of 1965, Northern Irish Prime Minister Terence O’Neill was keen to establish détente with the regime in Dublin. He caused consternation among hardline Protestants when he invited Taoiseach Sean Lemass to Stormont (among those offended was a rising star named Ian Paisley who threw snowballs at the visiting dignitary’s car). When Unionist Mid Ulster MP George Forrest addressed the Coagh 12 July march in 1967 he was jeered as he tried to pay tribute to O’Neill. The indignant Forrest threatened the crowd with his chair only to be dragged off the platform, kicked and left unconscious.

When full-scale violence did erupt across the province a couple of years later, it wasn’t long in coming to Coagh. In 1972 the Official IRA had declared a ceasefire but continued its attacks against the British for another 12 months in what it justified as “defensive actions”. In October that year, two of its veteran members John Pat Mullan and Hugh Herron were stopped at a British Army checkpoint in Ardboe near Coagh and arrested. According to IRA reports, the RUC advised the Army that the men were considered dangerous and should be “eliminated”. Herron was shot dead at point blank range and Mullan was shot while trying to escape.

The war mostly passed Coagh by for the next 17 years. On 7 March 1989 the peace was rudely shattered. Motor mechanic Leslie Dallas was at work in his garage in town talking to two men. Dallas was the closest thing the town had to a celebrity. He was a former European hot rod champion and still an active participant in the local hot rod circuit. His two visitors were a 72 year old pensioner and a 61 year retiree. The two men were chatting to Dallas about his second place finish in Ballymena that weekend. Their conversation was put to an end by a motorised IRA unit. They shot dead all three. The attack while shocking, wasn’t completely random. According to Brendan O’Brien’s "The Long War", Dallas had a shady alter ego and was a senior leader in the Protestant paramilitary group the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF). The two pensioners were collateral damage.

The UVF retaliated six months later. The Battery Bar is a quiet pub a few miles out of Coagh at Moortown. It was the haunt of IRA member Liam Ryan. A UVF force ambushed the pub on 29 November and shot dead Ryan. Again there was collateral damage. A Catholic civilian Michael Devlin was standing too close to Ryan and he died of gunshot wounds.

More bloodshed followed in 1991. Three IRA members “on active service” (as a pro-IRA site describes it) were driving towards town when it was ambushed by an undercover British Army SAS operation. By then the technology, surveillance and undercover operations of the secret 14 Intelligence Company known as “The Det” (for detachment) was seriously undermining IRA capability. The SAS were expecting the IRA men in Coagh. They fired 200 rounds of ammunition into the car. All three died.

Incidents such as Coagh were instrumental in bringing the IRA to the negotiating table in the mid 1990s. The result was the Good Friday Agreement and the remarkable sight of a snowball-less Ian Paisley sitting down in Government with IRA members. But while political progress has been astounding, it is taking longer to bring the community out of the years of hate. The Orange Order with its strident triumphalism remains a lightning rod for Catholic rage. Coagh knows that only too well. Its Orange Hall was badly burned in an attack in November last year.

But cultural change is following political change. There are attempts to rebrand the marches as a tourist friendly “Orangefest”. Drew Nelson of the Orange Order of Ireland told The Independent that they wanted to turn it into a community festival. “"We went to Notting Hill Carnival, to learn from that,” he said.

If I presume he is not referring to the riots, I am being overly cynical. Writing in the Belfast Telegraph yesterday Ed Curran called Orangefest a step in the right direction. He asked who would have believed five years ago the EasyJet inflight magazine would promote the 12th as one of the Belfast’s attractions. “We need to leave behind the Julys of confrontation,” he wrote. “And, if we can, perhaps future Twelfths will be promoted in not just one airline’s travel guide but in many other international tourist brochures.”

Reclaiming Uluru from the Climb: This is Tjukurpa

Creative Commons Photo by Philipp Roth

“You shouldn’t climb. It’s not the real thing about this place. The real thing is listening to everything” Kunmanara, Traditional Owner.

Life might not be about choices but moments often are. I was at Uluru in 2002 and I had the choice to climb up or walk around. I made the decision to go up because I knew I could walk around any time. I did this despite knowing that Uluru is sacred to the Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara peoples. They do not want people to climb it as plenty of signs around the base advise. The rock has spiritual significance as the traditional route of the ancestral Mala men on their arrival at Uluru. But they left the ultimate decision to me, the tourist, and expected me to make an informed decision. They asked me - out of education and understanding – to choose to respect their law and culture by not climbing. But despite my education and understanding, I flouted the owners’ wishes and climbed the damn thing anyway. I did it because I could. What happens when the owner of anything says to you “I don’t want you to do this but I won’t stop you”? Maybe you think what are the consequences if you do it. And if the consequences don’t seem bad you’ll do it.

So I did it. The climb is dangerous. But you cannot say you haven’t been warned. It is a long and strenuous climb that requires much patience and care especially on the way down when gravity does not work in your favour. The hardest part is right at the end when the chains run out and there is still (or was at least in 2002) ten to twenty metres to get to the bottom. The distance is big enough that if you fell, you probably survive but you’d be a mess. 30 people have died over the years. You had to inch out your way down by picking out each carved out rock. You were watching out for wind gusts. But not for a minute, did I expect the owners to make it any safer. If I did die, it would be entirely my own fault. The worst thing was I’d be making things hard on the Anangu. They have a traditional duty to safeguard visitors to their land and feel great sadness when a person dies or is hurt. The view of Centralia from the top was great but not sensational enough to have earned it.

Now I’ve done it I’ve no intention of ever doing it again. But it is not like the Haj, something you have to do once in your life. Let’s assume I didn’t have the choice in the first place. I might be pissed off a little I couldn’t climb but would not break the rules to do it. Others too might grumble, but I don’t think many people would break the law to climb it. The few that did would simply prove the efficacy of the law. It certainly wouldn’t have stopped many from coming out here to admire this astonishing monolith. There is also a good environmental case to be made that erosion from tourist damage is changing the face of the rock. Uluru is made from sedimentary rock called arkose sandstone which has been eroding for 300 million years. So that means it is bloody resistant. But yet again human impact, this time through weathering and urine, is starting to take its toll.

Given that the law to ban outright seems useful on a number of levels, the question is what would be lost if no-one could climb Uluru? Would people stop coming? More than 300,000 people visit Uluru national park each year. It is the prospect of collapse in these numbers that saw the Prime Minister fall short of supporting the move to ban climbing. The land formerly known as Ayers Rock has been owned by the Pitjantjatjara people since the Hawke Government gave it back in 1985. But the sneaky colonials put in a Hong Kong clause and insisted they give a 99 lease back to the National Parks and Wildlife agency.

The agency combines with the Uluru–Kata Tjuta Board of Management to run the national park that combines Uluru and Kata Tjuta (formerly the Olgas). Two thirds of the board are Anangu and the other third are government. The government has the last word. Last week, a draft management plan for the Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park issued in both the names of the National Parks and board issued its vision for Uluru and Kata Tjuta for the next ten years. They explained what cultural behaviour was driving the changes. “The Uluru–Kata Tjuta landscape is and will always be a significant place of knowledge and learning. All the plants, animals, rocks, and waterholes contain important information about life and living here now and for all time. Anangu grandparents and grandchildren will always gain their knowledge from this landscape. They will live in it in the proper way. This is Tjukurpa.”

The Anangu phrase Tjukurpa includes many complex but complementary concepts including those of time, religion, morality, the environment and knowledge. There is no single word in English that adequately conveys the complexity of that meaning. It has been distilled over thousands of years into an intimate relationship with the land and its features. It is not the 'Dreamtime' - there is no such word in Anangu language.

(Photo by Michael Pickard) It is Tjukurpa that drives the development and interpretation of Park policy. Tjukurpa prescribes the nature of the relationships between those responsible for the associated landscape, their obligations, and the obligations of those who visit that land. The Draft Plan for 2009-2019 tackled a swag of issues that currently or might affect the National Park. The issues would be informed by the Tjukurpa notions of integrity, respect, honesty, trust, sharing, learning, and working together as equals.

The most contentious item was the suggestion to shut down the climb before the plan expired. A survey of visitors showed that although one in three make the climb, the vast majority of visitors (98 per cent) would return even if it was banned. The Director of National Parks Peter Cochrane said the Uluru area was confronting the impacts of climate change and invasive species. But he was also interested in tourists. “We also need to think beyond the global economic crisis to longer term visitor travel patterns - who are our next generation of visitors? What experiences are they are seeking and what can we offer?” he asked. So the question for Cochrane was if they do close the climb for safety, environmental and cultural reasons what alternative experiences should we offer. He asked for feedback to the plan by 4 September.

The problem was that the proposal immediately became politicised. When Federal Minister Peter Garrett supported it, the Opposition rushed out to condemn it. On Wednesday Garrett’s shadow Greg Hunt issued a media release saying “Rudd must not close Uluru climb." Visitors from around Australia and the world would be stopped from "completing the majestic and exhilarating journey,” said Hunt. And why was that a problem, necessarily? Because it comes at a time, he said, when “Australia’s tourism industry is facing massive challenges from the global financial crisis”. Hunt made a ludicrous claim: “Big Brother was coming to Uluru to slam the gate closed on an Australian tourism icon, the climb.”

Hunt recovered enough dignity to call Uluru an Indigenous treasure but said the climb was a matter of enabling “informed consent”. The Shadow Minister got his own consent with a Government climbdown two days later. On Friday he was able to gleefully report this as “Rudd Over-Rules (sic) Garrett on Uluru Climb”. Hunt is wrong about Uluru as is Rudd in rising to the bait. Consent to climb relies precisely on being ill-informed.

The simplest solution is to ban it. Not only would culture, safety and environmental issues disappear in an instance, but the economic issue is also furphy - the recession has nothing to do with it. Given the survey results and creative talents of the Australian tourism industry, it should be possible to answer “will 300,000 still keep coming?” in the positive without the lure of the climb. Don’t make us wait till 2084 for Tjukurpa. The tourist industry has ten years to work out a plan. Get cracking.

Parallel importation of books: Cultural benefit vs consumer cost

Big changes are afoot in Australia’s lucrative book buying business. Australians currently spend $2.5 billion each year on new books at retail book chains, independent bookstores and increasingly, online and the sale of these books is governed by the Copyright Act 1968. The federal government is looking to change the law to remove the concept of “parallel importation” which was added to the act in 1991. This refers to importation of products containing copyright material made legitimately in the country of manufacture. The concept is used in the world of books, CDs, computer software and computer games but after further changes to the law in 1998 (sound recordings) and 2003 (computer games) it now only applies to books in Australia. It restricts the parallel importation of books which protects authors who own Australian rights from competition from foreign editions of that title.

Local writers, on the whole, are happy with the copyright restrictions. Author Tim Winton calls copyright “the single most important industrial fact in a writer's life, the civilising influence of a culture upon a market”. As well as giving authors a number of exclusive rights over their original material, copyright has a territorial provision. This gives creators the right to earn a premium for sales in their home country while only earning “export royalties” for overseas sales. The catch is that the Australian creator needs an Australian publisher to earn the higher royalty otherwise any local earnings is considered export. The dilemma for authors is whether to forego these local earnings in order to gain access to the greater reach provided by a London or New York publisher. Up to the 1980s, most authors went with overseas publishers.

In 1991 the Hawke Government came up with a novel solution to this problem to promote the local industry. It brought in the 30 day rule. This is “use it or lose it” legislation that allow Australian publishers 30 days to publish a version of any book that has been released anywhere in the world. If the book is published within 30 days, all booksellers are obliged to purchase the publication from the Australian publisher and cannot import the book from an overseas publisher. However this nifty solution did not envisage how the Internet would muddy the waters. Overseas online books are not subject to the order and do not incur GST at the point of sale.

The Council of Australian Governments' Meeting of 3 July 2008 discussed the import monopoly issue under the larger aegis of competition reform. The issue under discussion was whether the 30 day rule results in higher prices and less availability of books to Australian consumers. In November then Assistant Treasurer Chris Bowen requested the Productivity Commission to examine the provisions of the Act. The government called for submissions from the public and there were 272 responses.

Most authors saw the changes as “cultural suicide” and were bitterly opposed to any watering down of the 30 day rule. Peter Carey’s view was typical. “As long as we have a territorial copyright our publishers have a commercial argument to support Australian literature,” he wrote to the commission. “They will battle for the sake of our readers and our writers, even if their owners have no personal commitment to the strange loves and needs of Australian readers, or the cultural integrity and future of the Australian nation.”

Local publishers such as Allen & Unwin and McGraw-Hill are also keen to see the status quo preserved. They both say the local market is strong and competitive and this is due to the stability provided by the existing territorial copyright arrangements. Allen & Unwin said there is a cultural benefit also with 14,000 Australian books authored every year.

But the big retailers say the publishers are “showing disdain for the Australian consumer”. The so-called Coalition for Cheaper Books represent Dymocks, Coles and Woolworths. The effect of the 30 day rule, they say, is higher prices, less availability and the concentration of market power in the hands of publishers. They believe the removal of the rule will lead to lower prices and quicker availability. The problem has been brought to a head as the retailers lose $100 million of business each year to Amazon which did not exist when the 1991 policy was formulated.

The Australian Competition & Consumer Commission (ACCC) took a minimalist intervention stance in their submission. It questions whether there is quantifiable data that supports the societal benefit of the 30 day rule. “Given that the parallel import restrictions amount to a restriction on competition,” it says, “the onus of demonstrating such benefits should be on those advocating for their retention.” The ACCC said the removal of similar laws in New Zealand in 1998 resulted in lower or stable prices, improvements in supply and service and product differentiation. It also had no effect on the local creative book industry.

But although the Australian rule is contrived, it seems to work. While the Internet components need to be addressed, the question is whether we want to risk the destruction of a large and vibrant local industry in name of making books a dollar or two cheaper. The Productivity Commission sensed that concern when they released their draft findings to the Government in March. The main recommendation is that publishers still be protected from parallel importation, but only for the first 12 months.

The publishers and authors are angry with this outcome. As author Kate Grenville noted cultural externalities can’t be quantified in a way that will have any traction in a debate about economics. However, Andrew Norton sees it as largely a win for them “as most of the profits from a new release will be made in the first 12 months”. We shall soon see. The Commission has delivered its final report on 30 June (not yet in the public domain). The changes, whatever they will be, should make their way in Australian law later this year. The economic benefits might kick in immediately, but the cultural consequences will take a lot longer to be felt.

UPDATE (Tuesday 14 July): The Productivity Commission has released its final report. It has gone further than the interim version and called for the 30 rule to be scrapped. Quote: "From the available quantitative and qualitative evidence, the Commission has concluded that the PIRs [parallel import restrictions] place upward pressure on book prices and that, at times, the price effect is likely to be substantial."

Dear John: A letter to Pollyanna Hartigan

Dear John, On a long driving journey on Friday I was listening to a Radio National discussion about the efficacy of feedback. There was much feedback on feedback within the hour. What struck me most was what people thought the ratio of positive to negative feedback needed to be. One expert said that for every piece of criticism, you have to give 11 items of praise to compensate for the damage caused. Though others say three is sufficient, you strike me as feeling a bit vulnerable. So before I criticise your recent hand grenade speech to the Press Club I’ll go with 11 compliments.

Here are eleven reasons why I like your speech.

1. You are the head of the largest non-government media organisation in Australia. As such you have a powerful voice and one that deserves an honest hearing when used.

2. I still pay to read your newspapers so I'm interested in your philosophy.

3. For all its faults and shrieking opinion, I find The Australian’s news content usually authoritative.

4. While I’m not a huge fan of your online content I like how you don’t break stories into separate pages to inflate page impressions like "Firefox" Fairfax

5. I love your vigorous work leading the Right to Know Coalition. Censorship, almost without exception, is insidious and evil. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.

6. I like the fact you still spend money on large newsrooms. Long may that continue.

7. I like your national approach to stories. The commercial television stations are locked in parochial city rivalries. The Australian is one of the few organs that consistently takes a broader stance.

8 I agree with three of the elements in how you defined good journalism: "something that was original, highly relevant and genuinely useful to your audience". I didn’t like the fourth one: exclusivity. Nor was I totally happy you chose a diet as the best example of news that met all four of your criteria, but I’m dealing with that.

9 I also agree your berating journalists for being negative is timely. There is a future and it needs to be carved out not thrown out. News Limited has a talented pool of people that can help show the world that journalism is a valuable part of our society. A bit of optimism doesn't hurt.

10 I am also pleased to hear that newspaper ad revenues are growing in Australia. Long may it remain a profitable business. I’d hate to have to do the Sodoku online with my cuppa.

11 so I thank you for opening this up for discussion.

Call me Pollyanna, you said. Are you sure? Pollyannaism describes the tendency “for people to agree with positive statements describing themselves”. Not sure how well they deal with the negative.

But sure, be Pollyanna as you desire. Like the character in the Eleanor Porter novel you want your optimism to be infectious. You like to see the best in things. Can you accept, therefore, that some things could be better?

Let me start with the extraordinary sight of Fox News asking their (and your) boss about his opinion on the News of the World wire-tap story. Murdoch hid behind the likelihood that it could become a legal matter and refused to comment. Though the interviewer somewhat ruined the effect by becoming sycophantic when Murdoch wouldn’t answer, it was a surprisingly ballsy question for a usually undemanding and compliant network.

Because if the charges against the News of the World are true, then this is a significant ethical failure on behalf of News Ltd. None of these phonetapping targets passed any “public interest test” in destroying the privacy of their conversation. The effect of this behaviour will be twofold: Firstly it will further increase public cynicism and disillusionment and hardens the view that journalism is an amoral and a despised occupation. Secondly, it loses political trust as it shows how media companies will take increasingly desperate measures to generate sensational and salacious content.

But John, I'm sure you know these risks already. Some of the stuff you put out under such brands as the Daily Telegraph (Sydney) and news.com.au are as desperate as they come and a disservice to the craft. Your way is to “manage” tastelessness and turn it into just another aggressive marketing strategy. And anyway, let’s face it: NOTW is not your problem.

What is your problem is the need to keep Australian eyeballs and influence at News Ltd in sufficient numbers to counteract the inevitable migration to digital content. Overall sales are flat, you concede, and as you say yourself the online reader generates about 10 percent of the revenue you can make from a newspaper reader. So you’ll have to find eleven times as many people online to make a buck. Well, go find them - I just gave you eleven compliments with which to start.

The eyeballs are certainly out there and with them, the influence. Appetite for news is not on the wane. Google thought it was being attacked in the half hour after Michael Jackson died. You said yourself you had bumper editions after the bushfires. International audiences now available to you increase your potential reach from 20 million to several billion. Advertisers will eventually pay big dollars if they think they can get access to this level of influence.

But of course, you decide that three billion is not worth aiming for with free content. You think it might be time to make people pay up front. With this approach, those numbers are back around the 20 million reach again (probably even a lot less than that) but that might be enough scraps to survive on. So you throw a fence around your “premium content”.

Let me remind you of the decision by Encyclopaedia Britannica to turn down Bill Gates' offer to build a CD of their product because they thought it might interfere with their book sales. Instead Gates teamed up with Encarta and blew Britannica away with a $49 CD. Wikipedia then went a step further and put it all on the Net for free. The premium of the data was no longer in the price but in the use. The sooner News Ltd understands this, the less it will be like Encyclopaedia Britannica unable to understand why their fence fell down.

And then there's the journalism. I mentioned earlier I did not like exclusivity among your four goals. While the scoop has some merit as a competitive tool, its effect in the commercial world is to hide information from competitors (and sometimes readers) in an attempt to reveal earliest. It is this inherent rottenness that can infect the “chase of the story” at the expense of the overall truth. In the speedy world of internet connectedness, the fact that you come out a minute or two before the opposition is irrelevant.

Because information is not like a service. A service is exhausted on consumption. Information, like the recipes in the diet you so gladly defined as news, is reusable. The blogs reuse your news because they can. Taking that ability away won’t make News Ltd any better. One of the blogs you mentioned at the shorter end of the long tail was Crikey which does has a subscriber model. I subscribe to it more because of its packaging (a useful daily email wrap) than its decision to put content behind a paywall.

And then there's the bloggers. As the world moves away from being a market economy to being a networked economy, you should be looking for allies. Treating bloggers with contempt is not a wise move and tarring them all with the one dismissive brush is a bit silly. You are setting yourself up as a judge of intellectual value, which itself could be construed as being barely discernable from massive ignorance.

Instead of attacking them, why aren’t you asking for their assistance? Look at the sorts of things bloggers do well such as conversation, debate, and creating social networks as well as the things they don’t do so well (rounds, international news and straight reportage). Make sure your skilled journalists can out-blog the bloggers. You say citizen journalists don’t have the resources to bring us reliable news yet you ask for people to send in their photos and videos all the time. News Ltd needs to understand that the roles of producers and consumers is becoming increasingly complicated and interconnected in the digital economy.

Yes, amateur journalism is capable of trivialising and even corrupting serious debate but so is professional journalism. I’d even argue corruption is more of an issue in the professional field. Phone-tapping is much more capable of causing democracy to degenerate into mob rule than the opinions of bloggers, however hyperventilated some of them might be.

I do like your “future world view [where] good journalists will be very well paid, valued by their readers, and the envy of their colleagues.” But even here, I somehow think the manager in you will always begrudge those pay increases.

Anyway Mr Pollyanna, never mind the bloggers and the low paid journos. News Ltd has more to worry about from Google - and more to learn too. “Do what you do best, and link to the rest” is a philosophy News should cherish not criticise. What is needed is imagination to design new ways of connecting ideas and news in a distributed environment. Otherwise, you’ll eventually be left behind. And no-one will miss you.

By the way, if you want an example of a story that meets all of your criteria, try this one at EngageMedia about the Indonesian Government banning Al Jazeera from showing a Melbourne film makers documentary about West Papua. Its even got a local angle.

Bush Telegraphy

I’m back in Brisbane after a tiring nine hour drive the full length of the Warrego Highway. My nine day stint at the Western Times came to an end yesterday. Conveniently, the weekly edition arrived in Charleville on my last day and it was good to see the paper I put together wherever I went around town. The front page with my lead story and the photos I took stared at me from obvious places such as the Western Times office and the newsagent. But I also saw copies at a café, the petrol station and even the bakery. And when I went into the Hotel Corones for a farewell drink last night, a punter sat next to me engrossed in the paper. I resisted the temptation to ask him what he thought of it.

I was happy enough with it, though it wasn’t error free. I got through Super Tuesday when I put the paper together with the help of the sub-editor in Chinchilla. This week’s paper was 24 pages thanks to additional advertising so I had to find more articles to fill than the previous week’s 20-pager. As the day wore on, I would get messages such as “we need more for page nine” or “page 17 is looking a bit thin” and I would scurry away trying to find more articles or better still more photos (they chew up more space). A couple of photos accidentally snuck in that had already been used the previous week. But that wasn’t the worst of it.

The permanent journalist at Charleville returned to the office yesterday and he told me about my issue’s biggest mistake. At a local council meeting yesterday morning, a councillor told him gleefully that I’d photo-captioned the wrong shire name for a local mayor. I had a story about Bruce Scott (not to be confused with the local federal MP of the same name) the mayor of Barcoo shire which is centred around Quilpie 200km west of Charleville.

Scott has a valid concern his remote area is about to miss out on the government's $250m regional broadband plan. I based a story around a press release and other information he provided to me. I even had time to send it back to him prior to publication and he was happy I had captured the nub of his issues. The problem was that I had second unrelated story about another local mayor. This one was about Jo Shepherd the mayor of the shire around Cunnamulla which known as Paroo. When it came to putting a caption for the accompanying photos, I confused my Barcoo with Paroo and Mr Scott scored the wrong mayoralty (Ms Shepherd I got right – they were both “Paroo Mayor”).

While I was berating myself for landing in the Barcoo-Paroo poo (luckily I had no further complicating story about Thargomindah’s Bulloo too), an older lady entered the office. She asked me whether I was responsible for the “way back when” piece. This is a regular segment and a piece of local history provided by the redoubtable George who is the local font of knowledge of Charleville antiquity and runs Historic House museum. Each week he sends in a story with an accompanying picture. This week had an old photo which George said was taken of the three Burns sisters in a makeshift raft during a flood in the 1940s. The older lady pointed to the photo and asked whether anyone checked George’s information. I told her that alas I had to assume that George knew what he was talking about as no one else did. She said they were just two sisters – and she should know because she was their cousin. She also said they were "Byrnes" not "Burns" and doubted the photo was taken in the 1940s. She didn’t know who the third girl was but left me under no illusions that regardless of George’s memory, the Western Times had failed in its duty by getting the information wrong. I was fiddling while Byrnes roamed.

The lady was right of course, though I’m not sure how I could have validated George’s information. But the lesson I learned was that the 2,500 readers of the Western Times take their local publication seriously. And mistakes or not, I really enjoyed being given the opportunity to put it together for them. There is something about working for a small town paper that is richly rewarding. On the way home to Brisbane today I dropped in on the boss at Chinchilla. He reckons he will have more work for me elsewhere before the year is out, probably a permanent role somewhere. I could end up working for him at St George or Roma or at any one of a half dozen papers out west. I don’t really mind where. I think I will learn much about journalism wherever the paper and reckon I will have a hoot of a time into the bargain - as long as I get the mayor's shire right. Bring on the bush.

Clement Wragge: Self-Confessed Rainmaker

Surely the strangest tourist attraction in Charleville are the two Vortex Rainmaking Guns in Graham Andrews Park just off the road to Cunnamulla. The story of why the guns are there relates back to the bizarre actions of an extraordinary meteorologist during the worst drought in Australian history. The so-called federation drought began in 1895 and lasted seven long years. It reached its devastating climax in 1902 when virtually all of NSW and Queensland was affected. Half the newly formed commonwealth’s sheep died as did two in five of all cattle. Graziers grieved as their parched topsoil turned to dust.

In NSW, the desperate State Government declared 26 February 1902 a day of “humiliation and prayer” for rain. Up in Queensland matters were just as bad, but one man in particular wasn’t prepared to settle for humiliation or prayer. He was the state's Chief Meteorologist Clement Lindley Wragge. Wragge didn't want to ask God's permission - it was his plan to make the rain himself. Wragge was a flamboyant man but no crank. He was a world renowned meteorologist who travelled widely and was extremely innovative.

It was his idea to give names to cyclones. He took great pleasure in naming storms for anything from mythological creatures to politicians who annoyed him. It was this latter habit that, while endearing, created many powerful enemies. It would eventually see him be overlooked to lead the new national weather bureau in 1908 despite the fact the bureau was his idea and he had by far the best credentials for the job.

Back in 1902, Wragge had weightier matters on his mind. Clement had been Queensland’s chief government meteorologist for fifteen years and the impact of the drought and finding ways of fixing it were a personal obsession. During a visit to the wine making region of northern Italy, he found out about a strange invention the grape-growers used to dispel damaging hailstorms: the amazing Stiger Vortex gun.

The apparently successful idea was the brainchild of Austrian inventor Albert Stiger. In the 1880s, Stiger constructed a four metre tall cannon which shot vertically into the air prevented the formation of hailstones. No one was entirely sure how. Some attributed it to the effect of the explosion while others said it was the vortex ring that rose from the cannon. Whatever it was, it worked and the hail fell as rain much to the delight of vineyard owners. Wragge was deeply impressed and immediately thought that Australia’s drought could also be ended by similar “explosions in the air”.

Wragge took Stiger’s design back to Brisbane and created his own guns. The weapons were 18 feet long and shaped like “conical candle snuffers”. The idea was to use a battery of guns to fire shells at clouds causing a vortex (an artificial whirlwind) which would release rain. Wragge already had a working relationship with Charleville council so the outback town seemed a logical place to conduct the experiment. The drought-suffering council was happy to oblige and raised public donations to help fund the mission. Wragge took ten of the candle-snuffing guns to Charleville and placed them at various locations across town. Then it was a case of waiting for a cloudy day.

The Charleville Bugle of 12 September 1902 described the anticipation:

Self-confessed rainmaker Clement Wragge, has arrived in Charleville to oversee the delivery of six massive Stiger Vortex cannons. Mr Wragge will begin rainmaking operations when suitable clouds gather above the township. At that time Mr Wragge will give the word for the cannons to fire rain producing gas into the atmosphere. "I feel sure he is our strongest hope for rain," town Alderman John Armstrong said.

But the Bugle also expressed its doubts. In an editorial it asked “will Charleville be the laughing stock or envy of the world?” It would be another two weeks before it could be answered. On 26 September, the cloud cover was satisfactory for the experiment. Wragge gave the signal to load and the guns exploded into life. A flask of gunpowder was emptied into each breach and the powder was detonated with a piece of blasting fuse. The guns banged away one after another till the powder was used up. The effect was noisy and spectacular but there was nothing by way of rain.

Undaunted, Wragge procured more gunpowder and launched more detonations. Again the clouds obstinately refused to offer rain and he abandoned the experiment. That night he gave a lecture to a packed hall and returned home to Brisbane the following day beaten but unbowed. He later tried similar experiments in Roma and Harrisville but they also failed. Worse still, some of the guns exploded when they fired, narrowly missing onlookers.

When Herr Stiger found out about Wragge’s experiments, he sent him a letter admonishing him for his foolishness in trying to make rain this way. The guns were only designed to dispel hail, he wrote, and not to force clouds to release rain.

People soon lost interest in Wragge’s idea as news of the failure spread. In any case the drought broke at the end of 1902 and the guns were no longer required. The ten Charleville guns were abandoned and left to rot until most of them became dilapidated and sold for scrap.

Today only two guns remain intact. They have been lovingly restored and given pride of place in Charleville’s biggest park. Wragge, meanwhile, quit his job the following year when his funding was decreased by the Commonwealth. Fuelled by bitterness that his talents were not recognised, Wragge eventually moved to New Zealand where he built an observatory. He died of a heart attack in December 1922 at the age of 70. The Vortex guns are a fitting monument to a bold experimenter for whom failure was always only a temporary obstacle. As a sign at the park reads, Wragge was "equal parts genius, eccentric and larrikin".

Harry Corones: Charleville visionary

There are several grand buildings lining Charleville’s Wills Street linking the railway station with the centre of town. But the most elegant building of them all is Charleville’s most famous pub, the 80 year old Hotel Corones. The hotel was completed in 1929 after five years of construction. The man who built it was the remarkable Greek immigrant Harry Corones.

Haralambos Corones was born in the village of Frylingianika, on the island of Kythera on 17 September 1883 to Panayiotis Coroneos, a fisherman, and his wife Stamatia. After he completed his military service in 1906 the family decided that given the lack of opportunity on the island that Harry would have to emigrate. His application to go to America was rejected for medical reasons so he decided to go to Australia as his mother had relatives in Brisbane.

Harry arrived in Sydney and got a job at an oyster saloon where he worked long hours and improved his English. He wanted to start a business on his own and decided on Charleville in remote south-west Queensland. There he found an empty cafe, owned by a Greek named Theo Comino, was for sale. In 1909 Harry Corones bought the cafe with a loan of £120 and set off for Charleville which would be his home for the rest of his life.

Charleville was a remote, hot, dry and dusty but thriving cattle country town with saw mills, a meatworks and a few other small factories. It was an important rail terminal, and a stopping point for bullock trains and camel caravans, as well as for the many drovers who were moving stock. His new cafe on Alfred Street needed much work, but Harry succeeded by offering good service, good food and warm hospitality.

The following year he bought a bigger cafe and met Paddy Cryan, a travelling brewery salesman from Brisbane. Paddy astutely recognised in Harry the qualities of a good hotel owner. He suggested that Harry should move into the hotel business and take on the lease of the vacant Hotel Charleville. Cryan assured him the brewery would finance the deal and train him in the business.. On 7 October 1912 Harry signed the lease on the hotel for five years at a rent of £ 6 per week. In June that year Harry also became a naturalised Australian citizen.

In 1914 he married and was forced to rebuild the hotel after it was destroyed by fire. The new hotel was bigger and more luxurious than its predecessor. However there were still some rough outback ways to deal with. Boundary rode their horses into the bar, and at times there would be almost as many horses there as people. Harry was forced to change the doors to make them too narrow for a horse and its rider to pass through.

Harry expanded his business interests to open a cafe and Charleville’s first cinema with an innovative generator and electric lighting. The Excelsior cinema at the rear of the Hotel showcased silent movies and vaudeville acts from Sydney and Brisbane.

By now Harry was not only a successful businessman but also a respected member of the community. He served on the board of the Charleville Hospital and was a member of the original committee of the Ambulance Centre and the Fire Brigade Board. He also became interested in Australia’s fledgling aviation industry as a way of ending Charleville’s remoteness.

When Sir Hudson Fysh and others foresight decided to form an airline, which they would name Qantas (Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Services), several of their meetings were held in the Charleville Hotel. Harry suggested they gave the Greek names Perseus, Pegasus, Atalanta, Hermes and Heppomenes to five of their first seven aircraft. When the company was launched in 1920 Corones was one of the original shareholders. Qantas’ first scheduled service was from Charleville to Cloncurry on 2 November 1922, and he sent picnic hampers out to the planes. For many years afterwards, Qantas international flights would stop in Charleville.

(Corones pictured left with commissioner WH Ryan.) With his lease on the Hotel Charleville due to expire in 1924, he began to make plans to build his own luxury hotel. He paid £50,000 to buy the ramshackle Norman Hotel, which stood a block south of the Hotel Charleville on the corner of Wills and Galatea Streets. He brought in architect William Hodgen to demolish the old building and put in its place the new Hotel Corones.

In 1929, after five years of planning and construction, the new hotel contained a lounge and writing room, a dining-room for a hundred and fifty people, a private and a public bar, a barber’s shop and a magnificent ballroom capable of seating three hundred and twenty people at a banquet. Upstairs were ornate bathrooms, 40 rooms and a private lounge. It was easily "the best equipped and most up-to-date hotel outside the metropolis".

This luxurious hotel immediately gained a widespread reputation for elegance, luxury and fine service. One of the earliest guests was the aviator Amy Johnson on her epic flight from Britain to Australia in 1930. She filled her hotel bath with twenty-four magnums of champagne which all the other guests later wanted to drink in her honour. Other early distinguished guests included Sir Charles Kingsford Smith, the Wright brothers, Nancy Bird and English singer Gracie Fields. Fields caused a sensation when, in Beatles Let it Be-style, she stood at the open windows and sang the song “Wish Me Luck As You Wave Me Goodbye” to a large crowd outside.

In World War II business boomed in Charleville with the establishment of an American Air Force Base in the new Charleville Hospital. Harry welcomed the troops and treated them with his usual exuberance and hospitality, holding dances in the hotel every night. One night a crowd in one of the rooms had become so rowdy that an American Air Force officer, driven to distraction by the noise, fired his revolver down the corridor to shut them up. It was the Americans who first began to call Harry “Poppa” and his wife Eftyhia “Nana”. From this time on they were both were known affectionately to all by these names.

Harry’s crowning glory was an MBE he received in 1965. In his later years, he lost his hearing and a large part of his eyesight. He died in March 1972 aged 88, still resident in the hotel that bore his name. A procession of townspeople accompanied his coffin to the local cemetery where he was buried. His wife died two years later. The Hotel Corones still stands as a memorial to the pair but eventually was sold by the Corones family. The building became dilapidated but was painstakingly restored after the disastrous floods of 1990 and was placed on the Heritage List in 1997. There are now daily tours through the Hotel Corones celebrating the grand vision of “the uncrowned king of the West”.

Fieldnotes: The fastest media anthropology in the west

My first week working in Charleville is coming to end and it’s been quite a ride. Tomorrow there are photographs to take of a double family celebration: a wedding followed by a catering-saving bride’s Mum’s sixtieth. Then there are the bowling and golf pages to fill with pics on Sunday - though I’ll come back to the golfing pics. There’s also a market to cover in Historic House tomorrow and someone is replacing the cricket nets at the Catholic School. Tonight was a night off at the Cosmos Centre night observatory with its new retracting roof where I saw the beautiful outback night sky. I also saw Saturn’s rings, Alpha Centauri’s twin stars, the Moon’s terminator, the Butterfly Cluster, and finally Jupiter rising, which for a while I thought had to be distant street lights. Even at the observatory, I couldn’t help myself and offered to come back and write a story about it. It was all in a weekend’s work for a temping journo at a weekly rural paper.

The Western Times is a good little paper that comes out each Thursday (recommended price $1) but it needs to be complete for the printers by Tuesday night. This Times employs only one journalist but that's ok - Charleville has lots of occupations where there is only one of you. I’m here for nine days and with a bit of help at the beginning and the end, it’s mostly my role to put together one and half newspapers over three cycles. Unfortunately, or perhaps deliberately, there's no editorial content on the website. My first two days here were spent completing this week’s paper. It was mostly the work of another blow-in, himself replacing the regular journo the week before. He left me Tuesday morning and it was a race against time for me to proof all the articles for the lovely sub-editor in Toowoomba and then match them for her with photos I hadn’t taken. But Patience was her middle name, she said, and we got there in the end. Because this edition passed through several hands, a few things fell through the cracks. The article about the upcoming bi-annual Hungerford Field Day was missing as the organisers politely reminded me yesterday. It will be in this week, I promise - as soon as I can figure out a way of avoiding saying Hungerford three times in the opening sentence.

A bigger problem was the missing Charleville golf notes. The golf correspondent had sent an email on Monday with the weekend results but it wasn’t picked up. Worse still, the golf photos did make the paper but had the wrong names captioned against them. This was NOT the President’s Cup, as the correspondent told me in no uncertain terms yesterday. I promised to put a grovelling apology in next week to save me from the wrath of the local Press Council. Mind you, I'm being very unfair - the lady is not the Golf Nazi I’m painting her out to be. After all, she did offer to take the photos herself for me this week, an offer I’ve gladly accepted.

That will be one less worry for my paper due to be finished on Tuesday. Of course, I’m exaggerating when I say it is mine. I don’t have to worry about the classifieds for starters – thanks to the wonderful divisions between newspaper church and state, filling the advertising side of the paper is not my problem. The wonderful Dearne runs the office like clockwork and I refer all the really hard questions such as “how much is a health and beauty notice?” to her.

All I have to worry about is the editorial side. Here I rely on a vast quarry of press releases, Google alerts and local correspondents to get me over the quandary of filling 15 pages of newsprint in a week. The network of unpaid local stringers is vital. The geographical reach of the Western Times is enormously vast. Centred on Charleville, it stretches out several hundred kilometres in every direction: south to Cunnamulla and the NSW border, east to Mitchell, north to Augathella and Barcaldine and west to Quilpie and the one (and several) horse stations beyond. Not sure about the Google alerts which are emailed daily (or can be read as RSS in real-ish time). Most of the alerts for “Charleville” refer to the town for which Cork-born Surveyor W.A.Tully named it. While I found lots of evidence that the bitter Irish recession is hurting industry in rural Cork, one of the few alerts for the Australian version was for my own blog entry of last night "Charleville on the Rocks”. The alert for “Blackall” had nothing for my town 250km north but did have several synonyms including the Blackall ranges in the Sunshine Coast and a Kiwi who writes a lot under the name of “Leigh Blackall”.

But while Mr Google wasn't much use, the press releases are a life saver. They are especially useful when they have accompanying pics or look like they’ve been written by ex-journos who know what is newsworthy. PR flaks vastly outnumber paid journalists so its pointless taking them on. All I have to be is the gatekeeper and choose the relevant ones. There are generic rural pages in the paper where I can just grab press releases whole and plonk them in without worrying about understanding the terrifying detail of why prickly acacia is an invasive weed or why 15-17 micron wool is Queensland’s finest. Yeah sure, the writers are taking a paid position on something, but it’s a position I don’t know enough about to refute. They also give me plenty of other material to work with and, more importantly, people to talk to. Press releases are life savers. After working a week here, I know I’ll never refer to PR as “the dark side” ever again (well, at least not for a few weeks).

The regular journo is back on Thursday so I’ll help him with a start on the following week’s paper before I make the long drive back to Brisbane on Friday. He is on holidays because he is moving house but has popped in a couple of times to check on my progress. He told me the biggest difficulty is sometimes finding suitable stories for the front and back pages and he has often been found in the office late on a Monday without a story for either page. So I was delighted to report to him yesterday that I think I’ve got both for this edition.

The front page was a present from Toowoomba. A journo at The Chronicle there (a fellow APN paper like the Western Times) rang me up asking if I’d heard about a Charleville exporter story. The owner claimed he might have to shut down his factory because the government won’t extend the stay for the many Vietnamese workers he employs on 457 visas. I hadn’t heard the story. To be fair to Google alerts, the ABC version of the story did eventually appear in my inbox later that day, but the moral appeared to be to listen to the local radio rather than watch Sky News in the motel.

My mate at The Chronicle wasn’t entirely sure if the exporter’s story was accurate and he was checking the Government’s side of the story. There was something in it for both of us and we both contacted the exporter. I went out in person and got photos which the Chronicler was delighted to use. In return I’m hoping to get his government quotes on Monday to round off my tale. Win-win, as they say in wankword bingo.

With the front page cooking nicely, it was time to turn the paper over in the oven. I was delighted to get a proper football story on the back page, though it had to be translated as “soccer” for local consumption. Turns out that Charleville has a new football sorry - soccer - field and it will be officially opened next weekend. And as a local council official and football aficionado told me, it will be unveiled with a Chelsea training camp for local kids. It’s not quite as exciting as the glossy flyer featuring goal-celebrating Chelsea stars would suggest. Michael Ballack, Ashley Cole and Nicolas Anelka won’t be appearing in the outback any time soon. But the coaching clinic is sponsored by the London outfit and one of the coaches has some role at Chelsea, apparently (though I’d never heard of him). Despite the tenuous connection, the temptation for a “Chelsea comes to Charleville” headline was almost irresistible until my council contact said that might be underwhelming for rugby-league mad locals. When he told the kids that “Chelsea was coming to Charleville”, he said the response he got was: “who is she?” Well, whoever she is, she’s staying on the back page and we got pics of the kids out playing kickabout on the new field today to prove it.

Photos are everything out here and there are more stories needing photographs than there are of photos needing accompanying stories. Take for instance the ones I took of the local senior citizens enjoying the “Healthy Ageing” program at the community centre earlier today. They will all be used in the paper with just a caption each and everyone will have a lovely time just looking at them. If there is a story here at all it was not fit for The Western Times, because it was about me blundering into the venue and being unable to announce who I was because the entertainment was singing karaoke at the time. I took the photos of a couple of dozen or so blinking ladies but was undone when the on-stage maestro decided I needed to be part of his act. The inestimably talented crooner Clayton Lee Travis demanded my presence on his makeshift stage during his Classic Country Morning Melody Show and shoved the mic in front of my nose. He insisted I sing the karaoke unaccompanied. I was horrified but he would not accept the excuse I could not sing to save myself. Up to that point, I had not really been listening to what song he was singing. But suddenly I had to belt out the last chorus to the Green Green Grass of Home to the increasingly bemused audience. After the torture was over, I avoided the stares of the poor old dears who had to listen to my decidedly un-dulcet tones and made a speedy retreat to the green, green grass of my home office. Easy listening, it wasn’t.

But I expect I will even recover from this, eventually. There is so much going on out in the West when you look carefully. And while I only have nine days to look this time, I’ll definitely be back for more, maybe in another outback town.