Life on three continents: Of Ahmadinejad, Peter Costello and Omar Bongo

I was determined to write about Gabon today. After all, the West African nation has installed a female president Rose Francine Rogombé as an interim replacement for Africa’s longest serving dictator Omar Bongo Ondimba. And I will write about Rogombé and Bongo later in this article. However, a couple of other matters in Iran and Australia have grabbed my more immediate attention.

The biggest news worldwide is the continuing fall-out from the Iran election. Mousavi supporters are continuing a violent protest against what they say was a rigged election. Yet while the uniformity of the results does look suspicious, the wide margin suggests that Ahmadinejad probably did win. As the BBC’s John Simpson said “This was not, of course, the result the West was hoping for.” Of course. But the West needs to come to some rapprochement with Ahmadinejad (and his boss the Ayatollah Khamenei) if they are to end Iran’s international isolation. As Simpson said, Obama and the EU will “surely prefer President Ahmadinejad, with his reputation tarnished” than support the riots that have crippled the streets of Tehran since the result was announced.

The communication of those riots also became the news of the day. The revolution may not be televised but it could very well be Twittered. Ahmadinejad claimed that Western media are behind the protests against him but the fact is that CNN simply weren’t interested. It was Twitter where the action was both in #CNNFail US and opposition Iran. After being silent for several hours, defeated leader Mir Hussein Mousavi’s twitterstream announced on Sunday morning “Dear Iranian People, Mousavi has not left you alone, he has been put under house arrest by Ministry of Intelligence.” It was confusingly later updated to say the BBC confirmed that Mousavi is NOT under house arrest. As of today the man is free and is on the way to a protest where he is asking his followers for calm.

Back in the more rarefied atmosphere of Australian federal politics, one man did exhibit a Zen-like calm today. Peter Costello finally hung up his Overshadow and walked off the Canberra stage today with his decision to retire from politics. The actual end date for the meddlesome member for Higgins is not immediate; it will be effective next election. But the news means that Malcolm Turnbull will now probably lead the Liberals to the next two elections. Former Treasurer Costello was relaxed and joking as he spoke at Parliament House today. When he said his announcement would be welcomed by “both sides of the dispatch box”, everyone laughed knowingly. It was funny because it was an obvious truth and one that could not be admitted beforehand by Costello, the Liberals or indeed, by Labor.

While I paused to consider what that breathtaking insouciance says about the Australian polity, I cast my eyes back to Gabon. Situated on Africa’s west coast between Cameroon and Congo Republic, Gabon doesn’t get much press in the west. Nothing much happens in this small country of 1.5 million. It had known only one leader for 41 years. Omar Bongo was Africa’s longest serving head of state but died of cancer in Spain last week aged 73.

No one was terribly upset by his death. The Kenyan Standard called the diminutive Bongo “a pint-sized dinosaur who stifled Gabon”. He stole millions from his country in offshore oil revenues. Allafrica.com called him “a notorious looter-for-life” who spent $800 million on his palace while the capital Libreville did without a major hospital. But Bongo got away with his crimes because he was protected by former colonial power France. Nicolas Sarkozy will be one of ten heads of state to attend his funeral on Thursday.

Meanwhile Rose Francine Rogombé was sworn in overnight as Gabon’s interim president. The 66 year old Rogombé is Gabon’s first female president. Rogombé is a member of the Gabonese Democratic Party (PDG) founded by Bongo, was speaker of Gabon’s senate and is a human rights lawyer. She has been given all an elected president’s powers apart from authority to dissolve parliament or to hold referendums. Rogombé will be a breath of fresh air for a nation that has been used to Bongo's absolute power for almost half a century. The downside is that Rogombé doesn't have much time to make an impression. She will be ineligible to contest the presidential poll for a permanent replacement constitutionally due in the next two months.

The longer-term prognosis is not good. The favourite for the election is Bongo’s son and Gabon's Defence Minister Ali Ben Bongo. The 50 year old was parachuted into the role in 1999 as a move to pre-empt coups against the dictator while grooming the son to succeed. Ben Bongo is of the same corrupt cut as his father and enjoys conspicuous spending. In 2003 executives of French oil company Elf paid the pair $16.7 million in bribes to allow them pillage the nation’s oil wealth. Meanwhile, his wife Inge has been busy buying a $25 million mansion in LA’s most exclusive neighbourhood Malibu. But watch out for Ali Ben to resuscitate the party motto that only a Bongo can unify the country’s ethnic groups.

With Omar Bongo’s death, the mantle for the longest serving dictator in Africa now passes on to the estimable Muamar Gaddafy. The Colonel launched his Libyan revolution on 1 September 1969 meaning he is almost 40 years in power. He is currently being feted in Italy by Silvio Berluscone who will probably appreciate Gaddafy’s request to meet 1,000 prominent Italian women on the trip. And new president Gabonese Rogombé would be impressed by his all female bodyguard. Yet the man himself is as inscrutable as ever. "There is no difference between men and women on a human level," he exclaimed. "God made men and women, we must respect the differences between the sexes."

Indian students in Australia asked to stop protests against racial violence

Indian community leaders in Australia have asked students protesting against the racial attacks to put an end to their street rallies, saying they have served their purpose. Yadu Singh, coordinator of the Indian Consul General's community committee on Indian students' issues, said all parties have agreed to stop the rallies which have been going for three days in Sydney’s Harris Park. “They are disrupting the normal life of the people in the suburbs,” he said.

The protests began in Melbourne when Indian students were incensed by a wave of violence including a screwdriver stabbing which left one man in hospital. Attacks on Indian students in Melbourne and Sydney have dominated Indian media headlines for almost three weeks. Though exact current figures are hard to come by, at least 11 Indians have been attacked or mugged in the past month. Some say the problem has been growing for several years. Bloomberg reports that violent crime against Indian students has risen by a third in the past year in the state of Victoria with 1,447 assaults in the 12 months to June 2008.

The problem has been brewing for several months. On 1 December 28 year old Sukhraj Singh was attacked and brutally beaten up at a Sunshine Indian grocery store where he was about to buy naan bread for a party. Singh was left in a coma for three weeks. He still suffers from dizziness, a lack of balance and anxiety. Five men of varying ethnic background have been charged with his beating and three have pleaded guilty. Singh says he still has no idea if the attack was racially motivated. Western districts police Commander Trevor Carter told The Herald-Sun violence was almost never racially related to race, but with the intention of stealing phones and wallets.

Carter’s statement is supported by the rationale offered by another Indian student who is the friend of a PhD candidate in sociology at the University of Adelaide. The sociologist blamed the increasing casualisation of the workforce in Australia and decreases in housing affordability. Jobs are less stable and people spend more time commuting between work and home. Overseas students on low-paying casual work are among the worst affected forced to travel longer distances, alone and late at night, all increasing their vulnerability to attack.

But another Melbourne victim, Sourabh Sharma, has no doubts racism is the underlying cause. Sourabh was coming home by train from a workshift at KFC when six young men boarded at Aircraft station, between Laverton and Hoppers Crossing. They attacked him, took his phone and bag and kicked him in the head and face and ribs, while laughing and dishing out racial abuse. The attackers got off at the next station. Sourabh was left unconscious and bleeding, with broken teeth and a fractured cheekbone.

The role of the Indian media has been crucial in stoking up reaction with its emotive and racially inspired descriptions of "curry bashing". Australian High Commissioner to India John McCarthy said their constant coverage of the issue had done inestimable damage to Indian-Australian relations. "India's voracious 24-hour cable news channels helped stoke the wave of fear and outrage among Indians in both countries,” he said. McCarthy said that although the news cycle was now coming to an end, negative perceptions of Australia would linger. “You can't have three weeks of that sort of television without the perception of Australia among Indians being damaged."

Australia stands to lose considerable income from the education industry if South Asians vote with their feet. 97,000 Indians are currently studying in Australia contributing $16 billion to the local economy. They make up 18 percent of the total student population second only to China. Almost half of these are in Victoria. The federal Government's $3.5 million campaign to attract more Indian students as a recession busting measure is now in serious jeopardy.

Belatedly, authorities have begun to act. In May Victoria launched a helpline to assist Indian attack victims. Last week Victorian Premier John Brumby announced new measures to improve safety at railway stations with a record of violent behaviour. The measures include additional patrols by uniform police, transit members, the dog squad, mounted branch and air-wing, as well as traffic operations and booze buses targeting trouble sports in and around Sunshine, St Albans, Thomastown and the Clayton and Dandenong areas.

This is a good start, but is it enough? Writing for The Times of India, Sarina Singh says perception appears to be the fundamental stumbling block. Singh is an Australian of Indian descent who says the federal government has acted too late to stop the rot. She agrees with Indian student groups who have requested a more multicultural police force. “As someone who has specialised in travel writing about the sub-continent,” she was "aware of the damage that can be done by inadvertent cultural misunderstanding.”

But this is not high on Australia’s priorities. Multiculturalism has been marginalised by federal governments for over a decade. As David Ingram wrote in New Matilda Australia has “dropped the ball on multiculturalism. He said the media and ethnic groups had become complacent because they thought the battle had been won. Then the antagonistic Howard Government removed the phrase from the national discourse replacing it with the more strident “new nationalism”.

Michael Clyne says the Rudd government has followed this “by a discourse of covert exclusion through invisibility.” Clyne says the Prime Minister is not on public record using the term multiculturalism or any synonym such as "cultural diversity" when referring to Australian society. Nor is there a minister for multicultural affairs. “Social inclusion ought to empower all sections of Australian society to fulfil their potential and to make their contribution to the nation from their background and experience,” says Clyne. We have some way to go to get there but multi-million dollar losses may concentrate the minds wonderfully.

Ahmadinejad wins Iranian presidential election

Early results from the Iranian presidential election are showing a comprehensive victory for incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad over Mir Hossein Mousavi. Turnout was heavy as 34 million people voted and the polls stayed open an extra four hours to cope with the traffic. With 80 percent of the vote counted, the election commission say Ahmadinejad leads by 65 to 32 percent. The other two candidates Mohsen Razai and Mehdi Karroubi have taken less than two percent of the vote.

Ahmadinejad needs 50 percent of the total to avoid a runoff election. His campaign manager said the distance between Ahmadinejad and his rivals is so great that “any doubts cast on this victory will be treated as a joke by the public." State news agency IRNA has declared Ahmadinejad the definite winner. "Doctor Ahmadinejad, by getting a majority of the votes, has become the definite winner of the 10th presidential election," it reported. According to Al Jazeera “he not only won, he blew Mousavi away."

But Ahmadinejad’s pro-reform rival Mousavi is not accepting the result and has asked Iran's supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, to intervene. Mousavi complained of a number of voting irregularities and is accusing the authorities of fraud. He told a news conference overnight that that he was the clear winner and won by a substantial margin. Hundreds of his supporters marched on the streets of Tehran chanting "If there is rigging, Iran will be like judgment day!" Meanwhile Global Voices claims several reformist sites such as Norooznews were “filtered” today in advance of the election and there were also reports of blocked phone and internet access.

Steve Clemons at The Washington Note says Ahmadinejad’s election results “are just about impossible to believe”. Clemons says he expected him to win but says this is unsubtle election rigging. “To be up front, I never thought that Mousavi's strategic policy course would differ substantively from his now unlikely predecessor Ahmadinejad,” he said. “But a change in optics and posture, which Mousavi would have offered, might have yielded significant new opportunities down the road.”

While even Clemons admits that such an outcome was not assured, what can be stated with certainty is this has been the most polarising election in the thirty year history of the Islamic Republic. Mir Hussein Mousavi’s appeal across the political boundaries made him a real threat to unseat Ahmadinejad. Mousavi launched a vigorous attack on the president’s record since his election victory in 2005. He accused Ahmadinejad of creating a culture of dictatorship and cronyism and of “encouraging” government departments and employees to vote for him.

Ahmadinejad hit back in a fiery presidential debate last week. In his 10-minute opening statement, he said his government had been the target of unprecedented slander from Mousavi and from previous Presidents Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Mohammad Khatami. He said these three had led Iran away from the path of the 1979 Islamic revolution, and were part of a current "that saw itself as the owner of the nation, of the revolution, rulers of the people.” Ahmadinejad claimed he was the first President since the revolution to have secured Iran against US intervention.

However, as German Spiegel Online International reminds us, the Iranian presidency is only the second most important position in the country. Iran is ruled under Velayat-e Faqih, or "Rule by the Supreme Jurist". The real power lies with the Supreme Jurist Ayatollah Khamenei. He decides foreign and nuclear policy and is effectively the president’s boss. It quotes Die Tageszeitung which stated: “The republican institutions in Iran serve to balance the interests of the regime's various fractions. However, the basis of the political system is the late Ayatollah Khomeini's doctrine. The 'Islamic Republic' is not just a flowery phrase."

Setanta’s little helper: The rise and fall of a satellite broadcaster

My initial reaction was to laugh on hearing Irish pay television operator Setanta was in trouble. After all “Satan-ta”, as I preferred to call them made me pay for sporting content I used to watch for free. In the late 1990s, football games such as Ireland’s world cup qualifiers and Old Firm derbies were suddenly hoovered up by a company that knew they had a captive audience of football-starved Irish and Scots in Australia and made them pay through the nose to watch them. They made a lot of money out of it as the only way of following the games was either Setanta’s way or the information superhighway. So when I heard they were on the verge of bankruptcy this week, my first reaction was “good riddance”. But I was wrong.

Setanta fill a niche. It’s not their fault that greedy game rights owners decided they could get better deals for their products with the television networks. The founders of Setanta realised long ago that there was a gap in the market that they could fill. Two young Dubliners in London, Michael O'Rourke and Leonard Ryan, got into the game back in 1990 when they filled a gap on British television. Ireland were playing a crucial game in their first World Cup against the Ruud Gullit-led Netherlands in which both sides needed to get a result.

But the thousands of Irish fans in England had no way of watching the game. England were in the same group and playing at the same time. Both the BBC and ITV refused to show Ireland’s game. So O’Rourke and Ryan bought the rights to the game cheaply and charged west London dance hall patrons £10 to watch. The pair broke even after 1,000 Irish fans turned up.

The experience made them realise there was money to be made from the Irish Diaspora. O’Rourke and Ryan spent the next 10 years slowly buying rights for sports fans living away from home, developing niche channels in Britain, America and Australia. Ryan called the early days a “fight to stay alive”. Their clients were Irish bars in San Francisco and Sydney to whom they sold All-Irelands, Six Nations rugby and Irish football internationals.

In 2005 they made their first major breakthrough in Britain by buying the rights to the Scottish Premier League. It then struck south of the border by launching a successful joint bid with ITV to get the rights to FA Cup matches and England internationals for four years from 2008, effectively knocking out all of the BBC’s live football in the process. Setanta also won a three-year contract to show live Premier League games. Suddenly Setanta was second only to Murdoch’s Sky Sports in the UK. By 2007 another Murdoch outlet, The Times, was saying the pair were worth £35m each.

But the Australian media magnate was not taking the cheeky Irish challenge for granted. Sky had the monopoly on the Premier League since its inception and did not take kindly to the EU competition ruling in 2006 that insisted it be broken up into six television packages and no one company could have all six. Setanta won two packages giving it the right to broadcast 46 live games every season. But when the packages were rebid earlier this year, Sky upped the ante and won five out of the six for 2010/2011 onwards. In the middle of a global recession, Setanta suddenly had just 23 expensive games a year and Sky had ensured the Irish company were left with the least attractive games. It also had 1.2 million customers when it needed 1.9 million to break even. It didn’t help Setanta were shortly due to pay the English Premier League £30m. They also missed a £3m payment to the Scottish Premier League last week. The knives were out.

On Wednesday Setanta were forced to post a message on its website telling customers that it is not accepting new customers as it "attempts to secure the future of the business". On the table are a range of options, including spinning off its profitable US and Irish subsidiaries. They need additional capital of about £100m to plug the funding gap. But its City backers including private equity houses Doughty Hanson and Balderton, have refused to make more than £50m available.

Setanta is now looking for other companies to buy into it and has held talks with BT and ESPN. At the moment, ESPN is officially ruling itself out as a potential buyer. However this is likely to just be a bargaining position as the American cash rich sportscaster is keen to expand its UK sports portfolio. ESPN also bid for the English Premier League rights beyond 2010 but lost out to Setanta and Sky. If Setanta does default, the Premier League rights will revert to the holders who will try to find other buyers. ESPN is owned by Disney which is an even larger media company than Murdoch’s. Their actions may be well worth watching in the next few weeks as the big guns fight over the likely corpse of an Irish player that got too big for its boots.

Hezbollah acknowledge defeat in Lebanon election

Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah has acknowledged his party lost the weekend parliamentary election in Lebanon to the ruling coalition. The Sunni dominated March 14 coalition, led by Saad Hariri won 71 seats in the 128-seat parliament, while the Hezbollah coalition known as March 8 took 57. Speaking on Monday after official results were released, Nasrallah congratulated the government and opposition in a televised address on Monday. "We accept the official results in a sporting spirit," he said.

The loss of the Hezbollah-led opposition has been attributed to the poor performance at the polls of the Free Patriotic Movement, its Christian ally. The Free Patriotic Movement, led by General Michel Aoun, did poorly in the polls winning just 27 seats. Aoun blamed the loss on the large numbers of overseas voters who were flown in to cast their votes. He also said he has "thousands of complaints" about the March 14 forces' "violations" of the election law. "Laws and traditions were violated.” He said. “Regretfully, Patriarch Sfeir's Saturday statement took a tragic tone about the dangers posing to Lebanon which caused fear among people.”

AP's Sam Ghattas also noted the key influence of Patriarch Nasrallah Sfeir, head of Lebanon’s Maronite Catholic. Sfeir issued a last-minute warning about Iranian influence claiming that the nation's character and its Arab identity were under threat. Ghattas said that fears of a Tehran-supported government helped splice Christian swing voters from their supposed Shiite allies to deliver election victory to March 14.

Saad Hariri, son of Rafiq Hariri who was assassinated in 2005, is now poised to follow in his father’s footsteps and become the new Prime Minister. The Arabic An Nahar newspaper said consultations will be launched next Friday 20 June (which is the day parliament term expires) to name the new prime minister who will form the next cabinet and appoint a new parliament speaker. Another newspaper As Safir claims Hezbollah has no objections to Hariri becoming leader if it can do a deal to nominate the speaker.

Hariri will be anxious to negotiate particularly given that Hezbollah still control a powerful private army. Hezbollah’s militia won support in Lebanon by driving the Israeli army out of the south of the country in 2000, ending an 18-year occupation. The March 14 group see the dismantling of this army as a key cornerstone to any lasting Lebanese peace. But his supporters are adamant he will not give them a veto over government policy. It was the veto negotiations which brought the government to a standstill last year and sparked clashes that killed at least 80 people. One Hariri spokesman said Hezbollah’s weapons are “a matter for national dialogue in order to progressively unify them under the army’s control.”

But even though doubts remain about Hezbollah’s willingness to disarm, the election result was well received by Beirut Stock Exchange. On Tuesday shares of Solidere, Lebanon's largest construction and development firm, rose 15 percent. Fadi Mubarak, head of treasury at Lebanon's Credit Bank, said the election’s effect was positive and people saw it as a good sign. Many Lebanese worried that a Hezbollah win would have alienated the country's main donors and left oil-rich Persian Gulf investors feeling skittish.

Hariri’s victory has also been greeted with relief in the West which fears Hezbollah’s terrorist links and Iranian support. But writing in The Irish Times, Michael Jansen says the election should not be read as a victory for Arab moderates. The political balance in the country remains almost the same as it was before the poll with the ruling coalition actually losing one seat since the previous election in 2005. Jansen quotes Paul Salem of the Carnegie Middle East Centre who said “nobody won and nobody lost”. Salem said Hezbollah might be comfortable with the outcome because Israel has been deprived of a pretext to attack Lebanon.

While it seems unlikely Hezbollah would be satisfied to remain perpetually in opposition, the role of Israel cannot be ignored. Later today Obama envoy George Mitchell will go to Lebanon after visits to Israel and Egypt and before heading on to Syria. There he will try and advance a political solution between Israel and its northern neighbours. Mitchell's trip was indicative of his overall approach - to talk to everyone and then "try to move the ball down the field one yard at a time."

State of Play: Will the Internet kill the newspaper movie?

I went to Stafford cinema last night to watch Russell Crowe’s journalist caper movie State of Play. It is always constructive to understand why a film gets its name and in this case it is not entirely obvious from the political thriller plot. As far as I can see, the State of Play is that of the newspaper industry itself hovering on the brink of total collapse as is its 20th century revenue model. The film is no less than an elegy for newspaper values and the movies written about them.

State of Play's Scottish filmmaker Kevin McDonald is a former journalist. He brings an attention to detail to the piece which transports a 2003 BBC miniseries across the pond and condenses six hours to two. In many ways a standard Hollywood thriller that tries too hard to please, McDonald’s movie still says something important about the parlous state of industrial journalism in the world. Set in a fictional large newsroom in Washington DC, the film has a lot to say about the challenges newsprint is facing to survive; both from the disappearing advertising imperative and the impact of the new practices of digital media.

The central character is Crowe’s Cal McAffrey, a scruffy “old-style” journalist who uses his wide-ranging connections to get to the salient facts of any case. McAffrey is sartorial challenged but is adept at working his sources and knowing what news angles to use in any given situation. His employers, the fictional Washington Globe, serves as a cipher for the Washington Post and the film’s attempt to uncover dirty political tricks is redolent of the Woodward/Bernstein story in All the Presidents’ Men. But while owners such as Katherine Graham (now dead) and Warren Buffett have respected the venerable nature of the Post, the fictional paper has been taken over by the money men who want to see quick returns on their investment. The new owners are more interested in profits than Pulitzers.

The paper’s editor is played in Graham-style by Helen Mirren. She has to juggle the demands of her new corporate bosses while still encouraging her reporters to get the story. Mirren is keen to support the paper’s online presence. In the film this is portrayed by Rachel McAdam’s character Della Frye – a silly name but a plausible nod to journalistic films of yesteryear such as The Front Page or His Girl Friday. But while Rosalind Russell happily called herself a reporter in the Billy Wilder classic, Frye calls herself a blogger. Defending her new recruit, the editor tells McAffrey why Frye is employed: "she's hungry, she's cheap, and she churns out copy every hour."

While the blogger is initially stereotyped as someone who does not do any fact checking, it quickly turns out that Ms Della Frye is a darn fine reporter who gets under McAffrey’s crusty skin. The old journo lays down the law. "This is a real story, not gossip” he warns her. However this idea that some stories are too deep for blogs is horseshit. As was this line from Frye when Crowe’s character asks her if she is going to blog about it. Her response: "When people read this story, they should have newsprint on their hands." Ah but why, Frye? Such sentimentality is touching except for the fact most people want to read the news for free and not have to wait around for the morning delivery.

But what happens when there is no more morning delivery? Roger Ebert wonders if this will be last newspaper movie with its “eerie valedictory feeling”. Perhaps optimistically Ebert answers his own question in the negative. It will survive, he says, because no matter what happens to newspapers, the newspaper movie is a durable genre. According to Ebert, shouting "stop the presses!" is ever so much more exciting than shouting "stop the upload!"

Yet it is likely the presses will stop regardless of what Hollywood wants. In some ways McDonald realises this with his elegiac closing credits showing the production process of a newspaper. Having filed the story, the credits take the viewers through set plates, whirring presses, collated broadsheets and stacks of newsprint ready for the public’s morning read. As A.O. Scott writes in the New York Times, “the images are stirring and familiar, though in a few years’ time they may look as quaint as engravings of stagecoaches and steam engines.”

The film left unanswered the question of whether either McAffrey or Frye would survive the disappearance of print. To me, it seemed that the young blogger could easily pick up McAffrey’s skills but he would have difficulty picking up hers. No longer could they say of her as the LA Times could say about the archetypal blogger Matt Drudge: “He’s a menace to honest, responsible journalism.” But what Drudge did was challenge the rules of journalism. He bypassed the hierarchies of editor and publisher. Given that these hierarchies are about to disappear, the world will belong to those that master whatever is left behind. That is the true state of play.

Maryborough pub crawl puts New York in the shade

The Queensland Wide Bay town of Maryborough has taken back its coveted title as holder of the World's Largest Pub Crawl after the weekend's city-wide 13 pub event. 4,657 people combed the streets of Maryborough on Sunday smashing the previous record by about 1,500. A trawl of 13 pubs on a hot day is not to be sneezed at, and this correspondent did well to manage 11 of them - just not quite having enough intestinal fortitude to get the bus and take in the 2 outlier pubs.

This the fifth annual Maryborough crawl and it was all (well, mostly) in a good cause. This year, pub crawlers were urged to "paint the town pink" with proceeds from the "crawl" around Maryborough's historical hotels going to the McGrath Foundation which provides funding for breast care nurses in regional areas. Pink is not my favourite colour, but I was determined to add to the amber.

11am. The first pub was the Carriers Arms Hotel. A somewhat soulless place on the outskirts of town. But it was handy for where I was staying.













I was surprised at how many people dressed up. Probably 80 percent of people made the effort (your correspondent was in the shameful 20 percent).













The hard hats queue up for food.













11.50am Venue 2. The Lamington. Just off the main road north from Brisbane. The Lammy was pleasant spot for the second beer of the day.













Some of the many Lammy revellers in pink













Grave fears for Bernie's budget burials













An attractive array of Heidis yodelling their way past the Aussie (venue#3) back in the centre of town. Where the next 8 pubs are - all within swaying distance of each other













Next pub. The Oxford #4













A short hop across the road to the Sydney #pub 5













The Smurfs have hit the Sydney beer garden













as have the Saris













Not really a pub. The "Sunrise" (#6) is a vacant block where all the charities set up shop. But you could get your card stamped and have a beer. Good enough for me













The Royal Hotel, Kent St (#7) on the main drag in town.













Like some fabled South American bird, only one made out of instant tea and coffee sachets













Pub #8 is the Central - 'welcome to the "superbar". Its that big we're closing off the street'













They were not lying













Pub no. 9 The imposing Post Office Hotel













large crowds in the Post Office's defacto beer garden













enjoying the band at the Post Office













Pub 10 The Criterion, down portside where Customs Officers slaked their thirsts after checking the imports on the Mary













attractive and colourful patrons at the Crit













and the building itself doesn't look bad either













never seen death looking so cheerful













Pub 11 and last of the day. The Shamrock. Back out of town towards the road to Biggenden













more late evening fun in the sun to be had at the Shamrock beer garden













The builders labourers we saw at the start of the day have downed tools. 5pm. Time for everyone to go home. Hiccup.

Proud Mary: Maryborough prepares to down the hatch

Greetings from the small Queensland town of Maryborough which has New York in its sights as it attempts to break the world record for the most amount of people at a pub crawl. This is a familiar challenge to the town some 300km north of Brisbane which was the original holder of the Guinness World Record pub crawl in 2005. It lost the crown to London in 2006 before winning it back again with 2,758 people. It overcame Canadian efforts to bring the mark to 3,000 in 2008 before the Big Apple pushed it out to 3,163 in March. Now Maryborough is thirsty enough to want its crown back and is expecting up to 5,000 people for the fifth annual event tomorrow.

The crawl is a useful (if debilitating) addition to the social calendar of this atmospheric town, which is the third oldest settlement in Queensland. Lying some 20km from the coast, the town is built on a tidal bend of the Mary River along the migration path used by the Budjilla people between the Great Sandy Island (Fraser) and the bunya plantations which provided a rich addition to their diet every three years. Though there has been a town here since 1846, the Aboriginals and whites had mixed for at least 20 years prior to settlement.

When Captain Cook sailed up the north Queensland coast in 1770, his crew noticed the boat was being followed from the shores of the Wide Bay by a large tribe of natives. Cook didn’t go up the Wide Bay River thinking it was too dangerous with shifting sandbars and infested by sharks and crocodiles. But Cook’s voyage presaged the fact that thousands of years of solo Indigenous occupation was about to come to an end. There were roughly 300,000 Aborigines living in Australia before 1788 of which almost half lived in Queensland. The Protector of Aborigines Archibald Meston claimed that there were 2,000 natives in the Wide Bay region but an escaped white convict David Bracewell says there were a lot more. Bracewell said he had seen beaches on Fraser Island covered with tribespeople four miles long.

It was the convicts such as Bracewell that first brought contact between whites and blacks. John Oxley founded the Moreton Bay penal colony (now Brisbane) in 1824. Under martinet colony leader Captain Patrick Logan, prisoners received extraordinary punishment for the most trivial offences. Several convicts committed murder so they would be hanged - this was a preferable fate to living under Logan’s regime. Hundreds more escaped and fled to the Aboriginal communities. The majority of these were speared on site but some thrived in their new environment.

James Davis was one of those accepted into Indigenous society. Davis was a Scotsman who had drifted south. He was transported to Australia after stealing a half crown from a church plate in Surrey and then sent to Moreton Bay after he transgressed again in Sydney. He and another prisoner named John Downie escaped and headed north towards Wide Bay. An Aboriginal elder recognised Davis as the reincarnated spirit of one of their recently dead warriors. But while Davis was feted, Downie didn’t last long. When out collecting oysters he tipped out a bag of Aboriginal bones to store his catch. The tribesman saw his thoughtless act as a great sacrilege and immediately speared him to death.

Not all whites suffered this fate. And while cannibalism was relatively common, whites had a peculiar acquired taste. In 1864 George Beardmore noted that blacks told him that the flesh of white men was not so much in favour because as he said “too much salt – like it macon (bacon)". The salty Davis survived, took on an Aboriginal wife and even went through the painful Aboriginal manhood rituals by submitting to cicatrices on his chest. He was unaware the penal colony had been shut down in 1839 and lived on, like a Japanese second world war soldier on a Pacific Island, fighting a personal war long after the rest of the world had ended it. He was eventually brought back to white society by Moreton Bay’s new Supervisor of Works Andrew Petrie.

With Davis’s help, Petrie mapped out the Wide Bay region in 1842. But it was a few years yet before white people colonised the area. Edgar Aldridge and the two Palmer Brothers arrived from Brisbane to what was then known as the Wide Bay River in 1848. They found a man who had already set up shop in the vicinity. His name was George Furber, a publican from Ipswich who wanted to set up a wool reception centre for the squatters who had come to grab the lush grasslands north of Brisbane. Furber also built a wharf in 1847 where shipments of wool were loaded onto schooners and sailed away to markets.

In 1848 Governor Fitzroy demanded the name of the river be changed from Wide Bay to the Mary River in honour of his wife. It was an ill omen for Lady Mary Fitzroy. Barely three months later, she was in a carriage when the horses bolted and crashed down a hill. She was killed immediately when the carriage fell on top of her. Nevertheless the new borough by the Mary continued to thrive. By 1850, there were 200 people and 4 shanty pubs in the region. The town dealt in timber, tallow, wool and hides. Most people worked in timber; loggers, sawyers, axemen, bush carpenters and their families all made home in these new harsh surrounds. It was sometimes dangerous frontier living. Bullock drivers known as “bull punchers” swaggered up the streets in dirt-stained moleskins. The wife of Milne the Baker was known to deliver loaves of bread with a loaded revolver at her hip.

When a schooner ran aground for a week in 1851, it was the signal to move the town upstream to deeper waters. The town moved from a site near Baddow Island to its current location around a bend in the river. This city reach was called Moonaboola by the Budjilla people and meant the “river that twists and turns”. The town became a port of entry in the newly independent colony of Queensland in 1859 and sailing ships brought thousands of immigrants ashore at Wharf Street. From 1867 to the end of the century, the port was the landing place of 12,000 Kanakas from the Melanesian islands who were forced into indentured labour on the newly developing sugar plantations.

But it was the Gympie gold rush of 1867 that cemented the success of the port town. In three years, Maryborough exported £760,000 of the precious metal down the river. There is very little trace of the gold industry in the region today. Wool and sugar are still grown here but the port is now a plaything of yachts. Maryborough’s biggest earner in 2009 is tourism and the city makes much of its imposing 19th century heritage buildings. The pub crawl is an important event in the social calendar of the 26,000 population town. Maryborough marketing, tourism and events councillor Anne Nioa says the annual event had turned into a big town reunion, with many university students returning home to visit family and "celebrate" with mates. I’ll be there tomorrow to help the celebrations along and see if the old girl can knock New York off its pub perch.

Tiananmen Square massacre: 20 years on

Today marks the twentieth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre that ended the student revolt and the 1980s fragile Chinese experiments with democracy. The event will be studiously ignored in China which makes it all the more important the subject gets a good airing elsewhere in the world. Yesterday I looked at how China used the media to control the message it wanted to get out to deny the massacre ever took place. Today I want to look at the events of June 1989.

The massacre was the culmination of a 50 day long stand-off between the government and demonstrators from 15 April to 4 June 1989. The proximate cause of the protests was the death of Hu Yaobang on 15 April. Hu was a youth icon and a former General-Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party dismissed in 1987 due to his sympathy for the growing student democracy movement. Hu was well respected as a party liberal and reformist. Some said he died of a “broken heart”. Whatever the cause, his death ignited student anger and frustration at the lack of progress. The anger began at Beijing University and spread to the streets.

Tiananmen Square was an obvious fulcrum for the protest. It is the largest plaza in central Beijing and got its name from the Tian’anmen the “Gate of Heavenly Peace" - the entrance to the Forbidden City. It was also a significant landmark in Chinese history. In the 36-hectare square stood the massive monument to China's revolutionary martyrs - the Monument to the People's Heroes - and also the mausoleum containing the embalmed remains of Mao Zedong. It was here 40 years earlier Mao had proclaimed the People’s Republic and it was here where students gathered in 1976 to protest the decision to end the mourning of popular Premier Zhou Enlai who died that year.

13 years later, the students were back to occupy the square and were joined by hundreds of thousands of professors, writers, journalists, workers, residents and government employees. The people were proclaiming a new version of the republic. In the square, marchers laid white flowers mourning the death of Hu Yaobang. Each march was larger than the last. Many went on hunger strike as momentum grew. More than a million demonstrated in Beijing and thousands more in dozens of other cities. All openly challenged CCP rule and demanded political reform to go with the economic reform. At the end of May, a ten-metre tall replica of the Statue of Liberty appeared in the Square near the defaced portrait of Mao.

Sensing a serious threat to their power, Deng Xiaoping and the old guard adopted a hard-line attitude. On 26 April, party mouthpiece The People’s Daily condemned the marches and branded them “turmoil”. The students responded on a placard, 'Pleading on behalf of the people is absolutely not turmoil'. A week later, the party imposed martial law. Students and residents commandeered 270 buses for barricades to keep the army out. By the middle of May students were arriving from all over China. The party was forced to cancel a ceremonial welcome for Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev planned for the grandeur of the Great Hall overlooking the square. At Beijing University posters compared Deng Xiaoping, the party's de facto leader, to the hated Dowager Empress.

On 31 May, the government made the first arrests of the protest. The 11 arrested were leaders of a motorcycle club that played an important role in the demonstrations. Several hundred bikers had become one of the most vivid features of the protests, screeching around the city. According to the official New China News Agency they were arrested for “disturbing the public order” and the motorcycle club was disbanded. It was an ominous precursor for what was to happen four days later.

According to the New York Times on 5 June, the two month long demonstration was crushed the day when the government decided “to teach the students a bloody lesson”. On 2 June, Communist Party elders approved the decision to put down the "counter-revolutionary riot" by force. Some 150,000 troops with tanks and machineguns were in the city facing 5,000 students in the square.

Age writer Peter Ellingsen was a Tiananmen eye-witness. Watching the marches, he said it felt like someone had pulled the cork out of the bottle. The genie of democracy was loose but after seven weeks the army was about to destroy the cork, bottle and all. He saw the fightback on the night of the 4th: “On top of the tanks, soldiers in full battle gear fired into the shadows. The noise was deafening. I heard the flat thud of people being hit before I saw them fall. The tanks rolled over bodies in their way. One young man was squashed into the bitumen; his organs fanned out around his corpse."

By 2am, hundreds were dead. The troops and tanks had massed on the northern apron of the square and rolled over the tent city of 3,000 unarmed student protestors and half a dozen hunger strikers. The soldiers kept firing, hitting those standing well away from the square. Student leaders urged their followers to flee while they could. Many walked out singing the national anthem; others were killed where they stood. No-one knows the full death tally, it may be in the thousands. According to the government, 300 soldiers and “law-breaking criminals” died.

By the morning of the 5th, the army had regained control of the square leaving only the memory of the anonymous act of defiance by the “tank man of Tiananmen”. A British tabloid named the tank man as Wang Weilin, aged 19, but this is not verified. Nobody knows what happened to him. And yet his bailing up of seventeen tanks while carrying his shopping was captured forever as the iconic moment of Tiananmen.


But most of the story has been lost. An incensed Hong Kong built a Pillar of Shame to mourn the victims. China blithely moved on. As James Fallows wrote last week, Tiananmen is a lost memory. Chinese history students can recite chapter and verse of the Japanese cruelties in China from the 1930s onwards but most will not have any idea what happened in Tiananmen Square on 4 June 1989. This is the ultimate success of the Chinese government in repressing the memory. “For a minority of people in China, the upcoming date of June 4 has tremendous significance,” said Fallows. “For most young people, it's just another day.”

Lest we remember: Tiananmen and the Chinese media

Chinese authorities have blocked access to Twitter, Flickr and Hotmail in the lead up to the 20th anniversary of the final crackdown of the Tiananmen movement. Authorities have also banned Chinese social network site Fanfou and the new Microsoft search engine Bing, none of it with any official explanation. With the anniversary of the massacre in the square falling tomorrow, it was no wonder that a phlegmatic Fanfou announced on its site “hopefully service will be resumed June 6.”

Fanfou are correct: normal service will most likely resume at the end of the Tiananmen news cycle. In many ways it is astonishing that the Chinese have been able to suppress knowledge of the event among its citizens for 20 years. One of the ways they do is by this selective and time-sensitive censorship and media management. Yet this successful censorship does little to hide the fact that the massacre had drastic political consequences. The student uprising and the parallel fall of Soviet Communism led to the demise of Deng Xiaoping’s counter-revolutionary wing of the Communist Party and the victory of the conservatives.

The changes brought Shanghai powerbroker Jiang Zemin to power. Jiang did not have Deng’s showmanship but he was a fixer with ideas how to solve the government’s image problem. In a major 1990 speech, he told the media what was expected of them:

“From now on, our newspapers, periodicals, radio and television stations should never be allowed to provide grounds for bourgeois liberalisation. Truthfulness in news means precisely to uphold the party’s ideological line.”

According to Jiang there was no higher truth than serving the party. This maxim enabled every other lie in the book. The state-run media was an important complicit partner in ensuring the party’s ideological line got out after Tiananmen. All state communication had to be vetted by the Central Propaganda Department who had a checklist of subjects the media could not talk about. They must avoid stories about the military, ethnic conflict, religion (particularly Falun Gong), and the internal workings of the party and Government. And of course any mention of Tiananmen was completely verboten. What news did emerge about these topics was heavily coated in government rhetoric.

The late American journalist Harrison E. Salisbury was in Beijing at the time of the massacre. He said the media were complicit in the crackdown. “It is a propaganda blitz, and it is backed up by the biggest lie they could think of – Tiananmen did not happen,” he said. “No one, no one, was shot in the Square. They have even put down the memory hole their original announcement of the twenty-three students killed there. Now all they talk about are the brave PLA soldiers.”

Jailed Journalist Dai Qing said in 2002, “In the Chinese media, only the weather reports can be believed”. Dai Qing’s understandable cynicism would have only been strengthened by the Golden Shield. The shield is a sophisticated electronic surveillance system which allowed China to spy on the digital activities of its citizens. China developed this insidious product with the eager help of western technology companies such as Nortel using methods developed to counteract terrorism. At the same time China asked Google, Microsoft and Yahoo to filter their operations to suit local requirements. The bourgeois liberal tech companies all agreed in the name of good business. After all, as Bill Gates said in 1994 as he rubbed shoulders with Jiang, “it’s a little strange to tie free trade to human rights issues, it is basically getting down to interference in internal affairs.” The multi-nationals interest in protecting their internal affairs married nicely with the sanctity of the party’s ideological line.

But if tying free trade to human rights is essential in Gates’s own country, why shouldn’t it be essential in the countries his company deals with? The US understands this to some extent with its blacklist of countries American companies such as Google cannot deal with. China’s treatment of democracy is as bad as many countries on the list, but it avoids sanction for an obvious reason: The Chinese economy has been raining yuans from Heaven for the last 20 years, and everyone in the West wants a greedy share of the world’s biggest market. And so the large companies collude with China to pretend that nothing happened in order to sustain the fiction the party is always right. And as long as they can control the agenda, they may always be right.

Working in Warwick: tales from the frontline

Just got back from a couple of days trying out for the Warwick Daily News. This was unpaid work, but valuable experience in a real newsroom. Warwick is a small town of 12,000 people on the Darling Downs about 160km west of Brisbane. It is amazing a town that size can support a daily newspaper, and even the editor admits it is tough to survive – especially when there are two other newspapers (both free) in town competing for scarce advertising revenue.

But survive it somehow does as the smallest newspaper in the APN stable, Australia’s third largest newspaper chain. The Warwick Daily News is an old and venerable newspaper starting initially as the Warwick Argus in the 1860s and changing its name to the Daily News after amalgamation with the Examiner and the Times in 1919. Today’s paper still has the smell of an oily rag feel to it. There is a small editorial staff with the deputy editor running a team of four full-time journalists and a couple more part-timers. The staffers are young and enthusiastic and are all excellent reporters. In a small paper like Warwick’s, the reporters do the lot. That means all the rounds, checking the newswires, taking photographs, copy tasting, sub-editing and more.

On my first day there I was sent out to do a follow up on a truck accident. A day earlier a truck had overturned on a dangerous turn of the New England Highway in the centre of Warwick. The original story was already in the paper the morning I arrived. The deputy editor told me that the junction was the subject of a bunfight between the Queensland Department of Main Roads (DMR) and Hungry Jack’s who were building a restaurant on the corner. DMR wanted Hungry Jack’s to include an additional turning lane on the corner but were not prepared to pay to resume the land to make it happen.

As well as talking to the two organisations, my job was also to go down to the corner and find someone who would talk about what they thought the problem was. So having left messages with DMR and Hungry Jack’s I set off to the corner where the truck rolled. There were no pedestrians about and no one answered the door at the first few houses I knocked at. There was a curtain shop at the corner but the two ladies inside didn’t want to be interviewed and they gave me the mobile number of the store owner whom they said “would have plenty to say on the matter”. I rang him up but contrary to expectations, he didn’t want to go on the record. In despair that I would fail on my first job, I finally found someone sitting on his porch a few doors down from the junction who was prepared to talk. While his story didn’t fit in with the DMR/Hungry Jack’s stoush, I did get a photo and a few colourful quotes - he blamed the accidents there on cars cutting in on trucks “like a bat out of hell”.

While I waited on my other contacts to get back to me, I started on my second story. The editor had gotten a media release from the Queensland government who were promoting international travellers using the state’s visitor information centres. I had to walk across the road from the newspaper office to where the Warwick tourist bureau resided. There I spoke to the manager who admitted he wasn’t yet aware of the minister’s campaign but told me 10 percent of Warwick’s visitors were from overseas. Most were what he called “free independent travellers” looking for directions, accommodation, things to do and road conditions north and south - “not many go west”, he said. The rest were backpackers looking for work and these ones he packed off to Stanthorpe where the fruit-picking was.

After another photo op outside the bureau, I dodged the traffic back across the road to write up the second story. In the meantime Hungry Jack’s rang me back to say they had finally acquiesced to DMR’s demands so my angle was now that the corner would be fixed. I then got a terse typically carefully worded statement from the minister’s office confirming they were re-looking at the burger chain’s solution. I finally wrote up the story and managed to keep the photo of the resident and his contribution (the photo alas did not make the abbreviated online version) Happy that I got my first two stories ready for publication, I spent the last few hours helping out by filling “news in brief” columns from wire copy and local sports reports. There was one final bout of proof-reading the news pages before I emerged into the very cool night air of Warwick.

I was finding it a lot colder this side of the Great Dividing Range two hours west of Brisbane. I stayed the night at the Criterion Hotel in town where my book on Warwick told me that the road from the big smoke is named for Allan Cunningham, a former assistant manager at Kew’s Royal Botanical Gardens. In 1827 Cunningham led an expedition from Segenhoe in NSW north into Queensland and found a beautiful area he named the Darling Downs in honour of the then-NSW governor. I then read about the Leslie family who were the first white people to colonise the area 13 years later, before the early start (I left Brisbane at 5am) and the rigours of reporting took it out of me and I fell asleep.

This morning I woke refreshed and ready for a second day of Warwick journalism. I came away from the 9am news conference with two tasks. Firstly I was to take a photo of two Warwick High School teachers in their respective Blue and Maroon shirts for a backpage spread on the State of Origin. Secondly I had to find out why a local business was changing hands after 23 years. The teachers were in class so I left messages for them to ring me. The business owner was available. He told me he was retiring and selling his steel business at the end of the month to a big company called OneSteel. I arranged to go out there and take a photo of him outside the office. In my zeal, I made several mistakes including taking videos instead of photos, and forgetting to ask him to spell his name. But perhaps with retirement on his mind, he good naturedly responded to all my return requests.

Back at the office, the teachers were still not responding. I got a third story, a bit of federal “he said, she said” tit-for-tat silliness between federal Labor infrastructure minister Anthony Albanese and local National member Bruce Scott. Albanese accused Scott of not supporting road fixing schemes which Scott angrily denied. I went off to Hansard (actually used the more user-friendly Open Australia.org) which had the relevant parliamentary debate and with the help of the two sides press releases and an interview with Scott’s media minder, it was easy enough to write up the article.

But at 3pm, disaster struck on my State of Origin story. Neither teacher had yet responded and I found out that one of them had gone home sick. “Was that alright?” said the person apologetically who took my tenth call to the school. Well no, it wasn’t alright as now we had no back page photo. I rushed out into the streets of Warwick looking for blue and maroon clad supporters I could line up for the “mate v mate” pose. For the best part of an hour I cruised the streets armed with camera and notebook desperate to buttonhole anyone that might look like a fan. But no-one was wearing the colours. I finally holed up an 11 year old boy in the sports shop whose school colours were an approximation of Queensland’s and the shop attendants helped out by putting a maroon jester’s hat on his head for the photo. I asked them would they pose in blue to complete the photo but they both politely declined.

Delighted with my improvisation, I went back to the office only to be told it didn’t fit in with the theme – what was needed was a blue-clad body standing back-to-back to a purple-clad body (similar to the photo shown). Disappointed but not despondent I went back onto the streets and found a second sports shop. Here the owner told me that he had no blue shirts because NSW had changed manufacturer from Canterbury to Classic this year. With daylight fading and no supporters on the streets I had to admit defeat. The paper would have to go without a local photo angle. I still managed to get a couple of late quotes from local footy identities to at least add a bit of Warwick colour, even if I couldn't get the team colours.

After put these stories to bed (or least to copy edit), it was time to say goodbye to Warwick and the lovely people at the Daily News. In two unpaid days there I had worked harder than at any job in recent memory and I thoroughly enjoyed the experience. I found it a very different experience from blogging. I got an inkling of the daily tyranny of filling up a newspaper and all it entails. There was the joy of talking to diverse sources, the authority that comes with representing a media organisation, the frustration of waiting on people to return calls, the disappointment of not being able to capture a story, and the thrill of meeting a deadline. I think I will be back for more, some time.