Charles Wooley: How Facebook's bullying threats helped unite old enemies
I long ago abandoned Facebook as a paradise for trolls, flat earthers and conspiracy theorists and as no use to anyone who wants to know what’s really happening in the world, writes CHARLES WOOLEY.
Tasmania
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"The time has come,” the Walrus said, “To talk of many things: Of shoes and ships and sealing wax. Of cabbages and kings.”
This week can I be the Walrus?
Now that the social media giant Facebook has banned its Australian users from sharing and viewing local and international news content on its platform.
I long ago abandoned Facebook as a paradise for trolls, flat earthers and conspiracy theorists and no use to anyone who wants to know what’s really happening in the world.
If you get your news from Facebook you know nothing, apart from the odd Hollywood ‘wardrobe malfunction’.
Having been bullied by Chinese Communists now we are being bullied by Global Capitalism. But it seems at last the Australian worm is turning.
Facebook’s chief executive Mark Zuckerberg will find, just like the CCP’s Chairman Xi, that these days Australia is less likely to bow to threats and coercion.
While that was never in our people’s nature, now happily neither is it the disposition of our government.
Just as we have been finding markets elsewhere for our commodities banned from China so will we find alternatives for Facebook. We might even develop our own Australian platform.
Generally, the Australian media has been solidly behind the government push to make the social media giants pay for Australian news content.
Well, why wouldn’t they? But it takes a lot to get bitter old rivals like Channel 9 and Channel 7, the Sydney Morning Herald, Financial Review and the Australian all to sing from the same song book.
But the bullying threats of withdrawal from Google and Facebook helped unite old enemies this week. In the end Google backed down, agreeing to pay for access to the work of Australian journalists.
Which hopefully in the long run means you will get to read about a lot more than how the COVID jab will inject a mind controlling chip into your brain or how a happy Texas couple lost a combined 200kg.
I hope none of my readers would ever miss being fed like starving fledglings on the unwholesome regurgitations of Facebook.
But just in case, this week like the Walrus I will cover briefly (or click-bait) a couple of other things for you.
UTAS researchers have cracked the secret to how wombats produce cube-shaped poo. The old joke among bushies was that our bare-nosed wombat had a ‘square bum-hole’.
Not so. Apparently, it is an inside jobbie. The wombat has a 33 feet long intestine with the ability to form regular and almost squared faeces. The research found that the cuboid crap is formed within the last 17 per cent of the colon intestine.
It is a result of the drying of faeces in the colon and of muscular contractions which form uniform and regular shaped droppings. (Reminds you of Facebook?)
Importantly this discovery is a one-off for Tasmania as UTAS wildlife ecologist Scott Carver announced recently.
“This ability to form relatively uniform, clean-cut faeces is unique in the animal kingdom,” he explained. Spending a lot of time fishing in wombat country I have always had a healthy interest in wombat scat, especially now that my new best mate, Dusty the dog, has such an unhealthy interest in it.
He assures me they are dry and crunchy, full of fibre and much tastier than the 10kg bag of ‘scientifically formulated’ dry dog food for which I pay 75 bucks. But as usual I digress.
Now we know how the cuboid poo is formed you will want to know why. You might have noticed how blocks of wombat poo are always found piled up on top of rocks or logs. The animal uses poo to signal its presence and probably attract a mate.
If the scat was round it would roll away and be less noticeable. The old joke always told us that “the wombat eats, roots and leaves.”
Darwinism would go further to suggest in Wombat World the squarer your poo the better your love life.
It’s Evolution kiddies but as they always warn you, don’t try it at home.
Another thing I noticed was that Number 32 Albert Street, Cabramatta will be auctioned today. It was once the relatively modest home of a most immodest Prime Minister.
Gough Whitlam and his wife Margaret engaged an architect in 1956 to build a four-bedroom home in the modern mid-century idiom with floor- to-ceiling windows, open-plan living and separate sleeping zones and a central courtyard.
Social historians describe it as ‘a mid-century classic well ahead of its time’. Just like Gough.
The four-bedroom house is rundown. The swimming pool (Margaret was an Olympic swimmer) is in much need of rehabilitation as are the gardens. Which is why the joint is expected to go for around $750,000.
Word is that a consortium of ALP stalwarts will buy the property to preserve its role in Australian history.After 23 years in the political wilderness, over many late-night meetings at 32 Albert Street, the Labor Party’s plan for the famous 1972 ‘It’s Time’ campaign was drawn-up.
The Whitlam Government saw the end of White Australia and the beginning of multiculturalism. When Gough built his house in Cabramatta the suburb was the old sliced-white-bread Australia.
Now it is Pho to go.
Today, 35 per cent of residents were born in Vietnam. Only 29 per cent were born in Australia.
With Labor having Buckley’s of winning the next election, it hardly even seems worth anyone challenging Albo for the right to lose it.In the absence of the next Whitlam, Hawke or Keating it is even hard to believe the next Labor PM is yet in the parliament.
So, the party faithful might as well spend their money on enhancing past glories and buy No. 32 Albert Street.Don’t you worry too much about being outbid by the NSW Right.For the same money you can buy a place with an ocean view and a sky-full of clean air down Dodges Ferry way.Cabramatta in crowded south-west Sydney or Dodge City on our Southern Beaches?It’s a no brainer even though down here, we could do with a Vietnamese restaurant.
FEBRUARY 12:
HALF A VILLAGE FOR SALE IN TASMANIA – FOR LESS THAN A SYDNEY APARTMENT.
Such were the headlines around the country when seven houses in the Central Highland village of Waddamana went onto the market. With real estate prices so high everywhere, here was the opportunity to buy half a village, for the median price of just one modest house in a cheaper part of western Sydney.
The listing generated a news value way beyond Waddamana’s intrinsic real estate worth.
I am often called upon by my journo mates on the mainland to explain Tasmania to them. Last month it was: “Hi mate. I’m doing a yarn on species extinction. Can you explain why your Forest Minister, whatshisname, hates that little fast parrot so much?”
“You mean the Swift Parrot and the minister is a bloke called Guy Barnett.”
“Yeah, that one. Mate why does he hate that fast little parrot?”
“Well, I don’t think he really hates any birds, apart from ducks and that might stem from an unpleasant childhood experience.”
“But mate did you see the silly grin on his face when he boasted about his Federal Court victory over the fast little parrot?”
“No. Look it’s just a Tasmanian thing. Barnett doesn’t suffer from ornithophobia. He isn’t afraid of birds. It’s just that he fears Bob Brown a lot more. Besides, the parrots aren’t really a problem for him. There are only a few hundred of them left now and they don’t have the vote.”
“Ah right, it’s just political is it.”
“You’ve got it.”
“Thanks Charlie. Oh, by the way, how fast do those fast little parrots fly?”
“I’m not sure mate but apparently like the ducks, not fast enough.”
So it went last month: lots of calls about whatshisname and the fast little parrot. Explaining Tasmania to mainland journos is always a thankless task. But at least they didn’t quote me.
And now, this month it’s all about Waddamana.
“Mate, that little town for sale for seven hundred thou’. Waddadawadda whatever. Is that price for real?
“How do say the name and what can you do there?
“And is there a pub?”
There were stories everywhere: on air, in print and online. Australians love to fantasise about buying a hideaway paradise for next to nothing. Tropical islands used to be the go but they are pricey these days and so rural retreats in places most people have never heard of are now in vogue.
And we have heaps of those.
Throw in seven houses (two are cabins) a tennis court and a river, all for around $700k, and you will have what I experienced this week.
Waddamanamania.
I soon realised that the journalistic enquiries I was getting were not just professional interest. They were personal.
There has always been a high degree of burn out in journalism. After a mere half century of reporting politics and still at the height of his powers, Laurie Oakes a year ago suddenly pulled the pin and ran away to his shack at Batemans Bay to read detective novels and effectively disappear. I’m trying to interest him in Waddamana but he’s not returning my calls.
Another colleague who rang me from a national daily confessed he was of a mind to make a big move. “Charlie it’s not just the story I’m calling about. I have been thinking about a change. I’m sick of chasing ambulances. Do you think it would be worth my time to come down and have a look?”
I warned my friend he might get stuck in Waddamana. “Typically, people buy in places like this on a whim. Apparently, the present owners went there only to look at a billiard table advertised for sale. But they fell in love with the place and suddenly they were snookered. That was 25 years ago.”
“Mate,” he replied. “That’s just what I need. I’m on my way down.”
This week, with so much journalistic interest in the sale I decided to take a closer look. I hadn’t been to Waddamana since I was a ‘Hydro-kid’ at Tarraleah way back in the 1950s.
A trip down the winding, narrow, gravelled memory lane might jog my childhood memory or at least update the information I could give to my mainland friends and potential buyers.
I was amazed to discover that the old Waddamana power station dating back to 1910, which was the reason for the township, is now a beautifully preserved museum. Provoking from me a most unusual conjunction of words.
Full credit to Hydro Tasmania.
Credit as well to the happy band of custodians and guides contracted by HT to look after the place. I wandered the turbine hall with its antique Pelton wheels. The buckets are still freshly and brightly painted in shades of red, yellow and orange. The turbine cases are just as I remembered, a lustrous and dark British racing green.
It was an industrial time warp. It seemed nothing had changed since my father took me there as a four-year-old. The glass dials, the highly polished brass and steel, all still sparkle from regular and loving polishing.
There was one big change. The place was silent. As a kid I remember being hit by a wall of sound so intense I could feel it. My ears rang for hours afterwards. The noise level never seemed to bother Charlie senior who was a power station operator at Tarraleah. He had spent his life in engine rooms of one kind or another all around the world.
There were no earplugs or earmuffs in those days (if there were my dad didn’t use them) and by his early forties he seemed to me to be quite deaf. Which might help explain my parents happy 70-year marriage.
My museum guide, John Hardstaff, was a native of the village. His first six years of schooling took place in Waddamana’s one room schoolhouse. By all appearances it was a solid education which still informs Mr Hardstaff’s lucid and articulate account of the history of his region. “It is an advantage that so many of our guides have living memories of the heyday of the power station,” he told me with a twinkle. “It’s a bit like a visitor being shown around Port Arthur by someone who was there as a convict.”
It was easier than Port Arthur. But it was still tough.
The first workers around 1910 were recruited by newspaper advertisements in Launceston and Hobart. “Those were hard times and people must have been desperate for a job because there was only one way to get here,” John Hardstaff told me. “The advertisement promised a job, a pick and shovel, and food and lodgings when you got here. But the journey involved what the advertisement calls ‘an easy three-day walk from Deloraine’.”
Enough with the history lesson. You romantics want to know what would it be like to live at Waddamana?
Well, it would be peaceful, but you would never be bored because renovating the seven cottages in a robust highland climate should keep you busy.
Anyone for tennis? There is a court in a condition which would have the precious little darlings at the Australian Open whining much louder than usual. But it is playable and besides, the nearest alternative is hours away.
The Ouse river flows prettily past the back fences of your houses. I peered closely but saw no trout, though it was the middle of the day and of course early evening is the best time to spot rising fish. I did however spot plenty of ducks on the drive in and I think a Swift Parrot. But they move so quickly you are never sure.
Whatever. Don’t tell Guy Barnett.
On nearby Cattle Hill beyond the town there is a 50-generator windfarm and another of about the same size mooted for further down the road.
Which really means that romantic as your own highland village might sound, Waddamana will most likely sell to a hard-headed realist.
During the last windfarm building phase, houses in the other half of the village were reportedly rented out for up to $450 per week.
I suspect the place is a business rather than a viable romantic lifestyle.
But you should see for yourself. The power station museum is a beautifully presented exposition of the pioneering days in the Tasmanian high country. Most of us have Hydro connections to renew and I guarantee the kids will love the turbine hall.
The Waddamana Power Station Heritage Site is open Monday to Sunday from 11am to 4pm. It is a scenic two-hour drive from Hobart and Launceston and of course, an easy three-day walk from Deloraine.
Triabunna Mill project helps us chip away at the past, February 5
Tourism entrepreneur and founder of the Wotif online travel site, Graeme Wood, is a tall man resembling one of Russell Drysdale’s gaunt outback figures on the veranda in the 1941 painting ‘Moody’s Pub’.
I am with Wood at the former defunct Triabunna chip mill on our beautiful East Coast. Like the blokes in that iconic Australian oil painting, Graeme casts a long shadow in the afternoon light as he gives me a tour of the rusting red iron carcass of the monster he had helped to slay.
Though in his opinion the woodchip industry “killed itself”.
I found Wood as spare with words as any of those taciturn bushmen Drysdale painted back in 1941 on the deck of Moody’s Pub in the old heritage Victorian village of Seymour.
It is widely reported Graeme has spent a fortune redeveloping the site of Australia’s biggest woodchip mill.
Initially the development plan had been priced at $50m on a location which is a monument to the forest industry’s worst economic and environmental folly.
When I asked the taciturn new mill captain how much he had spent, he raised his eyes.
“Don’t ask,” he said.
As a savvy multi-millionaire and an environmental campaigner (‘Enlightened capitalism’ has more practitioners these days than you might realise) Wood’s avowed purpose is now to show Tasmania that there is a better future.
I saw that future last weekend and I liked it.
What was once cast in environmental infamy and known as Gunns Triabunna Woodchip Mill is now Spring Bay Mill, a vibrant and growing eco-resort.
Last week visitors marvelled at the field of huge sunflowers blooming alongside the resort’s organic vegie garden. And where once a mountain of woodchips dominated the view of Maria Island there is now an amphitheatre where guests were listening to a jazz band and drinking cocktails.
Later we retired to the luxury ‘glamping’ site where great bell-shaped yurts have sprung up like mushrooms. They have electricity and the most comfortable beds. I have never slept so soundly under canvas.
The enduring divisive legacy of the Forest Wars means there are some people who won’t like to read about this re-purposing.
But they would have to be the lucky ones who didn’t lose money when Gunns chief executive, the late John Gay did a runner.
In 2009 when Gay saw disaster looming, he sold his shares leaving his shareholders stranded.
Honest John had done a swifty and unloaded over $3m worth of shares. He was consequently convicted of insider trading, a serious crime which undermines public confidence in the integrity of the stock market (imagine a smiling emoji here kiddies).
The Australian Securities and Investment Commission went after him for the full amount but Gay settled out of court by handing back $500,000 in exchange for a $50,000 fine. “Thrashed with a feather,” an ASIC contact complained to me at the time. “He should have been tried in Hobart and done time.”
Gay’s trial took place in his (and my) hometown of Launceston where things are often done a little differently. The northern capital was long the happy home of strutting and popular robber barons who loved to ‘stick it to Hobart’.
In 1989 Gunns Ltd chairman and then Launceston’s most powerful citizen, the colourful media magnate Edmund Rouse was jailed for 18 months after attempting to bribe a Labor MP to defect to the Liberals and bring down the Labor-Green government.
He was of course just protecting his forestry investment.
Enough said, except to remember that Gunns was never a good corporate citizen of Tasmania and in the long term not such a good investment either.
In 2012 with shares worth only 16 cents the investors finally twigged and disgruntled shareholders began a multi-million-dollar class action against the company.
To cover costs Gunns started to flog off the furniture. Which explains how this week the celebrated greenie money-bags Graeme Wood was showing me around his Spring Bay Mill resort, rising phoenix-like from the ashes of Tasmania’s old growth forests.
There are many Tasmanians who would have preferred the mill site be completely flattened, just as more than a century ago the Tasmanian government seriously contemplated levelling Port Arthur to remove ‘the stain’.
Re-writing history is as old as history itself.
I was glad that Wood preserved this monstrosity.
It brought back vivid memories of when I was here with a film crew in the mid-eighties.
Wood-chipping purportedly was to reprocess ‘forest residue’ left behind after saw logging. But it soon became clear that saw logs were disappearing into the giant mechanical jaws of Triabunna.
While in country towns all over Tasmania small sawmills were closing due to a lack of sawlogs.
I went there at the invitation of a group of small sawmill operators who climbed all over the long queue of log trucks backed up and waiting for access to the mill.
The sheer scale of the operation was daunting. The angry sawmillers kept finding sawlogs on most of the trucks. “That’s a sawlog,” they repeatedly called working their way down a line at least 30 trucks long and growing.
“There’s another and another. And even that damaged chip log … I could run up fence palings from that.”
And so it went, all the way back down the road.
The awful truth was that wood chipping, introduced as an adjunct to saw-logging had become the main game. It seemed easier to churn Tasmanian trees into the cheapest chips on earth and export them to Japan where trees were sacred and could not be destroyed.
Wood-chipping has cost us a fortune. By 2016 Forestry Tasmania posted a $67m yearly loss. Subsequently, in an Orwellian masterstroke, the outfit changed its name to ‘Sustainable Timber Tasmania’.
Problem solved.
Equally cynically, why didn’t they chuck a few million dollars at Graeme Wood to totally cleanse the mill site and remove all evidence of the worst financial, environmental and political disaster in recent Tasmanian history?
Wood wouldn’t take their money anyway.
He plays his own game with his own money.
Nor will he deal with Tasmanian politicians.
“I ignore politics in Tasmania because it’s so insane and stupid and inbred.”
Wherever did he get that idea?
Visit the Spring Bay Mill.
It’s a beautiful location and I recommend the glamping. But make sure you take your kids to see the rusting old monster. They can get an idea of the size of the trees pulverised there by standing in the jaws of the giant log-handling machinery.
Then if you really want to break their little hearts take them up the Florentine, not much more than an hour from Hobart, to the Valley of the Giants to see both the devastation and the magnificent survivors. You will see the tallest flowering plants on earth, up there with the biggest trees on the planet.
Would it be too cruel to tell your kids it’s still happening?
Australia Day date change is just virtue signalling, Saturday January 30
We are said to be a ‘sports-mad’ nation and on balance I suppose sport is a relatively harmless obsession unless we allow the somewhat restricted sporting mindset to run our nation.
Cricket Australia last week clearly demonstrated why players and their administrators should stick to their game and keep well-away from the affairs of state.
Cricket Australia made a bizarre and ill-thought decision to drop the use of the words ‘Australia Day’ from their Big Bash event because of the presumed ongoing racist connotations of January 26, 1788.
It was brilliantly ironic. Only a few days before, some of the Australian team’s supporters at the SCG were using racist terms to abuse the visiting Indian cricket team.
Perhaps the decision to dump Australia Day was a knee-jerk reaction to virtue signal in the wake of a disgraceful episode.
By any estimation Cricket Australia bowled a wide ball, especially if you consider the first Australian cricket team to tour England in 1868 was full of Aboriginal players.
Over the following 153 years only five indigenous cricketers have played for Australia.
That is reminiscent of South Africa in the bad days of apartheid.
And the geniuses at Cricket Australia reckon Australia Day is racist.
Can you believe it?
Prime Minister Scott Morrison came out batting in defence of Australian History as he understood it.
“When those 12 ships turned up in Sydney, all those years ago, it wasn’t a particularly flash day for the people on those vessels either,” the PM responded.
He got it slightly wrong, there were 11 ships, but he was right in as much as this was no pleasure cruise.
And if it was an ‘invasion’ force you can be sure the vast majority of those onboard didn’t want to be there.
Even the rank and file soldiers were mainly poor economic conscripts.
There was little initial enthusiasm for the place from the gaolers or from the jailed.
Should people be made to feel guilty today because their forebears were latecomers to this ancient continent?
And should they really be expected to despise their history and be ashamed of their country?
Whatever side of the history wars, Australians need to study our bloody history and then come to terms with the truth that the brutality of the convict system was matched by the brutality with which indigenous people were mistreated.
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But a little knowledge might go a long way.
Robert Hughes’s ‘Fatal Shore’ remains the most lucid and horrific historical account of what happened to 160,000 men women and children shipped off the face of the known world and condemned to appalling brutality, disease and starvation.
Re-reading it on Australia Day was chilling but also uplifting.
Those were indeed the harshest of times and for more than 150 years Australians chose to sublimate their convict origins as well as the violence of the conquest of this land. Perhaps now is the time for us to do better rather than merely recriminate about the past.
We can’t change our history no matter how much the revisionists and the iconoclasts would wish.
Pulling down Captain Cook’s statue won’t cancel out a jot of it. No more than changing the date of Australia Day and vilifying the well-intentioned Governor Arthur Phillip.
Surely, we should celebrate the unlikely triumph that our modern democracy, envied around the world, arose from such cruel, violent and inauspicious beginnings.
But Scott Morrison needed to go a further than his initial response.
“You know on Australia Day, it’s all about acknowledging how far we’ve come,” he said shrugging off that wide ball from Cricket Australia.
We all got the gist of what the PM meant.
It might even pass the pub test and won’t lose him any votes.
But c’mon PM, what about some inspiring words for the future.
Legacy mate.
In recent times in remote parts of mainland Australia I have seen black people living in conditions as bad as anything I ever saw in Africa.
The difference in Africa is that there would be blokes from the UN running around in blue helmets.
We do not address this shameful state-of-affairs by making unctuous statements about changing the date of our national day or the name of a cheese.
That stuff is pathetic and meaningless. What needs to change is the future.
I have long considered myself a Marxist. That’s to say, a follower of Groucho Marx.
He who famously pronounced, “I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member.”
The other Marx (Karl) wasn’t nearly so funny, nor were his murderous followers, Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong.
But there was an important point about history expressed by the other Marx:
“Philosophers have only interpreted History.
The point is to change it.”
The change we need to make isn’t retrospective.
It’s about the future.
A future in which our indigenous people are not the most imprisoned ethnic group in Australia.
A future where Aboriginal Australia has the same lifespan as non-indigenous rather than a decade shorter.
Beyond health, education and jobs, what about a place where kids can be safe in their beds at night?
How can any of these gross inequities and shortcomings be remedied by changing the date of Australia Day?
It would be better if those among us who would revise history, cared to read the most inspiring Australian document of our time, the Uluru Statement from the Heart.
It calls for a constitutional change which would enshrine an indigenous voice in Federal Parliament to give Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders a say in law and policy affecting them.
Surely that beats tweaking the national calendar.
And couldn’t we all feel so virtuous?
But if we really want to make a difference, let us adopt the New Zealand model and have the equivalent of at least half a dozen indigenous seats in Federal Parliament.
It works for the Kiwis. It creates a sense of that word so loved by the PC crowd ‘inclusivity’ but it also makes a fairly dull political world just that little bit more lively.
Then we might even find more important things to argue about than changing dates and renaming cheese.
Originally published as Charles Wooley: How Facebook's bullying threats helped unite old enemies
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