Thursday, December 02, 2010

Chris Mitchell, Hugh Lunn, a return to the fray, and oh what a lovely bunch of coconuts ...


(Above: coconuts cooling in the market, Apia, Samoa, ready for a fresh chilled creamy drink of coconut juice).

Now where was I?

Surrounded by millions of coconuts and tons of hands of bananas, and not a single member of the chattering big city elite commentariat scribbling about how they hated big city elites to be found within cooee ... (nota bene the use of 'cooee', it'll come in handy later cobber).

Hang on you say, why travel to broaden the mind when there are millions of coconuts at home?What's wrong with decent Australian coconuts? Surely the finest pulpy flesh to be found in the Pacific ...

Well it seems that the coconuts have been loudly banging while the pond has been abroad. A large coconut landed on John Brumby's head for starters ...

But perhaps the most wondrous coconut routine has been performed by The Australian's editor in chief Chris Mitchell, who announced that he would sue Julie Posetti for defamation, as you could read in Geoff Elliot's The Australian's Chris Mitchell to sue Julie Posetti for defamation if you weren't sipping coconut juice through a straw in the remoter parts of the Pacific ...

It seemed Mitchell got most upset about a couple of tweets. Then a little later things got a little murky, as the outrage seemed to settle, and the Herald began to gloat, To sue or not to sue? The Aus frets over 'defamatory' tweet.

With a grandiloquence that could only be matched by perhaps climategate, or wikigate, the lizard Oz dubbed the affair The Posetti Tapes:

Canberra academic Julie Posetti live-Tweeted the event. Her Tweets are a fair summary of what Wahlquist said.

Wahlquist, who left the Oz a month ago, has told Mitchell that her comments have been taken out of context.

The Australian’s editor in chief, Chris Mitchell, says the Tweets are defamatory of him, and that Posetti did not contact him to get his side of the story.

And there it rests.


There it rests? Cue an enquiry from the Herald:

The "And there it rests" comment left many wondering on Twitter whether that line meant the editor would still sue Posetti.

It was later clarified with: "There’s some confusion on Twitter as to what `there it rests’ means. It means: that’s all I have. I have no more".


Zip, nada, nihil, and so forth. Would it be defamatory, we wondered, sipping on the lovely creamy juice of a coconut, to call Chris Mitchell paranoid in chief of a bunker fortification that's beginning to rival Hitler's besieged bunker?

Hey, first day back and it's death to Godwin's Law. Well what else can you expect from a newspaper where an editorial is a lecture ... about not lecturing. Yep, only in the wonderfully paranoid bunker can you find the kind of rant to be found under the header The Greens can grow by making laws, not lecturing.

By golly, the Greens could grow by making laws ... if they happened to be in government ...

But it was cheering to see that Bob Brown lecturing the lecturers about their lecturing in a 'rather strident' way. Yes, that's what we call full face cheek from a rag where the editor wants to sue a tweeter for accurately reporting an event ... Said Brown:

So I fired (please excuse the war-like reference) back. Ean Higgins has since written to me -- is he the Editor who called for the Greens to be "destroyed"? -- asking, rather plaintively, if I am running a campaign against The Australian! No, just standing up to you Ean, I replied. Now there is a much wider public debate about The Australian's censorious, biased, unethical, pro-plutocracy, anti-democracy, self-serving impact on the nation's affairs. That's a good thing. And former Murdoch editor Bruce Guthrie's new book Man Bites Murdoch will throw some much-needed light into News Ltd's darker crevices. (here)

Darker crevices Bob? Surely we shouldn't go there. Oh okay, if we must, but isn't calling Chris Mitchell a Pluto in charge of an anti-democratic plutocracy a tad defamatory?

Naturally we resorted immediately to Miranda the Devine first day back, and sure enough there she was niggling away, like a Pacific island dog still gnawing at a bone which had long ago lost any meat or marrow.

Devine starts off Journalism academics' bias shows by proving she's not just a prosecuting hack for the News Corp team, but jury and judge and lord high executioner ...

There has been extraordinary hoopla on the social networking site Twitter, about defamatory tweets made about the editor-in-chief of The Australian, Chris Mitchell.

That's right. No need to resort to legal action to determine whether the tweets were defamatory. They are ... because the Devine says they are, and there's an end to the matter, and any resemblance to the Red Queen in Alice is entirely un-coincidental.

So what are we to make of this from the Devine?

In fact, the tweets were a mild version of a self-aggrandising attack on her (Asa Wahlquist's) former employer.

So there you have it. The tweets turn out to be mild. Or so the Devine says. The real villain is Walhquist, according to the Devine ...

How many coconuts are you prepared to put on Chris Mitchell now mounting a legal action against Walhquist?

Yep, it's another storm in a teacup, another piece of pouting petulance from the paranoids in their castle - trying to get a walk on role as tongue poking French medievalists in a Monty Python skit, hurling cows and accusations - and bugger all else.

Gee there's a lot to be said for the complete oblivion of the Pacific Islands.

The rest of the Devine's piece is some muttering darkly about the future of journalism and "educators". Well, what are we to make of the "journalists" who practise the "journalism" on display daily in the ramparts and fortifications of News Corp? Oh ain't inverted commas a grand way to slander and defame ...

Speaking of legal actions, while in the Virgin lounge - not the airline it never even tried to become - I picked up a copy of The Monthly, and had a chuckle at Peter Conrad's review of Hugh Lunn's Words Fail Me: A Journey through Australia's Lost Language.

Sadly, it's behind The Monthly paywall - here - but the rousing final par gives a clue as to style and content:

Queensland, Lunn's native state, has declared him a cultural icon, installing him in its pantheon beside the Bee Gees. He has written a biography of Joh Bjelke-Petersen, and has taken on the persona of a philologic Pauline Hanson. Many of the fans he quotes come from Australia's upside-down version of the Deep South, and at the very end of his book he protests on their behalf about a metropolitan snobbery that derides "BAPH states" - an acronym for the provincial backwaters of Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth and Hobart. Backed by the gangs of helpers who have supplied material for Words Fail Me, he is leading a peasants' revolt against multiculturalism and its dilution of Australian integrity. But there is no such thing as 'one nation' anymore, and as many languages are spoken in Australia as at Babel. The past is not our lost homeland but a foreign country, pale-faced and uniformly blank-minded, and I don't want to go back and live there.

My lawyer advises that this is indeed a fair representation of Conrad's last par, and the last par is indeed of a piece with the rest of his review, though it should be noted that BAPH was in fact an ABC term, arising back in the splendid mists of time and the days of Sir Charles Moses ...

I say fair representation because this morning comes news that an indignant Lunn is proposing to take legal action against Conrad. It's all here in Talk about kick in the guts: critic faces libel suit for coming the raw prawn.

Dear sweet absent lord, Lunn is proposing to become a kind of literary Chris Mitchell, and achieve the kind of immortality once obtained by William Dobell when his painting of fellow artist Joshua Smith was challenged legally for being a caricature rather than a portrait (Archibald legal argybargies).

Unlike Mitchell, it seems like it's game on and we might yet get a chance to troop off to the Supreme Court and even the High Court, as did the Herald and food critic Matthew Evens in the matter of Coco Restaurant (The cooks, the critics, the restaurant proprietors and their court cases). Even further back Leo Schofield got stung for saying a lobster served up to him resembled an "albino walrus". (here).

Meanwhile, the lines are being drawn in the sand:

Lunn told the Herald ''legal action is in train'' for Conrad's ''defamatory assault''.

''Peter Conrad has a bee in his bonnet without knowing anything about me,'' he said. ''He obviously dislikes Australia and the past a lot, but this is lazy. He thinks I'm a Queenslander writing about the good old days, but he misconstrues my book.''

Lunn said the accusation of racism was hurtful because he was ''the exact opposite''. In the book he laments the disappearance of Aboriginal words from general use and includes words sent in by Australians of diverse ethnic backgrounds.

While Conrad disparages him for being ''a cultural icon'' in Queensland with the Bee Gees, Lunn points out that he has written in the past about how badly his state treated Aborigines and has stood up for West Papuans.


U huh. Lazy and misconstrued. Well on that daily basis we could be suing The Australian and the punch drunk Punch and sundry other Murdoch tabloid ramblings for egregious crimes against coconuts and humanity.

And the learned reply, muh lord, of the miscreants?

Conrad would not comment further to the Herald, saying: ''I'm not interested in helping Lunn to get more publicity for his awful book.''

Brigitta Doyle, the head of ABC Books, said ''the article was unreasonable and inaccurate''.

Naparstek said: ''Most intellectual debate in this country is conducted as timid and polite debate.'' He stood by Conrad's review as ''impeccable and meticulous'' and as a qualified lawyer said: ''There is nothing defamatory about it. They don't have a leg to stand on.''


At last, a good legal action designed to get pond devotees agitated about a storm in a teacup.

Take that Chris Mitchell. Paranoia isn't enough. We need people ready to stage a legal circus at the drop of a review, or a tweet ...

Meanwhile, did you know that falling coconuts are a health hazard? Oh sure it's part rural myth, and part islander gee gaw to get the palagi going - Are Falling Coconuts Dangerous? - but I take it as a handy warning and from now on while roaming Australia, damned if I'm not going to keep a careful look out for the many coconuts falling to the ground around the pond with a heavy thud ...

(Below: and now to bring all the themes together, remember the good old days when News Ltd published nude photos of Pauline Hanson. We got it wrong, admits News CEO, ran the headlines, but I prefer Paul Hogan's analysis. That's not a tweet, this is a tweet, by a bunch of bloody twits. And they dare to talk about the future of journalism ...)

3 comments:

  1. Welcome back! We've missed you! Who else can we rely on to make sense of it all for us?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hugh Lunn has survived worse. This from the Australian in 2001:

    Still crying his I's out
    By Red Harrison

    Working for Rupert
    By Hugh Lunn, Hodder Headline, 244pp, $29.95

    HERE is proof that a book can be judged by its cover. This one carries the name Rupert and a tiny photograph of Rupert Murdoch, which hints at revelations within. But honesty prevails: Hugh Lunn's name is twice as big and two photographs of him dominate the one of Murdoch. Four more photographs of Lunn adorn the back cover and another 20 are contained inside.
    So this is a book by Lunn writing about his admiration for Lunn. Murdoch, as the cover makes clear, is secondary to the plot.
    Lunn is a former chief of The Australian's Brisbane bureau. He has written several popular books and he recalls Murdoch asking if he was writing another. No, Lunn replied. ``Good,'' said Murdoch, ``now you can do some work for us.'' Before this, Lunn worked around, including a spell in Vietnam -- where, he writes, he was defoliated. Sadly, this book contains no photograph of that event.
    Lunn is of that ilk of journalists who claim more prominence for themselves than for their attempts at journalism. His demands for still more prominence drove one editor to ask if he would be happy only when his work appeared above the masthead. His journalism, like this book, is distinguished by a relentless dependency on the first-person. He admits this aroused derision among journalists who worked with him, but says the story that they filed the letter ``I'' off his typewriter is apocryphal. Is Lunn trying to demonstrate a sense of humour? Unlikely. ``I might,'' he says, ``have got away with my writing style if I hadn't long since stopped drinking in the Empire Hotel with everyone else.'' When was self-delusion ever amusing?
    Apart from seeing his name in print, Lunn does not seem to have enjoyed much about newspapers. He certainly has no respect for them -- increasingly, he writes, they fill pages with overseas news because it is cheaper than employing a local reporter. He told one editor that if he didn't work for The Australian he probably would not buy it -- and still he wonders why the paper did not trust him to write a column. He doesn't think much of editors, either, and wonders if some know the difference between writing and typing. He names some, but conceals them for the most part behind schoolboyish pseudonyms -- Flamboyant Editor, Tough Editor and so on. Murdoch changed them, he writes, as if changing a baby's nappies.
    Clearly displeased that he did not progress further, Lunn complains that every time he began to climb the ladder, Murdoch extended the rungs. Well, learning seems to have been a struggle. It took him 10 years, he says, to learn how to write a newspaper feature that readers would like. Now he is inordinately proud of having won three Walkley Awards for feature writing, though he does not yet know the meaning of ``enormity'' and remains blind to the pejorative aspects of the verb ``to pilger''.
    Anyone hoping for fresh insights into Murdoch in this dreary, solipsistic shuffle will be disappointed. As a memoir of newspaper work, it sells the craft dismally short. As an autobiography, it could hardly be more trivial. Lunn writes so self-centredly and without elegance that I struggled to finish the book. But I did, discovering that it is boring right to the end -- which is not the worst journalistic sin, but it comes close.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I'm guessing - this is just a wild guess, I'm floating it out there - that you have a few issues with Hugh Lunn ...

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