From the archives, 1991: Let’s show you the ropes, Sydney Morning Herald, 27 October, 2021.

 

From the archives, 1991: Let’s show you the ropes

30 years ago, history went under the hammer at Cockatoo Island when the contents of the former navel dockyard went up for sale. Many buyers got a bargain, but some conservation groups were disappointed.

By John Stapleton

October 27, 2021 — 8.16am

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CARD OR PAYPAL

First published in the Sydney Morning Herald on October 29, 1991.

The auctioneer’s voice echoes beneath the high ceilings while the dealers, the crafty old codgers and the simply curious mill among the banks of machines.

As the last dock workers look on sullenly, Cockatoo Island is going up for auction, with more than 5,000 lots for sale.

Money for old rope... preparations are made for the auction.CREDIT:GREG WHITE

Much of the large machinery which belonged to the Commonwealth Government has been taken to shipbuilders in Western Australia.

Nearly everything else is for sale, with no reserve prices, including lathes, borers, overhead travelling cranes, office furniture, hundreds of metres of rope, a hydraulic chain-tester and pneumatic hoist.

One of the largest lathes in Australia, 12.2 metres long and weighing an estimated 150 tonnes, sold for $15,000, and its buyer, Mr Brian Hemsworth, of Australian Winch and Haulage Pty Ltd, estimated it would cost $300,000 to get it off the island and reassemble it at his Smithfield workshop.

Bids go up ... Auctioneer Storm Jacklin conducts proceedings from above.CREDIT:PAUL JONES

But a new lathe would set him back more than $2 million.

Much of the machinery on offer is more than 30 years old.

Mr Bob Spark, manager of MD Machinery Pty Ltd, said the prices being paid for equipment were amazing considering its age and the cost of getting it off the island.

“It is the day before yesterday’s technology,” he said.

Many commented that the spirited bidding was an indication of the economy, because few firms could afford new equipment.

Auctioneer Mr Storm Jacklin said bidding had been stronger than anticipated, with about $1.4 million in sales.

*But Mr Stephen Davies, conservation director of the National Trust, said: “It seems crazy to be selling these things, many of the items which we know are significant, before you even know what you are going to be selling for. The whole way the sale has gone on threatens the integrity of the site.”

Industrial archaeologist Mr Carl Doring said he was very disappointed so much machinery was on sale.

“The list of equipment for sale contains a lot of items of likely historical significance,” he said. “To me the sale is too rushed.

Heyday ... The HMAS Swan II, up on stocks at the dockyard in 1936.CREDIT:F.J. HALMARICK

“It is rather unfortunate that at a time when the Federal Government is trying to promote manufacturing productivity they themselves are dismantling one of our major engineering facilities.

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Performing arts

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“Cockatoo Island is also a site of industrial heritage which would go a long way towards increasing the public’s appreciation of work and the work ethic. We are abandoning our existing capacity to undertake major engineering work.”

Currently, Cockatoo Island is open to the public with a number of activities available as well as accommodation in the form of apartments and a campground. The island, a World Heritage Site, has also played host to the arts in the form of a number of festivals and exhibitions including the Biennale of Sydney and the Nick Cave–curated All Tomorrow’s Parties music festival. Next month will see a performance of the opera Carmen.

Is Salman Rushdie’s decision to publish on Substack the Death of the novel? As Editor, A Sense of Place Magazine, 16 September, 2021.

 Is Salman Rushdie’s decision to publish on Substack the Death of the novel?

Julian Novitz, Swinburne University of Technology.

Email newsletters might be associated with the ghost towns of old personal email addresses for many: relentlessly accumulating unopened updates from organisations, stores and services signed up to and forgotten in the distant past. But over the last few years they have experienced a revival, with an increasing number of writers supplementing their income with paid newsletter subscriptions.

Most recently, Salman Rushdie’s decision to use the newsletter subscription service Substack to circulate his latest book has sparked conversation around this platform and its impact on the world of publishing.

What is Substack?

Launched in 2017, Substack allows writers to create newsletters and set up paid subscription tiers for them, offering readers a mixture of free and paywalled content in each edition.

Substack has thus encroached on the traditional territories of newspapers, magazines, the blogosphere – and now trade publishing. Though it is worth noting that until now it has been most enthusiastically adopted by journalists rather than authors.

Rather than monetising the service via advertising, Substack’s profits come from a percentage of paid subscriptions. Substack’s founders see the platform as a way of breaking from the ‘attention economy’ promoted by social media, allowing a space for more thoughtful and substantial writing that is funded directly by readers.

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Read more: Substack isn’t a new model for journalism – it’s a very old one

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Not a radical disruption

Rushdie’s decision to publish via Substack signals a surprising inroad into one of the areas associated with trade publishing – literary fiction – and certainly makes for a good news story. He is the first significant literary novelist to publish a substantial work of fiction via the platform and Rushdie himself talks jokingly about helping to kill off the print book with this move.

However, the novella that Rushdie is intending to serialise will almost certainly be available in a more conventional format at some point in the future, given all Substack writers retain full rights to their intellectual property.

Other experiments with digital self-publication by prominent fiction authors, such as Stephen King’s novella Riding the Bullet (first published independently as an eBook), and the fiction first generated on Twitter by writers like David Mitchell and Neil Gaiman, have made their way to traditional publishers.

Neil Gaiman has also experimented with digitally distributed fiction. shutterstock

While this movement provides excellent publicity for Rushdie and the Substack service, it’s perhaps better understood as a limited term platform exclusivity deal than as a radical disruption of the literary publishing ecosystem.

Potentially more interesting is what the “acquisition” of Rushdie by Substack illustrates about their operation as a digital service. Throughout its history, Substack has offered advances to promising writers to support them while they cultivate a subscriber base.

This practice has now been formalised as Substack Pro, where selected writers, like Rushdie himself, are paid a substantial upfront fee to produce content, which Substack recoups by taking a higher percentage of their subscription fees for their first year of writing.

The exact sums paid vary between writers, but it is not dissimilar to a traditional advance on royalties. When coupled with some of the other services that are available to writers with paid subscriptions – like a legal fund and financial support for the editing, design, and production of newsletters – Substack can be seen as operating in a grey area between publisher and platform.

They pursue promising and high-profile writers, generate income, and provide services in ways that parallel the operations of trade publishers, but do not claim rights or responsibilities in relation to the content that is produced.

Although Substack do not see themselves as commissioning writers it could be argued they do play an editorial role in curating content on their platform through not terribly transparent Substack Pro deals and incentives.

The evolution of Substack

Recently Jude Doyle, a trans critic and novelist, has abandoned the platform. They note the irony of how profits generated by the often marginalised or subcultural writers who built paid subscriber bases in the early days of Substack are now being used to fund the much more lucrative deals offered to high-profile right-wing writers, who have in some cases exploited Substack’s weak moderation policy to spread anti-trans rhetoric and encourage harassment.

It could be argued Substack Pro is evolving into an inversion of the traditional (if somewhat idealised) publishing model, where a small number of profitable authors would subsidise the emergence of new writers. Instead, on Substack, profits generated from the work of large numbers of side-hustling writers are used to draw more established voices to the platform.

The founders of Substack have been unapologetic about their policies, considering the “unsubscribe” button to be the ultimate moderation tool for their users. They do, however, acknowledge Substack’s free-market approach may not appeal to all and anticipate competition from alternatives.

Ghost already exists as a non-profit newsletter platform with a more active approach to moderation, and Facebook’s Bulletin provides a carefully curated newsletter service from commissioned writers.

At this stage, the use of newsletters for literary fiction is an experiment, and it remains to be seen if it will be sustainable. As Rushdie puts it: “It will either turn out to be something wonderful and enjoyable, or it won’t.”

Julian Novitz, Lecturer, Writing, School of Media and Communication, Swinburne University of Technology

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Secrecy and Power in Australia’s National Security State, As Editor, A Sense of Place Magazine, 16 September, 2021.

 Secrecy and Power in Australia’s National Security State

By Keiran Hardy, Rebecca Ananian-Welsh and Nicola McGarrity.

Australia has long been regarded as a leading liberal democracy, but our global reputation
is declining. Extensive lawmaking in response to terrorism, combined with an entrenched
culture of government secrecy, has put our democracy in a troubling state.

Police investigations into journalists and prosecutions of whistleblowers suggest government
respect for transparency, accountability and freedom of the press is at an all-time low.

11 September 2021 marked twenty years since the 9/11 attacks on New York and
Washington. Across these two decades, the Australian government has built a powerful
national security apparatus. Over this time, we have gone from having zero national laws
addressing terrorism to 92 such laws.

Collectively these amount to more than 5000 pages of powers, rules and offences. This is significantly more than comparable western nations.

Many of these laws contain unprecedented powers – from preventive detention to citizenship stripping and secret trials.

Secret: The Making of Australia’s Security State

Such powers deserve careful deliberation in Parliament, but they have been enacted in haste, sometimes in mere hours, their passage smoothed by a rhetoric of urgency and fear.

Like Australia’s historical wartime powers, our counter-terrorism laws have been justified as extreme responses to an immediate threat. However, unlike their wartime equivalents, these laws are a permanent fixture.

In 20 years, only one significant power has been repealed, and those with expiry dates have been routinely renewed.

These vast, complex laws undermine the core pillars on which Australia’s democracy is built.

Recently, their impact on free speech and freedom of the press has been recognised globally.

In 2021, Australia ranked 25th place on the RSF Global Press Freedom Index – down six places
from 2018.

Ranked higher than Australia is Suriname, where the ‘public expression of hatred’
towards government is punishable by seven years in prison. Its President, Desi Bouterse, has
been amnestied for the 1982 murders of 15 political opponents, including five journalists.

Liberty Lost: Australia’s Security Apparatus. The Best of 2020.

Australia also falls behind Samoa, where the Prime Minister, Tuila’epa Sa’ilele Malielegaoi,
has threatened to shut down Facebook and warned citizens not to ‘play with fire’
by criticising the government online.

This sounds like a comment that Australian politicians would not make – but when Prime Minister Scott Morrison warned journalists to ‘be careful’ making allegations of sexual harassment, and Defence Minister Peter Dutton threatened to ‘pick out’ some Twitter users to sue for defamation,
it became clear that the political climate in Australia had changed for the worse.

There has been a marked cultural shift in Australian politics. Holding politicians
to account and exposing wrongdoing are core tasks that should be valued – and
protected – in a democracy.

Now, these tasks are not only much harder, but also riskier.

A secretive culture which resists transparency and accountability has become the
hallmark of the current Coalition government, making it difficult for journalists to access
information about what government departments are doing, and what they are doing
wrong.

When this information is leaked, journalists and their sources face significant
jail time, even if it is in the best interests of the Australian people to know about it.

Australia’s counter-terrorism laws make public interest journalism a risky day job. Powers
of surveillance and decryption mean that journalists who report on national security
matters can no longer guarantee the identity of their sources will be protected.

Journalists also face significant jail time under sweeping espionage offences, which define national
security as anything relating to Australia’s political or economic relations with other
countries.

Holding governments truly accountable in this restrictive legal environment
– and keeping the Australian people fully informed – is more of an ideal than a reality.

A healthy democracy demands open, transparent government. It demands legal
protections for journalists and whistleblowers who act in the best interests of the Australian
people, and careful deliberation of new laws in Parliament.

A healthy democracy requires rigorous checks and balances on government power to uphold the rule of law. In this report, we explore how these democratic values have been chiselled away by counterterrorism powers and a growing culture of government secrecy. We identify four necessary
actions to help repair this democratic deficit. It is time to take stock of what Australia
has given up in the name of national security since 9/11 – and start gaining it back.

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To access the full Open Democracy Dossier: Secrecy and Power in
Australia’s National Security State go here.

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Dr Keiran Hardy is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice
at Griffith University and the Griffith Criminology Institute. He has researched and
published widely on counter-terrorism law and policy, radicalisation and countering violent
extremism, intelligence whistleblowing and the accountability of intelligence agencies.

Dr Rebecca Ananian-Welsh is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Queensland, TC Beirne
School of Law. She has a combined expertise in constitutional law and counter-terrorism,
and a recent research focus on how national security laws impact fair trial rights and press
freedom. Prior to commencing her academic career, Rebecca held legal positions with
DLA Piper Sydney and the Australian Government Attorney-General’s Department.

Dr Nicola McGarrity is an Honorary Senior Lecturer in the School of Global and
Public Law, Faculty of Law, University of New South Wales. She has previously
practised as a barrister in the fields of constitutional and criminal law, and
written extensively on Australia’s anti-terrorism laws and prosecutions.

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