On The Road Again

Posts will be scarce for the next few days. The goal is to be back at the Billabong by late weekend, perhaps a bit sooner.

The Woop-Woop Whack

OFF to have a little game of golf on a bush course where players place their green fees in an honesty box and the local rules allow a drop without penalty if your ball bounces off a kangaroo and into the rough.

Someone should produce a coffeetable book on Australia's bush courses. Here, for example, is Coober Pedy's answer to St Andrews:

That's a sand green held together with sump oil. The next tee is the little patch of Astroturf in the foreground at the lower left.

PGA pro Craig Hocknull demonstrates some other bush-bred talents:

An old joke says that holding a one iron one above your head will always keep you safe in a lightning storm. Not even God can hit a one iron, you see. Hocknull can not only swing one, he can pick off cans dangling on strings. Remarkable.

Emma Alberscreechy

POST-QUEENSLAND panic continues to chill the hearts, and louden the voices, of the Labor/Greens claque at Their ABC. Observe Emma Alberici losing it several times while having her pert bottom handed to her by Barnaby Joyce on last night's Lateline.

Few things gladden the heart so much as a luvvie floundering and thrashing. And best of all, much more entertainment in the months to come.

UPDATE: A shy commenter has raised the possibility that Emma's erotic appeal may extend no lower than the deskline, wondering if her bottom is of a match for that cute little pixie face. The pictorial evidence suggests she is a trim specimen all over.

Please, Mr Abbott, clean out the ABC as soon as possible. The prospect of Ms Alberscreechy doing late-night advertorials, preferably in leggings and sports bra, would be a certain ratings winner.

UPDATE II, A BAFFLED ONE: Several commenters have left stern words about references to Ms Alberscreechy's fine physique. There is nothing more weaselly than the non-apology apology, as in 'sorry if you were offended but", so one of those isn't being issued. And certainly not a full-blown one either. What's wrong with observing that an attractive woman is an attractive woman, especially when there is so very little good to say about her otherwise?

Seriously, this is a mystery. The Professor can generally get through social events without the thwack of a face slap or being jabbed by a hat pin, and it would only be at funerals that at least one or two good-looking women do not hear how nicely they are turned out and what a pleasure it is see them. And it is a pleasure! Women spend an enorous amount of time, effort and money on their appearance, and while much of this investment is to impress other women and themselves, surely there are moments before the vanity mirror or on the exercise bike when the thought registers that, (yes, pout and press lips upon tissue before the second coat), this is the stuff to turn a fellow's head, which is just as well for the species.


Alright, its true, there was a bit of sport about Alberscreechy's hectoring on the nightly box, where her style falls only in the narrow band between advocate and inquisitor. But the comments about her appearance were full of nothing but appreciation. This has always been a gentleman's blog. The f-word has never been dropped in a post and commenters know it is neither for the threads. But the charge of giving offence by appreciating beauty, that seems unfair and ill-deserved.

Commenters who wish to sharpen sensitivies at the Billagong, please weigh in. It will be a novel experience to be slapped.

Too Cowardly To Defend Cowardice

GETTING ON for 10 years ago, Keith Windschuttle published a book, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, which prompted a reaction that was quite astonishing. The author’s crime was to highlight the slack and often imaginative, er,  scholarship which produced a vast bulk of titles devoted to the proposition that Australia’s early history was an endless bloodbath of genocidal racist savagery. By the simple expedient of going to the expounders of that view’s cited sources and checking them against their recappings, Windschuttle was able to demonstrate that a number of the country’s most prominent historians were inclined to play very fast and loose with both primary sources and the truth.  One need not have an opinion on the extent of white imperialist bloodlust to appreciate the author’s sleuthing, which demonstrated many things sadly amiss atop the ivory tower. As Windschuttle put it, the near-universal view amongst those who teach the young was that white Australians, regardless of how many generations had passed since an ancestor stepped ashore, need to be regarded as “a kind of a vermin that arrived after 1788 along with the rabbit, the common starling and the fox.”

The reaction to Windschuttle’s book confirmed this impression in spades. Rather than demand retractions and corrections, those who dwell in the closed little world of approved academic thought rose as one to denounce the man who dared to question their mates. It was a vicious, unrelenting and spiteful campaign, one that saw every available asset brought to bear on the smearing and shunning of Windschuttle and the blanket dismissal of his book.  As you might imagine, Robert Manne was at the forefront of the charge, there being no show without Punch, as they say.

Manne’s part in the slag-a-thon was particularly low and sleazy. In December, not long after Fabrication appeared, he compiled a dossier that purported to chronicle examples of Windschuttle’s alleged plagiarism. He fed this to a young, eager and ideological sound Age reporter by name of  Misha Ketchell, who would follow the approved pathways of a luvvy on the rise and build a nice media career for himself. From the Age to Media Watch and Crikey, Ketchell now roosts at The Conversation, where many cynical souls believe he is merely resting until the ABC’s head of Current Affairs, Bruce Belsham, has paid lip service to the advertised selection process and installed him as  Jonathan Green’s successor in the editor’s office at The Drum. There are standards to maintain at the national broadcaster, and Ketchell’s record and connections suggest he is just the man to observe them.

The Age published Manne’s accusations on the front page beneath Ketchell's proud byline -- the muscle behind the intended knock-out blow to Windschuttle’s research and credibility being the quoted opinion of American academic Robert Edgerton that Windschuttle had ripped off his work without attribution. Edgerton formed this view not on the basis of a direct comparison between his book and Windschuttle’s, but via the Manne dossier, which turned out to be rather heavily doctored.

Manne and Ketchell, the useful tool, also extracted an initial condemnation of Windschuttle from the Parkville Asylum’s Andrew Alexandra, an authority on plagiarism quoted in that first round of muck-flinging as regarding Windschuttle’s academic standards as “pretty slipshod.” As with Edgerton, Ketchell had sent him only Manne’s deviously twisted summary of Windschuttle’s alleged crimes.

Subsequent to the front-page hit piece, both Edgerton and Alexandra examined Fabrication, checked its footnotes and very hastily retracted their criticisms with profuse apologies. Here is what Alexandra wrote in a letter to the SMH: 

"I have now looked over Windschuttle's book, where extensive referencing to the sources for the relevant factual claims is to be found. Therefore, I apologise unreservedly to Keith Windschuttle for making the incorrect claim that he had not provided adequate referencing for such factual claims, and for any adverse inferences concerning his professional integrity that might have been made on the basis of that claim."

What makes all this ancient history worth recapping is Fairfax’s apparent non-reaction reaction to Economics Editor Ross Gittins’ transcription and re-publication of unattributed mega-chunks from a recent OECD publication. Gittins’ masters appear to have decided he did nothing wrong, as his most recent column appeared on Monday, as scheduled. The sole hint of a suggestion – and it appeared only in the Silly version of the column -- that Gittins might have been been asked to explain himself was an opaque rejection in the second paragraph of the charge that he is a lazy, light-fingered lifter of other people’s work. If you do not read the blogs, you would not know what Gittins was talking about (not that there is anything unusual about that, mind you).

The real shame in this instance belongs not to Gittins, a pompous hack too weary to think for himself and for whom pity is the appropriate response, but with his employer’s embrace of jaw-dropping inconsistency as its guiding principle on the subject of what is, and is not, plagiarism. As Windschuttle painstakingly documents and explains in a minutely detailed response to Fabrication’s Manne-fabricated  furor, Fairfax reporters displayed a unique talent for extracting damning quotes where other publications found only exoneration: 

The Age published [Alexandra’s] apology in its letters page, but did not give it any prominence. Despite the fact that Manne’s accusation had been a page one story, The Age did not accompany this letter with any follow-up news story. Moreover, The Age declined to publish a letter I had written to the editor about this matter.

A few days later, when The Australian newspaper contacted Edgerton himself at the University of California, Los Angeles, he denied the plagiarism charge. “I do not regard Windschuttle’s work as plagiarism and do not believe that he needed to cite me more than he did,” Edgerton told the newspaper.

However, the Sydney Morning Herald also contacted Edgerton and reported a different response. “It is true that Windschuttle several times paraphrases me in what could be seen as soft plagiarism,” the Herald reported him saying. But in a letter to me on January 24 2003, Edgerton denied he had said this: “I told them I wanted nothing to do with the issue and that I saw no wrongdoing on your part. They even misquoted me. When I was asked if I thought you had engaged in ‘soft plagiarism’ I emailed a reply that said, ‘perhaps but I can’t say because I don’t know what the term means’.” 

So, when Fairfax encounters a person whose work and views it finds disagreeable, the full arsenal of immoral and unethical weaponry is brought to bear in the cause of character assassination. But when one of its own columnists engages in plagiarism, not a whisper, let alone a front-page shout.

The incident and the inconsistency between then and now says much about Fairfax, none of it flattering. And perhaps it also explains something else – the generally kind view Fairfax writers often take of alternative medicine. With all those necks twisted so far and hard in order to avoid recognising the obscenely obvious, the company must surely be keeping an army of osteopaths and chiropractors in full-time work.

Get A Kindle

IF YOU do not own a Kindle, delay no longer. Apart from the convenience and savings, with titles available for small fractions of their ink-and-paper prices, there is the greatest joy of all: immediate access to books otherwise unavailable in Australia for months, if ever.

Books, for example,  like Bruce Bawer's The New Quislings: How the international Left used the Oslo Massacre to silence debate about Islam. When the authorities permit only one point of view and use the official mouthpieces of leftist orthodoxy to spread it, a Kindle is more than an amusement, it is a weapon.

Let the Finko & Ricketys of this world line their nests and pockets with payments for producing manifestoes about the need to control everyone else's speech. A Kindle cruels them with the soft burble that accompanies its every latest download.

Torch Song

ENVIRONMENTAL activist Tim Blair has a long list of preparations needed for Saturday's upcoming Hour of Power, including some hot platters to pop on the turntable. Sadly, he has overlooked the best and most obvious choice, White Light, White Heat, which also benefits from being played loud, very loud indeed:

And when the dancing is done, why not hop in the car and head to the corner of Collins and Spencer streets, where Age reporters and editors will be even more in the dark than usual. You can park (briefly) in the taxi rank across the street, beside Southern Cross Station, get out your spotlight or Dolphin torch and shine it at the second floor, where the Age is located.

Spotlights are available for around $20 at any number of auto-parts chains. Being cheap and nasty, they will break in a few weeks, but will serve the purpose for Saturday night's outing.

With luck and enough participants it will be quite the festive gathering

A Thief With Friends In High Places

WHILE ON the road and in the bush last week, irregular connectivity made keeping in touch with the modern world rather difficult, although the one spot where the signal was strong did produce the not-altogether-surprising news that Fairfax economics editor Ross Gittins is a thief. As it would have been difficult to blog and moderate comments while loping through the greenery, word of Gittins’ plagiarism was passed to Professor Sinclair Davidson, who posted proof of the light-fingered columnist’s disgraceful ways. After that, the quest for fish and solitude drew the Professor deeper into Victoria’s sylvan fastness, where thoughts turned often amid the casting, catching and cooking to the conversations that must surely have been proceeding on the executive upper floors at Fairfax World Headquarters.

Apparently that was indeed the case, but being Fairfax the official response to yet another in-house travesty is typically confused. Gittins’ column appears this morning – or rather, one version appears in the Silly and another, rather different one in the Age. In the Silly, the second paragraph reads thus:

What follows is my account of his paper for the Melbourne Institute, The Dutch Disease in Australia: Policy Options for a Three-Speed Economy. As is often my custom, it will consist largely of direct quotes, indirect quotes and paraphrases of his paper. This practice is known as ''reporting''. If I misreport his views, feel free to criticise; but don't be silly and accuse me of stealing them.

In the Age, however, that same paragraph has gone walkabout, vanished without a trace. In its place, readers find this:

What follows is my account of his paper for Melbourne Institute, The Dutch Disease in Australia. Corden is an expert on Dutch disease — a situation in which a boom in one export industry leads to an appreciation in the exchange rate, which reduces the profitability and the output of other export and import-competing industries.

So what transpired when Gittins met with his masters to discuss the derivative approach to quality journalism? For want of an official explanation, it appears Fairfax has decided to cut Gittins quite a lot of slack, the Silly even going so far as to publish his defence of the indefensible.

But what of the Age? Did the editors at Melbourne’s broadsheet conclude their readers did not need to be told of Gittins' transgressions, even via the indirect acknowledgement  of a self-serving and ludicrous “explanation”? Or could it be – and this seems most unlikely – that the paper concluded Gittins’ defence of theft was so tenuous and absurd it should not be published at all?

But make no mistake: Gittins’ continued presence in the Fairfax press, a presence not even qualified with an official explanation, says more about Fairfax than it does of the columnist. Apart from demonstrating the media group’s cowardice in declining to hold a star writer -- OK, agreed, it is a very dim firmament --  to account, it showcases a telling inconsistency in that company’s approach to the conduct of its editorial affairs.

It seems some people can be done over on the front page for alleged plagiarism. But others’ crimes, if their opinions are of the right sort, must be swept under the rug.

There will be more on this element of the Gittins fiasco in a subsequent post, but not just yet. The Professor’s hostess is hauling hot scones from her oven. First things first, and especially with raspberry jam.