relief of distress

Comrades,

The current Pando got me to thinking this must be the just about the first time they've closed all the Sydney pubs in the 222 years of white settlement?

Well, not quite.

Seems it's a one in 100 year event. They closed all the pubs back in February 1919, re-opened them in March, and then shut them again in April through to the end of May, to deal with the "Spanish Flu" pandemic. They even show down all the Sydney race tracks, heaven forbid! Then they closed the border with Victoria, which produced a Constitutional outcry and shit-fight over the right of free trade between the states: "that's not what we signed on for!" cried the Mexicans. After successfully herding the incoming infected into the North Head Quarantine Station for a few months producing 49 corpses, 'Patient Zero', known as "S.L." arrived unannounced in Sydney on 24 January 1919 and the last NSW town to report the appearance of the disease was Dorrigo on 27 September 1919, according to the NSW State Archives. That's a long time between drinks. More than six thousand died in NSW alone, when the white population of the entire continent was about where Sydney is now - five million. This, after Australia had just lost 60,000 war dead.

The current Great and Glorious Leader of the Great State of New South Wales, the Hon. Gladys Berejiklian, has been less than inspiring in her public appearances and utterances to date and of little, if any, practical help to anyone at all. (In all the acres of old growth forest that have been felled to fill the vast number of advice pages that have suddenly sprung up to give you no end of terrific ideas on how to do idling and go about biding your time - while panicking and going slowly insane at the same time - nothing's been written along the lines of "Tips from the 30's! How to live through a Great Depression! Survival of the Fittest!". That'd just be scaremongering.)

With everyone now furiously scrambling to heavily back the horse called Self Interest, don't know if the Preeemier of NSW has any flow charts, or even white-board mud maps going on this one, but Glad surely would sure be glad of one of these blueprints - whipped up by the Public Service back in '19...

CLICK TO ENLARGE (NSW Govt, Organizational Chart, Pneumonic Influenza Epidemic, 1919. Source: NSW State Archives.)

The arch-Conservative Fed Govt has suddenly become remarkably Pinko, giving away stupendous quantities of free, brand new, freshly printed cash left, right and centre and they're now even moving to effectively nationalise the country's payroll. In Canberra, that must feel like a cheese-grater being run all over the 'every man for himself while we look after our business' ideology of ScoVo and his pack of Capitalist running dogs. Next thing, they'll introduce a Universal Basic Income. Christ Almighty! Menzies is already revolving at 78rpm in his poor, shallow grave.

What's missing, of course, is leadership - let alone a Central Authority, so why not devolve the relief effort to a Superintendent of Relief and the Joint Local Committee's of Relief? You know it makes sense. It may sound a bit Commo, but it's not rocket science, and it works. It certainly made the authorities sit up and take notice of the true extent of existing poverty and destitution in Sydney back in 1919. Not a lot has changed. And as far as compo for businesses went in '19, only a fraction of the money set aside was actually paid out, while the rest were dealt with by a mysterious "adjustment for loss" achieved through creative book-keeping, and God-only knows there's a whole lotta that going on right now. They'd learnt their lesson from The Panic of 1890, which led to Australia's worst depression ever, lasting nigh on a decade. The economic set back from Spanish Flu was not terribly long lasting for that reason - but we don't learn, because no-one ever listens.

the global battle against The Fear of Covfefe

Comrades,

In these interesting times of confused mixed messaging it's hard to know whether a "lock in" or a "lock out" policy is in force at the minute. Never mind self isolation or social distancing, there is no time like the present to build a wall. Keeps the perilous plague-ridden yellow hordes out, and keeps the terrified, panicked local population in. In any case, it stops people from running around like chooks with their heads cut off. It's a win-win situation for everyone.

So, when the going gets tough, the tough get wiping; sanitising with the ever reliable Pine O Cleen (kills 99.9% of all germs) is a given...as everyone knows, all trace of turd must be expunged in the first instance. And here's the ideal equipment, worth it's weight in 24-carat rolled gold.

(Rough translation on the DJ Trump! quote bubble: "this is the wall you are going to pay for")

It didn't take long for the arse wipe industry to ramp up production to meet the stratospheric demand, so it's now very comforting to know that the Trumpotus is also ordering in some extra supplies in the global battle against The Fear of Covfefe...God knows, we all need some medical elements in our lives right now, don't we?

and that's even before the very likely event that the White House will be officially declared a hotbed of hideous diseases, and The Donald takes off on yet another 17 day "working lock-down vacation" at the heavily disinfected Trump National Bedminister, New Jersey, where they say it's nice at this time of year and a quite lovely round of spring time golf is in the offing.

And if worse turns to catastrophe, then there's nothing for else for it but to sit back and await your fate, while you pack up your troubles in your old kit bag (and smile, smile, smile) as you suck on one of these quart bottles of The Cure.

Good night, and good luck

the sinking of the General Belgrano

Comrades,

The first time I ever wandered into a commercial radio newsroom in 1982, there it was. A telex machine with a continuous roll of paper constantly chuttering out of the thing, and then folding itself - flip flop flip flop - into a neat pile on the floor. It was the AAP news wire. It was the middle of the night, and I was pulling the weekend graveyard shift in my first real job as a DJ, presenting the popular Country Music Hour from midnight-1am, then five tracks in a row of easy listening interspersed with ads, then a station ID and a time call, repeat until dawn. You could walk away from the microphone for 20 minutes at the time and the station would play by itself after you'd set up the tape cartridge machines to trip themselves off. I soon worked out how to read the wire - in it's grey coloured Courier New font - rip the paper off for the latest news, then pick it up like a scroll, and sift through the dross until you find what you want. And believe me, there was so much dross. How many reams of paper that telex machine used every day is anyone's guess, but it was plenty.

The AAP wire was the news. The be all and end all. And it was endless. The telex never stopped, ever, even when there was no news. It was the rock solid foundation of every news bulletin I ever read for the next 19 years.

A few months after I started, the Falklands War blew up and as it was on the other side of world, it happened overnight on our island. Listeners demanded to know what the fuck was going on. The AAP wire delivered. It also carried the Associated Press, Reuters, and Agence-France Presse wires, so it was calling all the shots as the battle went on, and it was full of it. Mobile phones, let alone lap tops or an internet of things were fantastical dreams of science fiction, still. So it was no get stretch to start off reading mid-dawn rip'n'read news bulletins on the hour every hour, using AAP copy as it was. I had zero training in this, so not a red pencil went through it. The sinking of the General Belgrano in May was big news, if memory serves - Exocet missiles were all the rage back then - and month later it was all over as the Poms liberated a tiny bunch of sheep farmers in Stanley. But I continued to plough on with the rip'n'read service as I'd got the bug. Just threw together overseas news as it happened on the AAP wire. The breakfast news team loved me for sorting the wheat from the chaff. In down town Medellin, rival drug lords were quietly setting off car bombs in the car park's of the opposition's supermarkets, where they laundered their money. Nice way to scare off customers. Good old fashioned terrorism made for good news copy back then, and they slaughtered hundreds of innocents. From that point on I was hooked on news and never looked back.

The AAP wire was always the go to for "breaking news". I vividly recall sitting at the slot in the 2UE newsroom in Sydney on a very slow news day - Sunday 28 April 1996 - when the AAP wire chattered through a single line "Tasmanian ambulance service report responding to shooting near Hobart. Possible casualties. Unconfirmed. More..." That turned out to be a day and half as the world as we knew it exploded, but without the AAP wire, we would never have known, and neither would you. They seemed to have freelance reporters called "stringers" everywhere, and indeed they had. When I found myself working as an on-the-road reporter for the best part of a decade, anywhere anything was happening, you would always run into an AAP reporter; the only one holding a microphone without any signage on it. In Canberra, AAP had the minutiae of politics nailed down flat, with the sole reporter snoozing through late night sitting sessions. No one would have noticed the Independent member for Oxley, Pauline Hanson, making her maiden speech to an empty chamber, also in '96, if it wasn't for AAP. One year I covered a Federal budget. Afterwards lobby groups of every description line up to have their say into a phalanx on microphones, but time was of the essence. The AAP reporter sat on the floor with a stop watch, and after 30 seconds called "Time!", and that spokesman for whatever organisation was hustled out the way mid-sentence by another reporter from AAP to make way for the next. If you didn't have your sound bite ready, you were gone.

The AAP wire didn't come cheap but it was worth it's weight in gold, and many times it was out there in platinum territory. When I fell into a job running a little newsroom in Newcastle broadcasting integrated local/state/national news bulletins, the station owner was always onto me about the cost of the wire; 25 grand in '92 would have easily employed another journo. "Do you really need that fucking telex machine, Craven? You know the newsroom is the only department in this radio station that doesn't bring a penny in through the front door!". "Of course I need the fucking wire, without the wire, there is no news, none, we don't go to air, OK? Now go away". He did. Only ever worried by money, he couldn't be bothered with "editorial interference". AAP was an institution that commanded great respect in the trade as a straight down the line no nonsense scrupulously by the book reporter of accurate news. They only dealt in the truth - here's what happened - you make head or tail of it. Delivered to your plate, it was up to you to decide what tasted the best in that fuzzy but at the same time precise umami known as "news value". It was only ever rarely wrong, and corrections were always issued post-haste. The one, and most times the only constant in the bustle and churn of an ol' style newsroom. You know, when Olivetti typewriters were the tool of trade. Surely I can't be so old as to remember such a thing?

The AAP wire loomed very large in my working life, so it was deeply saddening to hear yesterday that facing insurmountable competition from the ramshackle make it up as we go along Google/Facebook fake news peddling duopoly, they are going to close - with 180 journo's to be thrown out onto the ever increasing pile on the scrap heap, as well as a back office of 120. To say it's the end of an era understates it. As an old hack and "blowie", it was like hearing of the death of a long lost former loved one. Things change, nothing ever remains the same, but there's a big chunk of decades of me making a living out the game right there, now forever consigned to the lil' history books.

After 85 years, it's finally the end of real news, as I came to know and love it. End of an epoch more likely.