“or Haiti, this is history repeated. As historians have documented, the impoverishment of Haiti began in the earliest decades of its independence, when Haiti’s slaves and free gens de couleur rallied to liberate the country from the French in 1804. But by 1825, Haiti was living under a new kind of bondage–external debt. In order to keep the French and other Western powers from enforcing an embargo, it agreed to pay 150 million francs in reparations to French slave owners (yes, that’s right, freed slaves were forced to compensate their former masters for their liberty). In order to do that, they borrowed millions from French banks and then from the US and Germany. As Alex von Tunzelmann pointed out, “by 1900, it [Haiti] was spending 80 percent of its national budget on repayments.”

It took Haiti 122 years, but in 1947 the nation paid off about 60 percent, or 90 million francs, of this debt (it was able to negotiate a reduction in 1838). In 2003, then-President Aristide called on France to pay restitution for this sum–valued in 2003 dollars at over $21 billion. A few months later, he was ousted in a coup d’etat; he claims he left the country under armed pressure from the US.”

Of the deep history there seems to be a fair amount of agreement; about Aristide there is little. Either way, brutalised nations produce brutalising governments. And Haiti seems to be no exception.

All discussed much better than I can, at Crooked Timber.

I have now sunk to the point where the last post features a picture of a dead cat, and I felt for a moment that it could be a great last full stop.

The truth is, I have had both nothing to say and too much to write about. I want to explore Stolen, a documentary about slavery in north-west Africa, but the film has turned into a fight inside the Sydney Left, with Polisario squaring up against some parts of the documentary community. Allegations of lies, fraud and simple nastiness have been flung about at the Sydney Film Festival.

But this is a huge task, and I quail before it with my work load at the moment. We are busily changing some roles at Screen Hub, and I am now full time.

I can but entertain you with an anecdote and a guest post. I discovered my left ear was doing something funny last Friday, as if some skin was peeling off the large cavity in my ear canal which was sculpted by a surgeon way back in 1953, and helps to account for my deafness.

Just after work on Friday night, I took off my hearing aid and felt a growth protruding from my ear canal. My life became instantly dramatic, with me carted to the emergency department of the Alfred Hospital, my second home these days, by a work friend. Just before the doctor had a squizz, I realised what it was. At the beginning of the week, I lost one of the buds from the headset I use with my Blackberry.

It had been inside my head for at least five days, and had finally decided to work its way out. I had pushed it inside the ear canal with my hearing aid, which is a pretty tight fit.

Anyway, here is a post from occasional commenter and fine screenwriter, Evil Steve. He went to Japan on holiday, and sent me this… (film writers tend to be economical)

Evil Steve’s Great Big Asian Adventure.

Do you know where I can get my shoe fixed?

The geezer tacked in close. We were the only honkies in a sea of oriental mysticism, a mysticism made even more mystic by the sea’s complete failure to grasp the earth’s first language and our complete failure to grasp the sea’s. I somehow expected him to be wrung out, battered by the weight of the rising tide, but he was shining, scrubbed flush pink like a child deposited on the sands of Treasure Island. The sole of his shoe had come away, brand new too, and we pointed him reassuringly to the covered market one street in. The geezer smiled, leaned in like an old pirate with one last, best-kept secret:

I’m from Brisbane. We were brought up on the Yellow Peril but I’ve never met nicer people in my entire life. We’ve only been here 24 hours and already a complete stranger has treated us to the sumo wrestling. Best seats in the house as well. I got him drunk, mind you.

The usual Western response to any act of native kindness. We smiled at the thought and winced at the consequences as the geezer reeled out to sea like an overloaded hook, never to be seen again.

And so we set sail. Floated, serene, past Mount Fuji, drifted through the lights of Tokyo, drew up in the sleepy port of Kanazawa, where you could still sense the samurai laying down their swords after a hard day in the office, and where the slumbering intensity of the artist quarter felt like Fitzroy, 1987.

Here we met Ohi Toshio (www.ohimuseum.com), number 11 in an unbroken chain of potters going back to the 17th Century. His father, Ohi Chozaemon Toshiro, number 10, busied himself in the background – hand-crafted wares, fired at low temperature in caramel glazes, designed with religious intensity around an ancient ceremony. Of course, as an island nation, it had to be tea.

We handled the exquisitely made bowls with a clumsy, recently acquired deference, sipped at the spumy, green tea.

It’s strange watching the world queue up in the fashion they had to have yesterday to buy the fashion they have to have today. None of it suits them. I call it the H & M syndrome. You know, the department store.

We nodded and laughed, awkwardness dissolving away as his warm wisdom washed over us. Like that other unbroken chain, the Phantom, we gradually became aware he’d been watching over us all since 1670.

So this was Japan: the land of the rising sun, sumo, and the vending machine; the land of memories, of kids in school uniforms and walls with no graffiti; a land where tiny bars are still public houses, streets have no traffic jams, and the sound of a lone horn reveals the absence of rage; a land of quiet graciousness, of bows and common courtesy; a land where the toilets blow-dry pubic hair, the ladyboyz sleaze the working girls and the live bands eat their guitars. What a place.

[The pot at item688086store.html”target=blank”>the head is a fine white Ohi sake cup-guinomi by Ohi. It has a miniature chawan form and a speckled glazing.”the head is “a fine white Ohi sake cup-guinomi by Ohi. It has a miniature chawan form and a speckled glazing.”

The Scientific American has an intriguing article about the origin of cats, when they first arrived at the human hearth, and why they show such a small amount of genetic diversity.

Without windows and doors, early humans were unable to keep their domestic cats from interbreeding as they chose. And in so doing, the cat was able to mate back to local wildcats, so the population did not have any intense selection mechanism to encourage a symbiotic relationship with humans. Also….

“The Truth about Cats and Dogs

Unlike dogs, which exhibit a huge range of sizes, shapes and temperaments, house cats are relatively homogeneous, differing mostly in the characteristics of their coats. The reason for the relative lack of variability in cats is simple: humans have long bred dogs to assist with particular tasks, such as hunting or sled pulling, but cats, which lack any inclination for performing most tasks that would be useful to humans, experienced no such selective breeding pressures.”

Freeloaders from the beginning, cats.

Ultimately from Metafilter.

This is a photograph of Adam Elliott with the Oscar he won for Harvie Krumpet, with Melanie Coombs as producer. He was a graduate of the animation program in the Victorian College of the Arts Film and Television School, taught by the likes of Sarah Watt, an internationally respected animator who has gone on to make Look Both Ways and My Year Without Sex. Melanie Coombs was trained as a producer at the Australian Film Television and Radio School, and the two have recently launched their feature, Mary and Max onto the world stage.

Alumni of the same school, both at Swinburne and VCA, include Gillian Armstrong, Jonathan Shiff, Richard Lowenstein, Geoffrey Wright, Robert Luketic, Andrew Domenik and Jamie Blanks.

Pretty good little hotbed of creativity, you might think. A veritable cultural ferment. Promise of the future, all that sort of thing.

As of now, the VCA no longer exists, and has been absorbed into Melbourne University like an oyster grazed by a starfish. Teeth take muscle, worn out by subtle, implacable pressure. Whatever the logic, this is a dreadful outcome, as far as I am concerned.

Robin Usher, local arts writer for The Age, has been following this in dolorous tones.

“Filmmaker Robbie McEwen accepted his degree last week before declaring in front of vice-chancellor Glyn Davis and other university officials at the Melbourne Recital Centre that “people could thank the University of Melbourne for ripping the heart out of the VCA”.

College lecturers who were there say the applause from students and their families was long and sustained, while Professor Davis appeared stunned.

Staff and students have met over the past fortnight to consider the impact of the merger, which has involved the loss of casual support staff, the merger of schools and impending budget cuts.”

Gone now is a unique institution in Australian cultural life – across many different forms, the VCA concentrates on the craft education of potentially elite artists likely to practice at the highest level.

The VCA, a pretty cluster of buildings just south of the general arts precinct, hard up against the Police stables, a genteel wander from the National Gallery, Federation Square, the Anglican cathedral and Young and Jackson’s pub, is completely embedded in Melbourne’s cultural life, of which the town’s middle classes are patriotically fond, as in ‘Sydney does glitz, we do sophistication.’

There is a weird kind of exceptionalism about this, a certain second city superiority, necessary to the collective ego up against the imperial certainty of Sydney. I think its a useful energy, but it can rely on the notion that Melbavostokians are simply superior. Of course, the cultural density of Melbourne depends on certain institutions and funding practices, and it is pretty fragile under its geometrically tiled and shiny surface. There is an older generation of activists who understand this, but they represent only some of the city’s power bases. And this story demonstrates just how little clout they turned out to have.

Beyond Wikipedia’s summary, which simmers with tension, there seems to be little of the VCA’s history on the net. Starting as the National Gallery School in 1867, it grew the other disciplines after 1972, and has a music and dance high school attached to it.

The VCA is also the final resting place of the wandering Swinburne Film and Television School, which was funded by the Victorian Education Department, and was booted out of its original home as part of the Hawke government “reforms” to higher education. The VCA simply bought it, though the computer animation department was snaffled by RMIT.

As an outsider participating in the screen life of Melbourne, I think the VCA Film and Television School is a mixed blessing. A very high proportion of my colleagues went to it, and its approach infuses film production in this town, and this cinematic subculture. To put it bluntly, it glorifies directors, doesn’t get writers and shits on producers. It has also produced a very long list of successful practitioners, while its animation and documentary departments are excellent.

There is an unresolvable but creative tension inside the education of our elite artists. Do we think of practitioner education as academic, or as craft? Both the VCA and the once-Swinburne FTS tried to sell themselves to the federal government as separate stand alone craft institutions, like the National Institute for Dramatic Arts or the the Australian Film, Television and Radio School. No chance – these cost a motza to run, and maybe Melbourne is the wrong city anyway, according to the federal government.

But VCA itself has gradually been infused with this dialectical problem of the relationship between practice and ideas in art forms. It plays out differently in different areas, and I am told the whole school is warped in the direction of the dominant art form of the time. The film school has remained resolutely atheoretical; as a result, I reckon graduates tend to have a poor working vocabulary, and a deficient sense of cinema history. That is pretty sad, when it offers a full time undergraduate degree in the area, with plenty of young students still forming their artistic sensibility.

For the last several years, the VCA has moved towards a combined theoretical component to the curriculum. There has been plenty of tension about this. What theory? When taught? To what extent can we generalise conceptually between very different disciplines? What is the role of academic literacy and exams?

For the filmmakers, this debate is playing out in a more general ecology of tertiary education. There are many good departments around Australia offering praxis-based courses in screen creation. But, the VCA is different – it is driven very heavily by practice. As staff will point out, it is one of the only two schools at which students make their own film, which they write; in the others, projects are carried out by groups, or there is a selection process. People come to VCA from all over Australia and around the world for that experience.

If it disappears, we as a culture lose diversity, and abandon an important approach to the high-level teaching of screen creation. It is a truism that education at this level is about intense practice and experimentation in a way which shares methods and encourages individuality. AFTRS is the only other school like this, but it has been criticised persistently for a certain sort of mediocrity. It has a lot of money, huge amounts of technical support, and creates cookie-cutter blandness.

As a result of this disquiet, AFTRS has been torn to pieces, and is being rebuilt around different models, which incorporate a full time undergraduate degree. It will take a while to see how this plays out.

Two very bad things have been happening to VCA Film and Television School over the last few years. With no other support mechanism available, the VCA fell into the hands of Melbourne University. That meant it was subjected to the same gross financial pressure of any other department, and has been subsumed in the particular machinations of that institution. I am not qualified to talk about that monumental train wreck, (which included Melbourne University Private) except to say that I once taught a useful screenwriting course there, it was cheap, it was oversubscribed, and it was abolished.

Unfortunately, film and television production is very expensive to teach. It needs technology, studio space and one-to-one contact with staff. The place is infused and inspired by industry staff on casual contracts. Ever since the school started in 1967, students have carried an outrageous financial burden to make their films, which has been a material problem in their subsequent careers.

Now, they are getting a lot less money spent on their educations. Here’s Robin Usher again:

‘The National Tertiary Education Union’s Matthew McGowan says trust in the administration under dean Sharman Pretty (pictured) is breaking down as anxieties grow about job security.

“Students enrol in the VCA, not Melbourne University, but that identity is under threat,” he says. “Promises given to the VCA about its future identity after the merger are being trashed.”

A 2005 heads of agreement over the merger also states there will be no changes to the college’s funding without consultation and that its identity will be preserved.

But Professor Pretty responded by pointing out the VCA no longer existed. “When the Federal Government withdrew the $5 million subsidy of the VCA, replacement money was supplied by Melbourne University until 2011,” she says. “The university rescued the VCA and now the aim is to make it sustainable.”

Her first priority is dealing with a $1.5 million deficit this year, before tackling the looming $11 million shortfall.”

That “sustainable” bit is about charging the schools rent for their studios, and cutting the staff-student ratio to cross-campus norms, and dividing a continuous program into semesters. By saying that the VCA no longer existed, Pretty is pointing out that the bits of it are just departments in an enveloping university, elements in a faculty of arts, fragments in a larger beast with a huge financial problem.

Under the Melbourne model, as one anonymous staff member told me on Friday, “students will learn in five years what they currently learn in half that time, with less production opportunities.”

As the VCA student website neatly says,

“Without immediate action the implementation of the “Melbourne Model” will see the V.C.A. ultimately dissolved into a broader, conventional fine arts degree. Limited specialisation will exist only for full fee-paying post-graduate students, in much larger numbers and in courses of reduced quality and length.”

Across the board, the education of artists faces a huge financial problem. It tends to be expensive in itself, requires a heap of subsidy by the student, and leads to a rotten income afterwards. That means students cannot afford to be significantly in debt afterwards. In this case, students will end up between $70-100,000 in hock at the end of the full five years; and that is without thinking about the costs of their productions.

To make matters worse, this sector does not require a tertiary ticket for entry. It kinds of assumes it in a general way, but people demonstrate their value by performance. Why on earth would you now go to VCA?

I reckon this is the end. The FTS may stagger along educating foreign students and rich kids, but it will be a shadow of its former self. Students and supporters are fighting back, but I don’t fancy their chances. Melbourne has a huge capacity to create arrogant institutions, and Melbourne University is a doozy; to solve this problem under any model requires both funding and a visionary commitment to build a campus like, say, the Slade, the Royal Academy, The Cooper Union, the Julliard School or UCLA School of Film and Television.

Any resistance is up against the new Dean, Professor Sharman Pretty. Profiled with anodyne distance by (ironically) Robin Usher, she is one of those contemporary change merchants who serves her employers well, sometimes in the service of good, and leaves a trail of rage behind her. Here is an unpretty picture of her previous job as Dean of Auckland University’s National Institute of Creative Arts; before that she was a major player in the Sydney music controversy depicted in Facing the Music, the documentary from Bob Connelly and Robin Anderson. Ironically, she was resisted by an academic Department of Music which was protecting its identity against a more practical Conservatorium. The amalgamation went ahead in 2005.

Is this a disaster for the profession? I reckon. And the Melbourne film and television community is just waking up to the problem. It is like the old joke about the aquarium – the fish swims in water, and doesn’t know it exists until the tank cracks.

Was it inevitable? I tend to cast the amalgamators and empire builders as malevolent in stories where diversity is crushed, but Melbourne University is probably just playing out a script set by numbers, and decisions in Canberra. There are some tipping points which could have saved the VCA and its film school, but they required too much vision from too many players who had nothing to gain. The federal government stuffed up much bigger things than the VCA.

There is never any point in wallowing in lost battles and keening over the rubble of broken dreams. Leave that to the historians innoculated by their own peculiar discipline. But we do need to realise the community now has an education problem, and address it. The enemy here is mediocrity, and a failure to nurture true creativity at those points where it intersects with people’s lives.

Melbourne University has cut the music theatre and puppetry courses as well. An act of barbarism.

Straight from a Crooked Timber comment: the horror show that is the British economy, with wit and clarity.

John Lanchester.

And the equivalent piece on the Australian economy is…. where?

(blatant copyright theft here: the image comes from a lovely photostream of The Labours of the Months, a fresco cycle in the Swiss village of Ronco sopra Ascona).

The Ida Missing Link story, whch is creating a certain media excitement at the moment, is an evolutionary fable of a different kind for the television industry. Driven by Darwinian competition, television companies have evolved a bizarre hybrid in which documentary networks pump resources into scientific research, which are arranged as sparkly stories. These in turn entice an audience rather like some species of bird decorating its nest to attract a mate. All that matters is the display, which has evolved past its original function, so the science is present only as a kind of vestigial organ.

On Wednesday, we ran a piece on Screen Hub about the controversy, which I will integrate with some later information. Next Monday night in the US, Discovery Channel will broadcast the whole two hour awe-fest, and the response will show us whether the rumblings about intellectual integrity damage the product. I am not holding my breath, but I am hoping that the world-wide science filmmaking gang might decide this is an evolutionary dead end, to live out its solitary life in some enclosure behind a sign which says “Don’t Go Here Again!”.

Here is the article:

World’s Biggest Documentary Presale: Monkeying around with the origin of Man

Fossil of ancient primate turned into intricate media circus, all to rebrand a bank. Where did the History Channel get the evidence? They bought it.

A&E, which runs the History Channel, has built a huge media event around a research program into a fossilised primate bought commercially in Germany, and has ensured that the science has been carried out in secret. As the scientists developed their research paper, the film was known only as “Project Y”, and is still not on the producer’s website.

Alongside this work, we can picture an equally hidden skunkworks of publicists, in whose imaginative hands the two hour special to be released in the US next Monday, ballyhooed first at a huge press conference last Monday, was pumped up with adjectives worthy of a new Einstein.

This has caused both consternation and derision across the scientific community and its serious journalists, because of the nature of the claimed discovery.

Nearly fifty million years ago, primates were beginning their long evolutionary journey to become an intricate collection of species and subfamilies. They had split into two groups, which subdivided into two more, one of which led to humans. Unfortunately, to steal some technicalities from the scientific blogosphere, the fossil is placed in a complicated and not always decorous shit-fight about vitamin C production, wet noses, tooth combs and toilet claws which place this single individual in relation to the human lineage.

As it stands, it is impossible to determine with any certainty whether this fossil is part of our heritage or not. It could very well be a separate branch, whose descendent species have been completely obliterated, and contribute nothing to the modern biosphere.

Nonetheless, the skunkworks has given this ambiguous creature a name – Ida. The program in the US is called The Link. In the UK, it will be Uncovering Our Earliest Ancestor. This hour-long version will be dignified by a script and narration track from Sir David Attenborough. BBC Worldwide will sell it to broadcasters who deal with the likes of us.

The website, which will be much spiffier once the film is launched, carries a to camera video from Attenborough. More sardonic viewers than I might call it a bizarre equivocating rant, which contains the phrase, “I don’t know”, while the Great Science Communicator talks only about the possible response of the scientists, rather than the factual content.

The skunkworks has gone into a frenzy overr this single program. This Will Change Everything is the publicity line.

“Huh?”, says the Knight Science Journalism Tracker, which boggles with fine restraint over the media’s attitude to truthiness in science. A missing link? But on the bicentenary of Darwin’s birth, the line is too good to resist. Scientists might curl their lips, but an audience of millions might tune in.

This is the kind of hype being deployed, from an emailed press release to a cynical American scientist:

“WORLD RENOWNED SCIENTISTS REVEAL A REVOLUTIONARY SCIENTIFIC FIND THAT WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING

Ground-Breaking Global Announcement

What: An international press conference to unveil a major historic scientific find. After two years of research a team of world-renowned scientists will announce their findings, which address a long-standing scientific puzzle.

The find is lauded as the most significant scientific discovery of recent times. History brings this momentous find to America and will follow with the premiere of a major television special on Monday, May 25 at 9 pm ET/PT chronicling the discovery and investigation.

Who: Mayor Michael Bloomberg; International team of scientists who researched the find; Abbe Raven, President and CEO, A&E Television Networks; Nancy Dubuc, Executive Vice President and General Manager, History; Ellen Futter, President, American Museum of Natural History.

In other publicity, the History Channel says this discovery is up there with the moon landing and the Kennedy assassination.

The Guardian claimed the press conference was touching, since Ida was actually revealed inside a glass box (for all the world like an alien pilot recovered from a spacecraft). The audience could see bones, and evidence of fur and the leaves and fruit in her last meal. But, surrounded by the “desperate, unseemly scramble to gather some of the action”,

“Dr Jorn Hurum, the scientist at the heart of the project, made the most exotic parallels. He screened photographs of the Mona Lisa and the Rosetta Stone, without elucidation, though the implication was clear. He variously described the fossil as the Holy Grail of paleontology and the lost ark of archeology.”

The New York Times provides an engaging description of the History Channel’s machinations. The project began when Oslo paleontologist Jorn H Hurum bought the fossil which had already been in a collector’s drawer for around 25 years, assembled a team, and accidentally met Anthony Geffen, who runs Atlantic Productions, which was also finishing Predator X at the same time. (Hurum worked on that project as well.)

The two made a deal, which ultimately lead to this perfect storm of adjectives. The NYT harvested this wonderful line from Hurum to describe his logic:

“Any pop band is doing the same thing… Any athlete is doing the same thing. We have to start thinking the same way in science.”

That is refreshing, since most scientists treat popularisation like the plague and have to be dragged stiff legged and polysyllabically entangled to the camera. But this story also looks like exactly what they are frightened of.

Hurum has maintained an icy Scandinavian discipline in the publicity process. We have no idea how he felt as his own funky Nordic project somehow moved to Michigan, and was publicised with the aid of the Mayor of New York. But he surely felt like a rock star as he stood before that image of the Mona Lisa, surrounded by eager politicians.

This week, the skunkworks cone of silence was lifted from the project, and we can see some intriguing details in the mess, which also point to some conundrums in the publicity system.

We now have a key document, which had to be released to ensure the scientific credibility of the project. PLoSone, the peer-reviewed but public access journal, has published the legitimate research paper which reports the findings, and the background to the story. It is available online, for anyone to read. In first writing this story, I couldn’t find it, and it turns out to have been closely embargoed until the press conference. The television tail wagged the paper pooch a lot here, and Chris Mooney has an excellent post dissecting the grubbiness. Among other details, it allows us to deduce how the skunkworks gamed with the minds and ambitions of the PloS people, who seemed to have wanted the paper enough to take some collateral damage to their reputation.

Obviously the Discovery Skunkworks was assembling all the pieces to create a cut-through event. And we can imagine the network programmers chewing the carpet as the entire production process moves towards the broadcast date like a heat seeking missile while the scientists futzed around with the paper, and tried to find a home for it in an arcane area of publishing which takes its own sweet time to act, thank you very much. If you start from the premiss that happy adverstisers on the Discovery Channel are much more important than scientific integrity, the whole manoever makes perfect sense.

I am betting that the marketing skunkworks wanted to stay on message with some simple ideas. Think link! Skeleton from Oslo! New, new discoveries! In that mindset, complexity was invented by Satan.

In fact, this is wonderful material without the messianic oversimplifications. The fossil is the oldest complete primate discovered, and it shows anatomical subtleties around soft tissues. Because the bones have been slightly crushed, they can only be observed remotely, so the full battery of modern beeping machines and screens are deployed to analyse it. With this alone, the work is pretty wonderful.

There is also a genuine scientific dispute about the deductions from the paleobiology – challenging to communicate, but there is plenty of visual material.

However, I guess that the skunkworks also wanted to keep some secrets about the narrative behind the discovery of the fossil. That is the only way I can explain why they would hide a lovely, ironic and vaguely ridiculous story which is fully acknowledged in the paper.

Forty eight million years ago, the Messel Pit in Germany was on the edge of a volcanic lake, surrounded by paratropical rain forest, which periodically burped up poisonous gases and killed the animals. By 1983, it was a shale pit, yielding a remarkable collection of fossils. Unfortunately, the owners wanted to turn it into a garbage dump, so the shale had to be split hurriedly, and the fossils carted away with little scientific ceremony.

We now know more about that private collector and the sale, via The Guardian on Friday. Probably a dentist, s/he lived on the outskirts of Frankfurt, and kept it framed on the wall.

“The remarkable specimen came to light only after the collector enlisted the help of a private dealer, Thomas Perner. He brokered a $1m (£629,000) deal for the 47m-year-old primate with a paleontologist from Oslo’s Natural History Museum in a vodka bar in Hamburg. The identity of the collector remains a well-guarded secret.”

However, the PloS paper told us that the specimen had actually been split in half, which I think refers to the mirror pieces created when the encasing shale is broken open . One half – most of which was the indented side of the fossil, had been sold to a Natural History Museum in Thermopolis, Wyoming. Someone, and the paper is discreet about who, then added other bits and pieces to create the appearance of a complete skeleton, thereby creating a false specimen. This was analysed by the lead author of the current study, Jens L. Franzen from Frankfurt, who published a paper in 2000 which sorted out most of the confusion, and provided the first tranche of analysis. This had taken at least six years.

In 2007, when the University of Oslo bought the rest of the specimen, the two pieces could be re-united. The paper does not describe how this happened, or whether the Oslo people knew what they had bought immediately.

According to Wikipedia,

“The significance of the fossil was first recognized by vertebrate palaeontologist Hurum, who was shown photographs of the specimen through a chance encounter at the Hamburg Fossil and Mineral Fair in 2006. He was approached by a dealer, offering the fossil for $1 million.[16] Dr. Hurum sought to find a natural history museum able to pay for the specimen, and eventually secured funds from the Natural History Museum of Oslo.”

Rebuilding the specimen enabled the combined team to toss out the last bits of fakery, and then do some taxonomy to reassign the animal to another lineage. ((As an Adapoidea, whose ending gets us close to the name Ida, though Hurum claims it is named after his daughter.)

Is that not a great story? The paper also reveals that the funding for Gingerich’s research came from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, which had “no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.”

Did the BBC, the History Channel, ZDF and NRK, who funded the documentary, pay for the non-Gingerich research? The Mayor of New York, “Abbe Raven, President and CEO, A&E Television Networks; Nancy Dubuc, Executive Vice President and General Manager, History; Ellen Futter, President, American Museum of Natural History” certainly wanted to claim a lot of the credit, by decorating that press conference with their presence.

The documentary may well have financed most of the project. Discovery has moved in that direction, and National Geographic has done this since the magazine first started.

Even if the funding was not direct, I guess a fair amount of cash changed hands to secure the rights to this project, and the general co-operation of the scientists. I would guess that they were able to travel, and secure time on sexy visualisation gear too, while sending the bill to the production company.

The producers, and their marketing teams, certainly did influence the timing, the secrecy and the use of the open-access system to lodge the paper. And they did use the scientists as the face of some very large claims.

Are they happy with their bargain? That we don’t know, and my imaginary skunkworks would not want the rest of us to find out.

The science bloggers are fascinating on the topic. Carl Zimmer at The Loom puts the boot in with the ease of a lizard whacking a fly. Framing Science is thoughtful on the whole process of popularisation; Laelaps does the science of this well, though the comments reveal just how little the scientists understand the documentary process, and the major event hype machine.

If you take money from a cable channel to support the work of your Institute, you must expect the owners to try and recover the millions it costs them to deliver the program to the audience. They will maximise the size of that audience for the benefit of advertisers and subscribers. Is it churlish to call this Capitalism for Dummies?

The story did leak out early, in the way which turns publicists into ravening hate machines on the telephone. Philip Gingerich, president-elect of the Paleontological Society in the U.S., a co-writer of the paper from the research, spoke to a Wall Street Journal reporter. While the cannier Norwegian, Hurum, kept his mouth shut, the unfortunate Gingerich only told Gautam Naik that the story was embargoed at the end of the interview. The reporter wrote a reasonable account, which is a scoop in that strange space where a breaking story is related not to events but to the iron mantle of secrecy by which the news is “managed”.

Gingerich seems to have been a real nightmare – he also spoke to the Daily Mail in London. Via the Wall Street Journal, The Australian and Mooney, we have a line from Gingerich which is pretty damaging:

“There was a TV company involved and time pressure. We’ve been pushed to finish the study. It’s not how I like to do science”.

It seems to me this situation is a humiliating mess, and Gingerich’s behaviour suggests a certain pain on the part of scientists who may feel like performing monkeys. This tale does point to the difficulties of science television. How can filmmakers deliver a sexy film, and retain the finesse on which scientists build their self-respect?

Was it “the world’s biggest television documentary presale” as I claimed in the headline? I don’t know, but it got your attention.

——————-

The Knight Science Journalism Tracker, based at MIT, is a great service, if you are interested either in science, or the interface between science and the media.

Primates, by the way, have probably been around in some form for at least eighty million years. Lose yourself in the complexities on Wikipedia.

Last Tuesday night, the Federal government relieved the besieged fortress of Australian public broadcasting with a modest wagon train of supplies. This moment will remembered for a long time, alongside the Fraser razor gang attack on the ABC, the creation of SBS, the first Howard budget of 1996, and the pulse of money from Keating’s Creative Nation that set up SBSi.

For the ABC, the news is great but not terrific, but SBS will be left to lick its wounds, and find somewhere quiet to heal. What will come out of the cave, is at the moment unknown. The ABC pulled off a coup which has been a long time in the making, while SBS was left with its pleas and schemes in the dustbin of history.

Both the ABC and SBS went into this budget looking for significant increases. The ABC had a powerful weapon – the ALP had said it should adhere to the commercial channel’s drama quota of 100 hours per year, and the Rudd government is disinclined to break public promises. Meanwhile, SBS was making an argument to necessity – it needs to fund its new digital channel, had lost the four million extra from the Libs that compensated (if I remember rightly) for the end of SBSi funding, and has to pay for the digital transition.

With a current government allocation of $422m/year, the ABC asked for funds to add an extra 70 hours of drama and a new digital children’s channel but was remarkably coy about the amount; SBS bluntly told the feds it needed an extra $70m per year. Given that the federal government provides around $92.7m for SBS TV in 2008-2009, that is a huge increase. In return, Brown would deliver an extra 100 hours of local programming per year by 2012, and four digital channels by 2013, starting with SBS world in 2009, containing the “best of overseas content”. SBS World News would be mostly subtitled, ehile coverage of the Asia-Pacific would be expanded. The second channel will also allow children’s programs in languages other than English, and a strand of English language tuition. It was an intelligent and enticing bid.

Both channels appealed to the independent production community for support. SPAA, the producer’s trade association, trekked to Canberra several times in their behalf, although the focus seemed to be on the ABC, with that handy electoral commitment.

The budget saw the ABC gain an extra $167m over three years, broken down as $67m for the children’s channel, $70m for drama production, $15m for new regional broadband hubs, and $13.6 million in capital supplementation in 2009–10.

The ABC puts in around 60% of the budget for projects commissioned from the independent sector, and all the drama money will be spent outside the Corporation. So this immediately increases the demand on Screen Australia, the State film agencies, and the international presale marketplace. By 2011-12, the ABC should be investing around $37m into seventy hours, which means producers will look for about an extra $21m. With the new producer rebate available from the tax system, I think that means a demand on Screen Australia of around $10m. In turn, that is about a quarter of the production budget, which is being reduced anyway.

So the ABC has become a much bigger player in the entire screen production system.

By contrast, SBS got $20m altogether, is expected to find an efficiency dividend as well, and is facing a declining level of advertising revenue. I’ve heard one informal estimate in this very inexact space of up to $8m/year. SBS is very unhappy with the situation, and has already announced that it will continue to fight.

The effect on the independent community is serious. CEO Shaun Brown has circulated a letter which says, in part, “Over the coming weeks and months SBS will need to reconsider its commissioning strategy for the next three years and take some tough decisions. This will mean some programs will not be made, even if development funds have already been invested.”

Fans of The Circuit and East-West 101 should be braced for disappointment. Some new shows will go as well; this hurts creators, but broadcasters cancel programs in development all the time. However, the net increase in television funding puts a golden glow on present travail. And cynics would say that producers can simply shuffle sideways to the ABC, get rid of that pesky multicultural agenda, and breathe a sigh of relief that the programs won’t be chopped up by advertisements.

However, the situation is a bit less simple than that. The one area in which the ABC and SBS are both handily ahead of the commercial license requirement is in documentaries. This means that the ABC has no direct incentive to increase its documentary output, while it will be hard put to find the drama money. I guess the documentary output will be static. At the same time, SBS will have to reduce its documentary commitment, so we can expect downward pressure on levels of factual production. There are no certainties here – the international market is very unstable, and the ABC is fond of its true life programs.

Also, it is a fact of life that SBS seems to be commissioning more edgy and interesting drama output; at the same time, the ABC has been a bit dull of late, though Dirt Games was an adventurous commitment, for which Auntie deserves kudos. The real creative energy in ABC commissioning can be found in its light entertainment and factual output, like Spicks and Specks, The Gruen Transfer and The Chasers...

The existence of a door for challenging, idealistic and anti-formulaic programs is very important for the independent community. We need hope and inspiration, to know that ideas can be developed organically, an not as a piece of mimetic Meccano. Without it, the sector withers in subtle ways, rewards timidity, excuses the mediocre even more completely.

However, these SBS decisions were made years ago – the two edgy shows are second series – and SBS has put in place a different team since then, and we have yet to see their preferences. And won’t at all, unless the advertising market improves.

We know why the ABC is getting more money. Lobby groups pushed for output parity with the commercial channels, and for a decent children’s channel. Budgets were a joke, lots of voters like the ABC, the commercial networks are going down the toilet so Auntie can hunt the audience, while the chair, the CEO and the head of television played an increasingly adroit game with the government. I am betting the ABC kept its connections with the ALP running, protected its autonomy even with a Howardian reactionary board, and demonstrated a new willingness to restrict its expansion to soft, non-political areas like children’s TV and drama. It is not as if the ABC demanded a huge increase in its news and current affair budget, though that is sorely needed; this in itself may speak to Auntie’s tactics with government.

But why was SBS whacked so viciously? Isn’t the ALP in favour of those soft, cuddly multicultural agendas? Doesn’t it have an ethnic constituency it wants to soothe?

Therein lies a tangled tale. In 1991, the ALP changed the SBS act to allow sponsorship, thus itself opening the door to commercial revenue. I guess they figured it was a way to allow SBS to roar ahead of its own accord, without turning to the federal government – and SBS’s budget was so staggeringly pathetic it had an argument for a significant increase.

When Keating included SBS in his ambitious Creative Nation program in October 1994, he did not give the money to the network; he set up a new organisation, with its own board, called SBSi. Meanwhile, both broadcasters relied on investment funds from the old Film Finance Corporation – the government did not simply give that money to the ABC and SBS, but channelled it through a weird bit of extra financial plumbing.

I reckon both gestures have the same origin – neither the government nor the independent community trusted the national broadcasters with the money. Even then, the ALP did not treat SBS like its little friend.

SBS always had a peculiar relationship with its audience. It was created by a particular historical moment, which slid away, and trod some strange paths to justify its existence. Was it there to provide content in people’s first language? No, its task was to show a multicultural world to all Australians. That means subtitles. Do most people want to watch subtitles? No. So, its mainstream Australian audience consisted often of people who would tolerate their drama and movies with funny writing on the bottom – Howard’s hated urban elites.

What SBS needed at the time was shows like The Circuit, Remote Area Nurse, East-West 101 and the ABC’s Wildside. Mainstream, no subtitles, pacey and challenging, that felt like the real life we live in today. What it got was shows like Fat Pizza, cos they were dirt cheap and appealed to a new, young constituency. There is a lot of fascinating discussion to be had in here, because most audiences don’t want to be confronted with real life on television – they want a nice, soothing bunch of cliches to take them away from their tired tootsies, whining children and menacing work problems. Getting the electricity of recognition to flow through the cables of escapism is no mean feat, and takes more money and skill than our television production community usually can deploy.

A couple of really interesting things happened once SBSi was set up. It was captured immediately by independent producers with good instincts and a determination to take risks. It had so little money it had to collaborate closely with other government funding agencies. They in turn had little interest in the voracious maw of television, but had strong agendas to develop the sector and emerging filmmakers. So SBS took a funnny swoop sideways into more interesting content, which was satisfying to make, respected complexity, gave chances to new players, and fed the need for experimentation and innovation in the screen sector.

It helped to finance a slate of low budget feature films supported by the AFC. It became the only Australian broadcaster to get its label on an Oscar winning film – a half hour animation from Adam Elliott called Harvie Krumpet.

We are yet to see the full cultural impact of the roughly ten years in which SBSi had independent power. I do know it tangled endlessly with SBS proper, who just didn’t get it, even though they were happy to buy and program edgy cult films with lots of sex late on Friday night, and could understand the notions of theming and countercyclic programming which put good shows on over summer. And they understood both the Eurovision Song Contest and the Tour de France.

But SBSi slowly succumbed to a more populist version of itself. It wanted to be more light hearted, and less serious. It wanted merrier, more mannered ways of making documentaries. To be more superficially naughty, more self-promotional, more daft. Personally I support this pressure, but I think it needed a much more sophisticated approach than it seemed to get. (The ABC seems to be doing better, by the way, and I don’t think that is just about money).

We will probably not get to the bottom of the changes in SBS until the Board papers are available to historians. It may take some cabinet documents as well. But we all know the Howard government clacked its fangs at the national broadcasters endlessly, and they took a lot of pain on the budget front. The Boards gained those notoriously reactionary obscure Murdoch pundits and academics from the far right. The ABC seems to have minimised their impact, but SBS made some odd deals.

It slowly moved to take advertisements between programs, like most public broadcasters round the world. It didn’t make much money from them. It absorbed a vehemently stated advertising industry message that ads inside the shows were worth real money, and allowed SBS to promote its own programs and therefore increase ratings and therefore get high prices for ads.

It recruited Shaun Brown to be CEO. His Wikipedia entry lays out the bare facts. In New Zealand,

“He was made Head of TV One in 1997. In 2001, he was appointed Head of Television on an annual salary reported to be $340,000, responsible for running both TVNZ channels. Brown held this TVNZ position for nine months before the position was eliminated by chief executive Ian Fraser…

…During his time at TVNZ, the network was accused by New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark of being “shamelessly ratings driven” according to a report.”

Brown ran TVNZ at the climax of a tumultuous time in New Zealand television. Again, Wikipedia can provide some information:

“As a state owned enterprise, TVNZ enjoyed enormous commercial success (sustaining two thirds of the overall audience share) and paid the Crown substantial dividends (over $250 million between 1989 and 1999). However, the commercial success had been achieved through an unabashed pursuit of ratings through populist and tabloid content, and prior to the 1999 election the National-led government was evidently positioning TVNZ for privatisation. Labour-led administrations since 1999 explicitly recognised the market failures of a wholly commercial broadcasting sector (e.g. saturation-level advertising, low levels of local content, heavy reliance on cheap imports and a disregard for quality genres and in-depth news and current affairs) and re-emphasised television’s cultural and democratic functions in their policy thinking.

The government’s highest profile broadcasting reform to date was the restructuring of TVNZ as a Crown Entity in 2003. This introduced a dual remit whereby the broadcaster had to maintain its commercial performance (continuing dividend payments to the Crown) while simultaneously implementing a new public service Charter.

The TVNZ Charter would require the negotiation and reconciliation of potentially contradictory commercial and public service imperatives. The final version of the TVNZ Charter included a range of public service objectives and expectations…”

Brown became Head of Television at SBS in January 2003, Managing Director in February 2006, had his contract extended just before the Liberal government was defeated, and has the job until 2011.

The decision to appoint Brown, at least in 2006, was clearly strategic. The SBS Board wanted a leader who was populist, was comfortable with advertising, and able to run a channel which was strong on the coliseum material of reality TV and game shows. During his tenure, SBSi ceased to be independent, advertising moved inside programs, and the existing commissioning editors moved on.

Wikipedia repeats the central claim that Brown used again and again to justify these manoevers, which were unpopular with some pundits, with audiences, and with some producers.

“At SBS Brown has lifted investment in commissioned programs from around $4 million in 2002 to around $30 million in 2009. During the same period SBS audience share has increased by 22 per cent to a total share of 6.2 per cent..
.
.. While Brown has admitted SBS audiences reacted strongly to the introduction of in-program breaks, since their introduction SBS has increased its audience share to record levels (and increased the revenue raised through television advertising to $46.3 million in 2007-08).”

I am one of those people who truly detests advertising inside television programs. I make rancid jokes about product placement chiselled into the Mona Lisa, or operas with the Louis The Fly song every ten minutes. You either respect the audience or you don’t. If you don’t, you should fuck off.

But I am not sure what the production landscape would look like in that alternate universe in which SBS refused to take that poisoned chalice. Did we really need the Australian edition of Top Gear, which rates less than the British edition? Or Desperately Seeking Sheila?.
SBSi supported “more than 800 hours of drama and documentary from independent Australian filmmakers” before this latest manoever; wasn’t the system working?

Part of the intellectual problem is that the challenging material is seen as an alternative to the populist stuff. I have no objection whatsoever to the programs I have just listed; I believe strongly that SBS ought to campaign for higher ratings; I see a fair amount of earnest mediocrity in Australian production. Indeed, I think the screen sector has its own subtle and unidentified culture war, which pits Quality and Integrity against Masscult and Grubby Populism; or Wankers against Entertainers, depending on your instincts.

But I am horrified by the idea that the older agenda of SBSi – the important programs that existed on their own terms, as a response to the content, through a particular sensibility, resisting formula and sensationalism – is being driven out by the need to create this more populist material that grabs ratings.

At this point, we reach a simple “no we don’t, yes you do” conflict. The current management of SBS would deny that they are dumbing down slots and projects; some producers would say they certainly do and will produce gruesome editing room anecdotes; others would say that individual staff members can be surprising and unpredictable. I would add the general fact that documentary filmmakers around the world are being pushed into bombast and faux hysteria, to make large claims in breathless moments of fake discovery. The ABC does it too.

At the moment, SBS can point to First Australians with absolute pride, even though it was commissioned under a previous regime, and the broadcaster had a unique relationship with a project which could conjure enormous respect in both material and working methods. But I don’t know of anything that SBS has on the books now which addresses the national agenda in such a significant way. The History of Racism in Australia, in four parts? Now, that would be a show.

How does this recent history play into the ALP funding decision? Stephen Conroy duelled with Shaun Brown for years in the Senate Estimates Hearings, and threw every piece of crockery he could find over the decision about commercials. He was not impressed, and made that very evident. This is just one exchange, from November 2006, about the proposal to put ads inside programs:

“Senator CONROY—You indicated some degree of support from people who understood that if it were a choice between losing or not making as many Australian documentaries they could live with it. Did I unfairly characterise your earlier response?
Mr Brown—That is correct. … when I took them through the rationale—although their concerns still remain, there is a considerable degree of understanding that if SBS is to continue to carry on with and expand its role then this is understandable and acceptable.
Senator CONROY—It sounds like they were presented with a choice: ‘You can have advertising or bubonic plague, which would you prefer?’ Funnily enough, they chose advertising.”

In November 2007, with the election looming, Conroy replied to an emailed question from Save Our SBS with these words:

“The introduction of in program advertising to the SBS in effect makes the SBS a de facto fourth free-to-air commercial television station and serves to erode the fundamental tenets of public broadcasting- that is, that it should be free from commercial and political influence.”

Again and again, Brown defended the strategy by claiming that ratings were increasing and SBS was harvesting revenue, with forward estimates for 2009-10 pushing up towards $70m per year. The income was spent on Australian programs, and an ambitious strategy to broadcast sport. That was obviously an ambiguous gambit since the government could so easily kiss SBS on its forehead for doing so well, slap it on the bum and reduce its budget. (Indeed, TVNZ is expected to return a profit to the government as its major shareholder, although it also provides a separate tranche for production finance).

Wounded campaigners from SBS were arguing after the budget that Conroy fought for SBS, and had to accept defeat. The ABC gets votes; SBS does not, so could be abandoned in a financial crisis. It is true that a million dollars given to the ABC gets to around three times as many eyeballs as SBS can offer, and that is surely good economic arithmetic in desperate times.

But I am not so sure this was the key reason. In those Senate hearings, the ABC fought the Howard government, and was supported by Conroy, while SBS confronted him, and was rescued by the Liberal senators. It wasn’t a good look, no matter how much it was foisted on the players.

I’ve heard a much simpler story: SBS accepted the Howard economic agenda, and the ABC resisted it. The wheel has turned, and SBS got very little for its position then, and has been given nothing now.

I suspect that outsiders don’t have enough financial data to really work through SBS’s choices. It functioned for a long time on niche audiences with strong funding agency driven programs, with overseas movies and heaps of subtitles, and maybe it can return to that model. But the sports landscape will surely change as SBS has to withdraw from that market.

What really bothers me, though, is an underlying question. SBS is trying to increase ratings, and believes that in-program promotion is valuable. SBS wants to do engaging, challenging and accessible programs, and will say that a lively audience will share that journey.

But I just wonder this: is SBS trying to commercialise to create audiences for what I think of as good programs, or is it actually just happy to make shallow crap for the fun of it?

When SBS opened its gates to Brown and his way of thinking, did it recruit allies, or barbarians?

The Chagossians are one of those multicultural communities that accrete from enterprising survivors of colonial labour, which swept up indigenous people, convicts, slaves, traders, travellers, pirates, fugitives and mercenaries. They have a romantic story, since they ended up in a remote paradise – the Chagos Islands, ribs of land between lagoon and sea which barely stand above the ocean’s surface, somewhere between Mauritius and India.

By 1960, there were a couple of thousand people -

“The Chagossian people’s ancestry is mostly of African heritage, particularly coming from Madagascar, Mozambique and other African nations including (Mauritius). There is also a significant proportion of Indian ancestry. The French brought them over as slaves from Mauritius in 1786. Others arrived as fishermen, farmers, and coconut plantation workers during the 19th century.

The Chagossians speak Chagossian Creole, a mix of Indigenous language and French-based creole language and part of the Bourbonnais Creole family. Chagossian Creole is still spoken by some of their descendents in Mauritius and the Seychelles.

The Archipelago later passed to the control of the United Kingdom and came to form part of the Colony of Mauritius.”

Surviving on a profitable coconut oil industry, in a fertile ocean, undisturbed since the wars between Britain and France, they were doomed by the Cold War. In 1965, the British bought the islands off Mauritius, as it secured independence, and created the “British Indian Ocean Territory” which gave the Chagossians no rights, no citizenship, no government and no constitution. It had already made a deal to hand the islands to the US, to create the place we know as Diego Garcia.

In the early seventies, it seems to have been a small, sleepy base, some of whose naval personnel were disturbed by the evidence of a missing population. An empty school, boats built by ghost shipwrights, a decaying chapel, and herds of feral donkeys which had to be scared off the runway so the weekly C47 could plonk itself down.

Pilger, with his usual pungent rage, explains what happened to the Chargossians. Google around – to this for example -and you too may conclude this is a fair description:

“To get rid of the population, the Foreign Office invented the fiction that the islanders were merely transient contract workers who could be “returned” to Mauritius, 1,000 miles away. In fact, many islanders traced their ancestry back five generations, as their cemeteries bore witness. The aim, wrote a Foreign Office official in January 1966, “is to convert all the existing residents … into short-term, temporary residents.”

What the files also reveal is an imperious attitude of brutality. In August 1966, Sir Paul Gore-Booth, permanent undersecretary at the Foreign Office, wrote: “We must surely be very tough about this. The object of the exercise was to get some rocks that will remain ours. There will be no indigenous population except seagulls.” At the end of this is a handwritten note by D.H. Greenhill, later Baron Greenhill: “Along with the Birds go some Tarzans or Men Fridays …” Under the heading, “Maintaining the fiction,” another official urges his colleagues to reclassify the islanders as “a floating population” and to “make up the rules as we go along.”

There is not a word of concern for their victims. Only one official appeared to worry about being caught, writing that it was “fairly unsatisfactory” that “we propose to certify the people, more or less fraudulently, as belonging somewhere else.” The documents leave no doubt that the cover-up was approved by the prime minister and at least three cabinet ministers.

At first, the islanders were tricked and intimidated into leaving; those who had gone to Mauritius for urgent medical treatment were prevented from returning. As the Americans began to arrive and build the base, Sir Bruce Greatbatch, the governor of the Seychelles, who had been put in charge of the “sanitizing,” ordered all the pet dogs on Diego Garcia to be killed. Almost 1,000 pets were rounded up and gassed, using the exhaust fumes from American military vehicles. “They put the dogs in a furnace where the people worked,” says Lizette Tallatte, now in her 60s,” … and when their dogs were taken away in front of them, our children screamed and cried.”

The islanders took this as a warning; and the remaining population were loaded on to ships, allowed to take only one suitcase. They left behind their homes and furniture, and their lives. On one journey in rough seas, the copra company’s horses occupied the deck, while women and children were forced to sleep on a cargo of bird fertilizer. Arriving in the Seychelles, they were marched up the hill to a prison where they were held until they were transported to Mauritius. There, they were dumped on the docks…”

In 1982, of course, the British responded to the invasion of the Falkland Islands with a war which directly killed nearly a thousand people. The Islanders are descended from similar fragments of imperial schemes, hopeful settlers, transmigrated gauchos, sealers and simple roving opportunists. By 1900, the community was dominated by Scottish shepherding families, joined later by whalers.

They numbered around 2000, and their political and cultural rights have been savagely defended. But they speak English, have a genetic heritage mostly from Britain, and they are White.

The Chagossians have fought back, and even secured some compensation, most of which was kept by the government of Mauritius. As Pilger said, on the way to his 2004 documentary on the subject,

“Led by a remarkable man, Olivier Bancoult, an electrician, and supported by a tenacious and valiant London lawyer, Richard Gifford, the islanders are going to the European court of human rights, and perhaps beyond. Article 7 of the statute of the international criminal court describes the “deportation or forcible transfer of population … by expulsion or other coercive acts” as a crime against humanity.

Through the early years of this century, the Chagossians have been subjected to a horrible legal roller coaster. The various deportation decisions were made by Royal Prerogative, hidden from Parliament and politicians, and the UK government argued that the court system had no jurisdiction; the House of Lords was agreed; the Divisional Court in 2000 declared the original order unlawful and the Labour government agreed to repatriate the Islanders, although not to Diego Garcia.

Then the Americans began bombing Iraq, and Diego Garcia throbbed with huge bombers and tankers. Even Google Earth will show you thirteen of them lined up on the tarmac, next to the gridded town which looks like Woomera with water. What happened to the government’s assurances is remarkable, even in the twisty annals of British foreign policy. As The Times reports the Court of Appeal judgement in 2007,

‘Following that decision, on November 3, 2000, Mr Robin Cook, then Foreign Secretary, stated that he accepted the court’s ruling and that a new immigration ordinance would be put in place which would allow the islanders to return to the outer islands, although not to Diego Garcia. A new immigration ordinance accordingly exempted the need for an entry permit to those with the relevant connection to the islands.

However, on June 10, 2004 the orders in question were placed by ministers before her Majesty for approval. The orders declared that no person had the right of abode in the territory, nor the right without authorisation to enter and remain there. The Divisional Court below held that to be unlawful.”

For the Chargossians, this was a considerable victory:

“In 2002 and 2006, the people of the Chagos archipelago – which is between Africa and Indonesia – won court decisions declaring the British actions unlawful.

Today, they defeated the foreign secretary, Margaret Beckett, who had taken the case to the court of appeal. They had not sought to return to Diego Garcia itself, but to other islands in the chain.

Speaking amid triumphant scenes outside the Royal Courts of Justice, Richard Gifford, the solicitor for the islanders, said: “It has been held that the ties which bind a people to its homeland are so fundamental that no executive order can lawfully abrogate those rights.

“This is now the third time that Olivier Bancoult, the leader of the Chagossian community in exile, has proved to the satisfaction of English judges that nothing can separate his compatriots from their homeland.

“They now call upon the British government for a new start in this abusive relationship and to proceed with the utmost urgency to restore these loyal British subjects to their homeland.”

During the campaign, small groups of islanders had twice been able to return for a short time. However, The BBC also reported that:

“… there is no prospect of the islanders being allowed back to live there in the foreseeable future, the BBC News website’s world affairs correspondent Paul Reynolds says.

The United States has a veto under existing agreements with Britain, which gives it the right to say who should live in the Chagos Islands – and it has said that for security reasons, there can be no return.

The British government has said that eventually Mauritius will be given sovereignty over the Chagos Islands, but only when what Foreign Office officials call “defence requirements” are ended.”

The British Labour Government, good social democrats all, then took the case to the Law Lords, as The Guardian reported:

“The US state department had argued that the islands might be useful to terrorists.”..

Jonathan Crow QC, for the foreign secretary, told the lords. “The Chagossians do not own any territory,” Crow said. “They have no property rights on the islands at all. What is being asserted is a right of mass trespass.”..

… The Foreign Office argued that allowing the Chagossians to return would be a “precarious and costly” operation, and the United States had said that it would also present an unacceptable risk to its base….

[Afterwards, the Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, said] “We do not seek to excuse the conduct of an earlier generation. Our appeal to the House of Lords was not about what happened in the 1960s and 1970s. It was about decisions taken in the international context of 2004.

“This required us to take into account issues of defence [and] security of the archipelago and the fact that an independent study had come down heavily against the feasibility of lasting resettlement of the outer islands of BIOT.”

In other words, tough titties for our expropriation thirty years ago. Things have changed. Ignore the plans to create an eco-tourism industry, even though yachts do anchor and roost at these moorings in paradise already. But agitation continues – British parliamentarians have formed an all-party group to agitate on the matter; Greenpeace veterans sailed into the area and had their boat confiscated; an appeal is being mounted to the European Court of Human Rights, which is demanding a response from the UK government by June 12th.

This is small beer in the scale of international atrocities, of course. Again and again, communities have been set up to serve the needs of empire, and screwed when they became inconvenient. The Chagossians do not have the kind of roots in the place which an Australian Aboriginal tribe had and has in its Country. A group went to England, and that community is now growing. Citizens never have an an inalienable right to their land and communities – ask anyone whose town had disappeared under a dam.

But there are special reasons why this situation is so outrageous. Diego Garcia is a kind of legal black hole, in which parliament, courts, agreements and treaties simply disappear, like the renditioned victims who were held there. There is no more secret place.

It is so invisible the Americans will not even countenance a small group of farmers, fisherfolk and tourism operators on the scattered smaller islands, some of which are 200 miles from the atoll itself.

Jonathan Freedland has written an excellent review in the NYRB of Island of Shame: The Secret History of the US Military Base on Diego Garcia, by David Vine, an anthropologist hired by the defence team.

“Vine could easily have written a book called Islands of Shame. He argues that there are at least sixteen such cases, where “often in isolated locations, often on islands, and often affecting indigenous populations, the US military has displaced local peoples” to make way for bases or similar activity. They range from the Bikini Atoll, picked for a nuclear test, to Koho’olawe, Hawaii, taken after Pearl Harbor; from Guam, of which the US military controls around one third, to the Philippines, where “Clark Air Base and other US bases were built on land previously reserved for the indigenous Aetas people.” The Navy pushed aside Aleutian islanders in Alaska, Puerto Ricans from the small island of Vieques, and Inughuit people from Danish Greenland—to say nothing of the 250,000 people displaced by the US base in Okinawa, fully half of the island’s population.

Vine’s evidence casts a fresh light on the ongoing debate over whether or not the US can be said to constitute an empire and, if so, how it might compare with its historical predecessors.[8] It had previously been fashionable to regard the US empire as exceptional, a break from the past in that its influence is almost entirely indirect and economic, since it refuses to join the Romans or British in ruling over colonies directly.

Thanks to the work of scholars such as Chalmers Johnson and now Vine, we can see the weakness in that argument. The latter estimates that there are one thousand US military bases and installations “on the sovereign land of other nations.” This “base world,” as Johnson calls it, is presented benignly, as the product of voluntary, bilateral pacts between the US and those states that agree for their land to be occupied. But often this presentation is, in the idiom of that British official, a “fiction.” Behind the veneer can lie the crude expropriation of land and the callous dispossession of some of the world’s weakest people. That is how it used to be in the old days of empire, whether under Rome or Queen Victoria. And that’s how it was in the Chagos Islands not much more than a generation ago.”

For myself? I collect evidence of bureaucratic bastardy, and this one is a beauty. How an official can sit in the very buildings in Whitehall in which Clive’s despatches were read, the empire in America was lost, and the colony in Port Jackson was planned, and complain that the Chargossians were demanding “the right to mass trespass” without any sense of irony is beyond me.

I suspect they were well aware that the line was a ghastly joke. But it was Lord Hoffman, providing the majority judgement of the Law Lords which deprived the Chargossians in 2008, who said

“Some of these scenarios [terrorism] might be regarded as fanciful speculations, but in the current state of uncertainty the government is entitled to take the concerns of its ally into account.”

He rejected the argument by the Chagossians’ lawyers that the government did not have the power to remove their right of abode in what is now known as the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT). “The law gives it and the law may take it away,” he said.

Which planet has he been living on? Both of those sentences are ludicrous, and contradictory, and point to the mess in which Diego Garcia is such an important tool.

For Australians, this is more than a teary moment far away. The Indian Ocean is being militarised, by the Indians, and the Chinese, with the Americans already there. It is a big place, but it is our coastline.

The online documentary has had a chequered history in Australia. Is it an insane idea, a bastard child of television, the future of the medium, or a bunch of pointless toys for lonely losers? The ABC reaches back to Gallipoli to find the digital future.

The ABC unveiled its new Gallipoli website last week, though there are many pieces still to be added.

From the outside, it looks like a major response to Anzac Day, which satisfies some sort of informal obligation to mark the event which has crept across the government broadcasters.

In fact, as Sam Doust, the creative director of ABC Innovation, told Screen Hub, “It was organic rather than necessarily intentional… we wanted to explore the 3D web per se, partly as a move towards Web 3.0…”

At the same time, a staff producer, Meena Tharmarajah, went to Gallipoli and came back with the feeling that she really didn’t understand the story until she had physically been there – the context is a vital part of the experience.

So the two ideas came together, based on a 3D recreation of the place, and using the terrain to anchor the experience. Moving around it, I am presented not with a linear story, but with a sense of simultaneity. It provides a shell around the individual experience of the soldiers, which is based on something completely different – the fragmentation and mystery of plunging into the unknown, at dawn, with no hindsight.

It is a different way of dealing with a basic tension in documentary storytelling. Filmmakers want to put the audience in the shoes of the soldier, but also create a narrative which makes sense of a complete event. Working the two together is central to the craft, and accumulating an emotional journey.

In this online world, the user can roll around the space and see the simultaneous lines of action, in a kind of infinite helicopter view, which darts down to the artefacts like the weapons, to pieces of story, and individual diaries and letters.

Doust claims that the landscape provides “a really good basis, on which we can create a sense of immersion.” As the dioramas erupt with sound effects and the camera swoops up the beach and across the jumbled hills, the audience does glimpse what it might have been like to be there.

I called the website “Gallipoli for the gamer generation”, but Sam described the line as unfortunate. From his point of view, it deploys no more than the 3D mapping, and has no gameplaying elements whatsoever. The expectation of creator and user is very different. The team were very conscious that they needed to stay away from framing the project as a game.

The project started in July 2008, and moved into full production mode in November, stimulated by the new resources of Flash 10, which is what Doust calls “so object oriented you can incorporate 3D spaces.”

Really, it took the work of eight people, for six months, with Plastic Wax hired to create the models outside. Trying to estimate a proper budget by an outside production company, Doust said, “It is probably nearer half a million – that is my intuition. We didn’t spend anywhere near that amount of money, not even remotely. That figure is off the top of my head – it is not an informed decision.”

However, it does provide a sense of the scale. For that money, a television company can make a handy documentary, but not a significant history project, set overseas. But, as Doust said of budgeting an adventurous multimedia site, “the true cost is never estimated properly. You come up with a figure and double it in terms of time and money – that is a cynical way of saying it is very difficult to estimate at the beginning, particularly if you are doing something new and full of surprises.”

Most of the large stand alone projects which the ABC has put online are built by the independent sector, but this was developed almost entirely with internal labour.

As Doust pointed out, the reconstruction of the ABC’s approach to the web two years ago meant that ABC TV took up significant multimedia responsibilities. There, the ABC is committed to developing a relationship with production companies.

But ABC Innovation is much smaller, and will continue to develop its projects in house. “We don’t have anywhere near the budget, so we are not in the business of spending money at all. We are a small group and we pull rabbits out of hats. We don’t have the money or resources to do larger things, and coproductions with outside companies are larger things. “

The division is responsible for the website as a coherent entity, as a brand and an interface, a doorway and an experience. It is responsible for the way it fits together, in the drive to make the ABC site part of people’s lives. So it does the design work, works out the conventions, creates the basic interfaces and constructs the architecture. The pieces belong across the organisation.

The old system, in which ABC Online ran its own empire and provided the multimedia services to everyone else, looked to outsiders like a dead end. As Doust acknowledges, “When we last audited the network, it had become profoundly institutionalised, with many hundreds of thousands of pages which were poorly connected.”

Besides this general responsibility, ABC Innovation also provides the news service which headlines the site when users hit the homepage. It adapts and filters the material from television and radio into an internet experience, answering the most basic need – we usually want news, we want to find it easily, and sort through it.

ABC Innovation is also responsible for the stuff in its title – innovation. Says Sam Doust, “We look in particular at the future trends of new media, and we try to implement some of that.” He acknowledges a playpen function, but cautiously. “It’s a completely relevant playpen or sandpit, but not as much as anyone outside might imagine.” The play is disciplined, directed at real projects, within a live context.

“There are lots of playpens where human nature took over any kind of innovation,”, he said. “They got bored and never invented anything at all. I’m terrified of that, and hope it doesn’t happen to us. It’s a classic trap, because the industry and the technology moves so quickly. By the time we use it, it is already outmoded.”

They are now working on an augmented reality game, which combines real life with gameplaying elements creating a kind of simulation. He expects this to develop with outside research partners.

There is more to do on the Gallipoli website, and ABC Innovation expects a second launch in November. Besides extra 3D material, they will populate the site properly with traditional html narrowband content, for those millions of Australians who can’t match the fierce ADSL2/2gig/Flash 10 requirements for the full experience.

Does it work? Is it, as the site claims, “the next best thing to being there?” With three excellent recent documentaries fresh in my mind, and some heart-tearing books, I am less than convinced. But then, most of its audience comes new to the experience, and is trying to create a realistic sense of a story which has been played heavily for its nation-building value.

As Sam Doust argues, the proof is in the forums, where comments are split between a discussion of a youth audience, and war nerds on the role of the battleships. There are plenty of congratulations, while the opinion of teachers varies between delight and frustration about speed and bandwidth issues. There will surely be a downloadable version.

Last week, Sam Doust told us that the site was designed as an experiment, to explore the potential of broadband, well beyond the “let’s download TV on demand” uses. The word “innovation” seems to mean “new for the ABC”, rather than “new to the world Infobahn”. I guess Gallipoli has contributed useful experience to the group; ironically, it looks to me like a shell waiting for a serious colloboration with an outside source of IP. The framework is there, but it needs a lot more stuff in it.

Just as a f’rinstance – the various bits of kit which were so carefully modelled tell you almost nothing. How big were those Turkish howitzers? How many in a crew, in a battery.. what did they sound like… what damage did they do.. ?

What would happen if the project was opened up to the Screen Australia history money? That, of course, means a co-production with the independent sector.

Then again, I would argue that kind of collaborative process, expertise and legal tools is a core part of multimedia. It’s not the interface, it’s the content, that makes your Mamma want to rock..

Now I have a brand new Blackberry Bold. As far as I can tell it simply won’t import my contacts and calendar from the Palm, even though it has a Wizard specifically to do it; it won’t record phone calls; and it has a much smaller screen than the Tungsten, though the keyboard is a better interface.

The calendar and contacts software on the phone seems to have less categories than the Palm, and is less searchable. The Blackberry seems to run off Outlook, which is less useful as well.

I gain something important – for less than $120/month I have unlimited mobile phone calls inside Australia, with bluetooth so I can work handsfree and type as I call. With that kind of deal, individuals can dump the Telstra landline, which means this arrangement is cheaper than copper + mobile for heavy users who depend on the phone.

But, it seems that my system has gone downhill, and all I get from the vaunted Blackberry is emails pushed at me away from the computer, which is intrusive, with a reasonably good keyboard on the phone. And slow access to the internet on a weeny screen, which is not part of the phone deal and can run out of control.

Am I missing something? Do we have to put the Blackberry Enterprise software on our server to enter a new, golden universe? (There are work reasons for not using the iPhone; Palm Pre is not around yet, and it seems to have surrendered to Outlook as well).

My real problem is at the computer end. I’ve never found a really good piece of software that enables me to build the accessible, detailed database of contacts I need for quick phone-based journalism. Which in turn links to the damn phone.

And when will “intent to confuse a customer” become a crime. No service allows me to check my usage online, unlike my ISP.