As is my wont at this time of year I published an April Fool’s story on our North West Star newspaper website on Saturday April 1. Headlined “Mount Isa to return to Northern Territory in border revision plan” it was a story by “Alan Border” purporting to reveal a plan seen by the Star where the westernmost part of Queensland from the Gulf to the South Australian border could return to the NT. Needless to say, the story was false. There is no such plan and those that followed the plan’s link in the story were rickrolled.
Many other details were false or invented. There is no journalist Alan Border. There is no Professor “Hugh Jerar” (a huge error surely, though I drag the good prof out regularly as a credible source each April 1) nor is there any “Grating Institute”. There is no plan to rename Mt Isa to NT Isa and there is no constitutional crisis over Queensland’s western border (though the bit about the west being added to Queensland in 1862 three years after the rest in 1859 is true). The map we printed where Queensland’s step-like western border is turned into a straight line was semi-false – it was the original 1859 map but it was dodgied up (with five minutes of poor Paint skills). The giveaway is Queensland and the NT agreeing to the proposal. It’s hard to imagine two governments agreeing on anything.
At the end of the day, I added an editor’s note. “Sorry/Not Sorry” it read, and a clarification. “This article was not written by the cricketer. He is ‘Allan Border’”. Our fake news was patently ridiculous but funny and while the serious tone (or reading the headline only) fooled some, almost everyone enjoyed the joke.
The grain of truth was the story of Queensland’s birth and how its border was revised in 1862. I’ve told that story on this blog before. It is based on the Peter Saenger book Queensland’s Western Afterthought. The trigger for Queensland taking the unclaimed land west of the 141st meridian was the search for the missing Burke and Wills in that region in 1861. The Queensland governor assured the Colonial Office his colony would protect settlers in the area as long as the western boundary was redrawn to include the Gulf of Carpentaria.
However I changed the 1859 map to show a fictional Mount Isa (it wasn’t founded until the 20th century) in an equally fictional “NT” (it was still part of NSW at the time). This map shown in the Facebook excerpt for my story hoodwinked a lot of people who read no further.
Fake news is fraught with hazard especially in 2017. Last year Macedonian youths made a lot of money when they invented shocking stories to gain large advertising revenue. They were exposed within days but millions believed the fiction. Donald Trump profited from that fiction then turned fake news on its head when he attached it to media giving him a hard time. The fake news practice has quickly spread across the world as a way to dismiss news you don’t like. Even truth itself has become muddied by “truthiness” and “alternative facts”.
So despite a long tradition of newspapers writing April Fool stories, I was concerned how people might react to my deliberately false piece. Looking at the Facebook feedback I needn’t have worried. One reader told me “I was really taken in by the border story! Whoever came up with this deserves a pat on the back. I love starting the day with a smile!” Many others were highly amused with many people picking out different favourite lines from the piece. There was hardly any negative remarks and even those who were fooled accepted their fate with good grace.
The story was shared over 300 times as people who got the joke then tried to fool their friends. There were those understood the joke, but still grappled with the issue: “If there are to be any border changes it should be new border along the Tropic of Capricorn to create the great state of North Queensland,” said one. Others though moving north west Queensland to NT was a good idea. Another said “It actually makes me sad this is fake”.
All in all, I’ll call it a viral success – at least in our remote part of the world. But it’s worth handling with care. I’ll stick to reporting the truth – at least until April 1, 2018.
Woolly Days 