In search of Doomadgee’s outstations

Doomadgee housing. Late 1950s.

Author Mark Moran shares his experiences of Doomadgee in his excellent book Serious Whitefella Stuff (2016). Doomadgee is an Aboriginal shire and township in North West Queensland, 100km from Burketown and 500km from Mount Isa. It began in the 1930s as a mission called Old Doomadgee further north at Bayley Point on the Gulf of Carpentaria. Old Doomadgee brought together the remnant population of Ganggalida, Waanyi, Garawa and Yanyula people from the western Gulf region. Their lands had been overrun in the 1870s and by the 1910s they lived in camps and shanties outside white properties, where they worked for rations. In 1933 they were herded up by Christian Brethren missionaries into Old Doomadgee.

A shortage of fresh water led the Queensland Government to believe that Old Doomadgee was unsuitable for population expansion. When a cyclone destroyed the mission in 1936, they decided to relocate the mission despite local objections. Around 50 children and 20 adults at Old Doomadgee were moved 100km south to the current site of Doomadgee on the banks of the mostly dry Nicholson River, named by Ludwig Leichhardt in his first expedition.

The site grew rapidly in the 1930s and 1940s, when the Queensland Government removed Aboriginal families from pastoral stations including Westmoreland, Lawn Hills and Gregory Downs. The Christian Brethren were strict, conservative rulers with no time for Aboriginal culture and Doomadgee was one of the most authoritarian missions in Queensland. Women had to wear ankle-length dresses while younger women were locked up at night and forced into domestic duties by day. As in Palm Island, children were separated from parents into same-sex dorms. They were not allowed to speak their language or practise customs. The superintendent’s word was law. Punishments included confinement or, for women, cutting off their hair.

The tribes initially had little in common. Some were from Queensland and some from the Territory, some from near the sea and some from inland. But they eventually bonded, calling Doomadgee home. The adults had to work on pastoral stations. Moran says that in 1965, half of Doomadgee’s population – 274 people – were working on 74 pastoral properties across the region, with the Mission receiving what little money they made. In 1968 when the Commonwealth Arbitration Commission decided Aboriginal workers were entitled to fair wages, the stations sacked their black workforce rather than give them equal pay and Doomadgee’s function as a regional cheap labour pool came to an abrupt end.

The Christian Brethren handed control to Queensland in 1983 but premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen would not grant the town autonomy. It wasn’t until 1988, the year after Joh was replaced, that Doomadgee became a local government region given trusteeship over the Doomadgee reserve land held in Deed of Grant in Trust, known as DOGITs. Many townsfolk established outstations including at Old Doomadgee after the road gang cut a 120km road “using a combination of local knowledge, compass dead reckoning and radio reports from a ministry pilot overhead.” The outstation movement was a Whitlam-era response to the problem of centralised missions and the assimilation era. In Doomadgee and elsewhere a land claim became a pathway to land rights. Elder Tom O’Keefe established one of the town’s first outstations at Six Mile, on traditional land owned by the Waanyi People of which Tom’s mother was one.

When Mark Moran arrived in Doomadgee in 1991 as a council superviser, all white people in town lived separate from the rest of the community, a legacy of mission days. The outstation movement was gathering momentum. Around a quarter of the town’s 1000-strong population wanted to move out in search of the bush life to strengthen culture. The outstations were ad hoc affairs using family labour and whatever materials they could scrounge. When the federal government introduced Community Development Employment Projects, (pejoratively, work for the dole) unemployment benefits were converted into community development projects which spurred on more outstations in Doomadgee.

The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission was formed a year earlier and provided useful funds and functions for Aboriginal communities. ATSIC provided 1000 cattle to four outstations to manage and each station got a $10,000 construction grant. The cattle were never profitable – helicopter mustering was prohibitively expensive – but they enabled young people to learn pastoral skills and helped the dormant Doomadgee Rodeo to resume. Young Jason Ned, now Doomadgee mayor, won the bareback bull ride in the 1993 event. Doomadgee had desperately-needed money to spend on new sewerage, street works, the airstrip and water infrastructure. But ATSIC reined in outstation funding after many splurged on huge cars, with expensive maintenance costs in rough conditions. There was funding for housing in town and Moran helped families who wanted to build more permanent accommodation on their outstations. Then Council went broke and an administrator sacked all contractors including Moran.

Undeterred, Moran returned to Doomadgee a year later working for the Centre for Appropriate Technology to prepare a planning report for the outstation housing grant he had brokered. They built eight homes using steel frames, full perimeter verandahs, external ablution blocks, elevated rainwater tanks and ventilated pit latrines. ATSIC called a moratorium on outstations in 1996 after hearing that many were abandoned or trashed. In Doomadgee some had done better than others with Merv Peter incorporating Gumhole Aboriginal Corporation to open avenues to government funding. With the help of ATSIC, Moran delivered an outstation plan and an outstation committee but it was never put to practise as funds dried up.

Outstations became an ideological battle front. In 2005 prime minister John Howard abolished ATSIC without a proper replacement. Indigenous Affairs minister Amanda Vanstone called remote communities “cultural museums“. Before the 2007 NT Intervention, crown prosecutor Nanette Rogers said outstations were “highly dangerous places for women and children because they are unable to escape any of the violence.” The free-market Centre for Independent Studies’ Helen Hughes called them a form of apartheid and a “socialist utopia”. Right winger Gary Johns said Aboriginal people should live in towns to escape from humbugging though Moran argues the need to escape was the impetus for the outstations in the first place. He admits that while there was improved health outcomes living on outstations, there were problems with providing education in remote environments.

Anthropologist Diane Austin-Broos defended the outstations saying they eased the pressure on larger communities. Despite the lack of jobs and schooling, people could paint, care for their country and enjoy well-being. She also said residents were less worried about comparative disadvantage than outsiders. “Clothing (often second hand), shelter (often makeshift) and food (a mix of foraged and store bought)…might look second rate to the outsider but…this mattered less to remote Aboriginal people,” she said. Moran said people moved to Doomadgee outstations for many reasons: culture, history, subsistence, autonomy, wellbeing and safety but they also expected similar housing, infrastructure and services they got in town and that proved to be beyond the funding they could source from governments.

The Commonwealth government restricted funding in 2007. Outstations could still get money but only if they were running a business on site. Work for the dole was harder to get and the Doomadgee CDEP corporation remained the only outstation resource agency in the area. Without ATSIC there was competitive tendering for contracts and in 2009 the corporation lost the contract to external employment services company, Mount Isa Skills. Moran says the result was Doomadgee lost its last lifeline to the outstations.

Under a new Labor government, Doomadgee was named as one of 29 “remote hub settlements” where services would be concentrated on larger communities. Each hub would have a Local Implementation Plan and Doomadgee’s LIP made no mention of the outstations. Most outstation residents were forced back into the quarter-acre social housing blocks in town. When Moran returned again in 2014, Merv Peter’s Gumhole was the only permanently occupied outstation left though Merv had died after a long illness. Rodeo champion turned mayor Jason Ned founded another at Spoon Creek as money flowed into the town via nearby Century Mine. Moran met Tom O’Keefe, then in his eighties, who was still at Six Mile which he described as his life achievement. “Built my outstation and now there are four mango trees,” O’Keefe told Moran.

Black ’47 and beyond: the Irish famine in history, economy and memory

The 1840s famine is the pivotal event of Irish history. Before the famine eight million people lived on the island of Ireland, but five years later less than six million remained. It was one of the more devastating and long-lived famines anywhere on the planet. I’ve covered British prime minister Robert Peel’s initial famine response which was well-meaning but ran up against British vested interests. Now I turn to the work of Irish economic historian Cormac O’Grada and his Black ’47 and Beyond: The Great Irish Famine in History, Economy and Memory (1999). It looks at historical and economic data from the famine era but also examines folklore to get a impressionistic view. O’Grada applies comparative studies to other major famines such as Finland (1866-68), Soviet Union (1918-22), Ukraine (1932-33), Bengal (1943-44) and Biafra (1968-70) but acknowledges Mao’s Great Leap Forward famine of 1959-62 in China was “in a macabre league of its own”.

The Irish potato harvest failed in 1845 due to a blight, phytophthora infestans. Poor weather in 1846 worsened the blight and contributed to the failure of public works as a famine response. O’Grada rejects suggestions of a British “genocide”. He says policy failures were a result of a dogmatic political economy of “doctrinaire neglect” not murderous intent. Infectious diseases were the main cause of death not starvation – the death toll was high in crowded Dublin slums far from blighted potato fields. The famine mostly killed the poor while the relatively better-off had the safety valve of emigration.

Ireland’s economy in the 1840s was overly dependent on the potato with 0.8 million hectares under cultivation before the famine, a figure halved by the 1850s. The potato was highly prized as a garden crop, initially as a supplementary and seasonal food. Ireland’s acidic soil and damp climate was advantageous for cultivation. It was among the first countries to popularise the crop and spread its love to other parts of Europe. The blight also affected Scotland, Belgium, Holland and Switzerland. But in the Scottish highlands the poor supplemented potatoes with oatmeal and fish. Nowhere was the impact as severe as Ireland. Irish consumption was five kilos a day for adults in the bottom third of the population, compared to 800 grams in Holland. This was partially due to British corn laws making them cheaper than in Europe, but it was also a function of Irish poverty.

Almost two-thirds of Irish agricultural labourers had no land and the top quarter of farms held 60pc of the land, mostly better land. Many farmers rented marginal land, often in joint tenancies, a continual source of friction. They were badly housed, illiterate, underemployed and too poor to move away. Emigration was an option for the less impoverished and population growth had slowed in the decade before the famine with rising labour demand in industrial Britain and America. Most of the very poor lived in the south and west and there was disproportionate famine impact west of a line from Waterford in the south-east to Ballyshannon in the north-west. Eastern counties were wealthier and had easier access to seafood and relief and employment in port towns.

Weather was a crucial factor. The 1845 harvest was only a quarter down on previous years but poor weather in 1846 caused the blight to inflict more damage than anywhere else in Europe. It delayed planting and stunted growth while heavy rain in the summer months of July and August caused fungi spores to wash into the bulbs and destroy the crop. Crop failures had happened before in 1822, 1831 and 1836 but never two years in a row. Public works was the government response to prior failures but Ireland’s cold winter weather in 1846-47 and 1847-48 made that a miserable solution to workers with inadequate clothing, “rags hardly covering for decency” as one Wicklow observer noted. Reports of initial deaths in late 1846 attracted shock and attention but as the bodies piled up in early 1847 they lost newsworthiness. Though yields recovered in 1847 the potato failed again in 1848 and conditions in the west in 1849 matched the worst of two years earlier. Bodies were left unburied and crime was rampant with many preferring transportation to the disease-ridden workhouses. Mortality remained high in some workhouses as late as 1851, five years into the crisis, far longer than any other famine in world history.

This drawn-out affair caused famine fatigue and contributed to negative caricatures of Irish irresponsibility and dishonesty in the British press, not helped by hundreds of thousands of unhealthy Irish arriving in Britain from 1847. Britain felt Ireland was not taking enough responsibility for its own problems. In 1849 prime minister Lord John Russell refused a grant to Ireland of £100,000 saying the problem was exaggerated. The Times admonished Ireland saying it needed moral stimulus to understand the difference “between giving alms in the presence of our children and inducing them to contribute out of their own pocket money”.

Authorities faced massive challenges in determining what relief to apply and where. Relief committees were tasked to raise funds, submit public works proposals, advise on the most deserving and distribute food to the needy. Unpaid committee members, usually clergy, traders, landlords and agents, had local knowledge but were overburdened. The government also pushed cash-for-work schemes which employed 140,000 people. By 1847 these schemes were replaced by soup kitchens and poor law unions using prison-like workhouses. The 130 workhouses spread across the island existed pre-famine for poor relief, but were stigmatised as a last resort due to prison-like uniforms, inadequate food, forced labour and confinement. As famine admissions rose they were overrun by typhus. By March 1847 the workhouses housed 700,000 people with 24,000 dying each week. A stingy British exchequer demanded too much of chronically underfunded local committees. Still, the small weekly wage was attractive for penniless families and they kept many people alive through the dark years.

Precise figures on how many died is difficult due to a lack of births and death civil registration. Protestant churches recorded burials and Bandon, Co Cork records show a large increase in mortality in the famine years, though it was less prevalent in Dublin. The main estimates of aggregate death come from comparisons of the censuses of 1841 and 1851 and assumption on population growth to 1846. There is also detailed 1851 mortality data compiled by Dublin surgeon and medical census commissioner William Wilde (Oscar’s father) though there was considerable under-reporting. Wilde’s data shows who died of dysentery, diarrhoea, dropsy, fever and starvation from 1846-51 with 407,083 deaths of which 54.9pc were men. Twice as many died in Munster and Connacht than Ulster and Leinster. The toll was highest in four poor western counties: Kerry, Clare, Galway and Mayo. No county and no constituency was immune. In 1847 Dublin’s Glasnevin cemetery reported a large spike in burials while the Waterford Mirror reported “fever and pestilence have been doing their worst here among the upper classes while famine and destitution are quickly thinning the numbers of the poor.”

Over one million people left Ireland between 1845 and 1850. Some would have emigrated anyway, but most responded to the famine. Harsh conditions aboard and the long crossing contribute to the myth of the “coffin ships” but O’Grada says most made it safely across the ocean. Mortality on the unregulated and cheaper Canadian route was higher than the American route, as this was the only option for poorer emigrants. The 2pc average mortality for the New York route was no worse than pre-famine times and the record of German ships in 1847 was worse than British ones. Irish emigrants usually had modest means such as land, animals, savings or a dowry. There were also assisted passages from landlords anxious to lose unreliable tenants. Though America was an improvement on Ireland, they remained on the lowest rung of society long after they got there. In New York they did “rude and heavy work” and most took the advice to move farther inland. The Irish-born population of Britain also doubled to almost a million, mostly in the port cities of London, Glasgow, Liverpool and Manchester. Long distance emigration continued for 100 years usually following the path of departed relatives.

Of those left behind, export manufacturers in the cities were least affected as they could still sell overseas. Survivors were also better off in a tighter labour market and traders benefitted from rising demand in the 1850s. Landlords freed of non-viable tenants were buoyed by rising meat and dairy prices and saw rents improve and tax bills decline. Ireland’s economy recovered again before flattening out in the 1920s – the price paid for political sovereignty and economic illiteracy of 20th century conditions rather than post famine effect.

The famine remained an important element in Irish memory and provide rich data sets and anecdotes of vivid lived experience. “If I told you where people were buried, you would not go out at night,” one 85-year-old west Cork farmer said. In Sligo one said if someone died in the house, they were left there unless someone from the house could carry them to the graveyard and do the burial. Another story tells of someone holding up a potato and saying to it “thank God it was not you I buried today.” These tales help O’Grada’s argument that the scale and depth of the Great Famine was unique in Europe. He said its enduring impact was reflected in a desire “to remember things we never knew”. Whether that remains true of wealthy 21st century Ireland is debatable. As Jerry Mulvihill wrote in the Irish Times this week, there has been a lack of visualisation of the Famine. “The commissioning of art, the growing list of literature, the creation of monuments and memorials relating to the Great Hunger are, I feel, Ireland reclaiming and owning its past and very much conducive to healing,” Mulvihill said.

Another visit to Norfolk Island

With my partner working on Norfolk Island, the South Pacific paradise has become my de facto holiday home. I’ve made four visits in 18 months despite the pandemic. This time last year the island was the first Australian jurisdiction to close its borders, which seemed shocking at the time, but quickly copied and made mainstream by the bigger states. The island has been COVID-free bar one case which was quickly isolated. The only effect today is usual air carrier Air New Zealand cannot deploy planes from Sydney and Brisbane due to travel restrictions. Qantas are filling the breach at least until end June.

The route is providing important revenue for Qantas while international routes are closed. The planes are full of tourists taking a rare opportunity to get “overseas” at the moment. The bustling streets and buses on the island are good for business but is causing stress on food supplies. With no supply ship coming to the island in the last few months, supermarket shelves in Burnt Pine township are bare, there was rationing of essentials, and cafes are only serving small cups of coffee amid dwindling milk supplies.

Island administrator Eric Hutchinson said Norfolk had a shortage of flour, cooking oil, sugar and rice. Locally produced food such as fish, beef and vegetables are ensuring there is no starvation despite the inconvenience and a ship was due this weekend. Hutchinson told media there was a longer term plan to build a temporary landing stage so trucks could drive off ships. “That will change the landscape,” he said.

There was a barge landing point at beautiful Ball Bay (above) on the east of the island. That jetty was a temporary structure used by contractor Boral to unload equipment to redo the airport runway last year and also shipped in supplies from the mainland while it existed. But part of the contract with Boral was to remove the jetty on completion of the work. It was occasionally unsafe with at least one barge escaping its moorings and crashing ashore in the dangerous surf.

Big surf is a fact of life on Norfolk Island and rough weather is the norm (which could delay the unloading of the current ship). When we tried to hitch a boatride to Phillip Island (above, rear) last Christmas it took us two weeks in the height of summer to find seas calm enough for the treacherous 7km trip. Even the nearer Nepean Island (above, front) just 2km offshore is out of bounds due to the surf beyond Kingston harbour.

Situated west of Kingston, Emily Bay is protected from the swell by a coral reef and offers safe year-round swimming, though you need to be careful with currents. As the only safe beach on the island, it is a popular spot but is big enough never to to seem crowded and is always an oasis of calm whatever the conditions on the ocean.

Every morning and afternoon I snorkelled in the reef which was usually crystal clear apart from at high tide in a big swell. I loved the vibrant fishlife with my favourite the bright blue wrasse, one of the larger fish on the reef. While I was there there was a running joke I had not seen any of the island’s many eels. A friend of my partner rubbed it in as she saw eels on numerous occasions. Finally my partner came to the rescue and pointed out this stout moray eel poking out from a isolated spot of coral. She took the photo too.

The rockpools were full of life at low tide including this lovely large crab. It seems the ecosystem in the Norfolk Island coral is in good health. Academic John Turnbull has just returned from a research trip to the island and found healthy corals on many survey sites. While large fish like shark were rare, he recorded blue mao mao, convict surgeonfish, the blue band glidergoby, sergeant major (a damselfish), chestnut blenny, Susan’s flatworm, red-ringed nudibranch, fine-net peristernia and an undescribed weedfish. “Given recent major marine heatwaves and bleaching events in Australia, we were pleased to see healthy corals on many of our survey sites on Norfolk,” Turnbull said.

East of Duncombe Bay are a group of small islets which include Cathedral Rock. The basalt that makes up Cathedral Rock cooled into columns. A gaping hole through the bottom of Cathedral Rock allows waves pass straight through an archway. Captain James Cook landed at Duncombe Bay in 1774, the first European on Norfolk Island which he named “in honor of the noble family of Howards”. Cook found the island uninhabited but with plenty of fresh water, spruce pines, fish and “babbage palms”. Cook’s discovery made Norfolk a useful adjunct to the infant colony of New South Wales in 1788.

Philip Gidley King and his small band landed at Kingston in March 1788. The difficulties of getting in and out of Kingston were exposed when First Fleet flagship Sirius sunk off Slaughter Bay in 1790. The first penal colony lasted until 1814 and was destroyed when vacated so it would be of no use to enemy nations. The second settlement began in the 1820s as the jails of Sydney overflowed and colonists needed a new harsher punishment centre.

Possibly the oldest surviving building from the second settlement is the Crankmill, built in 1827 as a store. The British installed powered cranks in 1837. Prisoners operated them to turn a pair of mill stones that ground corn and wheat. Intended as a punishment, it was constantly sabotaged but and was replaced by a windmill in 1840. Yet it continued as a punishment place until the end of the second settlement in 1855, the only one of its kind in Australia. Later uses included grain storage, milling, a hospital and a barracks while Pitcairners used it as a boat shed. Fire gutted the building in the late 1800s and the Norfolk Island Whaling Company housed boats there in the 1900s. It fell into ruin mid 20th century.

Another early building is government house, the official resident of island governors since 1829. Amid the succession of early brutal governors was one exception. Alexander Maconochie studied the penal system in Tasmania and wrote a book in 1839 called Thoughts on Convict Management and Other Subjected Connected with the Australian Penal Colonies. Each prisoner would earn marks of commendation through works and conduct and would be freed once they reached a set total. He avoided the use of leg irons, neck chains, “spreadeagling”, and the gag while the lash was used as a last resort. The Whig administration was anxious to see how his polices would work on brutalised Norfolk and made him commandant in 1840. Governor George Gipps would not allow his system to be used on repeat offenders, but Maconochie defied him, which led to the system’s downfall when word got back to Sydney. Although Maconochie achieved good results, the Colonial Office decided he was too lenient and the island returned to its state of terror in 1843.

Pitcairn Islanders were quick to claim the island in 1856 after it was abandoned a second time. They were descendants of the Bounty mutineers but the passage of time and the arrival of religion gave them a veneer of respectability. With the mutiny offenders long dead, the islanders were under the sway of George Hunn Nobbs who arrived on Pitcairn in 1828 and used his education to become leader. Nobbs was instrumental in convincing islanders to move to Norfolk. The newcomers ignored the previous British settlement, though they are all buried together in the beautiful Cemetery Bay graveyard.

The sense of grievance Pitcairners still have is abundantly clear across the island. In Burnt Pine there is a prominent display of painted green hands called Hands Up for Democracy to show the “concern and distress” Pitcairners have felt since they lost self-government in 2015. The People for Democracy Movement, the Council of Elders, and the Chamber of Commerce have written to Prime Minister Scott Morrison wanting the restoration of good governance and democracy. The say the removal of autonomy was ill-considered and poorly planned. Council of Elders President David Buffett said the island no longer has a say in government services such as education, policing and health. “They have been farmed out to New South Wales and there is now some discussion being held with the Queensland government to farm some out in the Queensland area,” Buffett said. “But there is no participation by Norfolk Island people in that process, and that is obviously a lack of democracy and it means a lessening of our cultural impact.”

As I flew home and looked out over the world heritage site of Kingston and Arthur’s Vale Historic Area, I reflected on another eventful trip. For a small island, it has an outsized history and profoundly affects all who travel here. Visiting the island in the 1930s, AB “Banjo” Paterson noted settlers “saw for the first time tropic abundance, so much so that some of them were inclined to stop there and not go on.” He recognised its qualities of paradise. “Why should they kill themselves working? Here was fifty inches of rain a year and every kind of fruit and vegetable,” Paterson wrote. But as author Robert Macklin found 80 years later it is a dark paradise. Food stress is a problem, when tourists arrive but the supply ship doesn’t. Unresolved tensions between Pitcairners and non-Pitcairners still dominate Norfolk Island’s political landscape. Nothing in its future is certain, though I know one thing for sure. I’ll be back again.

Google and surveillance capitalism

Photo by John Lee from Pexels.

In 2018 Google quietly removed all mentions of its unofficial motto from its code of conduct. “Don’t be evil” had supposedly been part of the tech giant’s DNA since 2000 though as Gizmodo reported, when Google rebadged as Alphabet in 2015 it became “Do the Right Thing”. The code was not just about providing users unbiased access to information, it was also about doing the right thing more generally, “following the law, acting honorably, and treating co-workers with courtesy and respect.” However as a stunning 2019 book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff shows, Google has blatantly long stopped doing the right thing so it is no surprise the phrase has been quietly retired.

Zuboff defines surveillance capitalism as something which unilaterally claims human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioural data. Though some data is used improve service and products, the rest is declared as proprietorial “behavioural surplus”. This surplus is fed into machine intelligence to produce prediction products which are traded in a “behavioural futures market”. The intention is not just to know about behaviour but to shape it at scale. This shaping is now leaving the digital world and becoming a day-to-day reality through the “Internet of Things”. Digital connection is a means to others’ commercial ends as surveillance capitalism feeds on every aspect of human experience.

Zuboff says surveillance capitalism was invented by Google in the early 2000s though other tech giants, especially Facebook, were quick to learn the lessons of applying big data to commercial success. They saw that Google got away with invasive actions as the law struggled to catch up, or was merely compliant. The timing of 9/11 helped as the US security apparatus sought to nurture and mimic surveillance capitalism’s capabilities for its own promise of certainty and total knowledge. Zuboff points out the error in the phrase “if it is free, then you are the product.” We are not the customers of surveillance capitalism, we provide its crucial surplus. Its customers are businesses that trade in its markets for future behaviour. This new knowledge is from us, but not for us. This huge market, Zuboff says, is likely to eclipse ownership of the means of production “as the fountainhead of capitalist wealth in the 21st century.”

It didn’t always have to be this way. Zuboff notes the early 2000s Georgia Tech experiment of the “Aware Home“. It predated the smart home by 20 years but was underpinned by trust and the sovereignty of the individual who had knowledge and control of the distribution of their information. But the rise of neoliberal economics has allowed what was once defined as “data exhaust” to become “behavioural surplus”. As Piketty described in Capital in the 21st Century the rate of return on capital exceeds the rate of economic growth and financial elites used their outsize earnings to fund political capture to protect their interests. The growth of surveillance capitalism was helped by the byzantine click-wrap agreements (upheld by courts) to which users simply say yes, rather than be bogged down in hours of semantic text.

Google is notoriously secretive but Zuboff has analysed the scholarly articles of its chief economist Hal Varian which explore “computer-mediated transactions” and their transformation economic effect. Varian noted that computers had many modern uses including “data extraction and analysis” and Google proudly says it is at the forefront of machine intelligence innovation. Varian says they gather large volumes of “evidence of relationships of interest” to which they apply “learning algorithms to understand and generalise”. Google’s invention of targetted advertising gave them a profitable start but it became the cornerstone of untold riches when it was put to the use of surveillance capitalism.

Stanford graduates Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded the company in 1998 two years after the Mosaic browser opened the doors of the World Wide Web. Their search facility was immediately popular and produced collateral data such as patterns, spelling, phrasing and location which was initially ignored. They hired Amit Patel to start data mining these accidental caches. Patel concluded they provided a “broad sensor of human behaviour”. Google engineers turned the “data exhaust” into a recursive learning system that improved search and spawned innovations such as spell check, translation and voice recognition.

Initially Google lived up to its “don’t be evil” mantra, reinvesting the user data into improved products. The problem was the products were given away freely and Google was not making money. It had a small AdWords team which generated modest profits from sponsored ads linked to key words but initially most revenue came from licensing agreements with the likes of Yahoo and Japan’s BIGLOBE. In 2002 the New York Times doubted Google could create a business model as good as its technology.

The 2000 Dot Com Crash left Silicon Valley under siege and Google investors were thinking about pulling out. Page and Brin abandoned their lukewarm hostility to advertising and decided to choose keywords instead of leaving it to advertisers. They would use the raw materials to improve search to meet this new objective. In 2002 Eric Schmidt was appointed CEO with a mission to understand the predictive power of their massive store of data and turn it into surveillance surplus. Initially that meant tying the price per click to the likelihood someone would actually click on the link. Google would mine data to match ads to interests. This was approaching the holy grail of advertising: providing the message at the right time when it might influence behaviour.

Google came up against the friction of privacy requirements. Many users were simply not giving information to make a full “user profile”. Google conscientiously overcame these decision rights deriving the missing data from online activity or from third-party services. As Zuboff said, targeted advertising turned Google from advocacy-oriented founding to behavioural surveillance as a full-blown logic of accumulation. Google used semantic analysis and artificial intelligence to squeeze more meaning from its data sets. That behavioural surplus at scale was a game changer and a zero-cost asset that led to enormous profits.

Google was transformed into a rapacious beast that put no limits on what it could find and take. It asked no permission and pursued – and continues to pursue – its own values ahead of the social contracts others are bound to. Facebook was quick to learn the lesson as it monetised its growing audience in the 2000s and hired Google executive Sheryl Sandberg as chief operating officer. Sandberg saw Facebook’s social graph as a massive potential source of behavioural surplus. They could not just satisfy demand but create demand using Facebook’s conversational culture. Together, Facebook and Google made surveillance capitalism the default model of capitalism on the web, spawning imitators in every sector. They all understand the value of Google’s discovery which is that we are less valuable than other’s bets on our future behaviour.

The goal is to automate us. Almost 20 years on, they are enormously successful with ever more ways to garner behavioural surplus as we live our lives increasingly online. The focus is moving from predicting individual behaviour to the behaviour of entire populations. Once we searched Google, but now Google searches us. Self regulation has not worked as surveillance capitalists declared their right to know, to decide who knows, and to decide who decides. As Zuboff says, it is a market-driven coup from above: an overthrow of the people concealed as the technological Trojan horse of digital technology. She said the first step towards any fightback is to name the problem. “My hope is that careful naming will give us all a better understanding of the true nature of this rogue mutation of capitalism and contribute to a sea change in public opinion, most of all among the young,” Zuboff said.

Brexit: Heroic Failure

The British right wing press are crowing. The COVID vaccine rollout, says the Express, is Brexit’s “finest hour”, and even Angela Merkel is envious, apparently. The Mail quotes the doyen of Brexit, Nigel Farage, who says Britain’s decision to unshackle from the European Medicines Agency has allowed it to launch its “brilliantly successful vaccine program.” The Telegraph has warned Europe to “stop sulking” at Brexit.

Britain is vaccinating a lot faster than Europe, 21 million Britons have received the first jab as at March 7. Its success is due to early approvals of the Pfizer and AstroZeneca vaccines and a January decision to prioritise the first dose. However the British Medical Association has criticised that latter decision as “unreasonable and totally unfair” and said it could cause “huge logistical problems” for general practices and vaccination centres, something Fleet St has ignored. It is no surprise that Britain and Israel lead the vaccine charge with both prime ministers using vaccine nationalism and a big chequebook to bolster their political credentials after botching the pandemic response pre-vaccine.

The vaccine has become another front in the war caused by Brexit. Leavers claim Britain’s speedy approval was proof of the case for Leave. Remainers pointed out the drug was made in part by a German company and will be produced in Belgium. It is a war forensically analysed by Irish writer Fintan O’Toole in his book Heroic Failure (2019). Heroic Failure was written before COVID changed our lives but its lessons will outlive the pandemic. O’Toole writes as a friend of Britain who notes the country’s open and tolerant reputation has taken a battering since the Brexit referendum in 2016.

Brexit, he says, is a largely English phenomenon built on a sense of imaginary oppression and the pleasures of self-pity. O’Toole says self-pity is a form of self-regard and promotes a feeling of implied superiority. Brexit’s internal incoherence is that it wants to be two things simultaneously, a mercantilist Empire 2.0 connecting the old white colonies, while also being an insurgency revolting against intolerable oppression.

O’Toole looks back to the period after the Second World War when England developed a “national grudge”. Despite being on the winning side in both major wars, it was bankrupt, Empire-less and suffering stagnation while the economies of defeated enemies were surging. Britain’s arrogance played a role. It was invited to the 1955 Treaty of Rome discussions and sent its under-secretary of trade who found the whole discussion distasteful. “You speak of agriculture which we don’t like, of power over customs which we take exception to, and institutions which frighten us,” he told the Europeans. Even when finally accepted into Europe, England oscillated between feelings of happy supremacy and a web of inferiority. The Daily Mail’s 1973 announcement of the EEC decision was that of Europe lucky to have them. “To know the British will be Europe’s privilege,” it wrote.

This doubtful privilege showed the reluctance of many English who felt membership was marginally less worse than staying out. Joining was framed as a sovereign remedy for economic ills but there was a collective loss of will from “Little Englander” intellectuals amid airy haughtiness and dejected resignation. The allure of Brexit was of ending the uncertainty. But O’Toole said, all it did was to fuse the two emotions into self-pity.

England could only imagine two fates: the coloniser and the colonised. If it was no longer the one, it had to be the other. Almost from the beginning, the Common Market was a scapegoat for everything from inadequacies in the health service to the rise of xenophobia. O’Toole said the English missed the chance to finally put the war behind them with the reunification of Germany in 1990 as the final vindication of their repudiation of Nazism. Germany’s triumph should have been Britain’s triumph as well. But there were no handshakes at the Brandenburg Gate because conservatives could not transcend their mental map of Britain imprisoned in Europe. That year trade secretary Nicholas Ridley called the EMS a “German racket” and though he had to resign for it, the idea germinated. In 2018 UKIP MEP Roger Helmer complained he was not born a European citizen and his father’s generation fought to ensure they would not be German citizens. “I am determined I shall not die as a European citizen,” Helmer said. The EU remained in the imagination as an insidious form of Nazism.

The media’s role was crucial. When Germany banned British beef in 1990 due to BSE, the media kept up a German “mad cow” war for 10 years, twice as long as the actual war, with the Mail still urging British government retaliation in 1999. They posted a photo of fake Nazis from ‘Allo ‘Allo along with a statement why it was “a good week to be beastly with the Germans” while audaciously claiming it was Germans who were “keeping the feud alive”. In 2016 the Mail ignored its own history of appeasement to slam David Cameron’s visit to Brussels ahead of the Brexit vote as “Who will speak for England?” drawing parallels again between the EU and Nazi Germany. The British media were keeping the feud alive and fighting the war again though evidence of the “invasion” was hard to find.

The book title comes from Stephanie Barczewski’s book Heroic Failure and the British with British heroes drawn from failures such as Scott of the Antarctic, Dunkirk, the Charge of the Light Brigade, the Franklin expedition, Gordon of Khartoum and the Somme. Heroic failure is transference, re-imagining British conquest of the world as an epic of suffering not for the victims but for the victors. Its currency is deeply debased in the Brexit debate, no longer disguising colonialism but wallowing in self-pity for a “plucky little nation annexed by a European superstate”. Its 2012 manifesto “Britannia Unchained” evoked slavery though it was black man Beau Isagba who represented the worst of what some elements of Britain have become” for punching a Malaysian student in the 2011 London Riots. Emotionally Brexit was fed by anxiety and the campaign slogan was “Take Back Control”. It put together two fears – Britain’s loss of status since 1945 and the erosion of white privilege – to provide re-assurance to righteous anger.

Irishman O’Toole notes the complete absence of Ireland from the 2016 Brexit debate. The only concession at the time to what has proved an intractable problem with the Irish border was Nigel Lawson’s arrogant suggestion that Ireland would be welcomed back into an independent UK. Brexit is the result of fissures in the existing kingdom. Englishness had been sublimated into Britishness since the 17th century but Scottish and Welsh devolution has forced attention again on what it means to be English. Previously the domain of skinheads, football hooligans and drunken squaddies, English nationalism reared up in 2016 as a new force. Opinion polls noted how the population was increasing calling itself English not British – especially outside London (mirrored by the Brexit result). But while the English want an English parliament, the Brexit victors took the opposite track claiming it as a win for the union.

That union looks increasingly broken. The SNP wants to put “Scotland’s future in Scotland’s hands“. The Unionists are saying the Northern Irish Protocol (which places the EU border back in the Irish Sea) is “doing untold damage“. In Wales even the pro-Brexit fishers are unhappy with the continued French access to fishing rights until 2026. The Mail may delight in an apparently speedy vaccine rollout. But otherwise Brexit is careering out of control with matters only like to get worse with full customs checks due to begin on July 1.

For many who voted leave, the intention was to blow the doors off and give the Establishment a good kicking, which as O’Toole said was richly deserved. But instead of being a controlled explosion of anger it blew up the whole vehicle of state. There was too much gelignite and misplaced energy. Brexit was a crisis of belonging. “The self-pity at its heart,” O’Toole wrote, “will sour into a toxic sludge of imagined treachery that will be hard to drain from the groundwater of British politics.”

Banjo Paterson’s Australia

Governor General Peter Cosgrove and wife Lynne Cosgrove unveil the Banjo Paterson statue to officially open the new Waltzing Matilda Centre in Winton in 2018. Photo: Author’s collection

A month ago, the Sydney Morning Herald commemorated the 80th anniversary of the death of Andrew Barton Paterson by reprinting his obituary. Paterson, the obit said, was a prolific writer of light topical verse and his ballads of the bush had enormous popularity. In his lifetime he was perhaps most famous for his rivalry with fellow Australian author Henry Lawson. While Lawson had an unhappy alcoholic life he was accorded a state funeral when he died in Sydney in 1922 aged 55. Paterson, by contrast, was far more content and successful in life, but was buried quietly after his death on February 4, 1941 aged 77. The raging war and the fall of Singapore concentrated minds on other matters when Paterson died but it also showed a long decline from creative success, a decline which only his death arrested. Today he is one of the best known Australians in history.

While I’ve long known of the evocatively named Banjo, I’ve had a keener interest in him since I came to North West Queensland. In 2017 I visited Combo Waterhole, which inspired Waltzing Matilda and then attended the reopening of Winton’s Waltzing Matilda Centre a year later. The Winton building features a prominent statue of Paterson, familiar from his appearance on the $10 note, and is where Paterson’s most famous song was first recorded. As Grantlea Kieza wrote in Banjo (2018), Paterson lived an epic life. Paterson wrote two other classics, Clancy of the Overflow and The Man from Snowy River, he was a reporter in the Boer War and he looked after horses in the Australian Middle East campaign in World War I.

The SMH obituary makes a telling observation about Banjo’s love of horses. It said Lawson wrote as one who travelled on foot while Paterson wrote “as one who saw plain and bush from the back of a galloping horse”. Even his famous nickname is equine-related. Paterson was not musically inclined – The Banjo was a family racehorse and he learned to ride at a very young age at rural stations.

Andrew Barton Paterson (known to family as Barty) was born February 17, 1864 in the New South Wales bush to two prosperous and well-connected Scottish families, the Patersons and Bartons. Australia’s first prime minister Edmund Barton was a distant relative. Paterson’s birthplace was Narrambla near Orange and his first five years were spent at Buckinbah near Wellington. The Banjo Paterson museum now adorns nearby Yeoval. Along with two younger sisters he had the run of 35,000 hectares on three adjoining properties. Its dangers and excitements – animals, droughts, floods, bushrangers, adventures, injuries and death – would form the core of his writings. Aboriginal nurse Fanny was a constant presence giving Paterson a respectful attitude to Indigenous people but their suffering was unimportant to him compared to the majesty of the land.

When wool prices tumbled in the 1860s, the family sold Buckinbah and they moved to Illilong near Yass where Paterson attended Binalong public school. He attended his first horse race at Bogolong (now Bookham) aged eight. A rider borrowed his saddle and young Barty was thrilled as the jockey won the race on a horse called Pardon. Paterson later used the name for his poem Old Pardon the Son of Reprieve. Barty learned storytelling from his mother and she encouraged his learning in the classics and in the country. Aged 10 he was sent to his Sydney grandmother for a big city education at Sydney Grammar.

Paterson loved sport and excelled at cricket and tennis. He broke in wild horses when home on holidays. Though he failed to matriculate into Sydney University, he got a job through family contacts as an articled clerk at the legal firm of Herbert Salwey. In 1882 he was 18 years old, earning money and enjoying a weekly magazine The Sydney Mail which serialised the book Robbery Under Arms by Thomas Alexander Browne (writing as Rolf Boldrewood). It was the first local outlaw tale following the real life exploits of Ned Kelly and the fiction of Marcus Clarke’s His Natural Life and it excited a craving for Australian experiences. Two years earlier editor Jules Francois Archibald started a bold new weekly magazine, The Bulletin, which quickly became known as the Bushman’s Bible. The Bulletin struck a chord as a nationalist Australian voice when the continent was still six squabbling colonies who preferred dealing with London rather than each other.

Paterson liked the Bulletin‘s anti-imperialist tone and was abhorred when New South Wales sent 750 soldiers to Sudan to avenge General Gordon’s death. He sent a poem to the Bulletin signed as The Mahdi (Gordon’s Khartoum enemy) saying that sending troops was a “fearful mistake”. It was published next to Archibald’s editorial. Paterson sent in a long political tract under his own name which was rejected and fearful of another rejection, signed a poem as The Banjo after “his father’s so-called racehorse”. The poem was a forgettable boyish piece about Irish home rule but the name stuck.

Archibald liked The Banjo’s rough, humorous style and encouraged him to send in material about the bush which he published for seven shillings and sixpence. An early poem in the 1886 Christmas edition was The Mykora Elopement which established his gift for alliterative rhythm: “By the winding Wollondilly where the weeping willows weep”. The commissions kept coming though Paterson needed to keep the legal job to pay the bills. In 1887 another writer struggling to make ends meet but without influential friends – 20-year-old house painter Henry Lawson – sent the Bulletin his first piece about hostility to Queen Victoria’s jubilee. “A Song of the Republic” delighted Irish Catholic Archibald who told Lawson “you have good grit”. Lawson the underdog and Paterson the adventurer would provide the creative fuel to the Bulletin for the next 20 years. Their spirited debate about the merits of Australian bush life enthralled readers.

In 1889 Paterson wrote his first great poem Clancy of the Overflow. The poem began as a demand letter to a drover. The drover’s mate replied, the drover had disappeared up to Queensland and “we don’t know where he are”. With its fractured grammar and a hero roaming wild unconcerned by office life, the poem was immediately feted as the epitome of the free-spirited drover-stockman.

Late that year Paterson visited Kosciuszko country and met a hill dweller who inspired a new poem. The Man From Snowy River appeared in the Bulletin in April 1890. With his “movement in the station” Paterson created a myth of Australian impressionism though it wasn’t immediately famous. Not until Angus and Robertson published it in book form in 1895 did it and Banjo become household names.

That year Paterson visited Dagworth Station near Winton and listened to fiance Sarah Riley’s friend Christine Macpherson pluck out the catchy Scottish song “Bonnie Wood O’ Craigielea” on her zither. Paterson and Macpherson collaborated on new words combining two locals stories about the shearers’ strike and a suicidal swagman. While it led to the break-up of Paterson’s relationship with the jealous Riley, the collaboration produced Waltzing Matilda, which became an instant classic and Australia’s unofficial national anthem.

By the end of the decade The Banjo was outed as Paterson. Melbourne’s Table Talk said his works “were the most valuable contribution to purely Australian literature”. When the Boer War broke out in 1899 the Sydney Morning Herald hired him as war correspondent. Unlike Sudan, Paterson approved this NSW adventurism but was sympathetic to Boer concerns. He reported on action at Colesberg and Arundel and the taking of a Boer homestead.

He saw the war was unwinnable. A friend of his came to the same conclusion and launched total war on the Boers. Harry “Breaker” Morant, a short-lived husband of Daisy Bates, was a charming conman and Queensland drifter who created his own legend as a horse breaker, and who also published poetry in the Bulletin. Paterson met him at a hunt in Australia and they struck up a friendship chatting till 3am before Morant typically asked for money. In South Africa Morant was a lieutenant with the Bushfeldt Carbineers and operated a shoot-to-kill policy in revenge for the death of his commanding officer. At his court martial Morant told prosecutors he was operating under “Rule 303” for the Lee Enfield .303 rifle they carried. Morant wasn’t the only murderer, but was hanged for mentioning the unspoken policy. Paterson never met him in South Africa but he too had enough of war and came home.

After travels to China, England and New Hebrides and a brief fling with fellow writer Miles Franklin, Paterson settled down, aged 40, and married Alice Walker in 1903. They had known each other eight years and were both part of the Scottish squattocracy. The wedding was reported in detail in the Evening News which was no surprise as he was now editor. The News was a lurid, racy publication to which Paterson added accuracy and colour. He continued to publish books and poetry but they were less successful than his 19th century work.

By the First World War the 50-year-old Paterson was seeking a new challenge and travelled to Europe as an honorary vet. From Colombo he broke the story of the Australian captain who sank the German ship Emden. While the troops landed in Egypt he went to England and then to the front in France. He visited Lady Dudley’s field hospital near Boulogne but could not get employed as a journalist. He sailed home and re-enlisted in September 1915 taking two years off his age. Putting his horse experience to good use he became a lieutenant in the Household Cavalry, 2nd Remount Unit.

Paterson was based in Cairo dealing with 50,000 horses and 10,000 mules. Promoted to captain, he and his men broke in the wildest horses in a dangerous daily rodeo show. He never saw the frontline but stayed in Palestine for 12 months after the war. He reunited with wife Alice who signed on as a nurse at the Ismailia Red Cross hospital. He was sickened as 2000 Waler horses were shot dead, unable to return home due to Australia’s strict quarantine rules.

Paterson returned home as his third collection of poetry, Saltbush Bill JP, was published. He got a reporter job for The Sportsman which he enjoyed thoroughly for eight years, especially reporting on horseracing. Though Paterson had represented Lawson in legal troubles, they quarrelled. When Lawson died in 1922, Paterson was among the few people in Sydney not to attend the funeral. He later regretted calling Lawson “the melancholy poet with a graveyard of his own.”

Paterson lived on as a major social presence in Sydney for another two decades. His voice was heard on the new medium of radio and his portrait won the new Archibald prize, bequeathed by Paterson’s old publisher. Australia was dragged into war yet again in 1939 and Paterson’s son Hugh fought as a rat of Tobruk. Hugh survived but never saw his father again. The Banjo passed from life into legend on February 5, 1941. As the Herald obituary said, Paterson and Lawson “imparted to the literature of their country a note which marked the beginning of a new period.”