Quadrant? Hoaxed with a spoof contribution? How could anybody tell?

Assuming you heard about it, what was your reaction to the hoax which led to right-wing magazine Quadrant running an article containing nonsense?

• I enjoyed seeing editor Keith Windschuttle exposed as sloppy and/or biased
• It was an outrageous example of fraudulent journalism and an unethical attack on a staunch defender of Australian cultural values.
• Boring. Can't we move on to something interesting.

It's clear that most Australians, even if they heard of the hoax – revealed on Crikey.com by media commentator Margaret Simons last Tuesday and followed up by newspapers such as The Australian and The Sydney Morning Herald the next morning – just didn't care.

The story would have died in a day or two. But then hoaxer Katherine Wilson released Simons from a confidentiality promise and allowed Simons to publish her name – but not her phone number or address.

Wilson outed herself only after journalists from the Melbourne Age and The Australian, as well as some bloggers, had sniffed out her identity. The hoaxer was about to go into labour with her second child (not a hoax, Ms Simons assured us) and refused to talk to reporters or be photographed.

Whatever, the naming of Katherine Wilson gave the story extra legs, but it's dying fast. Probably all but a hundred thousand or so Australians would pick the third option – Boring!

Among those who did bother to comment, a surprising number would tick the second option. It seems they don't believe an editor has a responsibility to check on an author's credentials, show the copy to someone who understands the topic, or do some basic fact-checking which would have exposed the hoax.

They believe that if a story is well-written and reinforces their preconceptions, it should get a run. It's criminal fraud by the author if it turns out to be nonsense. Does that says something about Quadrant readers?

However, this Grumpy Old Journo would not hesitate to tick the first box – it's a pleasure to see Windschuttle get his comeuppance. In the past, the Grumpy Old Journo blog has listed some of Windschuttle's arguments which go against reasonable, unbiased interpretations.

A little digression: GOJ has just checked Wikipedia and (at 5pm Sydney time, January 9) finds somebody has already updated its entry on Windschuttle. Perhaps the Quadrant editor's foes almost tripped over one another in the rush. The entry now includes:

In January 2009, Windschuttle was tricked into publishing a hoax article in Quadrant magazine. An [sic] bogus author using the pseudonym "biotechnologist Dr Sharon Gould" submitted an article claiming that the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation had planned to produce food crops engineered with human genes. However, "Gould" revealed that s/he had regarded the article as an Alan Sokal style hoax. Windschuttle accused the online publication Crikey of being involved in the hoax, a claim which Crikey denied. Two days later, Crikey revealed that "Gould" was in fact the writer, editor and activist Katherine Wilson. Wilson agreed to being named by Crikey, as her name had already appeared in online speculation and it seemed likely that her identity was about to be revealed by other journalists.

Windschuttle has a first-class honours degree in history. He knows how to ferret through source material. But even a first-class degree does not guarantee the holder will interpret his sources reasonably.

For example, I cannot reconcile my reading of Surveyor-General John Septimus Roe's journal account of the 1834 “Battle of Pinjarra” skirmish south of Perth with the conclusions Windschuttle drew from the same pages.

In 2002, in the first volume of his The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Windschuttle checked the references and footnotes of writers who argued that Aboriginal people were badly treated in the European settlement of Tasmania. He found many errors, many of them trivial. But they led to the conclusion that all such historical accounts were false.

Indeed, only two weeks after Windschuttle published that first volume, conservative newspaper columnist Miranda Devine – once a member of the Quadrant editorial committee – wrote that Windschuttle had refuted the black armband view of our history. Not just made a strong case against it, mind you, but refuted it.

Refute means to disprove. Do not say “Indonesia today refuted claims that . . . “ unless the context makes it clear that Indonesia has, in fact, disproved the claims. Use denied, rejected or rebutted. – from News Limited's 2001 Style book (which may be in error about rebutted, which I'd call a synonym for refuted).

Windschuttle is passionate in his defence of freedom of speech – when defending it against left-wing attackers. He has criticised the student protests against historian Geoffrey Blainey in Melbourne and pyschologist Hans Eysenck half a century ago in London.

Yet when director Dawn Casey's labels at the then-new National Museum upset the conservative commentariat, Windschuttle was in the pack baying to get rid of her.

They succeeded. Prime Minister John Howard initially extended her contract for just a year, then failed to renew it. The Quadrant mob may defend fellow conservatives' right to free speech but they show a glint of satisfaction when they get an opponent sacked. There's a word for people like that, but I'd better not say it.

In mid-2007 with Paddy McGuinness as editor, Quadrant had acknowleged we're right to worry about global warming, and that governments should be doing something about it. Under Windschuttle, Quadrant has again become a bible for deniers of man-made climate change.

So thanks, Katherine Wilson, you've brightened my week. Apart from that, you haven't achieved much.

When Australia voted Prime Minister John Howard out of office and out of parliament, they also signalled they were bored with tired old men peddling tired old ideas. Back when the Quadrant conservatives had duchessed Howard into adopting their ideas as policy, we were right to be concerned.

Today, Windschuttle and Quadrant are not worth worrying about. People are bored with them.

Only a few newspapers bothered to run the hoax yarn. In today's Sydney Morning Herald (the issue for January 10-11), acting letters editor Harriet Veitch listed the issues which fired up letter writers in the past week – Gaza, dog control, George W. Bush's awarding the Medal of Freedom to John Howard and the Howards' stay in Blair House, and cricket. Quadrant, Windschuttle and the hoax didn't make the list.

But what about Grumpy Old Journo? Look at me – I'm posting this long, heavy analysis of a subject most Australians now find boring. No wonder I have so few readers.

There is hope. My previous post, in which I referred to my concerns, attracted some really helpful advice, and I've talked it over with some knowledgable friends. I expect my next post will consider a new approach for Grumpy Old Journo. I'll try to put something up by midday Monday, January 12.
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So long Bulletin, F--k all editors

So The Bulletin's gone. Would Gwen Harwood (pictured) have been pleased? Probably not. She'd made her point, and the world has moved on.

In a hoax similar to the better known Ern Malley/Angry Penguins affair, she slipped the messages above into two sonnets published by the Bully in 1961.

She was protesting against what she saw as prejudice against "lady poets". Today, it finally is "So long Bulletin", but Harwood – who died in 1995 – might concede that recent editors fought hard and well to save the magazine.

And no-one likes to see the death of Australia's oldest publication. The Bulletin has been part of Australian life for almost 130 years.


At times it was boldly forward-looking, particularly in the Australian nationalism of its early days and its publication of the early bush poets and story tellers like Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson.


Through the thirties, too, it won credit for the space it gave to writers such as Kylie Tennant.

But by the 1950s, when I used to ride my bicycle to the corner of Pier and Hay Streets to peruse it in the old Perth Literary Institute, it was – even to a schoolboy – hopelessly anachronistic. Inside its red newsprint cover, it had sections with labels like "Aboriginalities" and "Business, bushranging, etc." And its motto, "Australia for the white man", remained on the leader page.


In 1960, Sir Frank Packer bought The Bulletin and sent in the bright and youngish journalist Donald Horne, who was yet to reinvent himself as an academic and public intellectual, to revamp it.

According to Horne (whose most recent book, Dying, A Memoir, co-authored and completed by his wife Myfanwy, is a moving account of his own illness and death in 2005, aged 83), Sir Frank bought The Bulletin only because it came bundled with The Australian Women's Mirror, which he wanted to keep out of the hands of his brash young rival, Rupert Murdoch. Sir Frank owned The Australian Women's Weekly and already had a successful opinion magazine in The Observer.

In his memoir Into the Open, covering 1958 to 1999, Horne gives a hilarious account of the way he and Sir Frank stormed the fusty offices and minds of the old Bulletin staff. But in a more serious tone, he says: "I had to knock down what was left of this nasty national edifice in a few sharp blows, so that they would never be able to put it together again."

Sir Frank Packer and his editorial whizzkids did pull The Bulletin into a bright, contemporary magazine. But despite our fuzzy nostalgia for the 1960s, we forget some of the misogyny of the times. Most women newspaper journalists worked on the social pages, and the Sydney Journalists Club refused to allow women members.

Down in Hobart, "lady poet" Gwen Harwood grew more frustrated at the rejection slips she received while The Bulletin published male poets she considered inferior. When she submitted her poems under male pseudonyms, magazines published them.

In 1961, she sent two sonnets to The Bulletin, re-using the pseudonym Walter Lehmann. Peope reading down the first letter of each line discovered the acrostics: "So long Bulletin" and "F--k all editors". As soon as Bulletin editor Donald Horne published them, Harwood's poet friend Vince Buckley broke the story.

In the ensuing publicity ("Tas. Housewife in Hoax of the Year"), Harwood felt that her point was not understood. The poems were "poetical rubbish and show up the incompetence of anyone who publishes them".

Useful information about Harwood and the hoax can be found here. It's unclear whether Harwood meant to keep the acrostic secret. In this analysis on the online Australian Public Intellectual Network, Cassandra Atherton takes a closer look.

The hoaxer did go on to win more appreciation, and the book Gwen Harwood: Selected Poems (Penguin, 2001) shows her work well.

Meanwhile, as I type this, old friend David Haselhurst (we were cadets together in Perth) is at The Bulletin's wake. He's written its Speculators Diary for many years, and I guess that's gone.

It's hard to blame anyone for The Bulletin's demise, although some will mount their ideological steeds and charge in anyway. Over the years, the Packers have hired the best journalists, artists and columnists in efforts to drive the Bully into a new era.

Perhaps, however, we can note that the old-time media tycoons like Sir Frank Packer invested their personal status and ego into their publications, and weren't that worried about incurring losses to do so. If outside shareholders didn't like it, they could just get off. For the new breed like James Packer, there's more money to be made in casinos.

In a pattern becoming more common today, media are owned by investors who see just another business, not institutions important to the functioning of healthy societies.

And the so-called private equity investors usually demand fast turnarounds, slashing the fat from moribund businesses, then onselling them for a quick profit. But without a longer-term involvement, they may also slash the company's foundations for growth.

Perhaps that's behind The Bulletin's death. In Crikey.com's first report, Andrew Dodd writes:

Just a few months in the hands of venture capitalists and Australia’s most famous magazine is dead ... Perhaps the new rallying cry for the nation’s media should be 'Australia for the Venture
Capitalist,' as the bean counters at CVC Asia Pacific – the company that now owns 75% of the former Packer family’s Publishing and Broadcasting Limited – have had their way at the expense of one of the nation’s great institutions.

Tomorrow morning, the pundits will waste acres of dead trees analysing the death, and most will blame the internet per se. Some may allude to claims in The Economist last year that the internet will have killed all print newspapers and magazines by 2040.

But I think it's more than that. Fundamentally, the changes come in the way we expect to receive information, entertainment and analysis. Perhaps in our crowded lives, we cannot wait for a weekly newsmagazine – but we may turn to increasingly high-powered television and radio as much as to the internet. And perhaps, as a relief from increasingly stressful working lives, we prefer our non-vocational media dumbed down.

Why read a thoughtful analysis by The Bulletin's Laurie Oakes when newspapers, TV and radio grab his reports and beat them up into something more hard-edged, concise and "sexed up"?

A year ago, I thought The Bulletin was building its online presence as it planned for closure of its print version. But in today's announcement, there's no reference to a continuing online publication, and early reports suggest management has ruled it out.

Paid subscription online magazines now appear less viable to general publishers. There may be more revenue to be earned with free online magazines, with higher readership allowing higher advertising charges.

After his purchase of the Wall Street Journal last year, Rupert Murdoch announced its online edition would become free, funded by advertising.

Australia's Crikey.com may soon face a similar dilemma. Go for subscription material, with the free stuff just a teaser to get them in, or make it free altogether to get the readership which would justify higher ad rates? At present Crikey seems to be having two bob each way.

There's an excellent illustrated history of The Bulletin, Patricia Rolfe's The Journalistic Javelin (Wildcat Press, 1979).