Journalism 2007

Melbourne Victory v Queensland Roar

After five drawn games, Melbourne Victory finally got its first win of the season by two goals to nil against Queensland Roar at Telstra Dome last night in front of 25,622 fans. In a dire first half punctuated by mistakes from both sides, with Victory particularly...

Social capital and our society

Published as 'Ethnics rule', Geelong Advertiser, Monday 20 August 2007, p. 15. The American social psychologist and political analyst Robert Putnam has had a huge influence overseas with his ideas about social capital and its importance for the kind of society we live...

Receiving a poor reception

Geelong Advertiser, Saturday 4 August 2007, p. 33. Listening to the radio last night, I heard that Australian motorcyclist Casey Stoner who leads the current MotoGP championship by 44 points half way through the season is back home in Australia at his farm in New...

Aussie fair go is far gone

Geelong Advertiser, Monday 23 July 2007, p. 15. What has happened to the land of the fair go? It used to be that we judged people on what they did, not on what they might have done, or what their cousins might have done. Now we, and we are all implicated, have turned...

Socceroos’ new adventure

Tomorrow an Australian sports team will embark on a great new adventure. For the first time the Socceroos will take part in the Asian Cup, the championship of all the nations in the Asian Confederation which stretches from Iraq and Saudi Arabia in the west to Japan...

The national capital in winter

Published as 'World stage: Aussies unite behind Socceroos', Geelong Advertiser, Friday 6 July 2007, p. 17. Why would you want to spend time in Canberra in winter people asked me? My answer on this occasion was that the Australian sports historians were gathering for...

Battling info brain-battering

Geelong Advertiser, Saturday, 16 June 2007, p. 41 Do you often get the feeling that there is just too much information hitting your brain these days? Television and radio bombard you with news and talk-back and advertisements. Newspapers deluge you with a world of...

Short political, economic memories

Geelong Advertiser, Saturday, 2 June 2007, p. 37 They say a week is a long time in politics, but the events of the last week suggest that inconvenient memories are being forgotten in what used to be called political economy. In business as in life there is always a...

Bastard Boys is ABC at its best

Geelong Advertiser, Saturday, 19 May 2007, p. 33 The ABC was at its very best this week when it ran Bastard Boys over two nights on Sunday and Monday. This dramatic story loosely based on the events of the battle on the Australian waterfront in 1998 has been praised...

How safe are we?

Published as 'Fears surrendering our freedoms', Geelong Advertiser, Saturday, 5 May 2007, p. 33 Watch television, read the news or listen to the shock jocks on the radio and you could be forgiven for thinking we are living in the most violent of times and places? Yet...

Labo(u)r and its leaders: Britain and Australia

Published as 'UK paves way', Geelong Advertiser, Monday, 23 April 2007, p. 17 Tony Blair is coming to the end of his period as leader of the Labour Party and Prime Minister of Britain, while Kevin Rudd is just beginning his leadership of the Labor Party and aiming to...

Good days and bad days in the world game

Published as 'Crowd antics not manufactured', Geelong Advertiser, Saturday, 7 April 2007, p. 35 We saw both sides of the world game this week. St Kilda president Rod Butters talked about recreating the atmosphere at Melbourne Victory games to brighten up AFL matches....

Solitaire man: The games people play

Geelong Advertiser, Monday,26 March 2007, p. 17 Do people play card games at home any more? It is not so very long ago that card nights were a highly popular form of domestic entertainment and recreation. As children we played rummy, Newmarket, whist and poker for...

Life kicks on in rural Victoria

Geelong Advertiser, Monday,12 March 2007, p. 15 In the last few years parts of rural Victoria have had to cope with drought, bush fires and floods, sometimes in quick succession. Daylesford has escaped the worst of these natural phenomena. Over our thirty years in...

Boom or bust

Geelong Advertiser, Saturday, 3 March 2007, p. 13 The Australian stockmarket took a dive earlier this week. A needed correction or the end of the most recent long boom? That is the question, as Hamlet might have said, had he been an economist and living at this hour....

Timely caution

Geelong Advertiser, Thursday, 22 February 2007, p. 19 I know how those people in Britain felt in 1752 when the United Kingdom and its empire finally adopted the Gregorian calendar rather than the Julian one, resulting in the loss of eleven days to bring the...

The rise and fall of the coal economy

Published as Coal hard facts, Geelong Advertiser, Monday, 12 February 2007, p. 15. What should be do about coal? For the last 300 years coal has been the critical mineral of the industrialisation of the world which has underpinned the living standards we enjoy today....