Rupert Murdoch - Notes from Pig City

Nature Boy

This story is based on an interview I conducted with Kamahl in March 2009, hitherto untold. It’s been a long time coming. I hope it puts his life, his perspective and the events of recent weeks into greater context.

Kandiah Kamalesvaran was seven years old when the Imperial Japanese Army completed their conquest of Malaysia in February 1942, after the surrender of Allied forces in Singapore.

By the time he was eight, he’d seen heads on pikes, and other things no child should ever see. Everywhere, there was a Japanese soldier astride a black horse, a sword on his hip.

To get out of harm’s way, his parents pulled their growing family out of the heaving Kuala Lumpur metropolis to the countryside. They owned a cow, and one day young Kamal took it out for a walk and a feed.

On the way home, he encountered a Japanese soldier on horseback. The soldier beckoned him, and put his hand to his hip. Kamal closed his eyes, anticipating that his head was about to be removed from his body.

After a few seconds, realising it was still attached, he opened them again, and saw a flash of silver. But it wasn’t a sword that the soldier was brandishing in front of his nose.… Read more..

Gina buys the chook run

Australian Politics, Media / February 2, 2012 / 4 minutes of reading

In the early part of his political career, former Queensland Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen – aka The Hillbilly Dictator – had a jaundiced attitude to the pesky officers of the press corps. “The greatest thing that could happen to the state and the nation is when we get rid of all the media,” he said. “Then we could live in peace and tranquility and no one would know anything.”

No one, maybe not even Joh, knew exactly what he meant by that – you could say that about a lot of his most famous public utterances, actually – but it’s widely suspected that he was serious at the time.

It was Joh’s press secretary, Allen Callaghan, who convinced him that the press, if manipulated effectively, could be used as a political weapon. And Joh, as reactionary a figure as any to have appeared on the Australian political landscape, proved he could adapt. Soon, he would refer to the media as his “chooks”: “I have to feed them every afternoon,” he said.

“Feeding the chooks” has long since entered Australia’s journalistic lexicon to describe the relationship between politicians and their interlocuters. But what if you simply bought the chook run?

Bjelke-Petersen’s good friend, the Western Australian iron ore baron Lang Hancock (who also donated large sums of money to Joh’s political campaigns) understood this.… Read more..

Gina buys the chook run Read More »