Podcasts about melbourne herald

Alan and Lionel are joined by Eric Beecher to discuss his new book, The Men Who Killed The News about media moguls' abuses of power.At 33, Eric became the youngest ever editor of The Sydney Morning Herald, before Rupert Murdoch crowned him editor-in-chief at the Melbourne Herald. So why, several years later, was he sued by the Murdochs? Eric has seen Murdoch at his best, successful and innovative, and at worst, a ruthless dictator.He shares a story of pressure and coercive behaviour, and his growing sense that the news agenda was being manipulated to avoid bad press connected to his boss. reveals that very little happens in the Murdoch empire without Rupert knowing--including, he alleges, the phonehacking scandal.Plus, Alan tries an AI experiment on Lionel, which leads to fears that they'll both soon be deemed redundant from their current roles. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Crikey's Eric Beecher and academic Denis Muller join us on Democracy Sausage to ask how media should operate when the lines between news, opinion and political campaigning have blurred. What impact have media moguls throughout history had on our politics and democracy? How can business models and governance structures be adjusted to ensure the Australian public is served by good journalism? And how does truth compete with exaggeration in the realm of public discourse? On this episode of Democracy Sausage, Eric Beecher and Dr Denis Muller join Professor Mark Kenny to discuss how to revive the news. Eric Beecher is a journalist, editor and publisher. He has been a reporter with The Age, The Sunday Times, The Observer in London and The Washington Post. He was the youngest-ever editor at The Sydney Morning Herald and the editor-in-chief of the Melbourne Herald. He was the founder of news website Crikey. He is the author of The Men Who Killed the News: The Inside Story of how Media Moguls Abused their Power, Manipulated the Truth and Distorted Democracy. Denis Muller is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne's Centre for Advancing Journalism. He is a political scientist, consultant, former journalist and former editor for The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and The Times, London. Mark Kenny is the Director of the ANU Australian Studies Institute. He came to the University after a high-profile journalistic career including six years as chief political correspondent and national affairs editor for The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and The Canberra Times. Democracy Sausage with Mark Kenny is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. We'd love to hear your feedback on this series, so send in your questions, comments or suggestions for future episodes to democracysausage@anu.edu.au. This podcast is produced by The Australian National University. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In 1932, 9-year-old Lennie Gwyther set out to ride a thousand kilometers to see the opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Along the way he became a symbol of Australian grit and determination. In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll tell the story of Lennie's journey, and what it meant to a struggling nation. We'll also recall a Moscow hostage crisis and puzzle over a surprising attack. Intro: Japanese detective novelist Edogawa Rampo's name is a phonetic homage. Samuel Barber decided his future at age 9. Sources for our feature on Lennie Gwyther: Peter Lalor, The Bridge: The Epic Story of an Australian Icon -- The Sydney Harbour Bridge, 2006. Stephanie Owen Reeder, Lennie the Legend: Solo to Sydney by Pony, 2015. Susan Carson, "Spun From Four Horizons: Re-Writing the Sydney Harbour Bridge," Journal of Australian Studies 33:4 (2009), 417-429. Paul Genoni, "The Sydney Harbour Bridge: From Modernity to Post-Modernity in Australian Fiction," Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature 12 (2012), 1-12. "Lennie's Sister Thanks the Community in a Book," South Gippsland Sentinel-Times, Dec. 13, 2018. Rachael Lucas, "Leongatha's Legendary 9yo Lennie Gwyther Garners a Statue for Epic Sydney Harbour Bridge Pony Ride," ABC Gippsland, Oct. 18, 2017. Peter Lalor, "Salute for Bridge Boy Who Rode Into History," Weekend Australian, Oct. 14, 2017, 5. Alexandra Laskie, "Lennie Gwyther's Solo Ride From Leongatha to Sydney Remembered," [Melbourne] Weekly Times, Oct. 13, 2017. Jessica Anstice, "Lennie's Statue to Be Revealed," Great Southern Star, Oct. 10, 2017. Yvonne Gardiner, "Lennie's Famous Ride Adds a New Bronzed Chapter," Queensland Times, June 15, 2017. "Immortalising Lennie," South Gippsland Sentinel-Times, March 1, 2016. Carolyn Webb, "The Nine-Year-Old Who Rode a Pony 1000km to Sydney," Sydney Morning Herald, Jan. 22, 2015. Neil Kearney, "Little Lennie the Toast of a Nation," [Melbourne] Herald Sun, March 17, 2007, 33. Michelle Cazzulino, "The Boy Who Rode 1400km to See Our Bridge," [Surry Hills, N.S.W.] Daily Telegraph, March 12, 2007, 11. Peter Lalor, "A Symbol for Australia," Weekend Australian, March 10, 2007, 1. "A Ride Into History," [Surry Hills, N.S.W.] Sunday Telegraph, Oct. 16, 2005, 91. "Lennie Gwyther's Long Ride Ended," Bombala [N.S.W.] Times, June 17, 1932, 1. "Lennie Gwyther Home," Lockhart [N.S.W.] Review and Oaklands Advertiser, June 14, 1932, 2. "Lennie Gwyther," Sydney Morning Herald, June 11, 1932, 18. "Visit of Lennie Gwyther," [Benalla, Victoria] North Eastern Ensign, May 27, 1932, 3. "Lennie Gwyther," Sydney Morning Herald, May 9, 1932, 10. "Lennie Gwyther Returning," Newcastle [N.S.W.] Morning Herald and Miners' Advocate, April 21, 1932, 6. "Lennie Gwyther's Return Journey," Sydney Morning Herald, April 20, 1932, 12. "Lennie Gwyther," Morwell [Victoria] Advertiser, April 15, 1932, 1. "Lennie Gwyther's Example," Sydney Morning Herald, March 18, 1932, 7. Lennie Gwyther, "The Boy With the Pony," Sydney Morning Herald, March 12, 1932, 9. "Boy's Long Ride to Attend the Royal Show," Sydney Morning Herald, March 10, 1932, 12. "550-Mile Pony Ride," Melbourne Herald, March 9, 1932, 11. "A Boy, His Pony and the Sydney Harbour Bridge," Conversations, ABC Radio, Oct. 31, 2018. "Lennie the Legend," The History Listen, ABC Radio National, April 17, 2018. Charlotte Roberts, "Lennie Gwyther," Sydney Living Museums (accessed April 13, 2020). Listener mail: Claire Bates, "When Foot-and-Mouth Disease Stopped the UK in Its Tracks," BBC News Magazine, Feb. 17, 2016. "Foot-and-Mouth Outbreak of 2001," BBC News, Feb. 18, 2011. Wikipedia, "2001 United Kingdom Foot-and-Mouth Outbreak" (accessed April 18, 2020). Video of a 4x4 Panda navigating a challenging track. "Hostage Crisis in Moscow Theater," History.com, Nov. 24, 2009. Wikipedia, "Moscow Theater Hostage Crisis" (accessed April 15, 2020). Michael Wines, "The Aftermath in Moscow: Post-Mortem in Moscow; Russia Names Drug in Raid, Defending Use," New York Times, Oct. 31, 2002. Erika Kinetz and Maria Danilova, "Lethal Chemical Now Used as a Drug Haunts Theater Hostages," Associated Press, Oct. 8, 2016. Artem Krechetnikov, "Moscow Theatre Siege: Questions Remain Unanswered," BBC Russian, Oct. 24, 2012. Becky Little, "How Opioids Were Used as Weapons During the Moscow Theater Hostage Crisis," History.com, May 25, 2018. Anna Rudnitskaya, "Nord-Ost Tragedy Goes On," Moscow News, Feb. 29, 2008. This week's lateral thinking puzzle was devised by Greg. Here's a corroborating link (warning -- this spoils the puzzle). You can listen using the player above, download this episode directly, or subscribe on Google Podcasts, on Apple Podcasts, or via the RSS feed at https://futilitycloset.libsyn.com/rss. Please consider becoming a patron of Futility Closet -- you can choose the amount you want to pledge, and we've set up some rewards to help thank you for your support. You can also make a one-time donation on the Support Us page of the Futility Closet website. Many thanks to Doug Ross for the music in this episode. If you have any questions or comments you can reach us at podcast@futilitycloset.com. Thanks for listening!

Alana Valentine—one of Australia’s most renowned and respected playwrights, whose work includes Parramatta Girls, Eyes to the Floor, Shafana and Aunt Sarrinah, Grounded and Cyberbile—reads the preface to the double edition of Brumby Innes and Bid Me to Love, two plays written by another of Australia’s literary treasures, Katharine Susannah Prichard. The introduction was written by Prichard's son, Ric Throssell.A little bit about Katharine Susannah PrichardPrichard was born in Levuka, Fiji, where her father was editor of the Fiji Times. She matriculated from South Melbourne College and worked briefly as a governess. She later taught in Melbourne studying English literature at night.In 1908 she travelled to London, working as a freelance journalist for the Melbourne Herald and, on her return, as the social editor of the Herald's women's page. In 1912 she left for England again to pursue a career as a writer and published two novels, The Pioneers and Windlestraws. She met the Australian Victoria Cross winner, Captain Hugo Throssell while away and in 1919 she married him and moved to Western Australia. Already a committed Communist in 1920, she was a founding member of the Communist Party of Australia. In 1922 her only son Ric Throssell was born. While she was on a trip to the Soviet Union in 1933 Hugo Throssell committed suicide.From the 1920s until her death she lived at Greenmount, Western Australia, earning her living as a writer of novels, short stories and plays. Her novels include Black Opal; Working Bullocks; The Wild Oats of Han; Coonardoo; Haxby's Circus; Intimate Strangers; and the goldfields trilogy The Roaring Nineties, Golden Miles and Winged Seeds. Prichard was a member of the Communist Party of Australia until her death, and her political concerns were reflected in most of her published work. Her novels were published throughout the world and translated into numerous languages. In 1951 she was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature.A few words about Brumby Innes and Bid Me to LoveWritten in the 1920s, Brumby Innes confronts the turbulent relations between the sexes and the races in the remote Pilbara region of Western Australia. It is published with another Prichard play from the 1920s, Bid Me To Love which, by contrast, is set among the fashionable rich in the lush hills outside Perth.

On 25 April 1915 Australian and New Zealand troops landed on Gallipoli at dawn. It was one of two main assaults on the Gallipoli peninsula. The Anzacs were to land near the promontory of Gaba Tepe, about halfway up the peninsula, while British forces landed at Cape Helles, at its southern tip. The two forces were to converge on the central mass of the Kilid Bahr Plateau, which dominated the Dardanelles Strait. The Anzac troops had expected open country, but instead were confronted with steep, scrub-covered heights, and climbed the precipitous cliffs under Turkish gunfire. Lambert depicted the landing at the moment when the Australian troops were climbing the steep, rocky hillside. He showed the hugeness of the landscape and the smallness of the men. He portrayed many of the soldiers as dead, or falling, with puffs of smoke in the sky. He wrote: visitors to the Museum ... complain there is a lack of fire, a lack of action and of the terror of war, but on the facts ... we must accept that men equipped as these men were, moving upwards on this particular place, without any idea of where the enemy was, what they had to do, would look just like this small swarm of ants climbing, no matter how rapidly, climbing painfully and laboriously upward through the uneven ground and spiky uncomfortable shrubs (ML MSS A1811, p.75). Lambert portrayed the scene looking up at the cliffs and the mass of soldiers clambering up them, a different perspective from the majority of interpretations of this event, such as Charles Dixon’s The landing at Anzac, 25 April 1915 (Archives, New Zealand) which showed the scene from above with the men climbing out of boats and wading ashore. By adopting this viewpoint Lambert made the seemingly inaccessible heights seem as much the enemy as the Turkish forces. Through his massive canvas, the harsh jagged outline of the cliff and the dark brown mass of the terrain silhouetted against a strident yellowed sky, Lambert conveyed the psychological impact of climbing these slopes. He helped viewers realise the endurance of the soldiers clambering upwards. Through his use of colour and abstract forms, he evoked the emotion of the occasion. And he showed the soldiers as small, faceless figures to create a visual metaphor for the scant regard in which these Australians’ lives were held by those in charge of the campaign. Lambert obtained facts about the landing from the Australian official historian C.E.W. Bean and other members of the Australian Historical Mission during his visit to Gallipoli in February–March 1919. At that time he painted oil sketches of the terrain at Gallipoli. Back in his London studio he made pencil studies of his models, dressed in uniform, as if climbing a steep cliff. From these, and from his oil sketches made on site, Lambert prepared a pencil design of the composition and a rough oil sketch. His son Maurice, an aspiring sculpture student, assisted his father by preparing the canvas and transferring the design onto it from Lambert’s composition drawing. The canvas, advanced this far, was rolled up and shipped out to Australia in February 1921. In Australia, Lambert was assisted by Louis McCubbin, who helped by under-painting the sky, which Lambert worked over afterwards. McCubbin’s assistance was of a mechanical kind, and not visible on the surface of the painting. Alexander Colquhoun reviewed the painting in the Melbourne Herald on 4 May 1922. He wrote: This is not a pretty picture, nor a cheerful one, and there is an uncanny lack of anything individual or personal in the scrambling, crawling, khaki figures scarcely discernible against the rocky precipitous ground. It speaks, however, as a declaration of sacrifice and achievement in a way that no other war picture has done. Colquhoun understood that by representing these Australians climbing this specific cliff, Lambert conveyed the universal experience of people overcoming obstacles. The painting was commissioned by the Australian government through the Australian High Commission in London in 1919, for £500, as part of the official war art scheme. Lambert began the painting in London and completed it in Sydney for the opening exhibition of the Australian War Museum, Melbourne, on Anzac Day 25 April 1922.

A sergeant of the Light Horse is a tribute to a type of Australian, generally a product of a rural background, who became part of the national mythology during the First World War: the Light Horseman. Lambert posed his subject in his flannel shirt, sleeves rolled up and forearms bare, seated in the open air before a ridge of scrubby hills and a blue sky. He is in a meditative position, with eyes glancing downwards. The Light Horseman holds his much-prized plumed hat to his chest – as if he has removed it in respect for his dead comrades, about whom his lowered eyes suggest he may be thinking. The portrait is painted in the high-key palette which Lambert adopted as a result of his appreciation of Botticelli’s paintings from fifteenth-century Florence and his desire to paint a picture which would look good under any light. Botticelli’s influence can also be found in the downward look, the elegant, slender neck, the long-fingered hands with clearly delineated nails and the sculptured features of the face. This work demonstrates Lambert’s observance of a balanced structure: the oval head is counterpoised against the circular form of the hat. The head is silhouetted against the brilliant blue, cloud-dotted sky and separated from and lifted above the V-shaped outline of the hills, which is mirrored in reverse in the shoulders, followed through with a repetitive echo in the (sergeant’s) stripes of the jacket and the angle of the elbow, and seen again in the pointed curl of the hair and the angular chin. Lambert gave this serviceman a sensuousness through his sharp-focus rendering of flesh and musculature, and in the way he portrayed the taut neck and wiry arms. As Hans Heysen observed, ‘the feeling way the eyes have been painted and the expression of that sensitiveness around the mouth are truly wonderful’ (Thiele, p.295). This image of a Light Horseman matches the official account of the Australian Light Horseman who served in Palestine. H.S. Gullett wrote: ‘So far as a distinctive type has been evolved it is … young men long of limb and feature, spare of flesh, easy and almost tired in bearing’. The long-limbed, lean and languid figure that Lambert portrayed fits easily with such a description. So too does this soldier’s rather sensitive glance for, as Gullett observed, the Light Horseman ‘for all his unconventional ways … was at least distinguished by shyness and reserve. The young countryman leads a simple and peaceful life. He bears himself modestly … A felt slouch hat, a shirt with sleeves rolled to the elbows, long trousers …’ (Gullett 1936, pp.34–6). The model for this Light Horseman is reputed to be Thomas Herbert Ivers (1881–1940), a sergeant with the 1st Signal Squadron who was employed colouring contour maps for the War Records Section in Palestine. He met Lambert during the latter’s visit to Damascus in 1919. Ivers was granted leave to assist Lambert with his large battle paintings in London from September 1919 to February 1920. This work is about an Australian type, his relationship to the countryside and his memories of his mates. Lambert created a new model for a military portrait; instead of the noble, the dashing and the heroic subjects of previous wars he presented a humble, but not humbled, man; he is shown in all simplicity without the pomp of his full-dress uniform, without the glamour and superior status of a horse, and he is the stronger for this. As Alexander Colquhoun wrote in the Melbourne Herald , on 11 May 1921, this was seen as ‘a truly distinctive figure, and constitutes the most original and descriptive presentment of a Digger which we have yet seen here’. More important is Lambert’s use, in this painting, of the image which perfectly matched certain powerful ideas current in the then-young Australian commonwealth. The image met a need for national self-definition. Australians who were formed by bush life, by working with animals and the elements in a blond land under a blue sky, would become the no-nonsense, unceremonious soldiers who excelled at war in the lands of the ancient Mediterranean, but knew its cost, were appalled by it, and would not romanticise it. They were tough, wiry and tender. It is also significant that the landscape setting in biblical Palestine has been made to resemble the familiar convention of a blue-and-gold Australian landscape. The work was purchased for the National Gallery of Victoria, on the advice of its director Bernard Hall, from Lambert’s return-to-Australia exhibition at the Fine Art Society’s Gallery, Melbourne, in 1921. It was reproduced on an Australian one-dollar stamp issued in 1974.