Rupert Murdoch’s media empire has insulted the western world for fifty years with a relentless stream of base sexism. However, I have the feeling that the end of this grubby exploitation is nigh.

A while back the grotesque Roger Ailes, a close executive colleague of Rupert, was finally nailed for awful behaviour toward female colleagues. He had been protected by Rupert for years. FIRED.  GONE. SHAMED.

However, no major change of corporate culture has been detected. Business as usual without the blubbering Ailes.
Then recently a strange thing happened. 

Major advertisers fled when they discovered that Murdoch had paid out thirteen million bucks as hush money to protect Bill O’Reilly, that loud mouthed creep of the O’Reilly Report, the so called flagship of Fox News.

O’Reilly has been groping and haranguing women colleagues for years and has continued to get away with it because Rupert has just kept paying. Megyn Kelly left Fox, partly because she couldn’t stand the harassment from O’Reilly.  This was a considerable blow to Fox. She was very successful. Gone to NBC.  ​

Now O’Reilly is on “Italian vacation” HE HAS BEEN FIRED.

His general hardline racist, sexist, nationalistic preaching and colourful untruths, have been his style for two decades. 

Rupert has always surrounded himself with alpha male, macho, chest beating blokes. Even though he is a slightly fey figure, he has used raw, masculine, forceful personas who exude “tough” man power for fifty years. Very few women executives and lots of testosterone.

Enter James and Lachlan. They, according to reports, have said to dad – no more O’Reilly. Enough. 

What prompted this rebellion God only knows!! Advertisers fleeing I would suggest – but maybe a little more also.
The era of Rupert, at 85 or so, may well be at an end. He has exploited long enough. The sons have realised (der) that obscenity, sexual predatory behaviour and insults are not acceptable to the sensibility of Fox viewers. 

O’Reilly’s reported replacement is Tucker Carlson, a soft, flabby, boyish 50 year old, with a vacant expression and the style of questioning of a teenager. He is suitably dim and parochial but will fit well with the bereft audience.

He will be inoffensive because he is not a sexist predator. Fox may or may not regain advertisers. 

Rupert has extended and promoted his version of sexual inequality for far too long.  His company will still promote other social divisions such as racism, but this is a significant moment with the removal of one of the last great bully boys ranked as a leader (by O’Reilly himself) in US media. 

Change happens in an interesting way usually triggered by an inconsequential moment.

Murdoch’s sons could be the catalysts this time. But maybe it was just one more woman too many, reporting that O’Reilly’s insignificant member was being fondled in a phone call to her. She brought charges against him. 

The doyen of the sexual bully set is exiting right. The dirty digger is getting a pounding in the Big Apple.

We should breathe a sigh of relief. He has sullied Australia’s name and has exploited gross sexism worldwide for far too long. 
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Elizabeth’s little boy Rupert has finally done his dash.

In late January 1970, I set out from a Cambodian border post, rucksack on my back, to walk across a barren stretch of dirt, several hundred metres wide, towards the Thai border—No Man’s Land. I recall the earth beneath my feet, the sensation of time slowly passing. With each step, it seemed, the Thai border was receding.
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I was exposed, a sitting target, caught within the sights of guns, pointing from both directions. The silence accentuated my sense of fragility. This stretch of land seemed like a place in which birds had stopped singing. In a sudden rush of madness, I was tempted to stop, mid-walk, lay down my pack, and set up camp within sight of the two borders.

I was relieved once I reached Thailand and negotiated the customs procedures. No one, however, could have foreseen the horrors about to unfold in the country receding behind me, the chain of events that would culminate in the Killing Fields. I had the luxury of moving on. There would be no such luxury for the citizens of the country I was leaving.

To understand how I felt back then, we need context: At that time war was raging in Vietnam, alongside a ‘secret war’ in the north, in Laos. For the past month, I had travelled through both countries. In Vietnam: I witnessed the chaos of war, the scarred landscape, the frenetic streets of Saigon, the pavement shantytowns, refugees congregated in vacant lots and sidewalks, bands of amputees, gangs of street children, allied soldiers on leave and the brothels and bars that serviced them. Young men sent to war—the fear in their eyes, their lethal bravado. The madness.

There were ten thousand Australian troops in Vietnam back then. Upwards of half a million US troops. Twenty-year-old Australians were being conscripted. My name did not come up in the birthday lottery. Instead I travelled on a journalist’s visa, issued in the Vietnamese embassy in Bangkok.

I had hitch-hiked north-east through Thailand, overnighting in towns that serviced US bases from which B-52s set out on their bombing sorties. I crossed the Mekong to Laos, where that secret war was being waged. Vientiane was a city of refugees fleeing the bombing. I flew to the southern city of Pakse, and to Saigon, in a rattling DC3, flying low over a scarred landscape, borderlands subjected to carpet bombing. Carpets: evoking images of beauty and softness—a euphemism for carnage.

Arriving in Phnom Penh, weeks later, from war-torn Saigon was a relief. Back then, it seemed, Cambodia was an enclave of peace, bar the not-so-secret US bombings on the Cambodian-Vietnamese border, ostensibly to destroy Viet Cong hideouts. Sihanouk appeared to be the undisputed leader—jazz saxophonist, film director, actor, script-writer, composer—founding father of the republic—a dilettante for all seasons. Playing off all sides to remain neutral. Presiding over a low-rise city, graced with French style boulevards, stuccoed buildings and villas, built in the image of its former colonial masters.

But the peace was deceptive. Forces were building. Foreign powers and their proxies were vying for ascendancy. The US and China were jousting in the shadows. A military coup was imminent. Sihanouk was about to be overthrown, and the CIA backed Lon Nol about to be installed as leader. A civil war was brewing.

This context puts the walk over No Man’s land in perspective: That barren stretch of land was, paradoxically, an enclave of sanity. There, at least, all was reduced to the human— stripped of tribe, nationality, disparities in wealth, and class distinctions. Stripped back to a kind of essence. It was also, however, very dangerous. Just one trigger nervous guard, just one incident, one misunderstanding, and shots could be fired.

In recent times my thoughts have returned to that stretch of dirt. There are many No Man’s Lands today—some literally a physical space between countries. This physical ‘no man’s land’, can also include those tiny patches of pavement, occupied by homeless people in the streets of our own cities.

The state of living in No Man’s Land can be a matter of legal status. There are 10 million people currently defined by the UNHCR as ’stateless’ — people denied a nationality and access to basic rights such as education, healthcare, employment and freedom of movement. Closer to home there are the 2000 men, women and children, now marooned for upwards of four years on Nauru and Manus Island, and upwards of 30,000 still living in limbo on mainland Australia, on various forms of bridging visas, their future undecided.

Many more languish for years in refugee camps—displaced people’s in search of new lives, asylum. We are now witnessing the highest levels of displacement on record. According to recent UNHCR figures, 65.3 million people worldwide have been forced from home. These include 21.3 million refugees, over half of whom are under the age of 18.

I return to that moment, back in late January 1970, that mad impulse to set up camp as an act of defiance. At a time when an increasing number of leaders proclaim we are going to make our nation great again—pointing the finger at outsiders, ‘the other’, at refugees and immigrants as the source of their nation’s problems—that barren stretch of land, can be seen, paradoxically, and symbolically, as a place of pure being, where all is reduced to the sound of one’s own heartbeat. There is nowhere to hide in No Man’s Land: all is so achingly and transparently human.

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Phillip Frazer

This year, Rolling Stone magazine is celebrating its 50th year on American newsstands. It’s also 45 years since I launched the Australian edition, still going strong.
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Back in 1967, I was publishing a pop-music tabloid called GoSet, selling 70,000 copies a week across Australia. America had no nationwide music paper until late that year when a uni dropout named Jann Wenner started Rolling Stone. Jann and his writers, designers, and photographers believed that, more than fun dancing music, rock n roll was an expression of an emerging youth culture that would change the world.

In 1970, I stayed for two weeks with Jann and his wife Janie in San Francisco, and apart from having fun we made a deal that I would publish an Australian edition, launching in January 1972. Working out of a group house in Glebe, a few mates and I coaxed the Aussie Stone toward sustainability then, in 1976 I sold the Australian franchise to a trio of Sydney gonzo publishers and moved myself to New York. 

My interests were in political, environmental, and cultural upheaval, all of which I was in favour of, so I kept up with Rolling Stone during my New York decades through occasional encounters with Wenner and by reading the infrequent outside-the-box political stories he published. 

On this 50th anniversary of Rolling Stone, these few major stories from the archives stay with me:
Tom Wolfe’s radical chic. When I arrived at the Wenners’ home in 1970, that night’s real dinner guest was Tom Wolfe, the writer of four books with long titles such as The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Jann and Tom talked about The Brotherhood of the Right Stuff, a story about American astronauts that Tom was writing for an upcoming issue of Stone, with photos by Annie Leibovitz on the biggest assignment of her nascent career. Wolfe’s stories, dubbed “New Journalism”, were rich in lively descriptions of characters, places, and cultures in motion, and major critics of media and literature loved that he inhabited the tripping brains of the heroes while containing them in a well-woven story. Given where we are now in terms of fact/fiction/faction, Tom might have been a mixed blessing to journalism.

Fear and Loathing. When we launched the Aussie Stone, Hunter S. Thompson, the chain-babbling trasher of all cultures, was cranking writing genre-bending up a notch with his epic reports on the 1972 US election and on convention events in Las Vegas. HST and his Samoan attorney (actually Mexican) famously travelled with suitcases of booze, pills and white powders, while attempting to unravel white racism toward Latinos. Thompson did a great job of trashing the suit-wearing, over-eating, know-nothing guys who run much of America, but his ferociously first-person reportage also may have inspired a million online ratbags. 

The reporter who died after killing the General’s career. In 2010 Michael Hastings, a 30-year-old freelance writer, spent time on the road with General Stanley McChrystal whom President Obama had put in charge of the US war against the Taliban in Afghanistan. McChrystal and his support crew let Hastings into diplomatic meetings, late-night booze-ups, and heavily armed visits to alienated Afghanis and disillusioned GIs. 

Hastings’ story for Rolling Stone faithfully reproduced the General’s no-bullshit repartee with everyone, making it stunningly clear that McChrystal and his fellow top brass were appallingly full of shit -- also ignorant, arrogant, crazy violent, and destined to fail at saving Afghanistan. 

After Obama read the article, he fired McChrystal and backed away from his “strategy” of having troops occupy villages to hunt down insurgents while uplifting the good citizens. 

US military and intelligence honchos don’t like being discredited by journalists (or black Harvard-educated Presidents), and they may have had a role in Hasting’s violent death in June 2013. Last month Wikileaks leaked documents on how the CIA can remotely control recent model cars. Hastings’ Mercedes hit a pole at full speed on a suburban street in LA at 4:25am.

Yes there is a theme in all this – it’s all about men behaving badly, sometimes the writers themselves. Jann always tilted his magazine strongly toward men as contributors, and readers (66% male). In a list of “50 notable current and former staff of Rolling Stone” on Wikipedia, there are only three women. One is a music journalist, one was publisher for seven years and is not well-remembered by the company, and the third is Sabrina Erdely, who wrote the notorious Stone investigative piece titled A Rape on Campus in 2014 which was subsequently adjudged profoundly flawed, costing Wenner Media millions of dollars in multiple defamation and libel cases (still ongoing).
I put Hastings’ revelations about just how crass the Masters of War really are at the top of Rolling Stones’ journalistic achievements. 
Me, I’m a little bit glad Wenner has published Stone for all those years -- and glad I didn’t.

Footnote: Jeune Pritchard interviews Phillip on ABCTV in January 1972, about the showdown with Rupert Murdoch’s Southdown Press over the launch of the Australian Stone -- HERE
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Phillip Frazer still inhabits the mid-Pacific miasma, but on most days he sees clearly now, from coorabellridge.com

George Biron has been a chef in some landmark restaurants that he has owned or worked for,  His Sunnybrae Farm near Birregurra was always a pleasure to visit as the farm style rooms and the freshly picked home grown food formed the basis of a wonderful culinary experience. 
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My introduction to the cooking of wild fungi began in the early eighties in London where ceps, chanterelles, morels and other wild fungi were quite commonplace on restaurant menus. A decade later when we opened our restaurant Sunnybrae near Birregurra I was privileged to employ a young chef Craig Creasy who had been introduced by another older French chef to wild edible fungi growing in Australian that are quite common in the forests in and around the Otway ranges in Victoria. So began a passion for foraging for wild edible fungi. 

The notion that we are still a largely a white Anglo-Australian fungi phobic community has changed remarkably in these three decades. I believe we are now, due to the enormous interest in food and cooking, a largely neophillic society actively seeking out the new and exotic food experiences. An extreme manifestation of this lust for the new in relation to edible fungi has even seen Cordyceps used on Masterchef! [season 7 episode 52] with virtually no background or explanation. FFS? I wonder if Coles was inundated for Cordyceps after that episode?  

As we were also a cooking school I began to host fungi foraging excursions and fungi cooking classes often with expert guides. I did this as much to expand my own knowledge as for the benefit of the others on the hunt. I bought as many books on the subject that I could find and began a study that still fascinates me now.  These trips ended with a meal made with our finds on the day.
Many farmers’ markets and seasonal restaurant menus abound in the sale and use of wild fungi but in Victoria it is mainly two common varieties Saffron Milk Caps, Slippery Jacks and their variants. In South Australia large flushes of Boletus edulis in recent years have also entered the trading mix and are being seen at Victorian and other interstate markets. I have also seen Wood Blewits, Horse mushrooms, morels and a few other varieties offered for sale in markets and used in restaurants.

 In the forest I often encounter people from European and Asian backgrounds and also young and older Australian foragers picking all sorts of other fungi that I would not consider edible that they are familiar with and were comfortable with and using in their cooking. And I don’t mean the trippers although they are all also there. While some of these hunter gatherers have solid experience I have also seen baskets full of mixed fungi picked and disturbed by amateurs just because they look “cool” 

 The more I learned about wild fungi, its relationship to the environment and the dangers of indiscriminate foraging the more careful I became. There seemed to be an endless public appetite to learn more about fungi and especially edible fungi but there were very few if any in depth courses run by experts that were available. Eventually I gave up hosting forays even though they became more and more popular. The last forays that I conducted had the most experienced guides I could find to minimise the risks. I eventually realised even though we were very clear in our warnings someone who had been on one of our forays could inadvertently make a mistake and suffer the consequences. I also began to fear that an inexperienced forager-chef could after one of our classes mistakenly use a dangerous mushroom on a restaurant menu with catastrophic results.  I realised that a short half day foray and cooking class was just not enough. 
The other day while having lunch at my local café in Kyneton my partner alerted me to an interesting wild fungi exchange going on at the back of the café. I wandered out the back and discretely inquired as to what the fungi being discussed was? The forager was trying to sell truffle like fungi to the cook. It looked like a type of Melanogaster? I did not know what it was. On further inspection the smooth exterior rang warning bells but to an untrained eye the cross-section could easily have been  mistaken for a black truffle which it was very clearly not. I gave my two bobs worth and suggested they do a bit more investigating before thinking about cooking with it. 

The interest in all wild foods is undeniably increasing as is the interest in sustainable living and I believe we have an opportunity to develop a series of courses run by academically trained and professionally experienced people to promote an ecologically sound guide to fungi foraging in Victoria. 

The bulk of wild fungi sold into food service comes from private foragers selling directly to restaurants or to larger aggregating provedores. Farmers’ markets also sell a lot of wild fungi that is often in less than optimum condition. I believe the managers of these organisations would embrace courses of this nature for themselves and their buyers. 

Commercial foragers who I have spoken with, who also have a professional attitude to this activity, are very keen to be able to gain more experience in this area to safeguard their clients and their livelihoods. I have also spoken to Matteo Pingnatelli the National President of the Restaurant and Caterers Association who is also keen to see such courses being made available to his members. 

 On the other hand, as a lot of this activity is taking place in the cash economy and there will be resistance from that quarter but I believe if such courses were available, provedores, executive chefs and Farmers’ market managers would only be too happy to buy from dealers who have been through such a course.  I am not suggesting compulsory accreditation but commercial foragers who have been through these courses would become the preferred provider leading to a growth of knowledge and would develop a deeper respect for the environment where they grow. Interest in these courses will also come from many private individuals who have a strong interest in cooking, ecology and conservation.  Rather than create a “gold rush” like culture that has developed in some parts of Europe and the United States Europe an ordered well conducted series of fungi education courses would be able to explain the ecology and special relationships that fungi have with the environment and confront the limited knowledge that we have about the edibility of native fungi. Out of such courses and the interaction created with people currently consuming “not documented as edible” fungi can only add to the growing wealth of knowledge that academic researchers are undertaking.

The confirmation of the edibility of wild fungi is a very complicated area of study but the provision of solid well researched and delivered courses to understand the subject and the limitations of current knowledge can only direct this fascination for wild foods in a positive direction. 

Bob Weis

It's funny how connections work. I had seen Rosie Jones' marvellous film "The Family" on Monday and told her I was going to write about it that night.  In fact I wanted to let it sink in while the various connections and reverberations kept coming so I decided I would do it after my usual Tuesday morning swim. On the way to my car from Il Fornaio after breakfast I ran into Rosie's partner, Peter Tapp, and commented that I had seen the film and how  much I liked it.  Then Robert and I drove off to get his car from Mary St. 

We were chatting and as I had done a thousand times before signalled my turn from Park St to Mary St at the roundabout and almost got through it when a deafening noise accompanied by the side air bags and a swerve of the car alerted us to the tram that had hit the car.  

I was in shock, I now realise, and pretty soon I was being led out of the car by Robert, my swimming partner, and told to sit on the ground and an ambulance was called as well as a tow truck.  Pretty soon there was a crowd with all of the above, the car stuck on the roundabout blocking trams in both directions and now three trams sitting there immobilised.  

Two policewomen from South Melbourne station attended and they couldn't have been nicer or more helpful.  The ambo paramedics got me into the ambulance and cleaned me up, I had some blood from cuts around the nose and under one eye and eventually Robert drove me to my doctor who I was due to see but was running late for now! She took me in straight away and did all the tests to make sure I had nothing broken and that I had no internal injuries or bruising.  Blood pressure and so on. Finally I got home and thought about writing this piece but then though better of it.

When I was watching the film it brought back to me something else. In the sixties I went to Monash University and in my second or third year met Cypra Helmer and friends of hers  As it turned out I had come across her brother Michael who was at Scotch College when I was at Caulfield Grammar and although I didn't know him well we did both belong to a wider friendship group.  My one abiding memory of Michael was him facing me as I bowled him out in a school cricket match and him refusing to walk after the umpire raised his finger.  No big deal. He was annoyed. Not out!!

Cypra was a tall willowy young woman who was high spirited and loved to chat and laugh and sing. I don't think she finished University and when I did I went to London to go to film school so it was probably the early seventies by the time we caught up again. She had a few musician boyfriends and I think also went to live in London for a while with one of these who it was said was physically abusive to her. In any case by the eighties we had drifted apart and she was becoming, by reports, more involved with drug taking and behaving erratically. The sixties lifestyle, sex, drugs and rock and roll, was embraced by most of us but some didn't see the onset of latent problems.

In 1988 I was shocked to hear that she had died after jumping from the top of the Trak building on Toorak Rd. She was naked and there was a note. She had been diagnosed as schizophrenic before this some time before this event but I hadn't heard about the involvement of The Family at this point.  I also don't know if it was a Family doctor who had made the diagnosis,

As is Jewish custom I went to the home of mourning that night which was Cypra's parent's home also In Toorak Rd.  The parents, Maurice and June were overcome with grief. Cypra's two brothers were studies in opposite reactions.  Her elder brother John said to me "what do you think happened?", and I was too shocked to answer only having heard the mental illness suicide version at that point. Michael on the other hand looked calm and smiled the beatific smile that was on display in Rosie's film where he was the only sect member who spoke positively about Anne Hamilton-Byrne. He said, "she's gone to a better place" and continued smiling while holding my look which must have been one of complete disbelief.

Rosie has crafted a feature length documentary that thriller or film noir style takes us through the setup of the cult that became known as The Family through reconstructions, interviews with both survivors and the two main policemen, Lex de Man and Peter Spence who led the task force and whose lives were changed and affected by the four year process and which still showed through years later both in the film and in the follow up Q&A at the Melbourne Film Festival following the screenings - of which there were four after the scheduled two had created more demand.

As it turned out I saw it at the Nova at a 1pm screening that was so full that the seat I had been removed for a wheelchair at a previous screening and so I saw the film from the discomfort of the stairs.  Anyway the film was so engrossing and disturbing I noticed the postural issues less than the horror story unfolding before me.

The end credits revealed two more connections.  I was on the Council of the national film school, AFTRS, and one of the two student reads on that council was Anna Grieve the Producer.  Anna showed then that she was and is very bright and had great values, and the film was beautifully shot by James Grant who I met when he was a tertiary student and then we worked together on Pure Shit which I produced and he was the camera assistant for.  Round and round.

Rosie came to directing from the cutting room and has made a number of films now.  The previous doc of hers that I saw was a chronicle of the community battle in St Kilda with developers and the Council against the Triangle development next to Luna Park, a battle which was ultimately successful and which saved the Palais and the site for community use.  The film was inspiring and as a long time resident of St Kilda it was a boost to my love of the place.  The film was The Triangle Wars and I recommend it too.

Bob Weis

I read Magda's book on my iPad and it is available from the iBook store.  I read it in the period over the past year or two of reading memoirs including Oliver Sacks, Jenny Diskin, Caro Baum and now this.
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Magda Szubanski was born 12 April 1961 in Liverpool, Merseyside, England. Her mother Margaret is Scottish-Irish and came from a poor family. Her father, Zbigniew Szubanski, came from a well-off Polish family and, as recorded in the Official Archives of the Warsaw Uprising Museum, was an assassin in a counter-intelligence branch of the Polish resistance movement in World War II. She attended high school at Siena College, Melbourne, and later studied fine arts and philosophy at the University of Melbourne.

In 1976, as a year 10 student, she captained a team on the television quiz It's Academic. - Wikipedia entry

What the Wiki entry for Magda doesn't say in as many words is that she is a multitalented individual with abilities across a number of disciplines that most of us don't possess or even come close to hoping to have.

Bob Weis

In my experience, and increasingly in that of many other Melburnians and travellers, it is the name of a complex, in the Burnley area, which includes a restaurant, gym and wellness centre and all the creation of a remarkable young woman, Emillie Hazell, 26.

​When you walk into the restaurant, Serotonin, you are greeted by any one of the staff and if you are lucky taken to a table. The first time I went I thought the staff were impossibly friendly and nice but over time I realised that it is genuine because the people who work there are proud of what they do and confident of their product, the food and the environment.

​The menu, in typical Emillie fashion, is not only by and large vegan it is also local, organic and complex. So no white flours, white sugars or processed foods. The food is tested in-house before ever being served to paying customers and Serotonin has scientific advisers who have an input to the final product.

Back in 1991 the “Iceman” was discovered in the snow high in the Alps on the Italian/Austrian border. His well preserved body was more than five thousand years old. Who was he? How did he live? What did he eat? What could he tell us? What could we learn from him? The world was quite excited, as was I.

It was crushingly disappointing, but unfortunately not surprising to learn two years later that he had been killed with an arrow in the back. How I had hoped he had died from natural causes, or fighting off a predator, or from experimenting with a food source; but alas, he was murdered. The oldest naturally preserved body in Europe was a victim of foul play at the hand of another human being.
 
It is generally accepted we ‘evolved’ from ancient ancestors to our modern form around 200,000 years ago and there is evidence of a skull from China believed to have been crushed by another human, that is almost that old. It seems we have been bashing each other to death for as long as we have been standing on two feet.

For me it begs the question ‘why’? Given the amazing brain we have developed we had the potential to be the greatest of creatures – a magnificence – a guiding and protective light for other creatures on the planet and perhaps beyond.

How and why has humanity failed to get even close to its potential is the question I am asking and readily confess I don’t have the answer? It is a question that has been asked before of course, but I haven’t seen an answer that has any real currency. I am not talking about individual magnificence, because many humans do rise above these limitations and there are plenty of self-help gurus urging us to discover our untapped potential, but they are dealing with individuals. Why, as a species have we failed?