The mind is an unexplored country.

Continuing the focus on Australian media and its backers in Canberra.

Sometimes, when you ask ‘What is that fucking government doing with my money?’ you get an answer.

The Albanese Government is part paying the wages of more than 2,000 journalists across 184 private newsrooms, and more than half of the money went to just four ownership groups…

The payments run until March 2028. They’re drip fed against progress reports the government must be satisfied with, and not one of the 184 newsrooms is required to tell you it’s on the books.

That’s okay. We know how the media money pie got sliced up.

Credit to Mumbrella for running the story, since they’re on the list too.

And what are our in-pocket media reporting? What qualifies as a story to satisfy the government’s standards?

Clue: if it smears the leader of a certain party, roll in to collect your dough.

Liam Bartlett went to Britain to make a program about immigration. He came home with a program built to take down Pauline Hanson, along with everyone who stood beside her. What Bartlett still doesn’t grasp is that no matter how hard the mainstream media goes on the attack, it only drives people further from what it’s trying to manufacture and manipulate.

Bartlett wasn’t alone in the mud slinging. He got off lightly, though, in terms of public response.

One Nation leader Pauline Hanson walked into a sold out Crown Perth ballroom on Tuesday morning, and the moment The West Australian’s editor in chief Christopher Dore suggested her immigration policy was “a version of a White Australia policy”, the room he was hosting turned on him. Hundreds of business leaders booed the question, and one man shouted “idiot”.

The One Nation leader is in Perth to support the party candidate in the Secret Harbour by-election. Hundreds of business leaders = full house. To put that into perspective:

Like Donald Trump, Pauline Hanson is living free inside the heads of the media. Nothing to do except sit back and enjoy the show.

But enough of this. I have recently discovered two excellent Australian books which can be accessed online.

I bought The Centre, by Penny Van Oosterzee, when it was first published in 1992. Since then it has had only one reprint – in paperback, in 2006. Damned shame, since this book was at the time the first to cover central Australia in about a hundred years. The language is rather technical, but I got the feeling that it might have been a lot more technical in the early drafts. At any rate, it’s worth a look just for the photographs, of which there are plenty.

My other offering is Challenge of the North, written in 1969 by Ion Idriess. The year is significant; every page brims with the enthusiasm that was common at that time. Man was leaving his footsteps on the Moon, and everything seemed possible. Idriess proposes numerous opportunities to farm the wealth of our northern oceans. Animals, seaweed, shellfish – all of them and more could be farmed and harvested. He also promotes that very 1960s concept of the underwater city. Knowing a little more about the deep these days, we’ve let that vision of the future pass by.

Idriess seems too gung-ho at times. But Challenge of the North presents ideas that were not so much discarded as never recognised. We were still doing well by digging up wealth, and riding on the sheep’s back. Maybe another generation or two will see something made of his vision.

Click on the links to access the titles.