The shortest man ever to play NBA explains how he transformed his perceived disadvantage into one of his greatest assets.

The stage lights are hot and Kurt Cobain reeks of dope. Muggsy’s just glad it’s over. It’s September 25, 1993, and Muggsy Bogues is joining the curtain call for the season premiere of Saturday Night Live. Beside him are the show’s cast and its other guests: Charles Barkley, RuPaul and the glazed-eyed boys of Nirvana, who’ve just performed the lead single to what will be their final album.

As the motley troupe wave before the studio audience, to the millions watching at home it must seem as if the little man who had freakishly defied the odds of both his genes and his childhood had reached the summit.

In many ways, they were right. Muggsy Bogues had reached the summit. As the shortest man to have played in the NBA — a distinction still true today, and likely forever more — Muggsy was not merely surviving but flourishing.

In the season just passed, he’d ranked fifth in the league for assists and 10th for steals — the next season would be even better. As its starting point guard, he had helped the Charlotte Hornets — then in their fifth season — make the playoffs for the first time. The cherry was knocking off the favoured Celtics in the first round.

In the season just passed, the Hornets had enjoyed large and rapturous crowds, and with Larry Johnson and Alonzo Mourning, Muggsy helped form one of its most visible and popular trios. His image was bought by Sprite and Reebok; countless kids wore replicas of his jersey. The game had made him a multimillionaire and also an icon: the subject of late-night punchlines but also a source of popular astonishment and inspiration.

And now, having awkwardly starred in a skit with Al Franken and Charles Barkley — it opens with Barkley calling him a “midget” — he was waving before the cameras from the fabled floor of NBC’s Studio 8H besides the most famous band on earth. Not bad for a short kid from Baltimore’s projects.

But what the audience didn’t know was that Muggsy was struggling. In a life filled with wildly intense and tragic years, 1993 had been especially intense and tragic. From boyhood, Muggsy had always transformed others’ laughing scepticism into fuel for his competitiveness — an abnormally fierce desire to prove doubters wrong. Now 28, and having reached the summit, he was using that devotion to basketball to bury his grief.

And he was exhausted.

Members of the jury, allow me a bold assertion: Muggsy Bogues’s career is the most astonishing in professional sports history — period. Sure, not for career stats, political significance or the richness of the highlight reel — but for the weight of his achievement measured against expectation. His career is absurd, a defiance of odds as extreme and wondrous as a supernova visible to the naked eye. It should never have happened, and will probably never happen again.

Members of the jury, the average height of the American male is 175 centimetres. The average NBA player’s height is 198 centimetres. Muggsy Bogues played 14 seasons at 160 centimetres. The emphasis in that sentence lands on his height, but it could just as well land on the length of his career. And for half of it, Muggsy was a starting guard. In the 1993–94 season, he was second in the league for assists — only behind John Stockton, the league’s all-time accumulator of them — and averaged a double-double.

No NBA player has a better assists-to-turnover ratio. Not Stockton, Chris Paul or Steph Curry. No one. It’s an obscure metric, perhaps, and uncelebrated — but it’s significant. Simply put, it means Muggsy rarely lost the ball. And once he had it, something good happened.

Members of the jury, I suggest all of this qualifies Muggsy Bogues for unique reverence. But now please consider: raised in the projects of East Baltimore, Bogues was just five when he was sprayed with buckshot — a shopkeeper, incensed about an act of vandalism, stormed into the street with a shotgun and began blasting indiscriminately. Bogues woke in hospital, scarred and terrified. Twenty years later, with steel pellets in his arms and legs, he was defending Michael Jordan.

“No, Jordan didn’t intimidate me,” Bogues tells me. “I’m not overwhelmed with any human being. We all human beings, just trying to accomplish the dreams we have in our mind. There’s beauty and brilliance to [Jordan] and I give that individual lots of credit, but, you know, to be overwhelmed in their presence? That’s not me.”

Violence — and the threat of violence — was the air Muggsy breathed. Not long after he was shot, he watched a man beaten to death with a baseball bat. Later, he saw a man stabbed. “As a kid, violence was the atmosphere and you had to adjust,” he says. “Violence was more or less a daily thing, and in that neighbourhood anything could possibly happen. What you witnessed must have had some impact on you — you gotta keep your eyes aware of your surroundings — but my whole outlook is always moving forward … I’ve never seen a therapist. What I witnessed never had a really detrimental impact on me, and I found a way to navigate through that world.”

When Muggsy was 12, his father was sentenced to 20 years’ jail for armed robbery. Soon after, his older brother Chuckie got deep into crack cocaine and petty cons to fund it.

“My dad wasn’t a typical father, I guess,” Bogues says. “He was old school, a provider. He wasn’t teaching me basketball down the court.” With her husband locked up and one son haunting alleys and street corners, Muggsy’s mother went to night school to achieve her high-school diploma and secure work as a secretary — all the while praying for the Lord’s help.

Meanwhile, Muggsy hit the asphalt court and shot until the sun went down. When he was a little older, he shot until the sun came up — the soundtrack of the night was the rattle of the rim and the pop-pop-pop of gunfire.

The neighbourhood kids were cruel, Muggsy says, and insistent in their cruelty. “Midget” was a familiar word. His mother would counsel that no one knew the size of his heart; that no stranger was an expert on his life.

Tenacity was his superpower. When others called him names, he was internally repeating his shooting mantra, “BEEF”: balance, eyes, elbows, follow-through. But working on his jump shot wouldn’t matter that much; at his height, Muggsy needed to perfect his dribbling, his passing, his vision. And he did. He played endless pick-up games on the local court. He slept with a ball in his bed. As a personal challenge, he dribbled while taking the rubbish bins out. He was tough, self-reliant and fanatically devoted.

But others’ scepticism never waned. When he dominated high school basketball, most doubted he could play college. When he succeeded in college, most thought he’d fail to be selected in the first round of the NBA draft — if at all. When he was picked in the first round, by the Washington Bullets in 1987, his “eccentric” selection inspired boos from the audience. When he was traded to Charlotte after a season on Washington’s bench, his new coach humiliated him before reporters when, asked about his point guard, he fell to his knees — distastefully imitating Bogues — and replied: “Will a midget really bother [Knicks centre Patrick] Ewing?”

“The naysayers didn’t realise a kid my size was capable of doing it, so breaking down those barriers was enough motivation for me,” Bogues says. “I was letting them know I belonged. That was fuel for me. That became my make-up. Even if it was a pick-up game, I had that same effort — I didn’t go easy on anyone.

“But no one gave me a chance each level I was climbing. [Legendary North Carolina coach] Dean Smith literally said I was too small to play in the ACC [a conference of the American college competition]. Washington didn’t believe in me, and my first year at Charlotte was another challenge. But it was a match made in heaven after that.”

At every step, there was abuse, condescension and disbelief. For years, Muggsy was an exile from conventional wisdom. To many, his achievements didn’t matter — few thought that his past performance suggested future success. Bogues tells me he assumed the doubt would eventually evaporate, but it never really did. At least, not until he was well into his NBA career. But, if I’m honest, I’m much more upset about this than he is. Muggsy’s sanguine. Muggsy just smiles.

By 1993, the final barrier of scepticism was at last overcome — only to be replaced with multiple tragedies.

Boston Gardens, April 29, 1993. It’s five months before Muggsy Bogues will appear on Saturday Night Live, and it’s a big night: a sellout crowd for game 1, round 1 of the NBA’s Eastern Conference Playoffs. It’s Charlotte’s first ever playoff game, and the Celtics’ first since Larry Bird’s retirement. Replacing him as captain is Reggie Lewis, the team’s All-Star, leading scorer and old friend of Muggsy Bogues. Together, Lewis and Bogues helped form what might be the greatest high-school basketball team of all time — the 1981–82 Dunbar Poets, who went two seasons undefeated at 60–0 and yielded a record four future NBA players. (When we speak, via Zoom, Bogues is wearing a grey Poets hoodie.)

In the first quarter, Reggie Lewis stumbled and fell — on the left side of the court, and well away from the ball. “We thought he’d just tripped,” Bogues remembers. It seemed harmless. Lewis sat up, perplexed, then stretched for a while before regaining his feet. The game had continued at the other end of the court. Lewis went to the bench but was subbed back into the game just three minutes later. His resumption didn’t last long: after a minute, he returned to the bench after a spell of dizziness.

“My whole outlook is always moving forward.”

It was his last NBA game. After days of tests, a team of 12 cardiologists diagnosed Lewis with a rare, life-threatening and career-ending heart disease. Lewis’s career was only just blossoming and he naturally rebelled against the news. Lewis sought a second opinion and quickly found one: cardiologist Dr Gilbert Mudge diagnosed Lewis with a benign fainting disorder and declared his patient to have a “normal athlete’s heart”. Lewis began lightly preparing for the next season. But two months later, while playing a pick-up game with friends at the Celtics training gym, Reggie Lewis suffered a fatal heart attack. An autopsy supported the original diagnosis of myocarditis. He was 27. (Mudge was later cleared of charges surrounding the death.) “For a while there that summer, I didn’t know all the details, but it seemed like Reggie was going to find a way back,” Bogues says. “But then I got the news.”

Just eight days after the funeral, Muggsy Bogues’s father died. Muggsy had a complicated relationship with Richard “Billy” Bogues. He put some food on the table, Muggsy says, but he wasn’t there with him at the rec centre or the asphalt court. Muggsy was a child when his dad went to prison — and an NBA star when Billy was released. His imprisonment profoundly rearranged the home, even if it didn’t alter Muggsy’s commitment.

As a teenager, Muggsy resisted seeing his father in prison, as the prospect was painfully disorienting. But as he got older he saw the importance of maintaining a relationship. In college, he visited his father. They talked ball and his father offered advice. Muggsy says he never “turned his back” on his father, and that Billy followed his son’s basketball career from prison, but there was a great and irreconcilable distance between the two. In his father’s absence, coaches and older players had assumed adjacent roles.

Bogues snr had only been out of prison a few years when he was found dead in an abandoned house just a few blocks from Muggsy’s former high school. The official cause of death was pneumonia, which Muggsy says was the result of a drug overdose. Billy Bogues was 56 — the same age as Muggsy now.

Billy had resumed drugs on his prison release, often with his son Chuckie, and at the time of his death, Muggsy Bogues spoke fatalistically about his father. “The streets was calling him,” he said, suggesting a greater power than he was capable of influencing. “It was breathtaking when I had to go and view the body.”

At 28, and between his two most glorious seasons, Muggsy Bogues stood and eulogised his father. He spoke gently and generously. He emphasised his father’s virtues, softened his flaws and didn’t speak to how strangely their lives had diverged. “I more or less said how proud of him I was,” Bogues remembers. “We were respectful and he gave me an opportunity to know what this world was about, even if he wasn’t the typical father. As a kid living in the [Baltimore] project, having both parents in the household is rare and that was taken away from me at an early age, but at the same time I had enough time to understand the true value of family.”

About grief, Muggsy Bogues is practical. “I’ve been around death ever since I was a kid,” he says. “I just continued to move on, that’s how I’ve been all my life. My whole outlook is always moving forward. You gotta channel [grief] in some kind of way, so you know [doing Saturday Night Live] was a way for me to escape and not think of the things that was going on at the time.”

But mostly, of course, he channelled it into basketball. Into Muggsyland.

The nature of basketball rewards size, but its laws still require the ball to touch the floor. And no other player was closer to it than Muggsy. Few had thought more about that space — between the opposing dribbler’s hand and the court — than he had. And that space, seemingly slight and inconsequential, was Muggsyland.

In addition to his athleticism — he had a vertical leap of 112 centimetres — Muggsy’s trick was seeing his opponent as the disadvantaged one. “See, my whole life I played on a lot of big guys,” Muggsy says. “But they’ve never played on a guy like me. I always thought that I had the advantage.”

The trick wasn’t only psychological — it wasn’t just an act of convincing himself that he could play against giants. He studied the game. He studied individual players — their habits, their feints, their preferred hand. He internalised the beats of the bouncing ball, so he could better anticipate — and disrupt — it. He became a scholar of Muggsyland. It wasn’t about overcoming his “disadvantage” — it was about transforming his uniqueness into a practical advantage. It was about making his opponent’s size a liability for them. It was judo.

Judo and tenacity. There’s a clip on YouTube of Muggsy defending Michael Jordan in the 1995 playoffs. Jordan is typically nonchalant, and backs Muggsy up, repeatedly and aggressively. Muggsy is uncowed, and his attention unbroken, as he contains Jordan — and then strips the ball from him. Such was Muggsy’s gift — and gnat-like persistence — that even gifted ball handlers resented bringing the ball up the court when playing against him.

This was Muggsy on defence. On offence, he marshalled plays and exploited gaps that few could see. Reporters asked how he could see opportunities through the forest of big men. He answered: How could I not? It was Muggsyland.

And then in 1995 his mother called, and told him that Chuckie was bad. Real bad.

In 1995, when the blocks of high-rise apartments that Muggsy Bogues grew up in were stuffed with dynamite and demolished, it was confirmation of what Muggsy already knew: for all of the developers’ professed optimism for Lafayette Courts, the projects were manifestations of racist neglect and segregation — and had become miserable sites of violence and decrepitude.

Lafayette Courts were opened in 1955, 10 years before Muggsy’s birth, and were part of a nationwide attempt to “de-slum” cities with the construction of high-rise public housing. Developers promised residents harbour views of Baltimore, but never adequately wired the place, and like its counterparts across the country, Lafayette Courts were poorly maintained — lifts broke; pipes froze. It was freezing in winter and sweltering in summer. Baltimore, in scenes that were being mirrored in Philadelphia and St Louis, decided to raze the city’s public housing towers. Muggsy wasn’t there but saw the implosion on TV. “It was very surreal watching it,” he says. “But it was well needed. The revitalising [plan] was well deserving to give folks better living conditions and opportunity to, you know, to provide for themselves in a more effective way. But it was still sad. And it was — it was a happy moment at the same time. There was the history of memories that you had as a kid, but at the same time, you didn’t want no one else have to live to those type of conditions — urine on the floors and the steps, and people on top of one another.”

The conditions of Muggsy’s childhood might only be partially familiar to Australians through the famed HBO series The Wire, set largely on the streets of Baltimore (though also in its ports, police stations, schools, newsrooms and town hall). With rare intelligence and complexity, The Wire examined the city’s drug trade. Muggsy’s wife Kim worked as a caterer on set. “They did an amazing job with the show,” Muggsy says. “For the most part, it was real. That was the culture, that was the atmosphere. In some regards, it changed after I left because they started using the younger kids to be the guys out there working on the streets to help them move their product, as opposed to us, when they was more or less helping us stay away from it. I guess they realised that the younger kids were easier because of the jail time they’d have to serve. But at the same time, the conditions were the same. The same dealing was going on, the same happenings behind the scene in terms of the killing and, you know, finding people in boarding houses and people all around who are dead that you don’t realise is no longer with you because something went down and he got caught up in a transaction.”

Muggsy Bogues keeps his own counsel, and there’s a distinctive combination of gentle modesty, patience and guardedness to him.

The City of Baltimore salvaged a thousand bricks from the rubble of Lafayette Courts and sold them to residents at a buck each. And they sent Muggsy one — it still sits on a shelf in his home in Charlotte. Muggsy’s home could be blown up, but the legacy of the projects couldn’t. In October that year, his mother called about his older brother Chuckie, who was then 37. She was despairing. Chuckie was still using heavily. He’d been arrested. He was often incoherent. She thought he could die soon — and what would Muggsy think about letting his brother move in with him?

A personal disclosure. I loved Muggsy as a kid and played basketball with joyous fanaticism. I fashioned bedroom hoops from coathangers and made replica jerseys with singlets stolen from my father and crudely rebranded with fabric markers. Most days I walked to the local court to shoot alone, or, if there were others, to join improvised games. If alone, I obsessively practised foul shooting and developed a respectable accuracy. I loved free throws because it was a shot made, even in games, without the harrying of defenders. The game paused, and so it was just you, the ball and the ring, and you could concentrate and conjoin your mind with your muscles.

My shooting was good but suffered from a terrible vulnerability — I was considerably shorter than everyone else, so my shooting rarely survived the interference of opponents. It was an absurdly contingent skill, like Superman being afraid of heights. To flourish, my ability required imagined opponents who I could reliably vanquish.

So, to better perform in games, I developed my dribbling and passing — skills that were less likely to be undermined by my height. I practised until my blisters leaked and my arms ached. There were few days that were too hot, wet or windy to discourage me.

And Muggsy was an inspiration.

In 1995, as Muggsy’s wife was moving out, his older brother moved in. (Muggsy and Kim would later divorce — then, many years later, would reconcile. There were “trust” issues, but Muggsy won’t get into it.)

Muggsy was also home a lot more — a serious knee injury required surgery and a long convalescence, and he played only six games that season. It was an awful brake on his career. The previous season he’d played 78 games, averaging 11 points and almost nine assists per game. Now there were questions about his career.

At home, it was just Muggsy and Chuckie. As Chuckie dried out, Muggsy served as brother, mentor, counsellor and nurse. Muggsy brought him food and cleaned up his vomit. He sat bedside as Chuckie trembled and screamed through the ravages of withdrawal. They played dominoes. He introduced him to teammates who came over to shoot hoops on Muggsy’s private half-court. And he prayed with him. “I thought if I took him to rehab we would’ve really lost him,” Muggsy told ESPN in 2019. “By the third month, I thought he was making a change.”

Muggsy says that helping his brother gave him a solemn purpose, at a time when he was suddenly without his wife or the game of basketball. And God helped, too, he tells me. “My faith got stronger as I got older,” he says. “I started to understand how much guidance He had in my life. And now I always glorify Him and I also think that things happen for a reason.”

Chuckie got clean, and remains clean today. Almost 30 years later, he still lives with Muggsy.

In retrospect, that knee injury in ’95 signalled Muggsy’s slow decline. Despite the surgery, the injury was chronic and would plague him for the remainder of his career. In the 1996–97 season, he played respectably — he was only slightly off the peaks of 1994 and ’95 — but it was the last season he’d play for Charlotte. Despite initial assurances, Muggsy was traded to the Golden State Warriors in California. It was a bitter break-up. Muggsy felt betrayed, and was saddened that he wouldn’t end his career with the Hornets — he had fallen in love with the city, and the feeling was mutual.

At his new team, Muggsy came off the bench and was putting up half the numbers of his best. After two seasons, he was traded to Toronto. (Throughout this zigzagging of the continent, he remained his brother’s keeper: Chuckie followed Muggsy to California and then Canada.) He would be traded again in 2001, to Dallas, but would never play a game for them — his mother was dying and he knew the time was right to call an end. “I was ready to retire,” he says. “Mom got sick, she wasn’t doing well. And at that time, I was ready for a change in my life. I think the weight had worn off. I didn’t have that need to prove anything, the proving stage was over. And I love basketball, it’s still a passion, but it’s not all that I am.”

Muggsy Bogues keeps his own counsel, and there’s a distinctive combination of gentle modesty, patience and guardedness to him.

That Muggsy has often kept his own counsel is unsurprising given how poor and sceptical so many judgements made of him were. He says this quiet toughness — and discretion — goes back to childhood.

Muggsy didn’t so much analyse his environment as plough through it. And he didn’t analyse himself but obsessively channelled his disappointments and grief into basketball. When he says to me, “I just try to control what I can control, and there’s a lot that I can’t”, it chimes with just about every other successful athlete to whom I’ve spoken.

After his retirement, he moved back to Charlotte where he still lives. Life continued to surprise — in both tragic and pleasant ways. After basketball, he worked successfully in real estate until the global financial crisis ripped the floor out; his long-term girlfriend died of breast cancer in 2009. He was named coach of the WNBA Charlotte Sting in 2005, until the team dissolved less than two years later.

In his 50th year, he remarried his ex-wife, Kim — his surprise birthday party was in fact a surprise wedding — and established a non-profit organisation for at-risk kids. He’s both an ambassador for the Charlotte Hornets and the NBA. For the past year, he has been working with a journalist on his memoirs — Muggsy — due next year. “I’m in a blessed place,” he says. “And I’m staying in my lane — just trying to control the thing I can.”

If you enjoy reading our articles on Medium, consider subscribing to unlock full access to the best in politics and culture from The Saturday Paper each week.

This article was originally published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper as a three-part series in November, 2021.

Muggsy Bogues on how his height became his greatest asset was originally published in The Saturday Paper on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Every January, divers plunge into the still waters off Port Victoria in South Australia carrying spear guns and competing to be crowned that year’s Butterfish King.

The contest represents a continuation of the spearfishing traditions of the Narungga people, known as “the butterfish mob”. For millennia the Narungga have been diving into the Spencer Gulf to spear the fish they call Gynburra, which venture in on the tide to eat seaweed that clings to the reef, including the red algae Asparagopsis armata.

“When you’re hunting in the water you see it — a beautiful red foxtail algae,” says Narungga man Garry Goldsmith, founder of the Gynburra festival and business manager at the Narungga Nation Aboriginal Corporation. “We’ve always had a connection with where it grows in sea Country … we hope now with Asparagopsis that we can care not just for our own Country, but to influence the entire world.”

The Gynburra festival site in 2022 will have a new neighbour — an aquaculture operation harvesting the algae at scale to feed livestock. Inspired by local mussel farming techniques, the algae is grown on ropes and harvested by boat, and then sent to a processing facility in Adelaide.

The development is part of a new global industry borne out of the observations of a farmer on Prince Edward Island in Canada, who noticed that his cattle grazing on dredged seaweed seemed more productive. Investigating this claim, environmental scientist Dr Rob Kinley discovered that not only were the farmer’s cattle healthier, they also belched out about 20 per cent less methane.

“It’s unfortunate that Australia … will potentially be yet again five to 10 years behind. The Australian government will hopefully realise that this is all happening despite them.”

Kinley immediately recognised the significance of this finding — methane is a key driver of the climate crisis, more than 25 times as potent as carbon dioxide and accounting for about a fifth of global greenhouse gas emissions.

The Canadian scientist set out on a global mission to discover the seaweed with the most powerful methane-inhibiting properties, which led him to a lab at James Cook University in Queensland, where in 2014 he tested native Australian varieties.

When Kinley ran samples for Asparagopsis, he assumed there had been some kind of mistake. “I couldn’t find any methane in there at all,” he tells The Saturday Paper. “I’d thought a 20 per cent reduction in emissions was fantastic, 50 per cent seemed not possible; but to reduce cattle methane emissions 100 per cent, well, I thought you would have to get the rifle out and shoot the cow.”

On the back of funding from Meat & Livestock Australia, Kinley worked to commercialise the technology as the chief scientist at FutureFeed, a spinoff company from CSIRO. In practice, Kinley found cows didn’t enjoy the taste of Asparagopsis at high enough concentrations to eliminate methane, but even in the low quantities at which they find it palatable the additive removes more than 80 per cent of methane emissions.

Yet when 104 countries pledged at the COP26 climate conference to reduce methane emissions by 30 per cent by 2030, Nationals leader Barnaby Joyce bragged that Australia had refused to sign. He said this was one of the conditions he had put on the Nationals supporting a target of net zero by 2050.

The Morrison government on Wednesday announced $500 million for a fund to commercialise new low-emissions technologies, with livestock feed flagged as an example of the kind of innovation that could secure backing.

CH4 Global, which holds the licence to roll out FutureFeed’s livestock feed additive, is critical of Australia’s refusal to sign the pledge. Adam Main, who is the Australian general manager of the Silicon Valley start-up, called for more federal government investment in agtech research and to help farmers incorporate the feed into their operations.

“It’s unfortunate that Australia … will potentially be yet again five to 10 years behind,” Main tells The Saturday Paper. “The Australian government will hopefully realise that this is all happening despite them, but they’re learning about this as a solution — there’s just a lag and delay in providing support to farmers and processors.”

Goldsmith praises Main and CH4 Global for their work nurturing the industry on Narungga land, and is effusive about the support offered by the South Australian government. When asked about the federal government’s role, however, he is more circumspect.

“I won’t make any comment on that just yet,” he says. “It’s really encouraging to see those countries sign on to the methane pledge. Obviously the federal government has to look at what their priorities are … hopefully our industry can give them confidence to sign on, knowing they have a clear pathway.”

Agricultural sustainability experts warn that focusing on solutions such as low-emissions feed alone cannot mitigate the climate impact of livestock. A new study by The Breakthrough Institute found that with existing technological fixes, including emerging feed additives, emissions from United States beef production would drop by only 18 per cent by 2030.

New York University assistant professor Matthew Hayek, an environmental expert who consulted on the report, says that amount is likely to be even lower for Australia, as US livestock are largely fed in feedlots where low-methane additives can be administered, whereas Australian cattle mostly graze on pasture. “This should sober that miraculous view that we feed cows one thing and that problem goes away.”

Hayek tells The Saturday Paper that low-methane feed could help contribute to emissions reductions, but he worries that it is instead being used to justify the continuation of current levels of meat consumption in the US and Australia –two of the highest per-capita beef consumers on the planet.

In addition to methane, livestock operations generate carbon dioxide emissions through deforestation. Pastureland and crop production for livestock use up 77 per cent of all farmed land, but produce less than 20 per cent of global calories. Hayek suggests pursuing policies to shift consumption patterns — for instance, by reducing purchases of beef in government food procurement.

“What we need to do in food systems is like what we need to do in energy systems across the board, which is rapidly deploy the solutions we have now,” Hayek says. “One of the solutions happens to not be a technology at all — it’s just eating less meat, substituting it with healthy and diverse but predominantly plant-based food.”

The minister for Emissions Reduction, Angus Taylor, has come down hard on any idea of changing consumption patterns. In an op-ed for The Australian, he claimed Labor wanted to shift Australians onto plant-based diets, and that the party has been infiltrated by Greens with “extremist” views. “What activists in Australia and elsewhere want is an end to the beef industry,” Taylor warned.

Labor and the Greens have also claimed that the focus on meat is a misdirect, saying that it gives cover to the substantial methane emissions generated by coal and gas. “This pledge isn’t about cow farts or having a steak sandwich,” said Greens leader Adam Bandt. “It isn’t about protecting farmers; it’s about protecting fracking.”

Grattan Institute climate expert Tony Wood noted that Australian beef consumption is on the decline in any case. “Angus Taylor is almost making it a badge of courage for Australians that we’re going to eat more meat … I’m not suggesting to close the meat industry, but we can’t ignore emissions from cattle.”

Kinley, the inventor of the livestock feed solution, is happy to sit out of the politics surrounding how it is put to use. He is focused instead on commercialising the technology. Kinley says he is “the science guy” and that it is up to others to decide how his invention is used. But he hopes it can provide a boost both to the environment and to jobs in places like Narungga country.

“We provide the tools that offer options in reduction of methane,” Kinley says. “Those tools can be used as applicable — we don’t determine how that is.”

If you enjoy reading our articles on Medium, consider subscribing to unlock full access to the best in politics and culture from The Saturday Paper each week.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on Nov 13, 2021 as “A question of cow”.

Could a seaweed diet for cows really reduce methane emissions? was originally published in The Saturday Paper on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This week it emerged that Andrew Laming used his staff to send out correspondence to the non-profit advocacy organisation Older Women’s Network NSW, warning them that a Facebook post they had shared from October was potentially defamatory. If they did not remove the post by Laming’s deadline, the email said, it could amount to “aggravating” circumstances and cause “additional costs”. After the group agreed to take down the post, Laming had a bouquet of flowers delivered to their offices. This is not standard practice, but neither is Laming’s usual sense of appropriateness.

Laming has available to him parliamentary privilege to make his case and defend his position against these supposedly slanderous advocates, but he must feel that forum is insufficient. Clearly also he believes it is the work of office staff to help him defend his reputation and to use legal threats in doing so.

Peter Dutton is of a similar view. He has argued that taxpayer funds should be available to members of parliament who intend to launch or defend defamation actions. He said these funds should be seen as a “workplace entitlement”. He made clear that the law has become prohibitively expensive but instead of reform proposed that politicians be added to the class of people who might afford to exploit it. “There are many members, as I look around, who don’t have those deep pockets to defend a defamation trial, in some cases costing over a million dollars,” he said. “That’s the reality.”

Dutton made the comments in the context of former attorney-general Christian Porter using a blind trust to cover his legal fees in an aborted defamation case against journalist Louise Milligan and the ABC. Dutton, of course, has his own horse in this race. He has mounted a defamation suit against refugee advocate Shane Bazzi for a tweet he alleges was defamatory. Bazzi crowdfunded $157,088 to pay Sydney-based firm O’Brien Criminal and Civil Solicitors to run his defence of honest opinion and fair comment. The case is yet to be decided.

The ability to sue for defamation right now is exclusively the domain of the rich or the few whose stories make the news… If we’re stuck with shitty laws then we should all have equal access to them.

When a citizen criticising an elected official can be sued by that official and potentially bankrupted by an adverse finding, the effects on democracy are profound. When politicians are seeking to use government money to expand their tactical litigation arsenal, or in the case of Laming using the resources of their office to send out legal threats, we must consider it a threat to democracy itself. Laming’s actions this week are the latest symptoms of a deep sickness: a lack of transparency and accountability in federal politics.

Crowdfunding is increasingly a necessity and core component in these fights, and is a further testament to the debasement of our democratic process. If even an attorney-general can’t afford to launch a defamation action, what hope is there for the rest of us? On October 27, author, academic and abuse survivor Gemma Carey received an email from lawyers at the firm Company (Giles) with three legal letters attached, one each from: politicians Christian Porter and Andrew Laming, and political editor Peter van Onselen. Rebekah Giles is the same lawyer Porter retained in his attempt to sue the ABC. Interestingly, van Onselen has strenuously denied knowledge of his letter being joined with those of Porter’s or Laming’s. Carey has withdrawn and apologised for the remarks she made about all three men, but they have not withdrawn or retracted their letters, which include demands for payment of legal fees.

In response to the three letters of demand a crowdfunding campaign called “#Enough: Defamation Defence Legal Fund” was co-ordinated by Nina Funnell, campaign manager of #LetHerSpeak, with money held in trust by Marque Lawyers. The money was to defend Carey’s position, not to pay the three men’s demands. Within 24 hours it had gathered more than $100,000. At the time of printing its total was more than $200,000. According to an update from Funnell, the surplus in funds will now be made available to the “14 individuals or organisations who have been threatened with defamation by either Christian Porter, Andrew Laming or Peter van Onselen (or a combination there of)”. Marque is officially representing five clients.

It doesn’t matter whether someone’s defamation suit is strong or weak, the cost of launching an action is prohibitively expensive for most and devastatingly expensive to defend. This is referred to as a “general deterrent” effect. Dutton suing Bazzi doesn’t just deter Bazzi specifically, it sends a message to everyone: if you don’t think you could crowdfund like this, then don’t criticise a powerful man. By defending his reputation, Porter’s proceedings against Milligan and the ABC sent a message of caution to all journalists and news outlets.

My interest and expertise is in the new “public interest” defences to defamation proceedings, but unfortunately even when these laws are put to the test by the courts and we know how they might be interpreted, for most individuals and outlets it is simply so expensive to defend a defamation action that the result is still a “chilling effect” on free speech, even with a case that would likely end up righteous and defensible.

The firm representing Bazzi, O’Brien solicitors, has announced it is also representing Nyamal man Terry Flowers, who the Seven Network wrongly identified as the suspect in the abduction of Cleo Smith. Flowers rushed to the local police station for help when his saw his picture circulating, and was so distressed he had to be hospitalised for a severe panic attack. The situation seems to be a spectacular example of someone who has a right to defend their reputation against reckless and unfair damage.

I asked O’Brien solicitors if they were running this one pro bono and they confirmed they’re acting on a “no-win, no-fee” arrangement. In their press release they have drawn attention to one of their other recent justice-driven defamation suits: “The firm previously took action against the Seven Network after its Sunrise program aired images of members of the Yirrkala community, who were filmed for a health campaign, as overlay for a panel discussion about the abuse and neglect of children.” When litigation itself is a big-ticket news item, the PR for a lawyer or firm can easily turn into a goldmine of future briefs.

What keeps me up at night, and keeps me angry, is the question of access. Years ago, I learnt that it was common in the United States for people to have to crowdfund for necessary medical procedures. At the time, I pitied them their dystopia. In Australia I have seen and given money to people forced to crowdfund for gender affirmation surgery — something that should obviously be covered, along with dental and mental health. These things are not luxuries, they are basic human entitlements that our government is far and above wealthy enough to provide. Now, increasingly, I am seeing people crowdfunding for access to the law.

There are two sides to the defamation coin: it can be understood as offering both a “freedom from” being defamed and, when defended well, a “freedom to” speak. If the law is working, everyone should sit at the nexus point of the healthy tension between the two. Everyone should be free to speak and also free to defend their reputations. That is not the current state of affairs in Australia.

As with most areas of the law — both criminal and civil — the way it looks and feels depends on your cash and power. On the one hand, it is frightening to think of what would happen if every single Australian could actually afford to launch a defamation suit. We are a notoriously litigious, pearl-clutching colony. On the other hand, the ability to sue for defamation right now is exclusively the domain of the rich or the few whose stories make the news. Defamation law isn’t more fair simply because fewer individuals have the opportunity to misuse it. If we’re stuck with shitty laws then we should all have equal access to them. Let the Lamings and the Porters get emails with three attachments. Let the Bazzis and the Flowers sue every time their feelings are hurt by a tweet.

The people involved in these matters are directly connected to democracy itself — they’re politicians, political staff, members of the fourth estate, citizens punching up and advocacy organisations. If the effect of these laws is that only a select few can defend their freedom of speech or their reputations, what are we left with? It’s difficult to crowdfund if you don’t have a platform or a following, and I don’t want to live in a country where popularity determines our legal freedoms. It’s also plainly wrong for secret donations to fund an MP’s litigation against the national broadcaster. We all know the saying justice delayed is justice denied; but when justice is this expensive, it is not only denied but dangerous.

If you enjoy reading our articles on Medium, consider subscribing to unlock full access to the best in politics and culture from The Saturday Paper each week.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on Nov 13, 2021 as “Uneven justice”.

How politicians are using defamation law to sue ordinary people was originally published in The Saturday Paper on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

ABBA’s best songs have always captured the business, pleasure and pain of being ABBA. They made every kind of song — delicate lullabies, hot-for-teacher karaoke staples, ballads of friendship — but there’s a deft magic to those they wrote about their own relationships and idiosyncrasies.

“Super Trouper”, one of the Swedish quartet’s many enduring romps from 1980, is a doleful threnody to the hardships of touring life, encrusted with glitter and rhinestones: “All I do is eat and sleep and sing / Wishing every show was the last show.” “One of Us”, one of the group’s final hits as both couples in the group were divorcing, paints the torture and treachery of marital break-up. “If It Wasn’t for the Nights”, a gorgeous hidden gem from the group’s 1979 record Voulez-Vous, advocates for workaholism as a way to distract from the pain of separation, the kind of crying-in-the-club disco anthem that ABBA’s countrywoman Robyn would go on to perfect 30 years later with “Dancing On My Own”.

That magic is present in “I Still Have Faith in You” and “Don’t Shut Me Down”, ABBA’s first new songs in 40 years. Released miraculously as a double-A-side single earlier this year in anticipation of a new album titled Voyage, both tracks seem to comment on the overwhelming weirdness of ABBA’s decades-later reunion, perfect pieces of metacommentary in the style of the band’s greatest hits. The first, a soaring ballad sung by Anni-Frid Lyngstad, is another entry in the band’s canon of trepidatious divorce songs, with some pre-reunion jitters thrown in:

Do I have it in me?

I believe it is in there

For I know I hear a bittersweet song

In the memories we share…

The second, sung by Agnetha Fältskog, trades in a similar kind of anticipatory tension. “Don’t Shut Me Down” is a mid-tempo disco cut that could slot in right alongside “One of Us” in the next inevitable reissue of ABBA Gold. In its best moments, it seems to make an appeal to the fans that might be nervous about the prospect of these four icons — Fältskog, Lyngstad, and their respective ex-husbands and songwriters, Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson — reuniting after so steadfastly refusing to for so long:

I’m asking you to have an open mind

(and I won’t be the same)

I’m not the same this time around

I’m fired up, don’t shut me down…

For fans, these songs allowed a sigh of relief. As with any reunion, there was something deeply strange about news of ABBA’s return. In the decades since it disbanded, the Swedish group has gone through a seemingly impossible number of commercial renaissances and critical re-evaluations, thanks to a handful of well-placed legacy fortifiers: the release of a greatest hits compilation, ABBA Gold, that caused a resurgence in popularity for the group; the emergence of Björn Again, an Australian tribute band that slowly became a genuine phenomenon; and the opening of Mamma Mia!, a jukebox musical featuring ABBA’s hits that was eventually adapted into a film starring Meryl Streep and Colin Firth.

In the years since ABBA retired, the band’s body of work has taken on a life of its own.

In the years since ABBA retired, the band’s body of work has taken on a life of its own; their songs, as schmaltzy as they can be, now play like standards, and there’s a certain kind of music nerd — myself included — who sees their hits as an all-time gold standard of pop songwriting.

All of this makes Voyage, which was released this week, a tricky prospect. There are so many wonderful ways to enjoy ABBA’s songbook, none of which could ever really taint the band’s legacy. Watching Streep and Pierce Brosnan struggle through a pitchy rendition of “S.O.S.” might feel like pulling teeth, but such a performance has no real influence over ABBA’s status as a band with an extraordinary strike rate and historically strict quality control.

“I Still Have Faith in You” and “Don’t Shut Me Down” are as good as anything ABBA has ever made — I genuinely believe they could have been released in the band’s ’70s heyday — but the question remains whether anyone genuinely needs Voyage. ABBA’s catalogue is so deep, and collections such as Gold — with a track list that’s free-associative and impressionistic as opposed to success-driven or chronological — prove there are infinite ways to rearrange the band’s work into an assemblage that feels new. Although its lead singles constituted something of a divine treat in an altogether terrible year, a new ABBA record has to prove its worth.

Voyage struggles with that task: it has its moments, but at its worst, this is a record that feels embarrassing to listen to, the kind of revival that seems to have only been concocted in order to wring the last few dollars from the pockets of ABBA’s core demographic. It would be fine if Voyage mostly comprised bad songs — many ABBA records mostly comprise bad songs — but there’s an unnerving 2020s gloss to Voyage that more often makes it feel like the work of an ABBA tribute bot than ABBA themselves.

“When You Danced with Me”, which aims for mirthful pub singalong and lands short, is poreless and thin, giving no impression that it was actually recorded by a live band, even though it was. “Just a Notion”, an “I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do”-style barnstormer, pairs vocals recorded during the Voulez-Vous sessions with new instrumentation, an altogether uncanny meeting of past and present. The song succeeds because it’s just so good and so ABBA — a clash of musical upbeat and emotional woundedness that nobody has ever done quite as well as Ulvaeus, Andersson, Fältskog and Lyngstad — but its attempts to recapture the magic of the band’s ’70s heyday highlight the fact that there was something ineffable and, in a sense, inexplicable, about ABBA’s imperial phase.

“I Still Have Faith in You” and “Don’t Shut Me Down” succeed because they capture ABBA’s unique craic while acknowledging, both musically and lyrically, that 40 years have passed since the band previously released music.

To suggest Voyage is altogether patchy, though, might be to suggest that it is a genuine return to form: even ABBA’s best records, such as Voulez-Vous and 1981’s paranoid, heartbroken masterpiece The Visitors, feature some almighty stinkers. There are some all-timers among the detritus here: “I Can Be That Woman”, sung by Fältskog, is a divorce song that numbers among the band’s best ballads. As ever, it takes a unique vantage point: Fältskog is singing to an ex, but much of the song’s pathos comes from the way she describes the effect the separation is having on their dog: “The reproach in her eyes is imagined,” she sings, “But the pain that I feel is real.” A gem among the rough, it’s bizarre and kind of brilliant — in other words, undeniably ABBA.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on Nov 6, 2021 as “Money, money, money”.

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The lyrics in ABBA’s ‘Voyage’ ask us to keep an open mind about their reunion was originally published in The Saturday Paper on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Back in 1997, when Crown casino opened its massive Southbank “entertainment centre”, I was possibly its best-known public critic. Neil Mitchell invited me to take a walk around the gleaming new palace and then drop in for a chat at the 3AW studio in the Crown complex. It was a time for compulsory cheering after Crown’s lavish opening, but I was disturbed.

When Mitchell asked, “But is this not a magnificent complex for Melbourne?” I said it is too big and too powerful, with so much money flowing that politicians and media will not even know when they have been bought. Mitchell took it personally and threw me out of the studio mid-interview.

This memory was triggered as I read the findings of the Finkelstein Royal Commission into the Casino Operator and Licence. The commission finds that Crown is unfit and has been, in a word, “disgraceful”. Barely an adjective is spared to describe its illegal, dishonest and exploitative behaviour. But somehow it gets to keep its licence and be put on probation.

That appears to be because of its size as the biggest single-site employer in the state, the taxes it pays and its importance to the state’s economy. Essentially, despite its illegality, it is too lucrative to be punished. Many innocent parties might be hurt if it lost its licence. Just as big banks in the United States had to be bailed out in the global financial crisis to prevent innocent people being hurt, so with Crown. Banks were seen as too big to fail and so is Crown. Because it is so big and so powerful, we all end up being bought.

Back in 1997 I had never heard of the concept “too big to fail”. But I sensed what was happening in Melbourne. An exclusive licence to print money and a flexible planning process under then premier Jeff Kennett allowed a monster to grow.

Crown was permitted to double its footprint in the original 1994 tender, making its casino twice the size of the biggest casino in Las Vegas. Today, the complex is the largest building in Australia, at 550,000 square metres. The second-biggest building in the country is just 250,000 square metres. It is Parliament House in Canberra.

Jeff Kennett spruiked Crown at every turn. He wrote to its 10,000 employees thanking them for the magnificent job they were doing for Melbourne. He did not write to teachers and nurses to thank them. Gambling once belonged to the cultural margins and was put in the category of gaming and vice by our police departments. That all changed with Crown as it moved to the cultural centre. It became a key part of our vision for a city, hosting the Logies, the Walkleys, the Brownlow and endless gangland meetings and celebrations.

It was now state sponsored and culturally applauded as our economic saviour. This was Jeff Kennett’s gaming-led recovery. He immediately booted the Melbourne Museum that was to be built on the Southbank site, pushing it to Carlton. I could not understand this. Kennett hadn’t found an Eiffel Tower for the prime location in Melbourne; he’d found a casino that would span two city blocks. With it came cultural and even spiritual degradation.

We all knew back then that casinos largely exist to launder money and enable organised crime — as this royal commission has again proved. When Kennett attended Christmas Mass at St Patrick’s Cathedral and the Catholic Archbishop warned that we will not allow ourselves to be dominated by the symbols of the casino culture, he stormed out.

Essentially, despite its illegality, it is too lucrative to be punished … Banks were seen as too big to fail and so is Crown. Because it is so big and so powerful, we all end up being bought.

Back then, the democratic process of Melbourne City Council had been undermined by Kennett with council amalgamations. As then mayor of St Kilda I, along with all the 210 mayors across Victoria, had been sacked. Kevan Gosper was appointed the chief commissioner for Melbourne Council and there was no resistance to Crown getting whatever it wanted from either Kennett or the commissioner-led council. When he finished as commissioner, Gosper joined the board of Crown until the Packer family’s PBL shelled out about $1.6 billion to take it over in 1998–99.

During the 22 years of Packer family control, run out of Sydney, the flow of the politically well connected to become Crown’s boosters has not ceased. Labor powerbrokers and Howard government ministers have sat on the board. Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews even greenlighted a Packer proposal to spend $1.2 billion in building Melbourne’s tallest building as recently as 2017, despite strong opposition from the City of Melbourne and Planning Minister Dick Wynne. Thankfully, the permit for this latest Crown expansion at Queensbridge has lapsed.

It is little wonder Justice Finkelstein found Crown bullied the regulator and effectively neutered it. It is just too well connected to be regulated. And this was the same regulator that Andrews and Crown were defending as robust and independent after revelations about misconduct broke in 2019, via Nine’s 60 Minutes program and The Age.

Although I lay a lot of blame at Jeff Kennett’s feet, he lost power 22 years ago and Labor have been equally supine ever since. I was being called the de facto leader of the opposition in 1997, for standing up to Crown and Kennett. Labor figures cheered me on and promised if they won power they would clip its wings. Steve Bracks won in 1999 and I was dismayed to see the opposite. The very same Labor politicians shamelessly became Crown’s best friend, immediately hosting Labor fundraisers and taking political donations. They had been vocal critics of the close relationship between Kennett and Crown developer Ron Walker, but they immediately fell under its sway.

Crown suborns every check and balance because it is just too big and powerful, having fleeced more than $30 billion from gamblers since the temporary casino opened in 1994. Crown Melbourne’s yearly gambling revenue peaked at $1.86 billion in 2015–16 as the colourful VIP high-roller clients collectively dropped about $700 million.

This revenue needs to be managed down to less than $1 billion a year through stringent British-style “know your customer” rules, the elimination of cash play, and mandatory pre-commitment for the gamblers who lose about $460 million a year on Crown’s 2800-plus $10 maximum bet poker machines.

Sadly, when there is that much easy money to make and spread as favours, all of us get bought. Crown had long been subject to charges of money-laundering, crime and predatory behaviour that had contributed to suicides, but every charge bounced off. Indeed, the police department called Crown the Vatican because it was a sovereign immune state effectively existing within another jurisdiction but not subject to the same laws. It could act with impunity and claim sovereign protection from the government of the day, who would rush to its defence against “slanderous accusations” coming from the likes of me.

Now that we have become familiar with the massive regulatory failure at Crown and its failure as a fit and proper licensee, we need to admit that ultimately this was government failure by whoever was in power. Both sides of politics protected Crown so that it was never held accountable. I remember being granted some proxy shares to attend the 2018 Crown AGM — James Packer’s last on the board. I asked some pesky questions and experienced the arrogance of an immune board outraged that anyone would dare to question their magnificent “public service” for Melbourne. They were so superior and so outraged at critical questions. They knew that they were untouchable. Only the 60 Minutes story breaking started to reverse this power equation.

Such was its impunity that James Packer has now admitted to the Perth Casino Royal Commission that although he was chair of the board at Burswood he did not bother to attend board meetings for three years let alone appoint any money-laundering experts on his board. Under cross-examination he belatedly admitted to this being a “mistake”. What other board in Australia can function this way?

The most damning part of Finkelstein’s report was Crown’s callous treatment of vulnerable people and the cost to the community. The commissioner found that the whole community had been hurt by Crown’s approach to problem gambling, saying the harm has been enormous. He made some powerful recommendations to protect gamblers in the future while blasting Crown for claiming it has a world’s best approach to problem gambling. He added “nothing was further from the truth”.

For mine, the best part of Commissioner Finkelstein’s recommendations was that Crown pokies players will need a membership card that makes them set a daily, weekly or monthly limit on how long they can play and how much they can lose. Players that hit their limits would be locked out and unable to change their limits for 36 hours. The Andrews government says it supports this and all 33 recommendations. It should extend this membership card to all pokies in Victoria’s pubs and clubs.

So what should happen from here? The royal commissioner’s probation prescriptions with a special manager overseeing Crown might work. I would have preferred a recommendation for Crown to be broken up into a gaming business and a commercial/retail business for it to keep its licence. The oft-quoted 12,000 Crown employees are mainly subcontracted separate businesses and nothing to do with Crown other than sharing a landlord. The gaming floor has far fewer employees. And making that visible would have reduced this casino’s dominance of Melbourne. Possibly we would not be still bought.

Crown Resorts shares went up 11 per cent on the news that it had retained its licence. Although James Packer must sell down his 37 per cent share to 5 per cent, he is a very relieved and a very happy man. As we have seen after the Royal Commission into Misconduct in the Banking, Superannuation and Financial Services Industry, federal politicians are weakening the restrictions recommended by Commissioner Kenneth Hayne. I believe the same will happen with Crown. Just like the banks, they now own us. Crown still influences state governments and remains too big to fail.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on Nov 6, 2021 as “Sleazy lies and heads that spared the Crown”.

If you enjoy reading our articles on Medium, consider subscribing to unlock full access to the best in politics and culture from The Saturday Paper each week.

Crown Casino and what happens when big business becomes too big to fail was originally published in The Saturday Paper on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

By Oscar Schwartz in The Monthly

Maggie Nelson’s essay collection argues against the false binary of freedom and obligation

Maggie Nelson is frustrated with how we talk about freedom. Or more specifically, she’s frustrated with how we define it in opposition to obligation, as if they’re contradictory. If freedom means personal liberation, reckless abandon, death-drive selfishness, then obligation has come to mean the opposite: care, self-sacrifice, duty, willing subjection. Nelson, an American poet and essayist best known for her theory-heavy memoir The Argonauts, has been watching this divergence materialise in our culture for around a decade, only for it to be thrown into sharp relief by the pandemic. The narrative is now supposedly simple: those who want to be free are incapable of care, while those who care willingly forgo their freedom.

This binary runs along a political faultline, too. To the right goes freedom; to the left goes obligation. This, in particular, annoys Nelson, as it means that many of her peers, those on the left, have rejected freedom as an irredeemable aspiration admired only by the corrupt, patriarchal and capitalistic. Instead, they practise love, caregiving, mutual responsibility. And yet, when Nelson looks at the world — and more specifically at social media — she sees people who are supposedly motivated by this civic-minded benevolence slipping into “something oppressively moralistic, more reliant on shame, capitulation, or assuredness of our own ethical goodness in comparison with others, than on understanding or acceptance”.

In On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint, Nelson offers a corrective — a reclamation of freedom’s “remaining evacuated possibilities” for her wayward allies. Freedom and obligation are not opposites, she argues, or even different sides of the same coin. Rather they are entangled in a Gordian knot. Freedom needs obligation’s constraint. Obligation requires the freedom to authentically care. Try to pull these two apart and the culture unravels. To stick together, we must embrace the knottiness, tolerate the intractable and ease into indeterminacy.

Maybe this is why Nelson describes the four critical essays that make up this book — on art, sex, drugs and climate — as songs and not essays. Perhaps they are supposed to convey the melodious back and forth of her thinking through this knotty problem, or poetically enact a negative capability that she believes is required of free and caring subjects. In some moments, On Freedom achieves this. Her ideas ambulate in what Hannah Arendt, herself a great theoriser of freedom, called “thinking without a banister”, a courageous undertaking where all ideologies are stripped away so that the writer can ascend freely and perilously towards some new philosophical plateau. At other times, though, these songs, which are really just essays, read more like a constrained rehashing of old ideas, kind of like being stuck on a treadmill.

That inertia is partly due to what Nelson sets her critical eye on. In the first essay, “Art Song”, she spends a good amount of time scrutinising two artworks that caused cultural scandals in 2017: Dana Schutz’s Open Casket, an abstract painting of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old African-American victim of a lynching in 1955, and Sam Durant’s Scaffold, a replica of gallows used, notably, in the 1862 massacre of 38 Dakota men. Both works — one exhibited at the Whitney Biennial in New York, the other at a sculpture garden in Minneapolis — were met with vociferous opposition, some arguing that they inflicted violence on the marginalised communities the works represented. Artist and critic Hannah Black wrote an open letter calling for Schutz’s painting to be destroyed. Native American activists called for the removal of Durant’s sculpture, a request to which he assented.

Nelson takes issue here. She says that when people call for prohibition or destruction, even in the name of racial justice, they are stripping an artwork of its “status as art”. That is, a work instead becomes “hate speech” or “physical assault”. Anyone who cares about art or wants to make it, Nelson thinks, should be wary of this ontological sleight of hand, as it inevitably narrows the field of creative possibility. (After all, it is precisely this logic, she points out, that conservatives use when they call for art to be destroyed or prohibited on the basis that it is “not art” but obscenity or communism.) This is not to say that an artist can make anything they want with no consequence, just that our criticisms should first acknowledge art as art and then proceed from there, with vicious intensity if need be.

This is a fine, if unremarkable, take. But a critic should choose their subject matter carefully, and Nelson made a bad choice here. The Schutz and Durant scandals are pre-eminent instances of how outrage culture can destroy critical discourse. Back in 2017, endless takes on these two artworks fed the algorithmic engines for weeks, becoming increasingly deranged and distant from the art itself, until eventually it was just hot takes all the way down. For some, the “censorship” was evidence of the “woke mob” demonstrating their penchant for petty fascism. For others, the works exemplified the art world’s essential white supremacy. To this day, every time these scandals, and in particular the Schutz affair, are dredged up there is another relitigating of precisely the same talking points. Perhaps Nelson thinks she can float above the discourse or offer some way out of it. Instead, she has provided grist for the outrage mill. Two scathing reviews of On Freedom, widely shared on Twitter, focused almost entirely on her analysis of these historical scandals, casting her as an ungenerous, out-of-touch reactionary. Nothing about this feels song-like or emancipatory.

In the essay about sex, “The Ballad of Sexual Optimism”, Nelson again elects to weigh in on the discourse, turning her attention to #MeToo. And again, she worries about a certain condemnatory vibe underpinning this movement. Justice for victims of sexual violence is important, she says, but seeking it out shouldn’t create a culture where we only ever focus on how others are doing sex wrong, “judging their behavior or desires as flawed, delusional, or dangerous”. Instead, we should spend more time asking ourselves the “far more crucial and challenging question of what we ourselves do or want to do”. (Nelson argues quite compellingly that we could all learn from the BDSM community, who engage in sex where the knot of freedom and obligation is attended to with great care, where liberated desire is matched by a safe word.)

Nelson is a phenomenal writer of unwieldy desire and the most compelling moments in this book come when she reflects on her own journey towards queer sexual liberation during the AIDS epidemic. Mainstream culture, she recalls, was telling her and her friends that their desire was a “death warrant, and that if it killed you, you deserved it”. And yet they continued to have sex and then care for one another as people became sick and died. The lesson she learnt, and the one she hopes to impart on the younger generation, is that in a frequently awful world, seeking desire is inherently dangerous and comes at a cost. We oughtn’t recklessly pursue sex with no concern for others, but nor should we fantasise “a world in which our safety is guaranteed, or one in which the success of an encounter is judged by whether we got away unmarked”. It is not just the orgy, in other words, but what we do the morning after.

Striking this balance between freedom and care is what Nelson calls the “ongoing practice of freedom”. One such practice, she proposes, is attention to context. The way we interpret sex and art changes over time and across cultures. We owe it to ourselves and each other to acknowledge this relativity and not imagine that our milieu or our moment has some moral “primordial impeccability”. I was thinking about context a lot while reviewing this book, how freedom means something different in America, where the book was written, than it does in Australia. These differences have been amplified in the past year and a half. In the United States, a culture maniacally committed to personal autonomy could be held at least partly responsible for more than 700,000 COVID deaths. Here, a culture of safety-oriented dutifulness has left us with a number almost 37 times less than that per capita. But, of course, statistics don’t tell the whole story and there will be harder-to-measure consequences of the pandemic beyond the body count. What changes in a population once they have experience of complying with authoritarian measures such as indefinitely closed borders, 9pm curfews, playgrounds wrapped in police tape? What will happen to the regimes of control the government has developed in the name of health? What happens to a culture in which cries of “freedom” become synonymous with craven libertarianism and far-right extremism, or are regarded as always and necessarily compassionless?

Nelson spends little time on pandemic fallout in her book, but the final chapter is devoted to the climate crisis, which no doubt enacts a similar cultural dynamic. On one side there are freedom-loving folk who want to “drill, baby, drill”. On the other are those who value obligation and want urgent climate action, even if it radically alters our way of life. (Nelson admits to leaning towards the latter, even fantasising occasionally about an environmentalist dictator who could benevolently steer us away from self-destruction.) The problem with this binary, she argues, is that freedom is reduced to self-serving hedonism, and obligation to moral hectoring: “Neither helps us seize the moment to shed some of freedom’s more exhausted — and toxic — tropes and myths, or to experiment with its next iterations.”

On precisely what these next iterations are, though, Nelson remains frustratingly vague. From what I can gather, for Nelson freedom can be at best a frame of mind that avoids nihilism, denialism and capitulation, and instead embraces indeterminacy. Freedom lets us confront our grim material reality while also believing in some semblance of human agency. Freedom, in the end, is an internal feeling of liberation that helps us accept that we live in a fallen world and yet choose to go on nonetheless.

Arendt, in her own key essay on freedom, took issue with such an inward-looking formulation of the term. She thought that “inner freedom”, a concept that emerged to allow oppressed peoples to maintain spiritual liberty while still materially enslaved, is in the end a politically stagnant position. “To be sure [freedom] may still dwell in men’s hearts as desire or will or hope or yearning,” she wrote. “But the human heart, as we all know, is a very dark place, and whatever goes on in its obscurity can hardly be called a demonstrable fact.” With these essays, Nelson is trying to shine light on this dark place. She wants to enlist us, her readers, into the collective project so that we can come “to love all the misery and freedom of living and, as best we can, not mind dying” together. In the end, this cry for communal freedom comes out sounding something like the language of self-care.

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Originally published in the November issue of The Monthly.

The right want freedom, the left want obligation — but is it really that simple? was originally published in The Monthly on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Ever since the internet’s big-bang moment, archivists have struggled to keep up with its burgeoning content. It’s time to change the rules.

Twenty-eight years ago this month, I got onto the world wide web. First among my friends — and among the first few thousand web users anywhere in the world — I explored a tiny universe of content.

But how did web surfers find anything before search engines such as Google — a tool that came along several years later?

In the beginning was the list: just a page of names and links to websites, sitting on the CERN website — the first website, and the birthplace of the web.

I worked my way down that list, methodically clicking on link after link, exploring the website that loaded into my “browser”, and going on to the next. By the time I’d finished that list, another list had appeared, this one hosted at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications or NCSA. Almost as famous as CERN, NCSA gave the world the first widely used browser, Mosaic. NCSA’s list had a lot of overlap with the list at CERN, but a few new sites would pop up on the bottom of the list every day, so I spent another day or two visiting all the sites on that list that I hadn’t already visited.

In seven days, I’d finished. I’d surfed the entire web.

For a few months, I managed to keep up with the list of new websites as they popped up on the NCSA list, priding myself on staying current with this amazing new technology. But by the end of February 1994, more sites went onto that list every day than I could find time to explore. Not long after that, the list’s maintainer threw in the towel — the web’s exponential growth meant that no archivist could hope to keep pace with it.

The data may remain somewhere but could be so difficult to locate that most people would simply resign themselves to a kind of perpetual digital amnesia.

In early 1994, two enterprising Stanford University students set up Jerry and Dave’s guide to the world wide web, a part-time project that rapidly grew into the first of the internet “unicorns”: Yahoo! Created by David Filo and Jerry Yang, Yahoo! took a librarian’s approach to the too-much-good-stuff of the early web, and asked you to choose your category, then your subcategory, and possibly even your subsub and subsubsubcategories, leaving you with a curated list of websites that you could examine at your leisure, each dedicated to your subsubsubtopic of interest.

It took 18 months for exponential growth to overwhelm Yahoo!’s category search; every subcategory produced a list of sites too long to explore. At this point, I started keeping lists of links — “bookmarks” — like a breadcrumb trail to guide me back to my favourite sites. When that list got long enough, I curated the best of the best, gathered them into a list named Stones, Stars and Gold, and put them on a page on my own website.

Visiting that list today and working methodically from top to bottom, only about one-fifth of the links load the pages they pointed to back in 1995. Most of them go to nothing at all, or to something that has the same name, but is completely different. In less than a generation, my snapshot of the early web — very personal, specific and meaningful — has nearly rotted away.

The term “link rot” may not be new — the concept dates back to the first decade of the web — but most people won’t know that the web had been designed to do its best to prevent the untimely death of links. The uniform resource locator, or URL, had been defined by web creator Sir Tim Berners-Lee as “immutable” — it must not change. A URL gets assigned once — a pointer to a page or a photo or a podcast — and that’s it. That URL always points to those bits. That’s the theory, at least. Unfortunately, immutable URLs immediately went into the too-hard basket. From that moment, the rot set in.

Brewster Kahle saw the problem almost immediately. In 1996, the co-inventor of WAIS (Wide Area Information Server) founded the Internet Archive, and began a methodical backing-up of the entire web. “How can you cite a document if the documents go away every 44 days?” he asked, using his back-up of the web to power something named the Wayback Machine — a technology intended to quell the rot. Pop a dead URL into the Wayback Machine and it will show you all of its back-ups of that web page, all the way back to the beginning of its first scan, 25 years ago.

Using the Wayback Machine on my 80 per cent dead list of favourite links from 1995, I find that many, likely most, of those websites can be recovered. The links themselves may be dead, but the pages and images once pointed to by those links continue to persist. If I wanted to, I could re-create my page with links that leveraged the Wayback Machine, breathing life back into the list. Yet that may not be enough to prevent a more pernicious form of link rot.

A recent paper from a group of United States-based researchers shows that even a good back-up of the web might miss the point. “Where did the Web Archive go?” details the fate of four web archives — the Internet Archive, fortunately, not among them — that changed their own URLs during 14 months from 2017 to 2019. Though well intentioned, those changes broke many of the URLs pointing to the content within those archives. An archive is great — certainly better than losing data. But an archive that doesn’t provide immutable URLs for its data, well, that’s peak link rot.

We all generate so much data all the time now — on smartphones and wearables and Zoom calls and so on — that archiving is no longer a luxury. Without an archive, we lose our connection to our digital past. I learnt this when I sought any online resources concerning the First International Conference on the World-Wide Web, held at CERN in May 1994, and which I attended. There’s very little documentation, and only a few photos, for one of the most important events in the history of computing: the web’s “big bang” moment. Why? The answer is almost too obvious: the conference took place before the web took off. The medium we now use to record, commemorate and share our experiences simply didn’t exist. It was only subsequently brought into being by the 300-plus researchers who attended the conference.

The shadow cast by that absence showed me that if we aren’t very careful, we could lose our connections to our past. The data may remain somewhere but could be so difficult to locate that most people would simply resign themselves to a kind of perpetual digital amnesia. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell wrote: “Who controls the past controls the future.” I’d suggest that those who forget the past don’t have much of a future.

All of the archives we add to daily — in the photos we share on Facebook, movies uploaded to YouTube, diatribes posted to Twitter, and so on — mean this threat touches nearly all of us. What can we do? We can demand immutability in perpetuity. Any organisation that publishes to the web should guarantee that even when they revise their systems, existing data will remain available and accessible forever, via the same URLs. We cannot let our history rot away. It doesn’t need to happen, and it shouldn’t. Not if we want to be able to understand how we got here, and where we’re going.

This piece was produced in collaboration with cosmosmagazine.com.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on Oct 30, 2021 as “Search history”.

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Where does everything on the internet go? was originally published in The Saturday Paper on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Australian governments are committed to action on climate change. They have always been committed to action on climate change.

On June 30, the Liberal and National parties released a new policy document, The Climate Challenge, “detailing a framework for positive action”. And it was detailed: “The policy covers areas as diverse as research funding; the role of the CSIRO; our meteorological services; climate prediction; the promotion of the use of non-fossil fuels; energy conservation; foreign aid policies; the Antarctic; coastal zone management; human health questions; pollution control; natural disaster relief and the protection of the National Estate.” Each was broken into smaller sections with their own policy plans, and the document was backed up by the latest science. The climate challenge, it said, “demands positive action — it demands it now”.

That was June 30, 1989.

The paper was prepared by the Opposition led by Andrew Peacock, and in the following year’s election campaign he committed the Coalition to cutting Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions by at least 20 per cent by the year 2000.

The Hawke government, for what it’s worth, rejected the target, stating it would “not proceed with measures which have net adverse economic impacts nationally”. “In terms of our global responsibilities,” Hawke said in the 1990 campaign debate, “we are out there at the forefront with other nations in doing what we can”.

Readers will no doubt find the language familiar. You’re probably thinking of this: “Australia will more than play its part to address climate change, [but] we do not have to sacrifice our economic prosperity to tackle the problem.” That was prime minister John Howard in 2007.

Howard’s environment minister was a young tyro named Malcolm Turnbull, and together, cornered by Kevin 07, they announced plans for an emissions ­cap-and-trade system that would be built with great care and rigour, because “it needs to last the whole of the 21st century if Australia is to meet our global responsibilities”.

Since 2013, the Abbott–Turnbull–Morrison governments have had more than a dozen different energy/climate policies, but they have yet to enact a broad-based emissions reduction scheme. The latest suite of unlegislated back-of-envelope Coalition policies continues this tradition of non-commitment.

Prime Minister Morrison’s “net zero by 2050” plan involves, bizarrely, increasing gas extraction all the way up until 2050, strong continued support for coal and oil exports, and a rejection of any significant interim targets — in other words, a business-as-usual approach for the foreseeable future. Actual emissions-reduction plans are hard to discern.

In October this year, at an energy industry summit, the nominal emissions reduction minister Angus Taylor explained the logic of the government’s approach. He reiterated to his audience that it was “committed to reaching net zero”, but that it would stick to providing incentives to cut emissions rather than penalising polluters. Taylor was quite open about the intended beneficiaries of the government’s policies: the goal was to protect the “key industries” of gas, coal, heavy manufacturing and agriculture, which also happen to be the Nationals’ key political constituencies. “We don’t want to see those industries being badly damaged,” he said. “And they don’t need to be.”

Taylor’s efforts have in fact been dedicated to supporting the coal and gas industries using climate change mitigation funds. Reciting the mantra of “carrots not sticks”, or “technology not taxes”, he is leading a protection scheme for polluters: in recent years, the Coalition government has been pouring millions into “carbon capture and storage” projects of the sort that have been failing for decades, and it has been using money from its emissions reduction fund. These schemes, along with “blue hydrogen” projects and dodgy carbon-credit schemes such as those based on “avoided deforestation”, are now being used as an alibi to increase coal and gas extraction, after the government appointed fossil-fuel industry leaders to its Emissions Reduction Assurance Committee — whose purported role is to “ensure the continued integrity” of the fund.

Taylor still talks about supporting Australia’s “gas-fired recovery”, and the Morrison government has been supporting resource companies to open up dozens of new coal and gas sites at a rapid clip. Never mind that banks and insurers internationally are deserting such projects, or that they undermine our climate targets. Or that gas extraction and burning create far heavier emissions than could ever justify the commonly used “transitional technology” tag.

For the Nats, many of whom are unashamed climate denialists, “net zero by 2050” has become another opportunity to pork-barrel. And for Morrison’s Liberals, it has become a political escape hatch, an alibi for not doing anything significant during his actual term of office, or indeed even in following terms. And why bust a gut when the states are doing all the heavy lifting? Every state and territory government already has an emissions reduction program, and these combined efforts alone should ensure Australia achieves emissions reductions of around 40 per cent (on 2005 levels) by 2030; in fact, most states are shooting for at least 50 per cent by then — significantly more ambitious than the federal government’s outline. In the pantomime of federal politics, Morrison negotiated long and hard with the Nats to strike a deal; in reality, he will pay their bribes by the billion, all to sign up for a national emissions plan that is, in fact, a handbrake on everyone else’s ambitions.

While the toll of climate-change inaction is rising, along with the cost of financing fossil-fuel industries and the likelihood of international carbon border tariffs, Morrison’s focus is elsewhere: on the politics. The Coalition’s decades-long intransigence has become embarrassing even by its own standards. Australian climate denialism is now unacceptable everywhere: on the world stage, among regional neighbours, across the Australian community, even in its blue-ribbon seats. Everywhere except the boardrooms of resources companies.

Enter News Corp. Even the organisation arguably most responsible for Australia’s climate inaction has clocked the damage and unpopularity of its long-running denialism. If history is anything to go by, News Corp will walk back its position, as it always has, and will attack any proposal that threatens to put meat on the bones of the government’s latest ill-formed climate posturing. News Corp’s most prominent commentator, Andrew Bolt, ever the contrarian, was in this rare case correct: the company’s “Mission Zero” campaign was “rubbish”, intended only to provide cover for Morrison, who’d finally been pressured into a change of policy by the Glasgow climate summit.

However, News Corp’s pitch — “Green and gold: How Australia could be number one in the new global economy”, illustrated with folks in high-vis — does tell us a couple of useful things. It acknowledges that even tradies (News Corp’s preferred “everyday Australians”) disapprove of the government’s traditional do-nothing approach to climate change. It tells us that even News Corp realises how regressive it is for the government to be neglecting Australia’s opportunities for renewables industries, green manufacturing and electric cars, and how vulnerable this leaves News Corp’s preferred government.

So, in an inspired piece of green-washing, after two decades of attacking “alarmist” scientists and “reckless” targets, it seems that renewable energy and the new ­economy are suddenly part and parcel of being a dinky-di News Corp–supporting Aussie. Just don’t read the fine print.

Morrison couldn’t have spun it better himself. In a campaign that landed three weeks after his private meeting with the global head of News Corp, the largest media organisation in the country picked up Labor’s pitch to Queensland working blokes and handed it straight to a prime minister who needs only to utter the slogan “net zero” in return. Congratulations to everyone involved.

The Australian public is broadly committed to action on climate change. It always has been. Yet the last time a federal Liberal or National party leader showed leadership on the issue, the Berlin Wall separated communist East Germany from the West, Nelson Mandela was a prisoner in a South African jail, and the World Wide Web was an idea written on a piece of paper.

No federal Coalition government has ever done anything that reduced real emissions nationwide. Only a fool would believe Morrison or Barnaby Joyce this time. Nevertheless, the shift is inevitable due to advances in solar, wind, battery technology, green hydrogen and electric vehicles, as well as coal and gas import bans, trade tariffs, and rising insurance and finance costs for gas and coalmining. The change will happen despite the promises, lies, obfuscations and obstructions of the Coalition. Maintain your rage.

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Originally published in the November issue of The Monthly.

Australia’s net zero ambition on climate is a global embarrassment was originally published in The Monthly on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Our African Roots, a documentary by journalist, filmmaker and author Santilla Chingaipe, presents a part of Australia’s history that remained largely untold, unclaimed and erased. It attempts to tell a complex story about the presence of people of African heritage in Australia; or more accurately, their presence on the lands of Indigenous peoples that would become, through violent dispossession, the country now called Australia. The historical records that shape the narrative don’t provide sufficient evidence to allow the figures in the documentary to be described in their own words. Consequently Our African Roots is both storytelling and — in how it fills in the historical gaps — story-making.

It begins with the founding of the first European penal colony in Australia, marked by the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788. On the 11 ships were 10 “African-descended convicts”. Our African Roots tells their stories, with a focus on John Randall, Billy Blue, John Martin, Fanny Finch and John Joseph.

John Randall, believed to be originally a slave from the United States and a soldier who fought for the British in the American War of Independence, arrived in Sydney in January 1788. As he was skilled in the use of a musket, Randall was soon employed as a hunter, sourcing wild game for high-ranking British officers. The narrative informs viewers that, although Randall was a captive of the colonial system, wielding a musket gave him “some power” over the Indigenous communities who lived in the area. We are not explicitly told — or due to limited records, perhaps could not be told — how he used that “power”.

“We all want to think that if we were denied our freedom we would fight for it.”

The documentary leaves us with Randall’s lasting influence through the contributions of his descendants to Australian society. One of them, Sergeant William Davis, fought with the Anzacs at Gallipoli. Another, Ernie Toshack, was a member of Sir Don Bradman’s “Invincibles” cricket team.

Next we meet John “Black” Caesar, “Australia’s first bushranger”, who rivals the legacy of Ned Kelly. Caesar escaped colonial authorities and hid in the bush, surviving by “stealing provisions and raiding Indigenous camps”.

Unlike Randall and Caesar, who disappear without significant historical trace, William Blue was a convict-settler of African descent who climbed the “social ladder of colonial Sydney” and is remembered in landmarks across the city today. In the documentary re-enactment portraying his life, a line stands out: “I respectfully stand before you, as the freed convict settler, William Billy Blue.” How can one be all at once freed, a convict and a settler? And, in telling Billy’s story, which of these identities do we represent for the public record and advance as a worthy addition to our national identity and character?

The documentary advances pride in our African heritage. There are moving moments, such as Chingaipe standing on the site of the Eureka Stockade rebellion, an event that inspired democratic reforms. She was led there by John Joseph, who joined the rebels and allegedly shot and fatally wounded the British officer who was leading the offensive against them. There are also affirming discoveries, such as Fanny Finch, a woman of African descent who was the first woman to vote in Victoria.

Our African Roots offers a redemptive story, a response to the narrative that initially inspired Chingaipe’s investigation — the so-called “African crime wave”. However, as American essayist Flannery O’Connor wrote of the urge to redemption, we often forget the cost when storytellers decide “that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored”. Too often, in this restoration the “sense of evil is diluted or lacking altogether” and all that can be offered up is either “mock damnation or a mock innocence”. What ties the African settlers in Our African Roots to “mock innocence” is the absence of the other truths. The absence of a story can be as revealing as what is told.

In an interview for SBS, Chingaipe acknowledges the consequences of the absence of certain histories: she says that the lack of African narratives in our histories “ultimately reinforces this idea that one group might be inherently predisposed to doing these amazing things and everyone else isn’t”. Likewise, when we focus on what is inspiring, we risk reinforcing the idea that a particular group might be inherently predisposed to doing deplorable and shameful things. As Maxine Beneba Clarke wrote, “We the colonised are sometimes also we the colonisers.” No story in the documentary can escape this.

Armed with a deadly weapon, John Randall roamed a country inhabited by Indigenous people, hunting their game to sustain his life and the lives of officers enforcing the colonial system. Randall was reportedly “granted” 60 acres (24 hectares) of land and joined the New South Wales Corps, the British military force that served the convict colony of NSW. Billy Blue was a close acquaintance of Governor Lachlan Macquarie, one of the most powerful men in the colony. Macquarie made Blue the harbour watchman and constable and “granted” him a farm of 80 acres (32 hectares). The word “granted” hides the truth that these lands were stolen.

At the end of the episode on Black Caesar, after telling how he survived by raiding Indigenous camps, Chingaipe remarks that what she loved about the Caesar story is that “it’s rooted in resiliencies”. “He was willing to risk his own life just to experience freedom. Caesar embodies the sort of traits we all want to embody, we all want to think that if we were denied our freedom we would fight for it.” Yet other records show that Caesar denied Indigenous peoples the freedom he sought for himself: there are stories of Black Caesar’s skirmishes with Aboriginal warrior Pemulwuy, who led the resistance against the incursion of settlers on his peoples’ lands.

This is the story of our African shame.

A number of counterarguments may be reasonably raised against the claim that the colonised is also the coloniser, including that their colonised position limited their actions and choices. This is true to an extent but doesn’t address the harms visited on Indigenous peoples. Violence and dispossession of lands is no less detrimental because the violence is delivered by Black bodies. And if we are to revere the achievements of Black settlers as acts of agency despite their being colonised, we must also recognise when they exercised that agency to harm Indigenous people.

It’s important to remember that history is created. It wasn’t inevitable that the relationship between Indigenous people and Black settlers should re-entrench racial hierarchies. Before the arrival of the First Fleet, coins found on the Wessel Islands evidence an equal relationship based on trade between the mediaeval Kilwa Sultanate in East Africa and Indigenous people here.

We shape stories and are in turn shaped by them. The story of people of African descent is not wholly confined to the colonial past. As Clarke says, the tensions remain contemporary because for all “the bloodshed, oppression and colonial disharmony that African diaspora migrants may or may not have fled, we too are settlers — albeit Black bodied — on Black land of which sovereignty had never been ceded”.

Our African Roots is now showing on SBS.

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This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on Oct 23, 2021 as “Absent histories”.

‘Our African Roots’: The lost histories of Africans who came to colonial Australia was originally published in The Saturday Paper on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

By Martin McKenzie-Murray in The Saturday Paper

In April, two extraordinary things happened. The first was a secret plot between the world’s biggest soccer clubs to establish a rebel European tournament, which would have effectively replaced the Champions League with a cartel. The founding clubs would comprise a “Super League” in perpetuity, eliminating the principle of open and competitive qualification.

Even for a global business infamous for its venality, inequity and corruption, the attempted coup was craven. Secretly conceived, it was then imperiously announced — a fait accompli from titans who believed themselves too big to be challenged.

In this instance they were wrong, because the second extraordinary thing was an immediate and cascading public revolt. Chelsea fans blockaded the team bus; Liverpool and Manchester United fans picketed their stadiums. Shirts were torched in the street; retired football heroes condemned plutocratic greed on live telly. Boris Johnson, Prince William and Emmanuel Macron were all critical, while Europe’s football administrators threatened sanctions. Inside 72 hours, the clubs apologetically capitulated.

Why shouldn’t Newcastle have its turn? If everyone’s guilty, then no one is. Which was the argument disgraced Tour de France champion Lance Armstrong made after his exposure as a drug cheat.

Compare that with this month’s scenes of jubilant Newcastle United fans, wearing keffiyeh headdress and waving Saudi flags, celebrating the club’s takeover by Mohammed bin Salman, crown prince of Saudi Arabia, a kingdom considered one of the most malignant theocracies on Earth. Their club, which had been joylessly sleepwalking for much of this century, had suddenly, theoretically, become the planet’s wealthiest.

And its biggest sports story.

The Saudi consortium’s purchase of the English Premier League club was first attempted 18 months ago. Newcastle’s owner then was Mike Ashley, a billionaire retail mogul whose arrogant, tight-fisted and ambitionless reign at the club had long made him villainous among fans. “We don’t demand a team that wins,” read a popular fan banner. “We demand a club that tries.”

In the Ashley years, Newcastle was twice relegated to the second tier of English football, and otherwise played a numbingly indifferent game — a cruel contrast with their mid-’90s pomp when they went trophyless but were competitive and famously exhilarating.

Popular hatred for Ashley only seemed to stubbornly generate his own, and for years both fans and owner were stuck in a toxic loop of contempt. Eventually, Ashley sought to sell the club and Saudi Arabia’s sovereign fund offered about what he had paid for it in 2007: £300 million, a mere drip in Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) worth about half a trillion clams.

The attempted purchase last year was ensnared in accusations of media piracy. The Qatari network beIN Media, which owns the Middle East’s Premier League broadcasting rights, had been blocked in Saudi Arabia since 2017 — the casualty of a rivalrous diplomatic stoush — and Qatar lobbied the Premier League to reject the Saudi offer because the kingdom had permitted the pirated broadcast of their expensively acquired games. As it was, the Premier League was relieved from making a decision then: the Saudis withdrew their bid, complaining that the vetting process was taking too long. Newcastle fans were furious. So was Mike Ashley, who later filed a lawsuit against the Premier League to force the sale.

Fast forward to October 2021, and Qatar and the Saudis have restored diplomatic relations, and the beIN blockade has been lifted — though the Premier League insists the hiccups were only ever about paperwork. As it was, the announcement came like a flash of lightning.

“We have to look things in the eye and we have to accept criticism,” Amanda Staveley, the British financier who negotiated the deal on behalf of the crown prince, said after the ink had dried. Staveley now sits on the club’s board, her firm having purchased a 10 per cent stake alongside the Saudi consortium’s 80 per cent. Sensibly, the murderous bin Salman has allowed her to become the sparkling and articulate face of the takeover. “Human rights we take very seriously, but our partner is PIF, not the Saudi state,” Staveley continued. “The separation issue has been resolved. It’s not sportswashing. It’s investment.”

This was breathtakingly deceptive. The Saudi PIF is a sovereign fund, run by Mohammed bin Salman. There’s no meaningful distinction, but there’s also no penalty for pretending that there is.

Meanwhile, Hatice Cengiz, the fiancée of the late Jamal Khashoggi — the Saudi dissident and Washington Post columnist who entered the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018 to inquire about some papers, and left in pieces stuffed in suitcases — was met with torrents of online abuse from Newcastle fans (and, no doubt, Saudi-sponsored trolls) for having tweeted her regret at the takeover.

In February, United States intelligence agencies declassified reports concluding that bin Salman had personally authorised Khashoggi’s murder.

In a column for The Athletic, former Newcastle United striker, manager and local folk-hero Alan Shearer gave an embarrassing performance of tortured ambivalence. “Every indication so far is that fans will be put front and centre,” he wrote about the new owners that had flatteringly — and shrewdly — brought him back into the tent.

“It is a moment to take stock, to celebrate the passing of 14 dreadful years and to usher in something new. Something that has the potential to be big and transformative. Something that comes with a few important caveats…”

And so, halfway into a column describing the long zombified state of his beloved club, Shearer obligingly pivots to those caveats: “We owe it to ourselves and the wider world to listen to the evidence about human-rights abuses in Saudi, to educate ourselves and know what we’re getting into. It’s important to be mindful about sportswashing and what that actually means.”

Shearer, like most Newcastle United fans, wants transformation and doesn’t much care where it comes from, or what motivates their new patron to offer it, but obligingly gestures to the rottenness of the new owner. It reminded me of the empty pearl-clutching of Tony Soprano’s wife, Carmela, when she occasionally needs to performatively demonstrate a capacity for moral disgust.

Hypocrisy and contradiction abound. Pundit and ex-Manchester United defender Gary Neville, whose articulate disgust about the Super League went viral in April, was now celebrating the return of “hope” to Newcastle.

Or take Boris Johnson, who sniffed the flare-streaked winds in April and promised a review of football ownership and regulation — including a study of Germany’s model of majority fan ownership — and yet intervened on behalf of the Saudi crown prince to publicly ask why the Premier League was being so obstructive. (And elsewhere: the British government sanctioned Saudi officials for Khashoggi’s murder, while the very next day resumed selling arms to them.)

Then there was Newcastle’s local MP, Chi Onwurah, who in 2018 described Saudi Arabia as a “murderous state” but who now parroted the new board in hoping “this investment is a sign of change and a desire to open up on the part of Saudi Arabia”, as she celebrated the departure of Mike Ashley and acknowledged the fans’ years of agony under his ownership.

Throughout this, there has been from fan groups, commentators and politicians a sickly conflation of the “suffering” of Newcastle supporters with the suffering of the tortured, beheaded, stalked, arbitrarily imprisoned and chemically castrated citizens of Saudi Arabia. If you thought the suffering of Jamal Khashoggi’s fiancée couldn’t be compounded, Cengiz need only have tuned in to Sky Sports in the past fortnight to watch the floods of sympathy for the poor fans who’ve experienced one too many relegation battles.

But why single Newcastle United out? Roman Abramovich, the prodigious industrial polluter and oligarchical Putin buddy, took over Chelsea in 2003 and has since won five Premier League titles, five FA Cups and two Champions League trophies, while Abu Dhabi’s 2008 purchase of Manchester City transformed the club from the anaemic kid brother of its cross-town rival to a global superpower. (They’re also the cold, distant, but wealthy father of current A-League champions Melbourne City).

Why shouldn’t Newcastle have its turn? If everyone’s guilty, then no one is. Which was the argument disgraced Tour de France champion Lance Armstrong made after his exposure as a drug cheat; and the same argument Luciano Moggi, ex-director of Italy’s biggest football club, made after the exposure of his vast program of buying off referees, or intimidating those he couldn’t.

If you can’t beat ’em, then pray that you can join ’em — another snout in the silty troughs of hedge funds, Kremlin cronies, petro-tyrants and the kings of zero-hour contracts. Still, it’s a curious enthusiasm for foreign ownership from a country that only a few years ago backed Brexit.

“Maybe it’s just our go,” Shearer shrugged, which was the perfect expression of the glibness and self-absorption required to sustain fandom among the dysregulated and pitiless intensification of capital in the Beautiful Game.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on Oct 23, 2021 as “Free kick for tyrants”.

Newcastle United: how the power of sportswashing is ruining the Beautiful Game was originally published in The Saturday Paper on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.