Those sailor-explorers were tough - like Matthew Flinders

FLINDERS: The Man who Mapped Australia,
by Rob Mundle, Hachette, 386pp. 

Reviewed: 19 January 2013

When I was reading this book, I was appalled to find that a couple of GenX liberal arts graduates from Australian universities had never heard of Matthew Flinders.

OK, it's timely to revise the history earlier generations were taught, in which everything was cast in terms of glorious expansion of the British Empire.  But it is sad that intelligent, humane, socially-responsible Australians have no idea how this country came to be what it is today. If you don't know history, you are easily led into delusion.  That is why history needs to be written, and written again, and written again, so we know where we came from to inform choices on where we might go next and how to get there.  End rant.

Matthew Flinders was one of a generation who harnessed the curiosity of the Enlightenment to the mercantile competition of European colonial empires.  The British seizure of Australia was a pre-emptive strike against their traditional enemy, the French, who were newly invigorated by the Napoleonic regime that followed their revolution.  It was an extraordinary period, in which French and British scientists helped each other in the cause of discovery, at the same time as their political and military masters were fighting for global dominance.

Flinders was inspired by a childhood reading of Robinson Crusoe.  He sailed with Captain Cook and also with Captain William Bligh, performing a series of intrepid exploratory voyages in small sailing boats around the uncharted coasts of Australia.

It is hard these days to understand that several decades after the discovery of Tasmania (Van Diemen's Land), no European knew whether or not it was joined to the mainland (then called New Holland).  Sea routes were all hazardous, navigation always risky, so it was not unusual for sea captains to avoid uncharted waters.

The risks of coastal exploration were extraordinary. Wooden ships were often frail if not rotting, and always at the mercy of the weather. For much of Flinders' voyage around Australia, the planks of his ship Investigator were leaking up to fifty tons of seawater per hour, all of which had to be pumped out by hand.

Flinders also experienced what we now call “political risk”. With the assistance of  grand figures like Sir Joseph Banks, Flinders had obtained  official documents to grant him safe passage through French territories and ports, regardless of the bilateral circumstances. Unfortunately, by the time he was heading home to report his explorations, the French regime had been infested by a cohort of hyper-nationalists vying for the attention of Napoleon.

When Flinders' ship limped into Mauritius, he fell into the hands of  Governor Decaen, one of these 19th century neo-cons, who had been persuaded that France had a mission to extinguish the British colonisation of Australia.  Flinders was kept on Mauritius for six priceless years as a kind of hostage to Decaen's political ambitions.

When finally released, Flinders returned home with just enough strength to complete the massive 350,000 word account of his major expedition, dying within days of the publication of A Voyage to Terra Australis in 1814, aged forty.  His explorations had been completed before he reached the age of thirty.

Lessons for today include how Flinders' ambitions were at times given crucial support by well-placed sponsors, and at other times frustrated by political chicanery, negligence, or sheer bureaucratic inertia. It reminds that history is so often personal, and that in the competition of empires, Australia has never been the main game.

Read the full review here

Corporate Spying Undermines Capitalism

MURDOCH'S PIRATES,

by Neil Chenoweth, Allen & Unwin, 402pp. 

Reviewed: December 2012

If you believe that democracy and private enterprise are, on the whole, better systems than others for the delivery of human welfare, it is always chilling to read how self-destructive uncontrolled capitalism can be.

A decade ago, Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation mobilised high-tech intelligence resources against its competitors in the global PayTV business.  Financial journalist Neil Chenoweth has hounded News Corporation for many years, and this latest chronicle of misdeeds reads like a spy novel.  But the combatants work for private corporations, not states.  There are no innocent parties, only winners and losers, in a world where law is seen as a tool and business ethics are for wimps.  And because it is true, the story raises serious questions over the ability of national governments to provide a business environment in which rule of law can be taken seriously.

The competition was for control of  the credit-card sized smart cards that give access to satellite PayTV.  The security of those cards is the key to billions of dollars in PayTV revenues.  Since the inception of pay television, independent hackers and organized pirate rings have repeatedly broken the codes to provide unauthorized access via a black market in forged smart cards.

PayTV companies fought back to defend their revenues, but then used the same capabilities to attack their competitors.  News Corporation's card security development company - News Datacomm (later NDS), was based in Israel and employed mainly ex-Israeli military and intelligence operatives.  

NDS infiltrated the internet chatrooms where hackers would boast about their achievements, developed contacts, and recruited agents.  They employed former police detectives and intelligence operatives for many nationalities, including a former head of Scotland Yard’s criminal intelligence bureau.  These agents used their contacts with state agencies, bugged phones, burgled homes, set traps, and employed every device familiar to readers of crime fiction – with apparent disdain for the law.  In the heat of it, some star European and American hackers seem to have been double agents, triple agents, or simply playing all sides for as long as they could.

Eventually two competitors, Canal+ and the US Echostar system, sued NDS for sabotaging their security codes.  The claims were for hundreds of millions in lost revenue, let alone any share price implications or criminal liability.  News Corporation had twenty lawyers in the California court-room, the plaintiffs had three.  Despite compelling evidence,  NDS was found guilty of only a minor misdemeanour with a $45 penalty.  By this time, News Corporation was a significant propaganda supporter of the Republican Party.

Tales like this explain why democracy is in decline in the developing world.  When high principle in Western societies is so undermined by corruption and political pragmatism, why should leaders of less stable societies behave any differently? We can learn more about realpolitik by reading 16th Century European histories than by believing the speeches of venal "democrats".

Read the full review here

Richard Thwaites was working on broadcasting policy issues while Australia’s pay television system was being introduced.

A Challenge to the Economics Profession

GITTINS' GOSPEL: The economics of just about everything,

by Ross Gittins,

Allen & Unwin, 312pp. 

Reviewed: 24 November

There is a welter of information and analysis, online and in print, that competes to influence our views and understanding of what might broadly be called "the economy".  At least nine tenths of this is nothing to do with the underlying  structures and trends that will determine our future material and social welfare. That bulk is usually about the ephemeral trivia of market speculation - will shares and bonds prices rise of fall in the short term.  It is no more useful than the form guide for a horse race, and serves the same purpose - to draw in more speculative spending by those of us who are no better than punters betting blindly.

A few commentators make genuine efforts to cut through the promotional flim-flam and remind us that "the economy" boils down to a social contract underpinning all of our employment, production and trading activities.  It cannot be discussed intelligently in isolation from whatever human values we see as important in holding society together and meeting the common challenges of sustaining our world.

So if you are suspicious of the economic claims and counter-claims of our politicians and lobbyists, then you will enjoy reading Ross Gittins as I did.  If you are not suspicious but you care about society, then you need to read someone like Gittins. For thirty years his economic commentary columns have shone skeptical beams through the fog and dust kicked up in the name of economics, often by professional economists blinkered by ideology or by the need to sell their services to somebody.

Did you know Adam Smith, patron saint of market economics, added an important qualification to his most famous observation about the primacy of self-interest in human decision-making. Adam Smith followed it up with "How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasure of seeing it". Rational self-interest is the founding assumption of modern economic modelling, but Gittins doubts any of us are predictably rational. Neither can our perception of self-interest be taken for granted. 

Gittins deplores the trite and self-serving neo-liberal assumption  that governments have no role until free markets can be shown conclusively to have failed.  The Global Financial Crisis is only the latest example of how unregulated markets tend to become corrupt, at vast cost to both suppliers and consumers.  Governments alone can set rules for "a better capitalism" through democractic process informed (he hopes) by more rigorous media commentary and analysis.

Gittins is not alone.  There is a growing rebellion of  behavioural economists who take a broader view, embracing a range of non-monetary considerations for economic policy – such as social equity.  Is growth a genuine economic benefit, or a short-term illusion?  Can any serious economic policy ignore the environmental costs?  Can fairness be ignored, when all history shows that inequality imposes heavy costs on social cohesion.

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Ocean Issues not just for greenies

OCEAN OF LIFE:

How Our Seas are Changing,

by Callum Roberts,

Allen Lane, 390pp.  

Reviewed: 19 September

I was reading this book while the Australian government was deciding whether to give a trawling licence to one of the world's largest floating fish factories.  The ships owners have headed for Australian waters after exhausting, and being expelled from, other fishing zones off Africa and in the South Pacific.

Callum Roberts is a professional ocean conservationist. The fishing industry lobbyists and libertarian economists would therefore dismiss his arguments as biased.  No doubt the same arguments were made by denialists as earlier human societies in the middle east and  in Central America, and Southeast Asia devastated the environments on which their advanced civilisations depended.  

The deafening political noise around atmospheric carbon emissions can distract us from the even more critical state of our planet’s oceans.  The plight of the seas is not about the extinction of photogenic clown-fish or pretty pink corals – it is about threats to the very engines of life as evolved on this planet. Earth only acquired its oxygen-rich atmosphere in the latest ten percent of its history, and it was ocean-dwelling bacteria that generated the oxygen in quantities that enabled the evolution of land-based plants and animals, ourselves included.

The oceans are still the primary forces that drive earth’s atmosphere and the climate we experience from it.  The web of micro-organisms that condition the water, oxygenate the atmosphere, and feed the next level of life, is becoming unbalanced with potentially dire consequences.  Excess nutrients, flooding from our agriculture and aquaculture practices, create semi-desert monocultures where once biodiversity prevailed in the nurseries of oceanic life.

Roberts supports the harvesting of marine life for human consumption, but he castigates the stubborn way that humans persist in destroying that upon which our growing population depends.  Since the development of steam-powered trawlers, we defy an elementary rule of capitalism, by consuming the capital resource rather than the income it generates.  More and more mechanical power has been employed to harvest smaller and fewer fish.  Without drastic restorative action, Roberts sees our strip-mined oceans reduced to supporting vast rafts of plastic rubbish and populated by little more than hordes of jellyfish and scavenging prawns.  The evidence of recovery is overwhelming when marine reserves are properly implemented.

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What can we learn from the London Underground?

UNDERGROUND OVERGROUND:

A Passenger’s History of the Tube,

by Andrew Martin,

Profile Books, 304pp.

Railway books have such a passionate and distinctive following that its hard to read one without feeling like a nerd.

On the other hand, the way a community builds, uses, and thinks about its public transport system is a key insight into the values of the people who make up that community - whatever their diversity.

To use public transport is one of the few collective experiences of daily life that crosses social divides, or in bad cases may accentuate them. 

The history of London’s Underground, or “Tube”, make a meta-narrative of that city’s development over the past two centuries. 

London was first to try the principle of building underground thoroughfares. It tried private and public models of investment and ownership. It tried competitive and centralised models of operation.  It reflected fashions in in engineering, architecture, and urban development principles. It embodied the aesthetics of its time in design, advertising and public communication.

London had the luck to be built mainly on soft clay that made tunnelling relatively cheap, but that didn't stop many lines falling in and out of bankruptcy. Urban transport is one of those fields that defy economic rationalism, because the benefits are too thinly spread to be allocated to individual users.

Most public transport users both love and hate their networks, but Andrew Martin mostly loves the London Underground, warts and all.  A barrister turned journalist and author, he has published six detective novels on railway themes, and edited a weekly column called “Tube Talk” for London's Evening Standard magazine. 

There’s a huge culture of complaint, commentary and anecdote among Tube travelers who include every class and kind. Martin provides lots of fun and color in this tangled history, while keeping the reader aware of the evolutionary forces that have shaped the Underground, and London with it, since the 1850s.

Read the full review..

Richard Thwaites lives and works in Canberra, a car-based city sadly lacking in effective public transport.

Negotiating China's Rise - like it or not

THE CHINA CHOICE:
Why America should Share Power,
by Hugh White, Black Inc,190pp. 

Reviewed: 11 August 2012

It's one thing to understand the strategic challenge, another thing to put forward a sensible win-win solution, but much harder to set out a way to get there from here.  Hugh White scores well on the first two, but doesn't really address the third.  Diplomats and strategists might call the missing link "the modalities".

The choices White identifies are to be made in Washington.  Australia, we infer, will be swept along whatever course the USA adopts.

The key word in White's analysis is “primacy”, which I take to mean unchallengeable military superiority. He warns that America and its allies tend to overestimate America's ability to translate military superiority into political outcomes.   White doubts that America, even now, has the real power to prevent a determined Chinese takeover of Taiwan.  China's ability to sink American aircraft carriers with land-based missiles could not be neutralized without escalating attacks upon Chinese mainland facilities.  Mutual retaliation could reach nuclear level. Few if any American allies would support such a venture.

On the other hand, China's ability to assert power beyond its borders is also limited by the major Asian regional powers that have historical reasons to be suspicious of Chinese power - Japan, Korea, Vietnam, India, Indonesia and others.

In my view White under-states the depth of anxiety among China's neighbours over growing Chinese power. For neighbouring nations, many of which already host significant Chinese racial minorities, have historical reasons to fear economic colonization, and increasing long-term immigration from China.  For such nations, a remote, over-fed hegemon (such as America) is preferable to a nearby, hungry hegemon, because they are less likely to move permanently into your house.

The rivalry between US and China is focussed in the Western Pacific, where China would like to establish primacy and America wants to keep it. White proposes that America and China must learn, somehow, to share power and leadership, at least within that region.

Any proposals for strategic dialogue with China must be read in the context of Sun Tzu's Art of War, whose precepts on tactics, negotiation, strategy and psychology still shape Chinese strategy. They are supremely pragmatic, whereas White argues for adoption of common principles for common benefit.

A basic rule of negotiation is that you do not give away your final position at the beginning. White goes so far as to offer, as his final chapter, a proposed text for an Address to the Nation by an American President, setting out the reasons why the United States has decided to share power with China in the Western Pacific.  It looks to me like an invitation for China to raise its demands and keep right on pushing.  What does China gain by conceding anything in that context?

Read the full review

Richard Thwaites is a former ABC correspondent in China and later participated in Asia-Pacific and multilateral negotiations for the Australian government.

Can you be a Futurist without being over-excited?

64 THINGS YOU NEED TO KNOW NOW FOR THEN:

How to Face the Digital Future Without Fear

by Ben Hammersley, Hodder & Stoughton,434pp. 

Reviewed: 4 August 2012

In my time I've reviewed many books about the future, and each has made claims that irritate me as a reader. But  I admire books that provoke thought, and maybe there's got to be some drama to keep the pages turning.  

Ben Hammersley addresses this book to "non-geeks", who are presumed to be already anxious about a future that they know they don't understand, but will have to endure.   You may need to be already a little bit geekish to enjoy the provocations he offers by way of 64 Things You Need to Know.... 

Publishers evidently believe that titles promising hidden knowledge are good for book sales. They may be right.  As a contrarian, my instinct is to say "Why 64? Why not 4 or 512?".  In fact, Hammersley gives us 65 chapters, beginning binary-style with 00 and ending with 64. 

My inner geek mutters again: "64 is a nice round binary number, a power of 2. Why not number your chapters in the base-16 hexadecimal notation used by computer programmers? Give us 65 chapters if you will, but number them 00 to 41 hex ?"  Then supply non-geeks with a link to an online hexadecimal converter in case they get lost.

But not much in the world is really binary. Even the genius of computational logic is the way that infinite complexity can be constructed upon machine logic that basically only understands ON and OFF as the prime binary digit. 

Let's face it, most average citizens are worried enough about how to control email inboxes or how long we can avoid committing our lives to smart-phones and social networking.

Ben Hammersley seeks to bring aid to the anxious.  He is a British explainer and prober of the directions and affects of the revolution in computerized communications, Editor-at-Large of the geek journal Wired, and the “UK Prime Minister’s Ambassador to Tech City” (an Internet industry concentration in London).

Any reader may find here more, or many less, than 64 things you need to know.  There's no linear narrative and you can skip randomly about like browsing Wikipedia. There are at least 64 ideas worth thinking about, but readers will differ as to which are worth worrying about.

Privacy, the future of media business models, unprecedented exploitation of databanks of personal information - short chapters will stir you to thought on any of these.

At the wacky end we get serious discussion of The Singularity (Thing 53),  whereby artificial intelligence created by humans is expected to evolve beyond the control of its creators, like Frankenstein’s monster.  We humans are to be subjugated by machines, sometime before 2050.

My personal favourite new Thing is the “spime” -  a “self-documenting object that can interact with the world by tracking its own process of production and gathering information about its usage”.  The object gains in value as it accrues information about itself.  Let's all be spimes.

Read the full review...

Richard Thwaites worked for some years in the Australian Government’s National Office for the Information Economy.