Telling Tennant's Story: Political book of the year
And other great things I found on the net this week
Buy it. Buy it NOW!
I’ve recommended Dean Ashenden’s writing on education in this digest twice before. But I was bowled over by this book and relieved and even a bit surprised that it had made it through a shortlist of more typical political books (like biographies of #ScoMo). I may write a more serious review of it, but in the meantime, don’t wait. Buy this wonderful mix of personal memoirs about a childhood in Tennant Creek and the history of the Great Australian Silence. That history passes through major vignettes in the history of Australian anthropology leading up to a great set piece:
Bill Stanner and Paul Hasluck were both born in 1905 into modest circumstances. Both bore a slightly toffy three given names rather than the usual one or two: William Edward Hanley Stanner and Paul Meerna Caedwalla Hasluck. Both rose in the world via very similar routes; both became journalists and studied part-time at university. Both inclined to and got involved in politics, both on the conservative side. Both spent time as public servants working on planning for a postwar world. One flirted with politics and ended up in academe, the other flirted with academe but ended up in politics. Both were intellectuals who saw scholarly insight and public policy as two sides of a single coin. Both found much in politics distasteful, even repellent. Both were correct to the point of puritanism in their public and personal lives. Both were solitary souls with a strong sense of apartness; each was determined to be his own man. For both, writing and writing well was a lifelong pre- occupation; both were stylists with an eye for just the right word and the pungent formulation, and both dabbled in poetry. Both were close observers of their colleagues, in meetings particularly, drawing passa- ble caricatures and writing nicely turned profiles. In their mature years they even looked somewhat alike: of middle height, a little overweight, round-faced, clipped moustaches, thinning hair brushed neatly back. They bore themselves in much the same way too, inconspicuous in dress and reserved in manner, although Hasluck’s persona and accent were more recognisably Australian than Stanner’s. Among friends both were excellent company, witty, and splendid raconteurs. Perhaps most strikingly, both possessed urgently whispering hearts. Both were appalled by what they saw in the frontier north and both spent much of their careers in Canberra just a mile or two away from each other, on oppo- site sides of the lake, trying to work out what should be done about it.
But pretty much from the get-go, they disdained each other from opposite ends of the whispering heart spectrum — of assimilation and self-determination.
I found that story gripping, but loved the denouement of the book in which half-remembered recollections from childhood are pieced together a lifetime on — you know, the way they used to do it in 19th-century novels. Tears came to my eyes when Edith said “That was me”.
I loved this conclusion to the second last chapter of the book. I liked its poise, its refusal to pretend that, taking sides is some mighty achievement. It’s dead clear who was more sinned against than sinning in the whole terrible saga. Yet the book painstakingly steers clear of the suggestion that, as necessary as it might be to basic decency, acknowledging the wrongs and then imposing a regime of new pieties (like endless robotic acknowledgements of elders past and present and welcomes to country) will get us very far.
Tennant Creek is unlike almost any other town in Australia and, on the face of it, quite unlike Australia as a whole. It is small, isolated and impoverished, racked by misery, home to nearly as many black people as white; Australia is big, urban, prosperous, confident and overwhelm- ingly not Aboriginal. And yet in both has been waged a decades-long struggle over telling the story, differing in weight and emphasis but with much the same ingredients. In both, the struggle began when the Aboriginal people, supported by many others, refused their allotted position. It continued through battles over land and then on to the Stolen Generations and conflict over the story itself. In the town and in the nation, the struggle was conducted within and between Aboriginal, scholarly, legal and popular forms of storytelling. In both, govern- ments used public history to counter unwelcome accounts, trying to smother them with stories of the Territorians’ triumph over hardship and adversity in one case, and of the coming of age of an Australian nation at Gallipoli and Flanders in the other. A stalemate, a ceasefire on much the same unspoken terms emerged in both: there would be two stories, the dominant and the subordinate.
I often puzzled over how there could be such similarities in two such different places. Of course there was cause and effect – mostly Australian cause, local effect – but it wasn’t just that. My best solution was to find under the differences a fundamental similarity in the organ- isation of life and power. In that respect Tennant is as like Australia as it is different from most other places in Australia, in the presence there of black and white, of the miners and the pastoralists, and of the southerners and the Territorians. Tennant, like Australia, is a field of life on which have played and interplayed relations between two racial groups, between material interests and conscience, and between fron- tier and post-frontier.27 In Tennant as in Australia, no combination of those poles was sufficient to overcome any other. On Harmony Week parade night, as in Australia as a whole, was the wish, longstanding and heartfelt on one side, recent, contested and erratic on the other, for something undefined and not quite graspable currently called, for want of a better name, ‘reconciliation’ between peoples with unrecon- ciled stories about themselves and each other. Tennant did try to tell its story and so did Australia; neither failed, and neither succeeded. The silence was not dismantled, but it wasn’t restored either.
Gender diversity and funding medical research @ Troppo
What is crypto all about?
“What is crypto all about”” I hear you cry. Yes, you — the one reading this!
Well, Bloomberg got one of the best explainers in the world to explain it. And then hoisted it all on the net for free! All 40,000 words. If that isn’t public-spirited, I don’t know what is. Here’s the article’s explanation of a one-way function. It’s the beginning of understanding how you can send crypto-currency around on the internet, but you’ll have to read on to get the full picture — and much else besides.
A useful property in a cryptographic function is that it be “one-way.” This means it’s easy to turn the input string into the output string, but hard to do it in reverse. … One example of this is a “hashing” function, which takes some input text and turns it into a long number of a fixed size. So I could run a hashing function on this article—a popular one is called SHA-256, which was invented by the National Security Agency5—and generate a long, incomprehensible number from it. I could send you the number and say, “I wrote an article and ran it through a SHA-256 hashing algorithm, and this number was the result.” You’d have the number, but you wouldn’t be able to make heads or tails of it. In particular, you couldn’t plop it into a computer program and decode it, turning the hash back into this article.
The hashing function is one-way; the hash tells you nothing about the article, even if you know the hashing function. The hashing function basically shuffles the data in the article: It takes each letter of the article, represented as a binary number (a series of bits, 0s and 1s), and then shuffles around the 0s and 1s lots of times, mashing them together until they are all jumbled up and unrecognizable. The hashing function gives clear step-by-step instructions for how to shuffle the bits together, but they don’t work in reverse. It’s like stirring cream into coffee: easy to do, hard to undo.
Applying a SHA-256 algorithm will create a 64-digit number for data of any size you can imagine. Here’s a hash of the entire text of James Joyce’s 730-page novel Ulysses:
3f120ea0d42bb6af2c3b858a08be9f737dd422f5e92c04f82cb9c40f06865d0e
It fits in the same space as the hash of “Hi! I’m Matt”:
86d5e02e7e3d0a012df389f727373b1f0b1828e07eb757a2269fe73870bbd044
But what if I wrote “Hi, I’m Matt” with a comma? Then:
9f53386fc98a51b78135ff88d19f1ced2aa153846aa492851db84dc6946f558b
There’s no apparent relationship between the numbers for “Hi! I’m Matt” and “Hi, I’m Matt.” The two original inputs were almost exactly identical; the hash outputs are wildly different. This is a critical part of the hashing function being one-way: If similar inputs mapped to similar outputs, then it would be too easy to reverse the function and decipher messages. But for practical purposes, each input maps to a random output.
What’s the point of a secret code that can’t be decoded? For one thing, it’s a way to verify. If I sent you a hash of this article, it wouldn’t give you the information you need to re-create the article. But if I then sent you the article, you could plop that into a computer program (the SHA-256 algorithm) and generate a hash. And the hash you generate will exactly match the number I sent you. And you’ll say, “Aha, yes, you hashed that article all right.” It’s impossible for you to decode the hash, but it’s easy for you to check that I had encoded it correctly.
After this, it’s reassuring that we may have passed peak crazy
Ross Gittins Annual Lecture to the Econocrats
Proudly published by ClubTroppo.
When it comes to regulation, the econocrat profession should be the repository of the nation’s knowledge of what works and what doesn’t, but it’s made little effort to become that. The new government’s commitment to an “evaluator-general” is good news. We need more rigorous evaluation of spending programs, with the results made public. This will always be resisted by ministers and department heads, but that’s all the more reason the econocrats should be unceasing in pushing for it. Academic health economists worked for many years to build the information base that allowed governments to control their spending on public hospitals more effectively than just giving them 5 per cent more than they got last year. Eventually this “activity-based” funding model was adopted as part of the federal-state hospital agreement. To my knowledge, the econocrats did nothing to support this research effort, and were slow to realise its value.
Back when the adults were in charge
Paul Keating, following Tony Benn, distinguished between Maddies, Fixers and Straightmen (Keating was a self-identified ‘maddie’). Tony Blair’s three categories are different.
David Cross is not a happy camper
David Cross is the CEO of the right-leaning Blueprint Institute. He’s not happy with the Sky after dark crowd.
Last month’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) meeting [was] a sickening, self-congratulatory echo-chamber of illiberal and contradictory populism. … You know you have entered the twilight zone when people on the Liberal Party executive genuinely believe that the future of the party lies in abandoning liberalism—calling for mass government intervention in the energy market to protect coal, trampling the individual rights and freedoms of minority groups by using the fight against cancel culture to justify bigotry … and proudly embracing anti-intellectualism by labelling scientists, academics and teachers as ‘out of touch’ and ‘not living in the real world’.
Do not mistake Kherson retreat for a crack in Putin’s armour
From the FT
Researchers of Russian society are observing a startling paradox. History puts Russia in a row of vast western colonial empires. But after its defeat in the cold war, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the economic hardships of the 1990s, a growing number of Russians felt they had been reduced to a colony ruled by western forces. They now believe they are casting off the yoke which so humiliated their country and “imposed” capitalism upon it. In the eyes of dissatisfied Russians, any form of resistance to the west is a victory, almost regardless of the end result. Even in retreat, they will console themselves with the thought of having prevented Russia’s “further enslavement”.
This is why there is no direct link between military setbacks and the weakening of Putin’s power. It is as difficult for the president to lose this war as it is to win it. … And the critics will be silenced with repression, just as they are now. There are signs that after retreating from Kherson, the more pragmatic elements in the Kremlin will look for a compromise. …
The word “negotiations”, once almost a taboo, is now increasingly heard from Russian officials. Moscow may try to secure a formal recognition of its control over the rest of the occupied territories, and a cessation of Ukrainian offensives, in exchange for the return of Kherson to Ukraine and an end to the bombardment of critical infrastructure before the winter sets in. But there are two problems with this offer. One is the total lack of trust from Kyiv. The other is that it would endanger Putin’s status as the challenger of the west. The risk is that this will push the Russian president into a virtually endless war for its own sake, and even tougher repression at home than he might have first thought necessary.
