Raising Hell: Issue 77: Long Time, No Trouble
"There cannot be a crisis next week. My schedule is already full." - Henry Kissinger, as quoted in The New York Times Magazine (June 1, 1969)
Yes, I know. I was supposed to be back up and running in January. And yes, I know, not unlike Kate Middleton, it’s been months since I last checked in. I’m not dead — I swear. Neither am I grappling with a cancer diagnosis. After Dubai, there was Cyprus where I got in touch with the roots and could have spent three months in Nicosia just photographing doors in the old town. After Cyprus, there was Athens, and then there was the long flight home.
And then after coming home there was the move. My partner was offered a job interstate and so in the space of three weeks we had to secure a new place to live before our lease ran out and then make our escape from Adelaide. It’s only taken a month and a half to put together this complex logistical operation that involved shifting our things and our cat across three states, execute it and get settled. Like all good adventures, this was complicated when some of our stuff got broken in transit and we, at one point, tried to buy a car off some organised criminals.
In the background of all that, has been the book. If you’ve never had a look behind the curtain on the publishing process, this stage tends to be long and frenzied, if quiet. First there was the edit — the process of making it good. Now we’re proofing and planning publicity.
It is verboten for me to talk details at this stage, but I’m very excited for what is to come. This is the product of an 18 month investigative project and I really want to talk about all the incredible things I’ve found. For those interested, there’ll be a cover reveal in early April and a website that will go live at that time. I have just spent the better part of last week locked in a 4x4 room logging 16 hours a day to build that bad boy. At first it will only be populated with a photo of the cover, photos and snippers of video but when the book goes live — publication day is August 1 — there’ll be a staged release with the key documents that underpin my research. Think of is as my first experiment in multi-media journalism.
I’m very excited in how this project turned out, and I’m looking forward to being able to talk about it freely. Upon setting goal, I just wanted to make sure that I put something new on the public record. The opportunity to take 18 months out to work on an investigation like this is extremely rare, particularly in Australia. Being conscious of this, I felt a powerful obligation and sense of responsibility. Now that I’m at the other end, I feel I have achieved this and then some.
On top of all that, I’m now back to full time freelancing. A change in scenery has also brought a change in cost of living, and I’ve been picking up work as it comes in. As usual, I have several smaller projects on the boil, most of them holdovers from last year, so as I follow up those leads, the plan now is get Raising Hell back in the rotation. My current thinking is that we’ll kill some darlings by making it shorter and tighter, which will allow me more time to focus on those bigger problems.
It also comes at a critical time. You have probably heard, but Meta — the parent company of Facebook and Instagram — has pulled out of its deal with the Australian government to fund media and I’ve already lost a few opportunities as a result. At the same time — media monitors and corporate due diligence firms take note — I’ve taken the decision to move my primary social media platform to Bluesky on ethical grounds. In a historical echo of Henry Ford, Elon Musk’s Twitter seems to have a problem calling a Nazi and Nazi and acting accordingly. I have no issues saying goodbye to the platform, but the reality is that it was the primary means by which I was often contacted by sources, shared my work and had conversations about the issues it raised. As a result, this transition has been tough as the visibility of my work is significantly reduced. The Twitter machine remains live for now, but its only purpose is to repost the material of others who have stuck around.
I also appreciate that Substack has its own Nazi problem, with its ownership refusing to boot wanna-be genocidaires from the platform. Substack’s “chief writing officer”, Hamish McKenzie, has said the company does not endorse these views but would consider any move to remove them an unacceptable act of censorship. Apparently, there is some concern about what kind of precedent this will set in what appears to be a fatal misread of that famous poem by Niemoller.
As far as I’m concerned, it is all well and good to be anti-censorship — right up until a political ideology makes it a stated goal to set up up a racial hierarchy, deny the humanity of entire peoples and demand their liquidation or segregation as a political objective. At that point the stakes change a little — culturally, there’s a reason why we shoot Nazi’s in video games.
This is also something that has grown increasingly important to me as I’ve grown older and learned more about the world. The various low-hanging branches of my family tree all walked out of the rubble pile that was Europe in the years following World War II. In every case they lost lives, family and entire communities as a repercussion of active right-wing extremism, xenophobia and racism. In return, they inherited legacies of trauma and dislocation. Experience shows these ideologies are vicious and self-destructive; they solve nothing and if left unchecked, eventually consume everything — and everyone — around them in violence.
I’ve spent a bit of time thinking long and hard about this; Substack is a very good platform that has helped me do incredible things — your ongoing financial support provided through this platform has been critical to my work in the past, and my upcoming book. However, as I am in the process of starting my freelance business back up and have just shifted my primary means of communicating with the public to a speculative platform with a limited audience. At this stage, I’m not sure I can sustain another major shift — I also don’t want to badger you all to move to a new platform.
A move, however, will be on the cards at some point; building a website for the book has me thinking of doing something similar over the medium-to-long-term. Time permitting, I might rebuild my personal website (which is the lowest-budget, low-rent version of a personal website I could get away with) to accommodate some kind of blog functionality and a Patreon. That’s a lot of screwing around though, and a long way off.
In the meantime, know that I’m sorry for the radio silence and grateful for the ongoing support you continue to provider as readers of Raising Hell. What matters now is that I’m back in the saddle and serving up my usual every second Tuesday.
For the… Whatever period of time it’s been…
Reporting In
Where I recap what I’ve been doing this last fortnight so you know I’m not just using your money to stimulate the local economy …
At this year’s Adelaide Writers Week, The Australia Institute let me in the backdoor and invited me to take part on a stage they were managing. WritersSA also kindly put me on an event about immersive journalism, which was a really great panel discussion.
‘Tasmanian sergeant received police funeral despite being accused of child sexual abuse’ (The Guardian AU, 18 March 2024).
‘Madeleine King set to take offshore gas approval power from Tanya Plibersek’ (The Saturday Paper, 24 March 2024).
‘Treasurer Jim Chalmers’ low bow to fossil fuels’ (The Saturday Paper, 16 March 2024).
‘Pure imagination: Tasmanian premier vows to build world’s largest chocolate fountain if re-elected’ (The Guardian AU, 10 March 2024).
‘Court rules against Santos gas project citing climate change considerations’ (InDaily, 7 March 2024).
‘The most powerful minister you’ve never heard of’ (7am, 4 March).
Solid-state batteries: inside the race to transform the science of electric vehicles (The Guardian AU, 4 February 2024).
‘How COP28 fell short’ (The Saturday Paper, 16 December 2023).
‘Inside the COP28 talks’ (The Saturday Paper, 2 December 2023).
Before You Go (Go)…
Are you a public sector bureaucrat whose tyrannical boss is behaving badly? Have you recently come into possession of documents showing some rich guy is trying to move their ill-gotten-gains to Curacao? Did you take a low-paying job with an evil corporation registered in Delaware that is burying toxic waste under playgrounds? If your conscience is keeping you up at night, or you’d just plain like to see some wrong-doers cast into the sea, we here at Raising Hell can suggest a course of action: leak! You can securely make contact through Signal — contact me first for how. Alternatively you can send us your hard copies to: PO Box 134, Welland SA 5007
And if you’ve come this far, consider supporting me further by picking up one of my books, leaving a review or by just telling a friend about Raising Hell!