We’ve been on holidays for the last two weeks of March, and so most of my listening has been in the car, with another passenger. I mainly indulged my love of current affairs with the UK and US variations of The Rest is Politics, but I did manage to get a couple of other podcasts in.
One was the ABC’s six-part series Conspiracy?: War on the Waterfront which deals with the waterfront dispute between Patrick Stevedores and the Maritime Union of Australia in 1998. I’ve mainly been left with the image of men in balaclavas and attack dogs, and I’d forgotten about the role of the National Farmers Federation and Dubai. It’s quite chilling hearing the familiar voices of John Howard and Peter Reith matter-of-factly telling lies. Interestingly, all sides claim to be winners, except the contract workers brought in to break the strike, even the unions and the waterside workers who, to me, seem to have lost more than they gained.
While we’re on the ABC, it’s worth listening to David Marr’s thoughtful interview with Associate Professor David Slucki from the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation, Monash University who was part of the working committee that developed the Universities Australia definition of anti-semitism. Yes, there I was shouting to myself as I listened to the podcast, frustrated by Slucki’s inability to define certain activities and attitudes as antisemitic or not, when students’ lives and careers are being held hostage to such judgements.
I was in Tasmania during this period, so it seemed fitting to listen to an episode Convict Mutineers Part 1 from Australian Histories Podcast hosted by the rather giggly non-historian Jenny which is rather a little too Convicts, Gold and Bushrangers for my liking. Nonetheless, she has an interesting episode on William Swallow, a man with a string of aliases who managed to escape imprisonment in Hobart Town to return to England, only to be arrested again and returned to Port Arthur where he plotted yet another escape. It’s part of a two-part series Convict Mutineers, and the second part continues with Swallow’s story.
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 