ChatGPT is faking out students

Posted on by Martin Newman

There was regret, much of it, as my student, pink-eyed and apologetic, confessed to numerous ChatGPT-derived mistakes in her essay, the gist of which she was unable to even explain.

“Don’t feel bad,” I offered, lamely, via Zoom. “You aren’t the only one.”

I felt partly responsible, having talked up ChatGPT’s potential* while not fully appreciating all its pitfalls. By that point, she was about the fifth student in a week I’d grilled for submitting what I suspected was a badly AI-written assessment.

The unfortunates were from across the grade spectrum, now converted to lesser marks or spectacular fails with essays full of made-up information and wrong attributions that, due to their lack of research, they had been unable to spot. There had been inadequate checks and they hadn’t put in the work, but in these early days of AI we had all been dazzled by the chutzpah of ChatGPT, and its promise of taking the work out of work.

The generative AI bot has hogged the headlines since OpenAI’s groundbreaking update in December introduced the world to an automated model of writing and problem solving that actually worked well.

Approaches to it across universities differ widely. Some departments ban it, some have no policy. Many are taking a wait and see approach. And few are yet to implement AI-checking software, because of questions over its accuracy. Which has left educators to figure out their own solutions.

While ChatGPT is impressive at doing straightforward tasks and there are many students, I would say, already using it well and improving their results, it has a tendency to go rogue when the prompts that feed it aren’t detailed enough. ChatGPT doesn’t do context, or at least not well.

As a result, I am failing more students than ever before, three times more to be exact, because of it, and grade averages are down. From the conversations I’ve had with other academics the problem is widespread. Meanwhile, the advantages at the other end of the spectrum, for students using it well, so far, have been minimal. I expect this will change, and change quickly, but for now there is some painful teething going on.

The line between using AI and cheating at your studies is particularly fine. I tell students to explore AI to improve their research and time management. The caveat is that they declare any use so it can be assessed transparently when graded. Most, however, do not.

For a technology that represents the greatest digital benchmark since internet search engines, adopting and developing its use, particularly at a university level, seems a no-brainer. But that suitably ironic term is at the heart of the current struggle in education over how to approach a technology that improves us, while making us less smart.

As a concept it is contrary to the goal of education, no matter how you spin it, and in the hearts of most educators they believe students are still better off learning the hard way.

By my estimates, at least a third of students in my course are using ChatGPT, Grammarly, Bard or some other AI bot, and because of the ones misusing it that means a lot more work verifying answers. For some assessments, I’ve seen a grade wasteland open up between papers scraping a pass and the higher credit scores where AI has not been used, or has been used competently.

Advice to fact-check AI content, because it is prone to mistakes, doesn’t cover the half of it, and it has caught out educators and students alike.

Rather than it just getting the wrong end of the stick and volunteering something out of context, university markers are finding ChatGPT fabricates results to please its user, and it does it so convincingly it can leave even academics second-guessing their own knowledge.

That has meant a sizeable blow-out in marking time for tutors chasing down references that sound real, are attributed to known researchers and even come with a fake (digital object identifier) library catalogue number, but are, in fact, an amalgam of different sources blended to look like something the user wants.

The uni library has been beset by gaslit students inquiring over academic texts they can’t find, mimicked by ChatGPT. Some, thinking they just can’t locate these papers, imprudently include them on their bibliography anyway, only to score zero on the research section of the rubric when the reference is checked.

It’s not only ghost academic papers that are a problem, the chatbot falsifies digital news article references too. The Guardian noted this in April after also fielding requests from members of the public trying to trace articles they assumed had been archived.

It threatens the unique and original voice of the individual and from a grading point of view blends in with all the other AI-assisted essays – lowering the mark.

In assessments over the past term I’ve found examples of fabricated ABC News stories, cobbled together from disparate sources (a news.com.au headline combined with a different date, a different reporter byline and a url to an unrelated ABC page).

In the subject I teach, media law for journalism students, the chatbot likes to equate topic queries with legislative changes, confidently stating an amendment to the law resulted from a particular case and effortlessly blending state and federal parliaments into one. And these conflations are delivered with utmost certainty that can sometimes take hours of research to disprove. Is it any wonder students are coming unstuck?

False arguments, citing of events that didn’t take place, repetition of points and excessively long descriptions of organisations are also a feature of the bot’s methodology. Wordy academic writing can seem like mumbo jumbo to the man or woman in the street, and when ChatGPT produces it, it often is – writing gibberish sentences that sound learned, often after being prompted to adopt an academic tone. This again fits the bot’s modus operandi of tailoring or slanting content to the expectations of the prompt – fabricating confirmation bias.

But the worst attribute of AI from an educational point of view is the genericised language style it produces and which we are witnessing across a large swath of the student body. It threatens the unique and original voice of the individual and from a grading point of view blends in with all the other AI-assisted essays – lowering the mark.

Tutors are already able to spot this style and in an informal test I took part in recently of a group of academics marking a paper produced with ChatGPT, scores were consistently in a lower pass range, indicating, to me, they don’t stand out.

The reaction to ChatGPT has been rare. Its faults only ever attract guarded criticism, and much the way a parent optimistically watches their child’s first stuttering steps, its success is taken for granted. Even warnings that an unchecked ability to adapt could see it run amok have only increased the awe in which it is viewed.

But its tendency to concoct what it cannot answer may be less a sign of its adaptive “thinking” arc and more a deliberate mechanism to hide its drawbacks, programmed to provide an authoritative response – right or wrong. ChatGPT only balks at politicised topics OpenAI has programmed it not to respond to.

Rather than the answer necessarily lying in AI’s improvement, it’s the students who are more likely to adapt quickly to the deficiencies of it, and do so much faster than the machine-learning models themselves, building better priming prompts that hone commands and limit digressions.

In some ways AI seems no different to other time-saving technologies. But GPS, or a calculator, or a washing machine, perform mechanical functions within specified parameters.

When it comes to thought and creativity, and the diversity of it, are we better off with AI taking over some of our thinking tasks, or have we been sold a pup? The university sector is grappling with that question, and right now, it’s not one I can answer.

* I co-ordinate Media Law and Ethics in the journalism program at University of Technology Sydney.

Originally published in The Australian Financial Review as ‘ChatGPT is gaslighting students and driving up fail rates’ on June 16, 2023.

Cricket’s ‘deadly’ consequences underplayed and underreported

Posted on by Martin Newman

I was fielding at square leg when the ball flew high over my head, struck from the western end of the pitch at St Andrew’s College in a hurried arc. It took about four seconds to reach my father.

All of 71, he was sitting on a bench talking with my daughter, their eyes averted from the game, and I had already started sprinting towards them, yelling at the same moment the leather projectile zeroed in on him, gashing open his head and sending him sprawling to the ground.

Only later in casualty, as a medic looped seven stitches in his bloodied forehead, did the catastrophising kick in. What if the ball had struck him in the temple? Or hit my child?

Having set up the match myself, I felt a sick pit of culpability in my stomach, like John Irving’s titular hero Owen Meany. The consequences didn’t bear thinking about.

We assume death and serious injury in cricket is freakish and far apart. But that incident seven years ago had me reconsidering, and recent studies have found evidence of a larger, more serious problem than our schoolboy view of the game had previously allowed.

Now, a new book that examines and explains cricket history using different data sources has drawn some unsettling conclusions, raising concerns of the probable significant under-reporting of concussion incidents here in Australia, and that this occurs at a higher rate than elsewhere in the world.

A wide-ranging book, Crickonomics by Stefan Szymanski (pictured above) and Tim Wigmore, answers numerous tantalising questions about Australia’s premier summer sport. If you have wondered whether batters or bowlers are more valuable, why the private school system continues to feed the upper echelons of the game or how women’s cricket has innovated the sport, you are in luck.

But it is the book’s estimate of concussion rates in Australia that makes for the most fascinating reading.

Szymanski, an economics professor at the University of Michigan’s School of Kinesiology, has written a number of books on sport using statistical analysis, including three on soccer.

But the Nigerian-born, UK-raised son of a Polish dad and English mum is just as hooked on cricket and has a netted pitch and ball machine in his backyard (his son Ed, he tells me, is the owner of the fittingly titled Lords restaurant in New York).

“I think there’s always been a resistance to the idea that data can tell us anything,” Szymanski says of Crickonomics, over an early morning (for me) Zoom call. “And there’s a belief that there’s something in the game, which you’re missing out on if you try to put it into numbers, and there’s a spirit of the game and a soul of the game.”

But keeping better data, both writers contend, is where cricket can save lives and prevent injuries.

“The experience of Australia suggests that concussions have been systematically underreported,” Szymanski and Wigmore say.

A cricket ball weighs 163 grams and, with a cork core wrapped in string and sealed with leather, is one of the hardest balls in sport.

Nobody wants to be hit by a cricket ball. A batter, even with the advantage of pads, gloves and a box, still does whatever they can to not be hit by that ball, which has a deep impact regardless of pace – and at true pace can be terrifying.

The death of Phillip Hughes in 2014 from a bouncer that tore the artery below his left ear was one of the few well-publicised incidents to bring the dangers of cricket balls sharply into focus. Before this in Australia, you had to go back to 1975 and the death of 22-year-old Martin Bedkober, a talented Adam Gilchrist-esque keeper/batsman on the verge of state selection, who died after being hit “over the heart” by a ball.

In the decade up to 2014, one concussion a season was reported in Australian cricket. After Hughes’ death, Cricket Australia commissioned La Trobe University to research concussions. It found evidence of 92 head impacts in men’s matches between 2015 and 2017, of which 29 were concussions. Records going back to 1850 revealed 544 cricket-related deaths in Australia, New Zealand, Great Britain and Ireland.

Using data from La Trobe’s 2018 study, and its estimate of a head impact every 2000 balls and concussion every 9000 balls, Szymanski compared it with the number of balls bowled (1,012,160) during the 2019 first class men’s cricket season in Australia. He extrapolated a result of 160 head impacts and 37 concussions for that one season – almost four times current estimates.

According to Szymanski, that puts the rate of head impacts in the Australian domestic game two-thirds higher than the known rate in other cricket-playing countries.

“There are a number of reasons for this,” he says. “Pace bowlers in Australia tend to be faster, spinners deliver a lower share of overs, and the pitches tend to be quicker.”

He laments the lack of data kept on cricket, when compared with sports such as baseball.

“We’ve got [cricket] scorecards from before 1750,” he tells me. “Yeah, well, that’s not enough detail. What you need is a record of every stroke played, every ball delivered. That’s how you can do real performance analysis.

“There are about 200,000 events in a baseball season. And I can get 100 years of baseball seasons. Now, once you’ve got that data, I can do statistical analysis with it and start to identify different things.”

Innovations such as helmets have made a difference, the book says, and there have been just 10 recorded deaths among cricketers in Australia after the introduction of helmets, compared with nine in the previous decade – the 1970s.

But Szymanski says that, despite a decline in deaths, scientific evidence shows the danger of head injuries is greater than previously assumed, and growing.

“There are myriad theories for the increase in head impacts and concussions,” he writes. “Batting technique against short bowling is said to have deteriorated (caused by an over-reliance on helmets) … Limited-overs formats are blamed for encouraging batters to hook the ball more compulsively … Improved strength and conditioning has enabled players to bowl up around 90mph (144km/h) now more frequently than before. And there is simply more cricket played now.”

In March, Cricket Victoria and Cricket Australia cleared Australian batsman Will Pucovski to continue playing despite him having reportedly suffered 11 concussions, the most recent during a Sheffield Shield match in February. According to the two governing bodies, a panel of experts – including neurologists – believed some of Pucovski’s concussions had been misdiagnosed and were actually stress-related responses.

But despite the recent spotlight on concussion, the accumulation of data on the topic has still been piecemeal, and what information is available has often focused on injuries to batters and not other associated incidents.

Additionally, it is becoming clearer that both authorities and the media, over a long period of time, have failed to appreciate the pattern of repeated incidents and to report on them as such. This has contributed to a general nonchalance among players and the public concerning risks.

Cricket statistician Charles Davis found in a search of Trove in 2015 more than 90 separate cases of men, women and children killed by cricket balls from 1880 to the 1950s in Australia. They included players (most of them batsmen), umpires and spectators. Of these deaths, 33 were aged under 16. The youngest, a baby of 11 months, Annie Dennison, was struck by a ball in a backyard game in 1894.

Davis wrote: “Most of these events attracted only fleeting attention, with just a few lines of reportage and no follow-up. In the few reports where any implications were discussed, no one seemed aware of more than a handful of prior cases.

“It was certainly a surprise to find how many times this happened, and how young the victims often were.”

Unlike many statistical compilations, Davis’ work did not include heart attacks during games, which have also contributed to many deaths, but are no different to exercise-induced heart attacks in any sport. (Of this, I can also attest having had a teammate, friend and colleague – Bob Spivey, 56 – die batting in a match in Devon while captaining the Daily Mirror/Sun team the Badgers in 2005. Fare thee well, Bob.)

Szymanski concludes a better record of the game will ultimately reduce the chance of injury or death.

“I think the statistical era of cricket is in some ways beginning now, and will actually develop quite rapidly in the coming decades,” he says.

“Something I’ve always felt very strongly as an economist is you have to understand history, and you have to understand culture and how they interplay with one another … to go back and reconstruct from what data we’ve got, the historical record, in order to get a better picture.”

This story was originally published in The Australian Financial Review newspaper on November 12, 2022.

On having women heroes: Alex Blackwell

Posted on by Martin Newman

Alex Blackwell’s brow furrows. The heavily pregnant (her baby is due in five weeks when we meet) TV commentator and former Australian women’s cricket captain has just heard her friend Beth Mooney has had her jaw broken. On the eve of the Ashes series, the loss of Australia’s best batter is bad news, but it’s more Mooney’s immediate health that is bothering Blackwell.

“She needs surgery,” she informs me, checking a stream of phone messages from friends and contacts. I ask how it happened.

“Motty [coach Matthew Mott] was throwing to her [not bowling, but chucking down deliveries in the practice nets],” she responds matter-of-factly. “Apparently, it came up under the grill [face protector]. She was a big support to me in that 2017 tour and an avid reader… I’ll send her an advance copy of the book.”

The book in question is Blackwell’s memoir, Fair Game, which is published this month. I commiserate dutifully and motion to the waitress for a menu, as Blackwell texts a salvo of replies. (Mooney returned to the crease just nine days after having surgery on her jaw.)

We’ve met at Lavana on Sydney Harbour. It is a place neither of us has dined at before but, because of COVID-19 infection numbers (29,833 cases the day of our assignation), it is the product of a search for an à la carte restaurant with open-air seating – not that simple a prospect for lunch on a Tuesday. There’s a light rain that comes and goes and the sky’s a comforting shade of grey, as we relax into the woven-backed Parisian bistro-type chairs.

Between its awnings and folded away front and side windows, Lavana is breezy and fresh, and the old wharves of Walsh Bay and their expensive pads float on the sea before us.

After conferring over the menu, we decide on Pelmeni (Russian-style chicken dumplings) and seared scallops as a starter to share. I tell Blackwell “no judging” on the matter of drinks, but she pats her stomach and orders mineral water anyway. Showing zero solidarity, I choose a glass of Cesari Pinot Grigio Delle Venezie, a crisp, dry and light Italian, with a slight grapefruit finish.

We’re seeing young boys looking up to the girls. They’re attending these matches, they don’t see gender.

“I’m looking forward to getting active again,” she tells me. “I’m having difficulty walking and feel uncomfortable in my body. I used to be an elite athlete and recognise how fit I was now that I’m not.

“I’m starting to think I’m two people, not one, and my mum is thrilled I’m not on the road [cycling to work] any more.”

Blackwell retired from international cricket four years ago and now commentates on TV. She also consults as a list manager for the Sydney Thunder – the Women’s Big Bash League team she led until 2019 and which she left owning the record for most runs and games across both the women’s and men’s competition.

A right-handed specialist bat and sometime medium pace bowler, she plundered 14 titles with the NSW Breakers, averaging over 47 with them. She held the record for most international appearances by an Australian woman player (251) until Ellyse Perry passed her in October. And, was the first woman to be elected a director to the board of Cricket NSW.

The 38-year-old’s next accomplishment will debut a month before that of Blackwell’s identical twin, Kate, who is pregnant too, with her first baby. She tells me the sisters, who both represented Australia in cricket and now share an obstetrician, are not that alike – but I’m having a hard time buying it. They are set to join a burgeoning baby club of Australian international cricketers becoming mums, including the current vice-captain, Rachael Haynes.

Blackwell has watched the game explode as better marketing and more cash has increased its visibility and appeal.

“We’re seeing young boys looking up to the girls,” she says. “They’re attending these matches, they don’t see gender and they’re getting photos with legends. There are young boys now modelling their game on the likes of Meg Lanning.”

Blackwell is on maternity leave from NSW Health, where she works part-time as a genetic counsellor, while juggling other commitments. It’s timely not just for the baby but also the publicity drive for the book.

Alex Blackwell playing in a 2010 Ashes Test against England. Photo: Bahnfrend/Wikimedia Commons.

Fair Game, written with journalist Megan Maurice and published by Hachette, recounts her early life, her rise up the ranks of female cricketers, and the triumphs and disappointments she faced as a player and a lesbian, in a time when people in the LGBTQI community had little support. The book’s title says it all and although, for Blackwell, it draws a line under many things, it is going to put a few noses out of joint.

“The views expressed in the book will not come as a shock. I think it’s important to speak directly to people about your issues… and I’ve done that,” she says bluntly. “We should be scrutinising what goes on in our national team.”

And what does go on in the national team she hasn’t always been happy with, slating simplistic tactics, a stifling of creativity and the patronising of female players by Cricket Australia and some of its coaches.

During her playing career, she was often at odds with coaches’ strategies and has some firm thoughts on the current set-up.

“I see fewer genuine batters coming through and I’m fascinated with the leg-spin bowling selection,” she says. “Alana King is great, but I wonder why we don’t have a ripping legspinner in that team. We want to encourage our spinners to turn the ball. I think Wello (Amanda-Jade Wellington) is just a bit of a different cat. I think we should encourage them to explore all their talent.

“It’s a bit robotic to pick people that only attack the stumps. It’s like, ‘We’ve cracked the code and there’s only one way’.”

My heroes were not women originally because they were not on television.

Despite this, she sees Australia winning the multi-format Ashes, but predicts a close series. (Correct, as it turned out, with the Ashes retained last night in the first ODI).

Blackwell was born in the NSW Riverina town of Wagga Wagga, 10 minutes before Kate, and grew up on a farm in the town of Yenda with her two older sisters, Leigh and Jane, and supportive parents who, she says, “wanted a rich life for their daughters”.

It was with Kate she first learnt to play the game on their grandparents’ wheat and rice farm near Tharbogang, just outside Griffith, using an old tree stump as a wicket.

“The champions of women’s sport and women and girls in sport tended to be males out in the country for Kate and I,” says Blackwell. She honed her craft on the concrete pitches of the Griffith Exies Club, across the road from her school. It was there that a teacher, noting their talent, set up the first female cricket team at the school. Within the year it had won the state knockout and Alex and Kate came to the attention of Australian cricket captain Belinda Clark, the country’s most decorated exponent of the game.

From that point on, Blackwell had the sport in her blood. While studying medicine at UNSW, she made her debut for Australia at the age of 19. Kate followed a year later, the pair being compared to the Waugh twins, Steve and Mark, who in 1991 had become the first twins to play test cricket for Australia.

“My heroes were not women originally because they were not on television,” she says. “It was only when I received a poster of Belinda Clark that I realised women played.”

“It irritates me when I hear, ‘Oh, how good’s the women’s game now, how quickly is it improving.’ The men’s and women’s games have always been improving and I feel it’s disrespectful to the legends of the game that came just before TV [picked it up].”

It is not the only criticism Blackwell has for how women’s cricket has been treated or of cricket’s authorities. Fair Game details her disappointment at being shut out of full-time Australian captaincy and the initial lack of encouragement for acknowledging LGBTQI players. But the experience, she says, taught her a lot.

“One of the lessons I’ve learnt is you aren’t always going to be number one choice for a role and that’s OK,” she says. “You can do a very good job in 2ic [second in command]. That’s the position I found myself in a lot.

“I do feel the attributes that made me good as a vice captain were held against me to be the actual captain… People can be pigeonholed in that deputy role and I felt a little bit that nice guys finish second.

“You have to put yourself forward for these positions and I didn’t put myself forward fully when I really had a great opportunity to be the number one leader in the team. If you do want to step up you need to demonstrate that.”

But Blackwell also acknowledges a tightrope walk for ambitious women, adding: “Women leaders need a lot of likeability to make it to the top.

“What I’ve learnt around leadership is it takes time to embrace different views, but if you don’t, then you run the risk of missing things. If I was the leader or coach of the best players in Australia I would want them to have more ownership of the direction.

“It felt at times under coaches from the men’s set-up coming into the women’s set-up that there wasn’t enough trust and respect that those players know their game and should be directed.

“I thought that hurt us in the end. Because I feel people rise or fall to the expectations you put on them and if you’re only going to plan for one thing you’re never able to get out of trouble if that’s not working.”

Professionalism in domestic women’s cricket has had an obvious impact on the game and, with better production and marketing, made stars of the current crop of cricketers. But the pioneers behind that change can be found in only low-res video on YouTube.

“Women being able to play longer has allowed the game to improve,” says Blackwell.

Although parity for female players has improved, there’s much work to be done. Blackwell herself made enough to play as a professional for only six months of her career. She and her wife, former England player Lynsey Askew, now a personal trainer, live in a nice two-bedroom apartment in Ashfield, but it’s a far cry from the likes of David Warner Inc and his collection of multimillion-dollar residences.

Blackwell struggled from a young age with, what she calls, her own internalised homophobia that “chipped away” at her. She recounts being told pointedly by a Cricket Australia official that the organisation was promoting the game as “a place mothers wanted to bring their daughters to play” and not to talk about being gay.

There’s still some moments where that internalised homophobia rears its head. It’s a response to growing up in Australia and growing up in cricket.

Despite these slights, in 2013 Blackwell became the first woman international cricketer to publicly come out as lesbian.

“Growing up in a society that has those subliminal messages was hard, and it’s still not always easy for me,” she says. “People will look at me and think, ‘Oh, she’s out there and proud.’ But there’s still some moments where that internalised homophobia rears its head. It’s a response to growing up in Australia and growing up in cricket.

“I’m OK with the person I’ve become and I like who I am, and it was difficult to feel my sport didn’t want me.”

The book is full of Blackwell’s clashes over prevailing attitudes. But, pragmatically, she rarely allows herself to respond emotionally, instead resetting when ruffled and presenting a calm, rational argument. What Blackwell hardly ever does, however, is leave things unsaid.

“I’m a little bit fatigued by that actually,” she says, as our mains arrive: pan-fried barramundi for her, duck a l’orange with baby carrots pour moi.

I put it to her that she might be “a bit mouthy”. She pauses, then laughs, seemingly in agreement. The truth is Blackwell is not a confrontational person, but determinedly finds ways to get her point across on her own terms.

“I think I’m always someone who’s looking at how can we be better, how can I be better and that puts pressure on other people,” she says.

With Askew, her partner of 13 years, she is now contemplating a whole new phase of life. But interestingly, that life remains closely entwined with Kate.

“We’re not in the same hospital,” she tells me, struggling to illustrate they’re not as in sync as it appears. “It’s a totally new phase of my life now. I’m so excited about it.

“[Kate’s] due a month after me. Isn’t it ridiculous? It’s just silly. We’re both 38, so we’ve got to get on with it. We’re really not that twinny, we’re not that twinny at all.

“We’re a little different with our [hospital] preferences, but we are seeing the same obstetrician. I told him, ‘You’re going to get us mixed up, we’re both in same-sex relationships, one month apart.’

“It’s going to be good going through this new challenge together. We’ve always lived our own lives but as it’s turned out, we’ve had similar interests. I’ve been very lucky to have her. She’s almost been like a psychologist to me.”

Blackwell is part of a baby boom recently among Australia’s female cricketers. Haynes and partner Leah Poulton had a son in October. Fast-bowler Megan Schutt’s partner, Jess Holyoake, had a daughter in August. And last month, former international and current Australia A player Erin Burns’ partner, Anna Jane, gave birth to a boy.

That’s been very powerful. To have a position where I can influence and I can speak up – so I’ve done that and don’t hold back any more.

Will there be a baby club?

“Probably,” says Blackwell. “Rachael and Leah are very good friends and live not that far from us.”

It’s a long way from the days when gay players trod awards night red carpet events alone, afraid they could lose their place in a team or even their job if they were “out”.

“It was a big deal for me to actually say, ‘my partner’ for the first time,” says Blackwell. “I accidentally found myself in this position – rocking the boat. These days through the medium of social media there is no coming out any more. You just put up a picture of yourself out to dinner or getting engaged and it’s just out there. I think that’s great. It’s just not such a big deal any more.”

But what she went through, and more so, what past players went through, is a source of anger for Blackwell. She believes an official apology is due to players intimidated into hiding their sexuality.

“I have connected quite a lot with past players, just randomly, who come up to me and say, ‘Thanks for saying what we couldn’t.’ And that’s been very powerful,” she says. “To have a position where I can influence and I can speak up – so I’ve done that and don’t hold back any more.

”I feel like the invisible legends have paved the way and given so much against the tide. I can’t speak for them, but my perspective on what they’ve done is huge and they didn’t get to enjoy the freedoms the current players do. I feel sad about that.”

As we finish off the meal with apple crumble and lava cake with ice cream, splitting them down the middle to share, it’s only the future Blackwell has her eyes on.

And she gives a big steer to the gender of her baby in the book’s last chapter (you’ll have to buy it).

“I’ll definitely take our child to the nets someday and see what they think,” she says, “we will bring a lot of love to that child.”

First published in The Australian Financial Review on February 4, 2022.

Image of Alex Blackwell by Bahnfrend Wikimedia Commons.

Adam Zwar’s Twelve Summers of cricket nostalgia

Posted on by Martin Newman

Sunburnt bodies on The Hill, advertising jingles turned national anthem, the crump of a bouncer dug into the pitch with merciless intent and a minted commentary dramatising each sublime moment. Welcome to a summer gone by in Australia, where the wallpaper of Test match cricket was welded to terrestrial TV, gold chains hung in the chest hair of macho fast bowlers and it was mostly young boys who dreamt of some day playing the game for their country.

Now, edging 2022, the women’s team is arguably more successful than the men’s, competitions are fragmented across different streaming platforms and energy firms – rather than beer and cigarette companies – crowd the hoardings.

While scandal is never far from play (Sandpapergate, Tim Paine) the world has evolved beyond the game, professionalising, bowdlerising it.

Author and actor Adam Zwar has wanted to write a book on Australian cricket since he was 16. That was about four years after accepting his destiny was to be on cricket’s sidelines. Now 49, he is contemplating what psychological import it had on him as a boy and beyond. The backdrop of Twelve Summers stretches from 1980 to 2007, a period that took in the very highs and very lows of the sport in this country, from the underarm bowling incident to world domination.

“There’s that little bit of grief when you realise you are never going to play for Australia,” he tells me, via Zoom from his home in Lennox Head on the far north coast of NSW. “I was 12 when I knew.

“Cricket’s always been the tent pole of my life, it stopped me from forgetting decades or years. I’d see everything through the eyes of what was happening in cricket and that helped me remember what I was doing and where I was. It helped in a chronological way as well as an emotional one.

“I was an anxious kid. I lived in a remote location, didn’t have any friends, went to a psychologist at a very early age. I was crying all the time. I fell in love with the song (C’mon Aussie) and got Dad to tape that off the TV.”

Indeed, while Twelve Summers is part memoir and includes lively anecdotes about being a driver for a high-class escort, Zwar’s relationship with his parents, and travails in the entertainment industry, it is cricket that provides an ever-present link and which fans of the game will appreciate most.

He writes: “I got a flat top haircut on the day Dean Jones scored 184 not out at the SCG against England in January 1987. I got my first girlfriend during a 10-wicket win against England in the first Test in Brisbane, in 1990. I realised the relationship was over 10 weeks later during a nine-wicket Australian win in the fifth Test at the WACA, in which Craig McDermott took 11 wickets for the match and Australia retained the Ashes 3-nil.”

There is a nostalgic, reassuring pattern to this book, one that suggests the collective experience may not be far from the personal; that, perhaps, every kid in Australia had similar memories-experience. For me, taken by my dad to see Dennis Lillee, signing autographs at the Balgownie Magpies ground in Fairy Meadow sits alongside an eight-year-old Zwar having Alan Border tell him he was “a good kid” outside a coaching clinic in Cairns.

Growing up in NSW I could recite every word of the Tooheys ad where Mike Whitney dives across the crease to snag the winning run (“How do ya feel?“), for Zwar growing up in Queensland it was Border slurping XXXX on a beach in a terry-towelling hat as a bikini-clad beauty wandered by (“I can feel a XXXX coming on”).

And while I was diligently writing down my own backyard Test match scores between Australia and the West Indies, played à la Don Bradman with a golf ball and cricket stump, there was Zwar memorising trivia about the Australian team (“Greg Chappell was married to Judy, Kim Hughes to Jenny”). Maybe I was that same anxious kid.

Zwar came to prominence in Australia two decades ago with a short film that became a TV show and then a US TV show – Wilfred. A cult hit about a man who sees his new girlfriend’s dog as a person, who speaks to him, took deadpan to new levels.

He followed it up with Lowdown (created with his wife, the director Amanda Brotchie), Mr Black and Squinters. But he has also pursued his obsession with cricket, presenting and producing cricket documentaries Underarm: The Ball That Changed Cricket and Bodyline: The Ultimate Test, for which he faced an over of Brett Lee’s 145km/h zingers without a helmet.

“Once I became interested in cricket it became part of me and for the moments the Australian cricket team were playing, my anxiety wasn’t there,” he says. “That’s what it means to me, and I’ve analysed it over time and whenever we’re playing everything is all right in the world.

“For me, it’s a mental health thing as much as anything else.”

In psychoanalytic terms our, at times, symbiotic, positive parasocial relationship with sport is sometimes explained using affective disposition theory, which essentially has that we make moral judgments about personalities that in turn affect our enjoyment of the unfolding narrative.

Strong figures like Border, Steve Waugh or Greg Chappell can assume a greater importance as drivers of success, and the suspense of that success, and, as a result, our enjoyment of a victory. Equally, we feel more connected to their struggles in adversity. Despite operating at a much higher level, their failures become relatable to our own struggles, which increases our ability to empathise with them.

While Zwar’s role models were Border, Waugh and Dean Jones, he also drew strength from figures like former England captain Tony Greig, then a commentator for Channel Nine, who was known for his weather wall and pre-match gardening with his car keys in the pitch.

“I was trying to catch confidence off him,” says Zwar. “I saw this bluster of this super-confident man who was never short of a word and said what he thought, even when he was wrong. He never apologised and I was just hoping some of that would rub off on me.”

He rates the 1999 World Cup as the happiest he has ever been, citing super-human efforts from Waugh (defined by a fightback and classic sledge against South Africa) and Shane Warne’s bowling in the final against Pakistan.

But time and again in the book he comes back to tales of adversity, relating to colourful spin bowler Greg Matthews and the struggles he had that cricket helped overcome, he writes: “I don’t know what mental state I’d be in if Australian cricket wasn’t there as a banister.”

Zwar likes to refer to his relationship to cricket in similar ways, often involving wood: a tent pole, a banister. He doesn’t mention a crutch, but it is clear it is that too.

And as with Matthews, it is the flawed but resilient characters who most fascinate him. So he compares an early flirtation with Kim Hughes as a shandy to a later conversion to the “neat Jack Daniels of Dennis Lillee and Rodney Marsh”.

And in the most accurate description I’ve seen yet of Border, who presided over, and transformed with coach Bob Simpson, a “massive shit show” of a team that “couldn’t bat, bowl or field” into world champions, calls him the “Churchill of Australian cricket”.

“There’s something about that gritty Australian captain that I love,” Zwar says. “And have you ever seen a more grisly bunch of humans than the Australian cricket side in the ’70s? Hairy-chested, hairy-faced.”

According to mathematicians, if you take up the blade or the seamed ball in this country you stand a 0.002 per cent chance of playing Test match cricket for Australia’s men’s team. And this book is very much for the fans who didn’t even come close – people like me and Zwar, who rarely troubled the scorers ourselves but live off the triumphs, complain of the defeats and often marvel at the sheer boofheadery exhibited by the country’s most celebrated exponents.

And while Zwar’s childhood anxiety subsided long ago, cricket remains a comfort as he works in an industry rife with stresses and uncertainty.

“For an industry that’s designed to make people happy, the entertainment industry can be a very miserable place and it can draw people to it for the wrong reasons,” he says. “If I’ve skirted over anything in the book maybe it’s that.

“In Australia writers are much maligned in the way that Australian television and film is run. We’re right at the bottom of the pecking order and we are the geese that lay the golden eggs.”

Looking forward, though, he is happy with where Australian cricket currently sits, is impressed with Alex Carey’s start and sees the emergence of a solid batting core around Steve Smith and Marnus Labuschagne.

“It’s kind of solid, just good, honest, solid cricket,” he says, signing off. “I’m very comfortable from my couch just enjoying it.”

Twelve Summers by Adam Zwar (Hachette Australia).

Originally published in The Australian Financial Review on December 20, 2021.

Icon of yesteryear unpacked for a new generation

Posted on by Martin Newman

It was in 1948 on his last Ashes tour of England that Donald Bradman, at the tail of an extraordinary career, led a team of cricketers that today are regarded as one of the greatest cricket sides of all time.

Over 144 days the Australians, including titans of the day such as Keith Miller, Ray Lindwall, Sid Barnes and Arthur Morris, went undefeated in all of their 34 matches – earning the sobriquet The Invincibles.

Among them was 19-year-old Ashes debutant Neil Harvey.

A few months earlier, the heir apparent to Bradman had become the youngest Australian to score a century, in just his second Test match.

Today, at 92 not out, Harvey is the last man standing from that historic tour and the second oldest living Australian Test player.

It’s a number that is decades advanced from the glory days of his career and seems far too late in life to represent the point at which a definitive biography should appear. And yet that is what former cricketer and journalist Ashley Mallett has written.

His evocatively titled book The Last Invincible has connotations of Valhalla to it and there is no shortage of cricketing gods referenced within its pages.

It cannily taps into the aura of a near perfect team and of Bradman – that sporting freak, described on his retirement by writer R.C. Robertson-Glasgow as a “flawless engine”.

The Don’s legend has been so great as to even defy the disinterest of today’s young cricketers in jerky black-and-white reels reproduced on YouTube and Pinterest pages of once dun-coloured newspaper pages, brightened with phone filters.

Harvey’s has been more muted, even though by the time of his retirement in 1963 only Bradman had scored more runs and made more Test centuries.

But in the era of the Big Bash League, Steve Smith (with his extraordinary 61 average) and the not so distant wake of Ricky Ponting, many who saw Harvey play (averaging just under 50, with 21 tons) still think of him as Australia’s best batsman after Sir Donald – and Mallett is one of them.

“He was so neat and compact and so unflurried getting down the track to the spinners, it was quite amazing,” he says.

“I would have loved to have bowled to him, but I would have got belted around. Harvey was probably the best fieldsman Australia’s produced too; he could throw down the stumps diving in mid-air with only one stump visible, and he did that regularly.”

Not so much about that stardust-tinged tour or its elite membership, The Last Invincible is more a tap on the shoulder to later generations of fans about a boy wonder who was the real deal, while others came and went.

“I think I set out to write Harvey’s story and everything else, but also to reassert his place in Australian cricketing history,” Mallett says, his voice crackling down the line from his Adelaide home. “I think he’s been largely forgotten.”

Before qualifying the remark: “Harvey isn’t the only one. Ray Lindwall and Alan Davidson also fall into that category.

“He’s had all the accolades, he’s got in the Hall of Fame and has a statue outside the MCG, but I wanted to bring it to the modern reader to say that here’s a bloke who’s as good as anyone since Bradman.”

Mallett, himself a former Test spin bowler with 132 scalps, is not unfamiliar with holding his own in a red-hot team full of legends, suiting up throughout the 1970s alongside the Chappell brothers, Jeff Thomson, Rod Marsh and Dennis Lillee.

And in Harvey’s adeptness against spin, Mallett saw a possible antidote to the lack of nuance in how batsmen today play the spinners.

“There’s no getting down the wicket and pushing for twos,” Mallett says. “You wait ’til you get a bad ball and whack it for four. It’s either block or slog. Whether that comes from the T20 I don’t know, but it’s a crazy way of playing the spinners and it seems to be the modern way.

“That’s when I started to think this is a book I could do and bring in Harvey, the way he played.”

The book delves not just into the history of Harvey but also the nostalgia of boyhood, when Mallett first got bitten by the cricketing bug.

Among the match reports, Mallett knits together memories of his grandfather taking him to the SCG when he was nine to see the “veritable gods of Olympus” warming up in the nets before the second Ashes Test against England in Sydney in 1954: Harvey batting, Frank “Typhoon” Tyson sending down thunderbolts alongside him, Bradman leaning on the nets, whispering instructions.

“It was heaven on Earth in a way,” says Mallett. “My grandfather was a great advocate of cricket and was able to talk to me about it; he knew the game.

“He loved watching [Victor] Trumper play when he was a young bloke and then later on watching Bradman. He reckoned Harvey was a bit like a left-handed Trumper because he had all the grace and the movements, tremendous footwork and unhurried. It really struck him that he had plenty of time – time to play the quickest of bowlers.”

Mallett has approached his task with forensic zeal and there’s a depth of detail in the book, from anecdotes about some of history’s greatest games to obscure details about Harvey’s administrative role in his wife’s Tupperware business.

But life and cricket are complicated, and the book also examines the sporting politics that shaped the Australian team and determined the legacies of those who played for their country.

“Harvey had his own opinion, all his life,” says Mallett. “He’s always aired his opinion. And he hasn’t held back. He doesn’t hold back at all.”

As a selector, after Harvey’s retirement, his frank assessments of the Australian team would sometimes put him at odds with players, and as a player himself, Harvey’s tendency to speak his mind didn’t endear him to the cricket establishment. It probably cost him the captaincy in 1957, when he was passed over for Ian Craig, then but a six-Test veteran and aged just 22.

“I think he’s been misunderstood totally by the modern cricketers,” says Mallett. “If he went along and had a chat to them in the dressing room they’d love the bloke and embrace him straight away.

“He talks passionately about the game and about the players, and he reveres some of the modern players, talking about Warnie as ‘the best I’ve seen’. He gives credit where it’s due. There’s none of this sort of, ‘Oh, we were far better in the old days.’”

Only at the tail of his career did Harvey get to captain Australia, stepping in for the injured Richie Benaud (who had “torn the subscapularis right down to the capsule that contains the shoulder”) in the 1961 Lord’s Test.

Not afraid to paint grand scenarios, Mallett’s reconstruction of this match sounds more like a trudge up Pork Chop Hill under heavy fire.

The encounter was marked by a protuberance in the batting surface from the top of an old drain under the pitch, which the players dubbed “the Ridge”. It was a fast bowler’s delight, which Harvey relates made the ball “fly off at strange angles and odd heights”.

The conditions were tough for both sides, but Australia won the Test easily after an inspired decision by Harvey to have 19-year-old debutante Graham McKenzie “attack the Ridge” – scuttling five of the English bats for just 37.

Perhaps part of the problem with Harvey’s fading legacy has been his self-effacing nature, and Mallett notes that getting his story wasn’t easy.

In fact the only other significant book about the cricketer is Harvey’s own, My World of Cricket, published in 1963, which is full of cricketing anecdotes but reveals surprisingly little about the author himself.

“It’s very hard to get him to talk about himself,” Mallett says. “He knew how good he was, but he doesn’t go around spouting about it.”

Neil Harvey The Last Invincible by Ashley Mallett (Hardie Grant) is published on July 28.

First published in The Australian Financial Review on July 23, 2021

Politics, purgatory and playing the game

Posted on by Martin Newman

They arrived a band of misfits, sporting gunslingers who had chosen cricket over country and money over morals, and they were to all pay a high price for it – but the truth of the West Indies’ rebel tours of South Africa in the apartheid era has never been black and white.

Theirs is a story not just of racism and ethics, but of the gap between rich and poor, of hypocrisy, of ambition, of ego, of macho anti-authoritarianism and of the shifting attitudes in sport and politics at the time that would significantly reshape the world we live in now.

The full, layered history of the 20 rebels, who returned home pariahs from those tours, banned from cricket for life (even at a club level), has for the first time been thoroughly detailed in a book by Australian sports writer Ashley Gray.

Shootings, drugs, mental illness and homelessness – The Unforgiven: Mercenaries or Missionaries? burrows deep into the boyhoods, careers and decline of these men who once had the world at their feet, but came down on the wrong side of history.

For some, the fall from grace was absolute, but even for those who rebuilt their lives the bitter aftertaste of the rebel tours of South Africa lingers on.

Gray, who made numerous fact-finding trips to the Caribbean and North America, as well as conducting interviews in South Africa, England and Australia, had the topic on his mind since first stumbling across one of the down-and-out rebels on the streets of Cross Roads in Kingston 17 years ago.

“It began with a conversation with a cabbie in 2003,” says Gray from splendid self-isolation at his home in Tempe, in Sydney’s inner west.

“It was during Australia’s four-test series against the Windies and I was doing stuff for Inside Cricket and on my way to a one-dayer at Sabina Park, when the driver told me Richard Austin was now begging on the streets, doing drugs and other things.

“He drove me and a mate to Cross Roads, the commercial district of the city, where we found Austin running with a gang.”

By this stage of his life Austin, who had played two tests for the West Indies before being dropped for joining the World Series Cricket (WSC) circuit, was 48 and spent most of his days walking the streets barefoot, high on rum and cocaine.

A once gifted athlete – he excelled at football and table tennis – he could bat anywhere in the order, keep wicket and bowl spin or seam. The great West Indian keeper-batsman Jeffrey Dujon described him as the most talented all-round cricketer he had ever known.

But Austin, who died in 2015, was just one of the many gifted West Indies cricketers lured to South Africa by the shunned nation’s cricket chief Ali Bacher, acting like an administrative P.T. Barnum.

Among them you could have easily picked a Seven Samurai of magnificent outcasts, with plenty of room for more.

There was Lawrence Rowe, the only batsman to ever score a double century and century on Test debut; the former West Indies captain and 66-test great Alvin Kallicharran; David Murray, the country’s finest wicketkeeper at the time, who was only displaced from the Test team by the exceptional batting of Dujon; Franklyn Stephenson, regarded as the best player never to appear officially for the West Indies; all-rounder Bernard Julien, once labelled the new Gary Sobers; fearsome pace bowler Colin Croft, who still holds the best Test figures for his country as a fast bowler; and all-rounder Collis King, who starred alongside Viv Richards in the Windies 1979 one-day World Cup final win.

Many of these players, despite their bans in the West Indies, went on to play county and regional cricket in England and South Africa and carve out lesser careers even while stigmatised by the blood money tours. But some struggled badly.

Gray, who writes about the men with affection and a real sense of empathy for their plight, says: “With some of these young guys it really messed with their heads. Herbert Chang ended up in a mental institution at one stage.

“When Everton Mattis came back to Jamaica he said the cops were after him, making life difficult. So he escaped to New York where he ended up becoming a cocaine dealer and got shot.”

Years earlier – before the stigma of the tours in 1982-83 and 1983-84 – Mattis had found even out-scoring everyone but Viv Richards in his second match for Clive Lloyd’s West Indies team was not enough to crack a regular spot in one of the greatest cricket sides of all-time. The pendulum, for him, had already swung.

“The reaction in Jamaica was more extreme than in the other islands in the Caribbean and Mattis, Rowe, Chang and Austin were dealt with very harshly when they came back,” says Gray.

“There had been big slave rebellions in Jamaica that didn’t happen so much in the other islands, which gave it much more of a history about who you are and where you came from.”

The white supremacist apartheid culture of South Africa, which segregated blacks from whites, had been unravelling for some time with boycotts of sporting events and the exclusion of the country from the Olympics since 1964. But sportspeople and entertainers still regularly took the coin of promoters to appear in places like Sun City, giving the regime an air of business as usual.

At the time of the rebel tours Nelson Mandela, the country’s future president and unifier, was still incarcerated at Pollsmoor Prison in Cape Town.

Other countries, including Australia, England and Sri Lanka, carried out unofficial rebel tours of South Africa during apartheid, with the players facing bans of a couple of years for their troubles – but none copping the vilification or penalties the West Indies received for their perceived race betrayal.

But the motives of the rebels were complex. Some simply saw it as their lot as professional cricketers. Needing to feed their families in a sport that still paid very little, a player could earn from two rebel tours between $80,000 (60 times the average wage in Jamaica) and $150,000.

A few, locked out of the national side, seemed to be raising a defiant finger to officialdom.

Others genuinely regarded the tour not as something that would prop up the apartheid system, but which might help bring it down – showing successful black sportsmen competing and bettering their white counterparts.

And the touring players were an immediate hit, adored by the mostly white crowds that came to see them. That contrast, or conflict, with apartheid could not be lost on anyone.

The backdrop to all of it was the era of World Series Cricket, where Kerry Packer’s rebel tournament in Australia had fragmented national sides, creating a gun-for-hire culture that accelerated professionalism in the sport while also shredding the quaint notion of cricket being a gentleman’s game.

“As far as the white (South African) population goes it was eye-opening for them,” says Gray. “They hadn’t seen anything like this in the flesh. They hadn’t seen professional black sportspeople.

“Franklyn Stephenson is still very angry about it. He sees them as liberation tours and draws a link to the end of apartheid, and he thinks it stimulated that. He says they should be lauded because in WSC players were mercenaries, they just took the money Kerry Packer gave them.

“But these guys who went on the rebel tours, in his eyes they had a cause, so there was a moral purpose to it.”

Perhaps the most enigmatic and complicated player among the rebel cricketers was the touring captain Rowe, seen before his fall from grace (and to an extent by many of his countrymen still) as a national icon.

Ostracised on his return he emigrated, as was the case with a lot of the rebels, and now lives in Miami, like Jamaica’s king in exile.

“He saw himself as a martyr,” says Gray. “He thought he was just playing the game and it was a practical thing he did for his family.”

As pig-headed in character as he was sublime with his batting, Rowe remains resolute the rebels were victims of politics and did nothing wrong.

“I had such a strong belief in the cause,” he told Gray. “The only person who can convince me that is not so is Jesus Christ. If he comes down to me and says, ‘You are wrong’, I will apologise.”

The Unforgiven: Mercenaries or Missionaries? The Untold Story of the Rebel West Indian Cricketers Who Toured Apartheid South Africa, by Ashley Gray (Pitch Publishing).

Originally published in The Australian Financial Review on May 30, 2020.

Is news destroying our brains?

Posted on by Martin Newman

Rolf Dobelli gets a frosty reception from most journalists and when I call him at his home in Bern late one night (AEST), the bestselling economic philosopher sounds more than a little hesitant.

The conversation is stilted as he cautiously explains his ideas while at the same time trying not to insult me.

That’s OK though, I understand. It’s a difficult tightrope walk for Dobelli. After all, he’s just published Stop Reading the News, a guide to giving up your daily dose of news, a move that, if generally taken up, would put me out of a job.

It’s a book which patiently deconstructs the news cycle and draws numerous negative conclusions, including that there is too much news and that it is bad for your health, your brain and your happiness.

“There was always something wrong with ‘the news’, it confuses news with relevance,” he says. “News is in the business of selling what it produces as relevant to people, which is rarely the case.

“The amount of time people spend reading the news in all western countries is 60-90 minutes a day, which over a year is about a month’s worth of your life (It’s actually 15 days, but I assume he’s talking about ‘awake time’ so I don’t quibble). With the internet it became very easy to produce news and to copy news, so you end up surfing through huge amounts of little news stories.

“If you want to really have more time, just cut out the news.”

As with social media, readers get a feel-good dopamine hit from staying abreast of breaking news, imbuing them with a false sense that consuming more and more makes them smarter and better informed. Studies, he points out, show this not to be the case. Dobelli says readers instead should devour detailed, subject-specific texts if they want to retain knowledge.

Dobelli contends the modern news cycle overloads the brain and trains it to process short bites of information while at the same time ‘untraining’ the brain to absorb more complex ideas. He cites various examples and uses different exercises to show how little knowledge we retain from news stories, as opposed to life events.

And while I suspect his citations, rather than being definitive, fit his own viewpoint, they can be compelling.

A self-confessed “former news junkie”, he draws on research indicating a declining attention span and attacks the credibility of much journalism, which he broadly categorises as entertainment rather than actual news.

“Journalism has less and less meaning,” he says. “The quality goes down [as reporters are laid off]. It’s a vicious circle.

“If you consume news voraciously, like I did, you’re reading 100 stories a day, 30,000 a year. The amount of waste news you have to wade through is just incredible.”

Stop Reading the News explores the explosion of opinion-based news, the elevation of mediocrity over substance (The Kardashians!!), the way news creates the illusion of empathy, can elevate stress levels and builds a mindset that reinforces negativity.

Dobelli argues, among other things, that news encourages terrorism: “There’s a reason why terrorism was unknown in the Middle Ages: there was no news media. The terrorist’s true weapon isn’t the bomb but the fear triggered by the bomb.”

But his two biggest complaints are that news wastes our time, distracting us from meaningful work, and that it rewires our brains to make us less effective.

“When our brains encounter information without us having the possibility of acting upon it, we gradually assume the role of a victim,” he writes in one chapter. “Our impulse to take action fades. We become passive. The scientific term for this is learned helplessness.”

If news is important enough, he adds, “it will reach you through other sources, word of mouth”.

His views have at times put him in sync with Donald Trump, who has attacked the media repeatedly for bias and misrepresentation.

“I should have written this 10 years ago,” he laments. “Now I have some strange bedfellows, like Trump.”

In defence of reporters he draws a distinction between news churn and longform reads and investigations, but insists cutting regular news sources out of your daily habit is the best way to win back quality of life .

“Even if you don’t want to go cold turkey, reduce your news consumption to one – and one only – weekly publication,” he says. “Ideally print, so you don’t have to deal with hyperlinks and flashy videos on the side.”

Dobelli hasn’t always been a writer: 25 years ago, shortly after completing his doctorate at Switzerland’s University of St Gallen (one of the most prestigious business schools in Europe), he had a year-long stint as the Sydney-based chief financial officer for Downtown Duty Free’s 30 Australian stores, then a subsidiary of Swissair. He was then made chief executive of Nuance Global Ships in America, another Swissair offshoot.

“I was a corporate guy,” he says, “but I was more interested in cognitive science. Still, I have a huge admiration for CEOs. I know I couldn’t do the job [as a career]. I admire people who lead people. It’s especially tough in publicly traded companies, and corporations are one of the best forms of organised labour.”

After eight years in finance, Dobelli felt he needed another path. He quit Swissair in 1999, about three years before its shambolic grounding and failure, (a fiasco that cost Swiss taxpayers billions and left a heavily restructured and devalued firm – now Swiss), and set up a publishing company, GetAbstract, where, from 2003, he churned out six novels in a “Philip Roth style” based on his experiences in corporations (“business managers getting into trouble”).

They did well, but none well enough to be translated from the German, which prompted a switch to self-help books, starting with his 2011 bestseller The Art of Thinking Clearly and four years later The Art of the Good Life.

The 53-year-old now resides in Switzerland’s defacto capital with his wife Sabine, who he credits with putting him on track to stop reading news, and their twin six-year-old boys.

Like The Art of Thinking Clearly, his latest book leans a lot on the idea that modern life interrupts our thinking and to achieve more of a meaningful nature requires purifying your routine. Part of that process entails cutting out social media and staying off devices, the logical extension of which is removing the sources that bring you to those platforms and devices – like news.

While much of Dobelli’s criticism is reasonable (there is too much content, too much over-hyped reporting and too much deliberately teased information that wastes our time reading it) and his arguments neatly logical, they are also slanted – in the same way direct-selling businesses cadge their methodology at mass recruitment seminars.

It’s impossible not to feel there is a general antipathy for the press underlying the thrust of Dobelli’s book. It has an academic disdain for the journeymen and women whose job it is to interpret all manner of subjects beyond their individual expertise and convey them to the masses.

That, in itself, is not a bad thing. There are certainly unlikeable aspects about the production of news and sometimes those producing it. But from Dobelli’s lofty perspective there’s a notably hard edge to his arguments that makes you wonder if he’s blinkered to more of the news cycle’s attributes.

“Holding journalists responsible for the current mess is like holding sugar cubes responsible for our poor diet,” he writes. “Our own behaviour as consumers has led to a race to the bottom. All self-respecting journalists should steer clear of news journalism, just as no chef who takes pride in his work would start a career at McDonald’s.”

Myself? I’ve not stopped reading the news, and not because it’s my job (though that’s a good enough reason for me) but because when it’s accurate and informative I believe it does contribute a helpful understanding of the world around us.

The question is how do we filter the garbage and facilitate the gold? Dobelli’s meticulous disquisition is a solid starting point for both.

Stop Reading the News by Rolf Dobelli (Hachette Australia).

Originally published in the Australian Financial Review on February 15, 2020.

The power of a good headline and how to capture your reader

Posted on by Martin Newman

In the age of digital news, the art of headline writing at times feels a bit irrelevant.

Wit and clever idioms have mostly been replaced with search engine optimised key words.  But both from a practical point of view and a creative one, good headline writing is more important than ever in the modern media.  A nod to the intelligence and knowledge of the reader, and despite having evolved to be more direct, clever headlines remain an important part of the overall tone of a story. 

From a distribution perspective, writing a headline containing the most likely search terms for the attached article is the key component of a digital article today.  And any content management system worth its salt allows both an SEO headline and one that can more creatively reflect a story.

Furthermore, the ability to tease a headline without making it look like clickbait is a skill in high demand in digital newsrooms and among social media editors.  For budding journalists, it is an essential element in their tool kit.

The Walkley Foundation’s annual awards for journalism have for the past couple of years recognised not just headlines but captions and hooks, to accommodate the many forms digital storytelling takes, from the splash to a tweet.

That the winners have remained, invariably, big production headlines from the front pages reflecting significant events, underlines the professional import of headlines in journalism and the impact of traditional media, even whilst in decline.

A good headline rings bells in readers’ heads. It forms synapsistic links with topics that give them a warm fuzzy feeling or tickle their funny bone because they get the reference and are in on it.  Great headlines can support a great story and great design or elevate a mundane yarn to a loftier place than it may otherwise have deserved.

I learnt this lesson early as a cadet reporter on Sydney’s Daily Telegraph-Mirror. Sent to Taronga Zoo with a photographer to capture the moment a newborn chimpanzee was presented to the world, I’d spent most of the day labouring over the writing of it; trying, too hard, to wring out a funny line. Instead all I could manage was a mediocre intro that the sub editor scoffed at loudly as I retreated to my VT100 (with its green screen and Geiger counter staccato, the staple of office computers at the time).

The next day when I opened the paper I was stoked to see above my re-written lead and a picture of the baby monkey and its mother, the title: ‘A chimp off the old block’.  That headline saved my terrible copy from being pushed to the back of the news section. It remains one of my favourite headlines and an example of how the wit of an organisation’s wordsmiths can capture a reader’s attention, bring a story alive and bolster the quality of the product.

Like that example, great headlines are remembered and sometimes come to epitomise an event. When rower Sally Robbins quit mid-race at the 2004 Olympics as her seven teammates continued to plunge their oars into the water, Melbourne’s Herald Sun bellowed, ‘It’s eight, mate, pull your weight’.  Sometimes it controversially reflects the cultural zeitgeist, as when The Sun in Britain, full of nationalistic fervour for the Falklands War, blasted ‘Gotcha’ across its front page, crassly reducing the sinking of Argentina’s General Belgrano to a comic book moment. Writing active, not passive, headlines draws in the reader, and is a discipline any journalist needs to understand if they want their stories read.

The contracting industry has been particularly harsh on sub editors, often cut from the business in large numbers and their roles subsumed into other areas or outsourced to time-poor, brand agnostic production staff in distant hubs.

So, the optimum environment for writing engaging, funny or clever headlines, has suffered and the media overall has been victim to a witticism bracket creep as words and their use have become plainer.

At The Australian Financial Review where subbing has been embraced again and a full team employed to bolster the paper’s standards, journalists write their own headlines and desk editors then tweak and tailor them individually to both print and web.

Understanding your readership and how it consumes news is at the forefront of the effort to engage with readers, to retain them and to grow a digital audience further afield and across demographics.

Finding the right headline for a subject requires a good general knowledge, an eye for associations and either a very sharp brain or some fast work on your keyboard comparing idioms and chasing thoughts down rabbit holes of words and rhymes, of assonance and alliteration.

Blog_headline_class_LD

WORD PLAY: Journalism students discuss headline ideas. 


Often it can require trying different lines, seeing what the words look like on the page or the preview, and changing tack if they just will not fit into the space.

Headlines can be effusive, or they can be spare, but above all else they must entice the reader to go on that ride with you, into the story.

Originally published by Macleay College on November 1, 2019.

Game of Thrones-style twist few Australians saw coming

Posted on by Martin Newman

It was the classic Game of Thrones twist that hooked millions of people around the world.

Author George R.R. Martin was adept at building up a character, dropping them in a life threatening situation, offering hope they would escape, then withdrawing it – bloodily.

It happened in the very first episode when Bran was pushed from the tower and continued on its merry way through the execution of Ned Stark, the red wedding and the murder of Jon Snow.

But without Martin’s books as a guide the last two series have been more Lord of the Rings – predicatable and shockless – with the final episode seeming little more than a set-up for a sequel.

The real Game of Thrones moment, the gut-churning twist, the realisation of loss and betrayal Australian fans had sought from the show, came instead on Saturday night – in real life.

As incumbent PM Scott Morrison carried the field in the 2019 federal election, millions of voters anticipating a Labor win looked on in horror.

With bad result after bad piling up around him, quickly and brutally Bill Shorten’s run at leading the country slid inexorably into the abyss.

The celebrations of gleeful Coalition voters felt as painful as watching Robb Stark’s headless body paraded around on horseback. The King of the North.

Shorten, the king of the working class, was just as dead – politically.

In the lead up to the election, it had misleadingly seemed as though everything had gone right for Labor and Bill.

A usually reliable measure of preferences, the leaders’ debates had been twice won by Shorten, clearly.

Even a story suggesting he was misusing his mother’s memory backfired, turning into a ball ache for the Liberals.

Most deaths are regarded as untimely, but the passing of widely-revered former PM Bob Hawke was the opposite. It was incredibly timely. And it seemed to augur success for Labor.

With Paul Keating, Hawke had come out two weeks before to endorse Shorten and a Labor ascendency.

But while Bob’s death wiped a number of anti-Shorten stories off the front pages of the next day’s papers, it may also have acted as a reminder to voters how underwhelming the Labor leader was compared to the greats of the past.

The Coalition had its own moments of luck. An egg aimed at the PM hit but did not break. For God-fearing Morrison, the unexpected recipient of the leadership after Peter Dutton’s failed tilt, it was another miracle, ahead of his ‘miracle win’.

But despite an uncomfortably narrow two per cent lead in the two party preference vote, the media almost unanimously predicted a Labor victory.

Post-election it then turned around to unanimously blame the pollsters rather than its own analysis for getting it wrong. A repeat of the Trump victory. Of Brexit. Of Gladys.

The media has grown fond of asking this question: Can polls be trusted?

Unfortunately, what has been repeatedly revealed is the mainstream media’s inability to analyse accurately.

It’s nothing unusual, factoring in protest voters and those who haven’t thought about it hard yet, that a two per cent poll lead can evaporate or be reversed. That’s all John Hewson had when he went into the ’93 election as favourite and got thumped by Conservative Australia, not prepared to cast their votes for the GST.

An insider in the Liberals’ campaign team told me it had been a source of constant incredulity within the party how wrong the media’s interpretation had been over the past few weeks.

“We focused on 10 key seats in every state, winning those,” she said. “The strategy was clear and we knew the polls were misleading. We were still strong in the first party preferred vote and our own polling showed that seat by seat we could win. Although, we believed by only a narrow margin.”

She added: “We couldn’t understand the single-focus of most of the media on the national poll trend. They just didn’t look beyond it. Nor did they listen.”

So Scott “The Accidental PM” Morrison, now has a genuine mandate to roll out his policies, while fans of fantasy adventures are reminded life provides enough of its own bitter pills to swallow.

Picture: Street art in Melbourne

Calling Aboriginal massacres what they were – war!

Posted on by Martin Newman

Sometimes they gunned them down or poisoned their bread or water. In other accounts groups were driven off cliffs into deep gorges.

There were many gruesome ways to die if you were an Aboriginal in the ‘Frontier Wars’, which researchers say covered a time from 1788 to well past Federation.

In schools this has been taught as a bunch of disparate massacres – a byproduct of nation-building. Not a war, but a collection of executions of small groups by soldiers, farmers, sealers and various other ad hoc militia.

As poorly as American indians have been treated, US historians have at least painted a fair if unapologetic picture of a protracted, one-sided frontier war on a native population unwilling to cede their land to a superiorly armed invader.

The New Zealand Wars, too, were recognised as a conflict over a legitimate prize – ownership of land and the right to use it.

In Australia we’ve well-rehearsed the presentation of our history from a colonist’s perspective.

From the label terra nullius (nobody’s land) considered applicable to Australia since settlement, to the myth Aboriginals were entirely nomadic when there was plenty of evidence to the contrary (read Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu). All of these heavily-weighted descriptions favoured the colonists’ land grab.

The idea of ownership is at the heart of everything our society is built on. To have an asset is to have leverage. Leverage to eat well, to sleep safely, to raise a family and be proud of your place.

Ownership weaves our lives inextricably into the society around us.

Not owning anything is not encouraged in Australia.

And the idea of the indigenous population having no ownership of where they had lived, or of not being organised to defend what they had, is a very convenient perspective.

Professor Jakelin Troy, the director of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Research at Sydney University, laments that the history of Aboriginals in Australia has been taught in isolation.

“Aboriginal massacres have been an open wound since 1788, no one talks about them,” she tells me.

“At least we have a recognition in this country of Aboriginal rights, but we need to teach all the things that have happened.”

To look fairly at the confrontations that occurred when Britain colonised this country, those convenient myths must be stripped back.

That includes acknowledging the indigenous population fought a real war to protect its rights – rights to land, rights to hunt and feed their families. Maybe not an organised war the way the British military would conduct them, but a war nonetheless.

Historian Lyndall Ryan’s ‘massacre map’ which has plotted over 250 such incidents is ample proof that the armed defence by Aboriginals of this land was taking place across the country at hundreds of sites.

You’ve probably heard of the Dharug warrior Pemulwuy, but what about these names: Windradyne, Jandamarra, Yagan or Bussamarai?

They all led a resistance by their tribes to settlers pushing into their territory, and there’s no good reason they shouldn’t be remembered in the same way Americans remember Geronimo, Cochise or Sitting Bull. Heroically.

Aboriginal culture has given plenty to be proud of, but more remains hidden behind this skewed history.

(Originally published in The Daily Telegraph. Illustration of The Battle of Parramatta.)