Random Play by Graham Reid

For a week I've waited to see if any media commentators would pick up on the matter, but since no one has I’m going to have a go. And no, it’s not about the gossip columnist who went “undercover” to get alongside Mick Jagger.

My thoughts were about the well-managed press conference outside the White House 10 days ago with China’s president Hu Jintao and George W Bush in attendance. Well managed that is, until it went haywire.

As any observer knows, such events taken months of planning and the nuances of protocol are very important. Every word is scrutinised before and after for subtext and sur-text, every gesture analysed for some deeper or metaphoric meaning.

Nothing is left to chance either before or after the phot opp, and you’d love to know just how many hands the speeches actually go through before they are read aloud.

So that event was always going to be as much about what wasn’t said as what was.

Then suddenly someone said something unexpected -- and pointed out the elephant in the room.

That someone was journalist Wang Wenyi who yelled at Hu that evil people die young and that his time was running out. "Anything you have done will come back to you in this lifetime", she shrieked.

Wang is a Falun Gong practitioner and her yelling -- which went on for almost three minutes -- was prompted by her anger at the repression, torture and murder of Falun Gong practitioners in China. She also berated Bush for his silence on the matter.

Wang writes for The Epoch Times which as even the most casual Sinologist knows rails regularly against human rights abuses in China -- some might say that’s all it does -- and has been very strong in its support of Falun Gong.

She could hardly have been unknown to American security personnel.

That said, a spokesman for The Epoch Times said she had previously attended White House events in her role as a journalist and had “never before exhibited this type of behaviour."

Another spokesman said, "We expected her to act as a reporter; we didn't expect her to protest. None of us had any idea that Dr. Wang was planning this."

I guess she’d just had a gutsful of the oppression, and the hypocrisy of people being nice to the guy she fingered as colluding in it.

Even a cursory reading of Falun Gong literature -- and the increasing number of independent human rights reports confirming practitioners are being imprisoned, tortured and killed, and maybe even having their internal organs harvested while still alive -- is enough to outrage any thinking citizen.

What struck me about that incident -- which of course was not screened on television back home in China -- was Bush’s subsequent comments.

Given that every word is weighed, it was interesting that he pressed home the point -- despite his discomfort at the interruption and an apology to Hu -- that China should expand the freedoms for people to assemble, speak freely and to worship.

That message -- and yes, we know it is a refrain of his along with victory being in sight or whatever -- could have gone unuttered, could have been edited out beforehand because of its sensitivity, could have been pushed aside for the greater message of “free trade” and "co-operation".

But it wasn’t. The bugger just came right out and said what needs to be said: China is a repressive place.

That seems an important point to have not shied away from, especially when commanding the world stage.

I didn’t get the impression that when Chinese premier Wen Jiabao was here a couple of weeks before that any of our leaders so publicly made that important point.

Among the Chinese delegation accompanying Wen was Bo Xilai, the Chinese Minister of Commerce who has been sued (by Falun Gong refugees) for genocide in seven countries including the States, Britain, Poland and Germany. He was the governor of Liaoning province from 2001 to 2004 and during that time it is alleged he supervised the campaign of persecution against Falun Gong practitioners which resulted in a number of deaths (some say the figure reaches into the hundreds).

Local Falun Gong members asked that Bo be banned from entering the country, but he came and Helen Clark said that while she would raise human rights concerns the focus of the visit would be on free trade.

Dunno about you, but I saw no public comment by anyone in government about China’s abysmal human rights record during that visit at all. But the refrain of “free trade” hung heavy in the air, drowning out everything else.

Four agreements were signed: one to strengthen cultural ties in arts, culture, heritage, sport, archives, broadcasting and tourism; a treaty on Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters for greater co-operation between law enforcement authorities; a Deer Protocol (signed by the ministers responsible for food safety, always a big issue of course); and a Memorandum of Understanding on co-operation in education and training.

Our prime minister also announced that we would participate in the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai.

All this is important stuff -- China is New Zealand’s fourth-largest trading partner and accounts for almost 5.5 per cent of our total exports -- and dialogue should be encouraged.

But maybe we also needed someone -- other than local Falun Gong members and sympathizers well away from the frontline -- to point out the obvious: there was an elephant in the room.

At the tail end of 2002 I spent two weeks in Honiara, the capital of the Solomon Islands, on an assignment for the New Zealand Herald. Let me give you some background to the current problems, and also offer a picture of what Honiara is like.

The airport -- not unpleasant but rundown -- is to the east of Honiara. On the way into the capital along the coastal road you pass the Chinatown area (referred to frequently as “the heart of the business district” but it is little more than a few streets and looks like Deadwood or some other scrappy wild west town), and then further on you get to the centre of Honiara.

Central Honiara is smaller than Paeroa, in fact you can walk from one end to the other --- from the market to the Post Office -- in about 10 easy minutes. And there’s not much to see: stores, some government buildings, some office blocks no more than a few storeys high, open air “restaurants“, and people squatting everywhere because there is nothing to do other than chew beetle nut and spit the red juice onto the broken pavements.

Behind the main street are a couple of other roads but again, there ain’t that much to see or do.

The island of Guadalcanal itself is very beautiful in a typically tropical way, but Honiara is definitely Third World.

The tasteful parliament building is on a hill behind the town and the best place for a drink is the Point Cruz Yacht Club, a members-only place where you can sign in as a temporary member, sit around drinking SolBrew, and get the gossip. And there’s always plenty of that.

You can go beyond Honiara to the west but passable roads run out at White River. So from the airport to White River -- the safe zone as I was told on arrival -- takes about 20 minutes by car, and most of that time you are passing fields and a few houses. It ain’t a big place.

You can’t go further because the roads are so badly potholed and broken from flooding and slips that they are impassable. I stood in a pothole that came up to my waist.

Wealthy people -- and there are a few, more on them soon -- live in the hills behind Honiara. The police took me up there to show me where the then-prime minister’s special advisor had been shot at the day before I arrived. A guy had stepped out of the bushes as the car passed and fired a few shots through the boot and back window. It was a serious assassination attempt.

I stayed in a small motel on a hill above the market. Electricity was infrequent, phones unreliable (no one answered anyway) and because the politicians I was trying to find were elusive (“a moving target is harder to hit” as an Australian said) I spent a lot of time just wandering around talking to locals whom I found fierce looking (very black skinned, rebel t-shirts, permanent shades, expressionless faces in what looked like a scowl) but very good natured, quick witted and smart. They opened up easily and smiles were free.

So that’s what the place was like. I only once felt frightened -- there were gunshots in the night sometimes -- and that was when I went down to White River Village by myself, against the advice of locals I should say.

The village was a scrappy collection of huts and there was a menacing feel about the place. I was pinned in by two scowling young men with heavy sticks who took my cigarettes and said nothing, just circled me slowly. I left as soon as I could.

I had arrived in Honiara at the end of what was euphemistically called “the ethnic tensions” but which you and I might better refer to as massacres, beheadings, random shootings and other thuggery.

Here’s a brief overview of the complexity of the Solomons’ current situation.

Everyone agrees the country was not ready for independence in 1978, but it happened -- and, other than bad things, not much has happened since. The infrastructure broke down so roads and buildings started to fall apart (one guy said you could see rust growing on your computer if you turned it off, the air was that damp), and corruption became endemic.

It is a failed state in a region that is on a knife edge anyway, which is why it is important, especially to Australia.

Gun running through the porous borders of the Solomons is not uncommon, and there is a fear the place could be a haven for Islamists.

The Solomons’ culture has many layers: there is the wantok system (“one talk”) which loosely means you are connected to people who speak your language, or more correctly dialect. And there are about 100 different indigenous languages.

More specifically wantok means people from your village, and with these people you share. Wantok affects everything in the Solomons: if you have a shop and someone from your wantok comes in and takes something that’s okay. If your taxi driver is from your wantok you won’t have to pay.

All of which sounds charming, until you get to the police and judiciary. If a policemen is from your wantok he won’t arrest you, a judge from your wantok might just acquit you if you do come to court.

You can see where this leads: you naturally only give jobs to people in your wantok -- and that's nepotism by any other name.

Wantok paralyses the democratic process and means transparency in business is impossible.

Then there is another layer: the resentment between people on Guadalcanal (Gwales) and those from the nearby island of Malaita which lead to the “ethnic tensions”.

Malaitan people are generally recognised as more hard working and ambitious than the Gwales. Ever since the war, when Malaitans were brought over to help build the airport for the Americans, Malaitans have been working their way to the top in business and politics in Honiara. The Gwales resented this.

A further problem was that on Malaita the society is patrilineal, but on Guadalcanal it was matrilineal. So boys from Malaita -- and if you are 60 you are still a “boy” -- would come over and marry Gwale women and of course end up living on the best land.

In the late 90s some Gwales got utterly pissed off with this and formed the Guadalcanal Revolutionary Army to serious kick some Malaitan arse. Many Malaitans fled back to their own island -- although a fair percentage had never lived there -- and the Malaitan Eagles formed.

On Malaita -- which is an astonishingly beautiful island and a terrifyingly slow 40 minute flight in a plane where you can see the rivets popping out -- I met a guy who explained their attitude: you hit me I hit you back twice.

The Malaitan Eagles went to Guadalcanal and beat the shit out of the GRA. There were random killings on both sides, people disappeared and the island of Guadalcanal must have been a nightmare. Add to that various tribal factions with machetes, the fact that the Eagles captured the armoury (such as it was), and a few mad bastards who just liked killing for its own sake and you had a terrifying situation.

A peace was brokered but it had a peculiar quirk in it: former rebels on both sides were made into “special policeman” who could now pick up a wage if they put down their weapons. Word was these guys just wrapped their guns in oilcloth, buried them in the garden and came to town and signed up for the money.

Of course there were an indeterminate number who simply didn’t exist but someone collected their wage for them. Or not.

The Solomons government didn’t have any money to pay these guys so basically you had some very pissed off people -- with access to guns -- who felt betrayed and were just itching to have a go. The day I left a couple of hundred “specials” came to town waving sticks, drinking SolBrew -- two and these boys are explosive -- and spoiling for a fight.

But wait, there’s more: corruption infects every aspect of Solomons government. Bribes and kickbacks (added to wantok protectionism) are the order of the day. Most of the previous government should be behind bars, they just took aid and development money and put it in their own pockets (to help out those in their wantok, of course).

Then you have The Big Unaddressed Issue: the influence of the Chinese and Taiwanese.

Businesses in Honiara are largely owned by local Chinese. You enter a shop and a Chinese owner is sitting by the till at the door. But you seldom see the Chinese anywhere else, they keep to themselves. They were the most invisible people I had ever not seen, until I found a small and very good Chinese restaurant behind the town. That was where they would meet and do business.

The overseas Chinese and Taiwanese are pumping money into the Solomons because they can see the mineral, fisheries and logging potential.

On paper the Solomons should be a wealthy place, but of course corrupt politicians have very deep pockets.

So there has long been a seething resentment amongst Solomon Island people -- whether they be Gwales, Malaitans or from whatever wantok -- against the Chinese who they see as taking their money, their land and buying their politicians. No surprises then that the Chinese-owned Pacific-Casino Hotel and shops in Chinatown -- where it struck me few Chinese lived actually, they are up in the cooler hills -- got hit hard in the riots.

Those who didn’t accept the appointment of Snyder Rini as the prime minister and went on a rampage have a point: he’s tarred with same brush as all the long-running politicians and it is widely accepted he’s a frontman for Chinese business interests.

So that’s the background, the Solomons is very broken and not easy to fix.

As recently as two years ago armed gangs were on the move outside Honiara.

Australasian military and police on the ground will be able to restore order, but cannot address the endemic problems the Solomons face which involve a cultural ethos which runs counter to the democratic process, deep seated resentment between Gwale and Malaitans which has not gone away, rage against overseas interests stripping the country of its natural assets (the Malaysians are in there boots and all too), and the usual mad bastards and wide boys who suddenly appear at times like these and are spoiling for a scrap. With anyone.

Let’s hope those specials don’t start digging up the guns.

PS: The two stories I wrote for the Herald about the situation in the Solomons -- more considered and poetic than this bare outline -- won me the Media Peace Award in 2003, judged by the very nice Jim Tully who took in good humour my previous posting here in which I deliberately misused his name. Cheers Jim.

In an unexpected outburst on Sunday morning the head of Canterbury University’s Journalism and Augury School, Professor John Tulley bemoaned declining standards in cliche writing by New Zealand journalists, and noted an increasing tendency for writers to go beyond stating the obvious.

Tulley’s comments were prompted by newspaper reports on the recent visit to New Zealand by the actor and singer Russell Crowe, and concerts by the Rolling Stones.

In the case of Crowe, he told a crowded bar near Christchurch’s Cathedral Square, he had seen one columnist in a Sunday paper not mention that the actor had once thrown a telephone at a hapless desk clerk.

“Now this was senior writer whose work I have often respected, but here was a flagrant example of someone avoiding the cardinal rule of journalism: to tell the readers something they know already.

“An incident like Crowe throwing a telephone, no matter how long ago, is always worth bringing up in serious writing, even if it is ‘apropos of nothing’, as we say in journalism -- which is Greek for meaning it hasn’t got a lot to do with anything.

“I was equally disappointed that another Sunday paper, and more surprisingly a respected weekly current affairs magazine, didn’t take the opportunity to re-litigate the fight between Russell Crowe and Eric Watson, the gentleman who used to own that blonde woman called Sally, of whom incidentally we don‘t seem to be hearing enough of either these days.

“These are more than just oversights, they are wilful acts on the part of editors and journalists who seem determined not to condescend to their readers.”

Tulley said he also noted that when the Rolling Stones came to New Zealand last weekend two journalists writing for Sunday papers not only failed to mention the collective age of the long-serving members of the group but also did not refer to them as “the Rolling Bones, or as old and wrinkly people”.

“Again we see a deliberate avoidance of easy and shallow characterisation which has been the hallmark of some of the best columnists for many generations. It is all too easy in the case of a group like the Rolling Stones to discuss their music or even applaud their longevity, but when a cheap shot is available I can see no reason why these writers would not choose to take it. It injects lowbrow and obvious humour to their work, and shows the writer to be somehow superior to the subject. Those are both hallowed cornerstones of journalism, particularly as it is practiced by columnists.

“I can only think there is some failure of direction from editors, or that a pernicious kind of intelligence has some how crept in.”

Tulley’s comments have been applauded by many in the world of serious journalism, especially by those who write horoscopes, cover golf tournaments and write about fashion.

Editor of Fashion Weekly, the very lovely DeeDee Schnitz-Muller said she too had noticed some individuality creeping in, especially amongst aspiring freelance writers, and she had been at pains to stamp it out.

“I have noticed that some young writers fail to mention Karen Walker, Kate Sylvester and Trelise Cooper in their copy, and if that’s the case I simply send it back to them. You often get someone who will write something critical of our iconic New Zealand labels, and I have no time for that at all.

“We are here to be supportive of our wonderful fashion industry and so of course need to talk about how hard these darlings are working. They don’t need to be critiqued, least of all by those who want to chop down tall poppies and don’t have a firm grasp on the principle of cliches.”

Today Tulley -- a veteran journalist who fought in the Fairfax Wars -- says he will be discussing the matter with senior newspaper editors in the hope that some measure of clichéd writing will be returned to journalism in the near future. He also says that he will be looking closely at the journalism courses the university is offering.

“We will be putting in place a raft of measures which will come to fruition in due course. But at the end of the day it’s down to the editors at the coal face.”

Not all in Tulley’s audience were impressed by his outburst however. Sixth year journalism student Andrew Marks was in the bar when his professor began the discussion and said today that while he agreed on some points he really didn’t want to hear them at 1am on a Sunday morning.

“But there was bugger all you could do. With the new laws here you can’t just leave the pub and bugger off to another, so we had to sit it out.

“Fortunately after a while he put himself to sleep with what he was blabbing on about, so we could just sink a few quiet ones. In a way it was probably useful for us to hear I suppose because journalism means you have to think for yourself.

“Journalism is all about your mental fitness, doing the hard yards and going the distance.”

Some time in the mid 70s the late Alistair Cooke -- in one of his patrician but always fascinating Letter From America programmes -- spoke about an old editor he worked under. On a slow news day the editor would haul out a book of important events in history and scour the pages.

He’d usually return with a wonderful idea for a story and would be triumphant when the article appeared the following day and his paper beat all its competitors by covering some event as significant as the 143rd anniversary of the Battle of Barossa.

Well, this isn’t quite like that -- but today is a significant anniversary. And one which, unlike most anniversaries, might make you think.

Twenty five years ago the space shuttle orbiter Columbia was launched from the Kennedy Space Centre, 20 years to the day after Yuri Gagarin’s historic space flight.

The Columbia -- which on take-off looked like an elongated Taj Mahal -- circled the Earth 36 times in two days. Then, miraculously, it landed and was used again. And again. In all it undertook an astonishing 27 successful space missions.

However in January three years ago it broke up on re-entry killing the seven astronauts on board. On that flight it had been up 16 days and among the crew were the first Israeli astronaut and the first woman of Indian birth.

On previous missions the Columbia had carried the first Hispanic American astronaut and the first member of the US House of Representatives into space.

And Eileen Collins, one the great figures in space exploration, was the first woman to command a shuttle when she took her seat in the Columbia in 1995.

If you are ever lucky enough to go to the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida someone is bound to tell you how shuttle pilots vie to be the closest to a particular landing spot on the massive runway which disappears into the distance between the low scrub and marshland.

Collins still holds the record by some margin. She could, as the Americans say, land that thing on a dime.

There are many people -- like me, obviously -- who can remember Neil Armstrong landing on the moon, but what is interesting now is just how much we take this space stuff for granted.

Ask around: how many men have walked on the moon?

A dozen in total -- and they’ve driven around in buggies and camped out there too.

Once upon a time people dreamed of flight. These days kids can sign up for astronaut programmes. I guess they figure if that guy from NSYNCH can do it . . .

About 18 months ago I spent some time at the Kennedy Space Centre. Just looking, not training of course. I assume a drink driving conviction precludes you from taking hold of the joy stick on something which burns a thousand gallons of gasoline a second.

What impresses is the scale of everything. When you reach for the stars you are dreaming big, and having to think big to accomplish it.

We stood outside a building so high condensation clouds formed inside it some days. We drove alongside a runway that was the width of Eden Park (stands and everything) and gazed in awe at rocket engines in which we could have misplaced our house.

After the Challenger disaster in 86 there seemed to be a loss of will within the US administration to keep funding the space programme at the same level. The tragedy of the Columbia three years ago has been a further blow to space exploration.

There will always be debate about whether all this is a waste of money when there is poverty here on Earth. If one child is going hungry why would Man try to reach for the distant planets?

Well, there is no simple answer to that. You end up in a world of metaphors about dreams and human aspiration, a discussion about Man’s desire to reach into the beyond.

In that regard Man has come a long way.

My father had a crystal set when he was a boy and saw the maiden voyage of the airship R101 when it crashed in a field in France on its way to India. Later in life he was on a PanAm flight that took him halfway round the world, with cocktails and dinner.

Forty-five years ago today Yuri Gagarin was the first human being to go into space, and only 25 years ago Man went up in vehicle that allowed a safe re-entry, and which you could use again. When you think about it, it makes most of the news today seem meagre and petty.

Look past the sad headlines of the moment and you have to concede, we’ve come a long way in some things.

Twenty-five years ago?

Hell, the Checks weren’t even born then.

It’s not just any day I go to Real Groovy and look for David Bowie’s idiotic 1967 single The Laughing Gnome. But this is not just any day. It is the day after the night before -- and last night my book Postcards From Elsewhere won the Whitcoulls travel book of the year at the TravCom awards.

I have been very self-effacing about my book, and indeed just minutes before the announcement I was saying to someone that it was just a lightweight summertime reading thing and so on.

(Ironically you couldn’t find in bookshops before Christmas, I was told they clear out such things because large format stocking-fillers by Jamie Oliver and Peta Matthias hog the shelves.)

But I have been modest about my book (my “award-winning book“, ho-ho!), so much so that when I was called to the stage -- and believe me there was no thank-you list prepared in advance -- I referred to the description of it by Chris Bourke (formerly Kim Hill’s producer) who said it was “a dunny book”. He meant that as a compliment.

Anyway, I've been downplaying my book, but no longer. The more I read about people who are “passionate” about mixing cocktails or will “die for” a decent cup of coffee the more I realise we live in an age of pretentious hyperbole.

I’m not about to go down that path, but I am now going to say (and respected judges have concurred) that my book is actually pretty okay. It’s a damn good read (with photos!) and not that expensive either. Even you could afford a copy. (Speaking of which you can buy it through this site, along with other fine books by Public Address bloggers -- and I am suggesting you do, it’s an award winner and I’m “passionate” about travel! It has jokes too.)

So last night was an unexpected delight and I want to go on record here to thank all those who made the book possible, notably the people at Random House and my beautiful wife and loyal supporter Megan without whom . . .

If you can’t afford the meagre $29.95 I think it is in some libraries but, generous fellow that I am, I have also put a couple of sample chapters here -- one about an odd island off the coast of Korea and the other about Breaux Bridge in the bayou -- which also has a number of other travel stories, about 150 photos and some very cool and appropriate music by my son AB.

Check it out, it’s kinda fun.

Also on that site you may read (should you care to) my potted biography which ends -- because it is my CV as I tout for work as well -- with a list of the journalism awards I have won. I say this because there is a weird irony here.

You might note that I have picked up a few awards sponsored by the airlines Qantas and Cathay Pacific. And yet not once -- not even last night when I got a generous cheque for $2000 and $500 in book tokens from Whitcoulls -- have I ever won a trip anywhere.

Given that most travel sections are full of writing by people who have flitted off on a contra deal I might have to investigate that, non?

Aaaaanyway . . . the David Bowie song: I need it for the talk I am giving at the Art Gallery on Sunday (3pm, and it‘s free), a follow-up to the very popular one last weekend which -- I am told by someone who has no reason to fib -- pulled the biggest audience they have had this year.

(That can’t be true of course: we went to hear John Berendt recently and there wasn’t a spare seat in the place -- and at mine there were two.)

Anyway I did find The Laughing Gnome at Real Groovy and maybe later today I‘ll bang it on the stereo.

But right now it’s time for some Panadol, a bottle of Coke and a lie down.

This is not just any day.

PS: For those who wrote in support of my recent post bemoaning the paucity of local coverage about Thailand’s current political woes you might be interested to know that PM Thaksin has just stepped aside. Maybe they’ll have something on the news about it?