News & Events
To receive notice of ACIJ news and events, send a message to acij@uts.edu.au
2008 Events
'Forsaken Voices - Desecration and Plunder in the Democratic Republic of Congo' - 9 September
Caritas, the Catholic aid agency, will launch 'Forsaken Voices', a report into human rights abuses in the Democratic Republic of the Congo on Tuesday 9 September at UTS. Interviews with victims of abuse is documented. A short film will be shown. ACIJ is supporting this event. All welcome.
Venue: Building 4, Level 2, room 34 (4.2.34), Cnr Harris & Thomas Streets, directly opposite the ABC.
Time: 12 - 2pm
RSVP: acijmanager@uts.edu.au or Jan McClelland on 9514 2295
Media enquiries: Tim O'Connor, Caritas Communications Director, 0417 284 831
Munster award - independence in reporting - 19 September
Entries to this year's George Munster Prize for journalism represents many of the main stories in the media over the last 12 months. They include gripping investigative pieces, human interest stories and stories that reflect on the diversity of Australia and its place in the world. The winner of the Munster Prize will be announced at a public forum on Friday 19 September. The theme of the forum will be announced late August.
Time: 6 for 6.30pm - 8pm
Venue: University of Technology, Sydney, Guthrie Theatre, 702-730 Harris Street, Building 6, Level 3, Ultimo
Free public event - free drinks and refreshments
RSVP: For catering only - Jan McClelland on 9514 2295
The Munster forum will be broadcast on the ABC Radio National Big Ideas program.
Reportage Festival: 8 - 26 October
Reportage Festival: 8 - 26 October - Festival of Australian & International Photojournalism and photography - ACIJ will be hosting a panel on Saturday pm 11 October at the Chauvel Cinema, Oxford & Oatley Road, Paddington. More details Reportage Festival.
2008 Public Right To Know conference; 17 & 18 October, University of Technology, Sydney
Registration has opened for the 2008 Public Right to Know conference: 'Giving the people what they want'.
Abstracts will be posted end August. You can register for the conference now.
Click here for details of previous events.
Sydney Writers Festival - moderating on conflict and suffering - Tony Maniaty
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The best writers' festivals, like great journalism, belie the enormous work that goes into them, and, indeed, all the hard slog that goes into creating books in the first place. (As Nathaniel Hawthorne once noted, "Easy reading is damn hard writing.") Sydney this year was no exception; the breezy harbourside venue, the holiday feel (complete with sidewalk cafes) and the insoucance of those writers who, either by style or subject, make it seem so effortless: all conspired to create a relaxation out of sync with harsh realities beyond the glistening horizon. |
With this in mind I accepted with some trepidation the Festival's invitation to moderate sessions on conflict and suffering; did anyone really want to hear about humankind's misery on a sunny Sydney afternoon? The first gig suggested my fears were unfounded. "The Lessons of Vietnam" drew a solid crowd to hear two speakers who, in many ways, were polar opposites. Professor of history and international relations at Boston University, Andrew Bacevich, is a veteran of the Vietnam and Gulf Wars who gained his PhD on American diplomatic history from Princeton, and made friends and enemies for his staunch opposition to the current Iraq War. He's the bestselling author of The New American Militarism, which argues the United States is embarked on a fatal mission, deploying its armaments globally to impose its will on the world. Andrew had, I discovered, great conviction and many contradictions; he was also articulate and sat with a ramrod posture.
Next to him was a very dishevilled Paul Ham, Sydney correspondent for The Times in London, who had just flown in from Burma where he'd been reporting (undercover, posing as an Aussie tourist) the devastating impact of Cyclone Nargis and the military regime's failure to swing into action. (His protective byline in The Times was a cheeky 'Harry MacKenzie'). Paul, who last year published his majestic Vietnam: The Australian War, looked every inch the battered correspondent, unshaven and bleary-eyed, and with regulation crumpled shirt and dusty boots.
It proved, from an interviewer's perspective and for the audience, a dream ticket: engaging, provocative and surprisingly good-humoured given the bleakness of the topic. The joint verdict from both Andrew and Paul: the Vietnam debacle that defeated America militarily for the first time in its history offered a hundred powerful lessons for Iraq, but who was listening?
Andrew joined me on the pier two days later (again, spick and span) to team up with another polar opposite, arguably the best print reporter of the Iraq War, The New Yorker's Jon Lee Anderson. (That judgment is by no means mine alone; reviewers worldwide have compared his gripping The Fall of Baghdad to other great war writing including Orwell's Homage to Catalonia from the Spanish Civil War and Michael Herr's Dispatches from Vietnam.) As a conflict reporter, Jon Lee Anderson has been around: as well as Iraq and Afghanistan, he's filed from Lebanon, Liberia, Angola, Colombia, Venezuela, Cuba, Northern Ireland, Uganda, Sri Lanka, Burma, Bosnia and Iran, yet in person - tall, lanky and goateed - he's as far removed from the archetypal, sweated-encrusted war junkie as you could get.
His demeanour is more of a small-town newspaper editor, not prone to over-excitement or sudden outbursts, and a first reaction might be that he's a man who's seen far too much of humanity's excesses for his own good. That quickly shifts to the realization that he's more thoughtful, balanced and considered than the great bulk of his profession. Carefully and dramatically, with the precision of someone who loves the English language, Jon Lee had the capacity audience hanging on his every word. ("The blast from the bomb that blew up the Mount Lebanon Hotel in Baghdad in mid-March knocked me out of my chair and sent my coffee flying out of its cup," began one of his Baghdad reports in 2004. "A few seconds later, there was a burst from what sounded like a Kalashnikov..."). He's a correspondent who not only knows how to tell a story, but who knows the value of getting well-sourced information in the first place. Jon Lee was the perfect foil for Andrew Bacevich, though both agreed the conflict in Iraq was a disaster of immense and still unpredictable proportions.
My third gig at this year's Sydney Writers' Festival was called, rather staunchly, "Commentariat". What power do the Op-Ed pages have in the shaping of national and international policy? Is it naive to believe that news pages still reflect factual information? And is a new wave of political bloggers challenging existing media pundits? This was sexy stuff, plugging into all sorts of fears about "opinionated" online media versus the old "fact driven" school of journalism. The line-up was stellar: English philosopher John Gray (Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia), James Reston Jr. (The Conviction of Richard Nixon), and New York Times contributor David Rieff, whose latest book Swimming in a Sea of Death, about the death of his mother Susan Sontag, had been creating wide interest in the global media. So why didn't this session really take off? On paper it was terrific, but competing egos, a topic too vast to funnel into a mere hour, late in the day, too many overlapping voices all conspired to leave us exhausted. I wasn't entirely sure we even reached the topic itself, although the audience seemed, as always, happy just to be in the company of good writers.
For the ACIJ, participation in the Sydney Writers' Festival was more than worth the effort. (We unfurled our new stage banner there for the first time.) Outside the sun was shining, yachts were sailing past, the crowd was joyous - yet oddly, our most successful sessions were those most concerned with war, human suffering and strategic policy. This told me two things: literary festivals are the ideal place to deliver an iron fist in a velvet glove, and readers are as deeply concerned as ever about the world's troubles. Heartening news for journalism.
