{"id":51185,"date":"2020-05-08T11:46:20","date_gmt":"2020-05-08T01:46:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nofibs.com.au\/?p=51185"},"modified":"2020-05-19T00:39:57","modified_gmt":"2020-05-18T14:39:57","slug":"musings-in-coronavirusworld-margokingston1-comments","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/musings-in-coronavirusworld-margokingston1-comments\/","title":{"rendered":"Musings in #coronavirusworld: @margokingston1 comments"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"
\u201cLanding Brolgas\u201d, 2015 Marglu Billabong, WA. Photo: Veronica Volkoff<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Hello. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s been a while. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

My last published piece was an editorial <\/a>before the federal election. Two months later my plan to write an #IndependentsDay book ended when my mother was diagnosed with Acute Myeloid Leukaemia the day after my 60th birthday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Solitude in the home my mother and I shared for 14 years. Solitude spent taking responsibility for my home now, for a little while, since Mum\u2019s death, as I go through her papers and mine in preparation for me moving out and my home being sold. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Immersion in politics is my main distraction technique from occupying my own life. I have to do the latter now, run out of choices. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And in general, I reckon, particularly for those who live alone #coronavirusworld, a society built on distraction suddenly shifts to compulsory reflection. Hard.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Anyway, Peter Clarke called me out of the blue three weeks ago to chin wag. I got to know him a little when I came out of a 7 year hibernation from the internet to Tweet in late 2012 and former Webdiarist Tony Yegles built me the No Fibs citizen journalists website<\/a>. Peter, then a media academic, agreed to become NoFibs\u2019 media columnist<\/a> for a while.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A pioneer ABC radio compere, the first presenter of Offspring (Now Life Matters) on RN, then a practical media academic, he’s 70 now and semi-retired. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

His wife Vicki is severely immunocompromised, so self isolation is extreme and meticulous. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

His recipe for sanity in #coronavirusworld? His son Ivan and he built a little sound studio out the back of his home, and he\u2019s begun a gig podcasting news to Asia commissioned by a Melbourne think tank.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Oh. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

What about doing a podcast discussing stuff in #coronavirusworld, I said. That might be fun.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Next thing I know he\u2019s asked Tim Dunlop to join Peter and I in a weekly podcast. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tim Dunlop! We lost touch many years ago, but he\u2019s was an important influence on my professional life. I was introduced when he sent me a 7,000 word attempt to intellectually demolish the case for dairy deregulation early in the new century championed by the Labor Government and in particular Mark Latham. I didn\u2019t know what to do with it so I published the longest piece ever under the Sydney Morning Herald banner, in Webdiary, then called Inside Out, on March 30, 2001 and called it Pull the udder one<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The result: a long refutation by an economic rationalist reader and a typical in your face, emotional counter by Latham. Oh, and dairy farmers around the nation distributed photocopies of Tim\u2019s prescient piece. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tim became a constructive critic of where I was going with Webdiary and his remarks triggered passionate debates among readers upon publication. When his wife was posted to the USA, he began his Road to Surfdom blog, which became indispensable during the Iraq War debacle. And in 2006, soon after Fairfax had crushed Webdiary and forced me to go independent and I\u2019d retired ruined, he was offered a blog on the NewsCorp website – I was thrilled for him, and a little envious. Short lived, course – Tim was sacked when he dared critique a Denis Shanahan piece in The Australian<\/em> newspaper. He\u2019s now a full time writer. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In his fascinating 2013 book, The New Front Page: New Media and the Rise of the Audience<\/em> (Scribe), Tim opened with a chapter on Webdiary<\/a>, the only examination of my baby, a virtual newspaper on the pre-Facebook, pre-Twitter very new SMH website which I wrote, edited, and published reader emails and articles on from 2000-2005. (I dropped doing the PhD mentioned in my intro to Tim\u2019s chapter extract because it was too painful for me to relive Webdiary\u2019s demise.)  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

How could I refuse? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019d decided after Mum died that I needed to withdraw hard from reading and thinking and tweeting #coronavirusworld. Yes, it was the biggest story of my lifetime, and yes, if I let it overwhelm my existence, not a new phenomenon, my life would collapse. Not something you want to happen in #coronavirusworld, because I knew someone would take responsibility for getting me off the floor and that inevitably that person would have their own #coronavirusworld upheavals to deal with.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, as I\u2019d tweeted so often when the the coronavirus upended the world as we knew it, it was a test of character and I had no choice but to step up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet now, a chance to help create a new public space with two people I liked a lot and chat about ideas, abstract based on personal, because #coronavirusworld is everyone\u2019s story now. Fun!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Peter is EP, sound engineer, podcast producer, logo beginner experimenter, the lot just about, and he\u2019s having a ball. We\u2019ve recorded our opener, and after a redo of the intro and closer tomorrow, we\u2019ll be up Friday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We have different conceptualisations of #transitzone and I\u2019m interested in how that will play out. We\u2019re receptive to each others ideas, which I like a lot. I don\u2019t want a focus on the daily to and fro of political news. I find I\u2019m over it, very weird feeling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Predictably I\u2019m into participant listeners. I want a small, engaged, partnership with listeners, and to me that means throwing out there requests for logo designs, topics, structure, anything. We have an email, transitzonepod@gmail.com<\/a> to receive feedback and input.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For the first episode, we each read a two minute audio essay we\u2019d written on a #coronavirusworld topic we\u2019re thinking about. Mine is below, and I\u2019m wondering who might be an interesting guest who knows a lot about the meaning of \u201chome\u201d to have on. Ideas welcome :)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think I might write a weekly blog after each episode on Non Fibs; my main man Wayne Jansson has agreed to publish them if I do. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here\u2019s my opener, drawing on my long, somewhat obsessive Twitter thread<\/a> on #coronavirusworld border closures in Australia. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Love Margo<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Home<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We faced a sudden, evolving, question when #coronavirus ran around the world to occupy our lives. Where, exactly, is home, and why? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nations asked their people to return home before they closed their borders. Citizenship the criteria – the legal right to belong. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then all States except NSW and Victoria closed their borders. First Tasmania, SA, WA and Queensland said only residents of their states could enter after closure.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then Queensland said even they would need a permit, and WA did a hard border closure – Western Australians could no longer come home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In WA there\u2019s a short exemption to visit a seriously ill relative or attend a funeral, so where your family and friendships are comes into play in the notion of home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet it\u2019s more than that. A friend was devastated when WA closed its border hard. She\u2019s fifth generation of a pioneer family in the wheat belt, and she knows exactly where home is despite living in Sydney for 20 years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another friend says she belongs to three places  – Canberra, where she grew up and her parents live, Melbourne, where she lives, and the extended family\u2019s holiday home on the NSW South Coast. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

WA is the only State to create internal borders, five regions where residents must stay in place. In Qld, there was a push for a North Queensland border, and regional tourism towns told visitors, mainstay of their economies, to stay away, even those with a holiday home there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Annastacia Palaszczuk asked us to stay in our suburbs, and I prefer to shop local now. I\u2019m getting to know the supermarket workers, the haircutter and shoppers. Somehow social distancing and a common enemy makes life outside your house more intimate, and for the first time since I moved from Canberra to Nerang to live with Mum it began to feel like home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n


Since she died in February I\u2019ve been packing up her things and mine because my home will be sold and I\u2019ll move to NSW, where my best friend wants me. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But I\u2019ll always FEEL a Queenslander and I don\u2019t  want her borders ever closed to me. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hello.  It\u2019s been a while.  My last published piece was an editorial before the federal election. Two months later my plan to write an #IndependentsDay book ended when my mother was diagnosed with Acute Myeloid Leukaemia the day after my 60th birthday. Solitude in the home my mother and I shared for 14 years. Solitude spent taking […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":51186,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"Musings in #coronavirusworld: @margokingston1 comments #auspol #covid19au","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[3434,2969,3492,3491,3330,3402,3493,585,26,3354],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/05\/brolgas3flyingfp.png?fit=800%2C400&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3t0mw-djz","jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51185"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=51185"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51185\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":51190,"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51185\/revisions\/51190"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/51186"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=51185"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=51185"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=51185"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}