It’s my last day at UQ, which makes a fresh theme seem fitting. The banner design this time is by Sarah Xu, who has been taking the lead for the past few months on the Working From Home project. I think she gets the Home Cooked Theory vibe just right. Thanks Sarah!

One of my fondest memories of working at the CCCS was running the Pig City symposium in July 2007, which we put on the day before the concert featuring the reformed Saints. Hundreds of school kids, Gen Xers and aging rockers descended on campus to either reminisce or hear first hand what it was like to be part of the Brisbane scene in the 70s and 80s. As Clinton Walker put it: “It’s great to be back at UQ. I used to come here often. To buy drugs.” Even though we were in a huge indoor lecture theatre we could still hear the sound-checks going on in the field below. Everyone was pretty excited.

The recordings from that day have never been made public, and as a parting gesture I’m putting them online here.* Listen to these and you’ll get a unique insight into the reality behind the Pig City mythology and the difference between Brisbane then and now.

The line up:

Melissa Gregg – Introduction

Andrew Stafford – Music writer and author of Pig City: From The Saints to Savage Garden

Clinton Walker – Australian Music Historian; author of Stranded: The Australian History of Independent Music 1977-1991

Lindy Morrison and Kiley Gaffney in conversation – introduced by Nadia Mizner

The Future of Brisbane Music Panel - Chaired by John Birmingham

Featuring

* Graham Ashton – Head of Marketing and International Licensing at Dew Process Records (home of Bernard Fanning and The Grates)

* Paul Curtis – Manager of Valve Records and Brisbane bands Regurgitator and I Heart Hiroshima

* Deb Suckling – Project Officer for Qmusic, label manager for Sugar Rush Records and Funk Folk Records and current member of Brisbane band Brindle

* Ian Rogers – UQ postgraduate student and member of Brisbane band Iron On

Please spread the word about these recordings. There’s some valuable local history captured in them spanning the protest era to the Go Betweens love triangle to Ladyfest – plus the inside story on how to get a gig in the Valley. Enjoy!

Meanwhile, a lot has changed even in the time I’ve been living in this town: new galleries, libraries, universities, busways and bridges (and more in progress, much to the detriment of my daily travels).

Not to mention a female Premier, a local Prime Minister, and a woman as Head of State. Whichever way you look at it, this has been a phenomenal time to be in Brisbane. So in spite of the gimmicks of the branding campaigns (Bernard Salt’s recent description of the city as a fried egg – “It has this very dense, funky centre stretching around Spring Hill, New Farm, the Gabba and West End, and all of that is cementing nicely” – takes the prize for the most ridiculous statement in the most offensive article to date), I’ve made many friends here and learned a lot. I’m looking forward to coming back often.

*Thanks to Ian for his work on the day; and to John and Nick for helping me with uploads.

We all left the cinema feeling vaguely depressed and graceless, having been transfixed by the incredible performance of Wei Tang as the heroine Wong Chia Chi. As if to confuse us even more, we ate dinner backing on to a carpark in Chinatown, where one restaurateur was celebrating the New Year in a quite bizarre fashion, singing personal interpretations of John Denver mixed with Christmas carols and dedicated to the hundreds of diners by then smoking and drinking under temporary marquee (this latter reappeared in my dream that night, where another ubiquitous blogger tried to beg his way into my beachfront wedding).

After Kenny Rogers, the ABBA megamix got going, and it was like being forced to spy on a well-catered suburban Australian wedding of the type I used to waitress for in Hobart. It couldn’t have been further from the vision of China for which we had just witnessed the most intense and committed displays of bravery, and in spite of an apparently endless suite of flawed men. I’m still feeling unhinged by the whole thing.

But it did help me appreciate the complicated, chaotic, compromised world we live in, and how regularly it seems to involve being constantly buffetted by the most incongruent trivia just to make sure we don’t ever remain completely comfortable in our response to something. This lack of certainty and my resignation to it feels closely tied to what I understand by ‘having a scholarly temperament’, even though I also lament the way it prevents me from accessing many familiar kinds of mundane reassurance.

Instead Saturday night left me overwhelmed with desire for histories we can hardly dream of, let alone hear about, even if we had time to read all the books we own, or were quiet enough to be able to listen well. It also made me crave more scholars and writers who are driven to blog for reasons other than marking career achievements or articulate position taking (conscious that these are all things I am also seen to be doing); perhaps because they are vulnerable or courageous enough to use this medium to reach out for others who might have their own much better sense of what might be worth caring about.

On this: if you are an Australian reader and you haven’t heard about GetUp’s campaign to help aboriginal elders get to Canberra by Wednesday, they are taking donations here. Any excess funds are being used as part of a long term campaign to make sure ‘sorry is the first step’.

As you might expect, for me this was less an exercise in screen aesthetics than it was a theoretical experiment, and if you watch the video you might wonder why I chose something so incredibly bourgeois and marginal as SBS reception for a topic. The election is hardly going to be decided by a bunch of apartment-dwelling New Farm yuppies – nor should it! But there were a few reasons behind the choice, including:

- an ongoing curiosity at the parlous state of television reception in the capital cities I’ve lived in over time (Sydney and Brisbane most recently);
- a sense of mischief in wondering how lazy one could be in making a news story (hence the title, ‘armchair journalism’);
- to stage a mini-commentary on the forms of representation that count as ‘serious journalism’ (which explains the different voices in the film, the journalist’s tone and the distracted mumblings of an ‘ordinary’ television user.

The footage of the TV isn’t really watchable and it goes on too long and seems kinda pointless… but it’s precisely that aspect of television’s boring and mundane potential that I wanted to capture, along with the sense of powerlessness and frustration in the face of existing media provision that certainly I often feel. When I think about how badly the government has managed important new opportunities like pay or digital television I get incredibly grumpy, and I’m genuinely concerned about the ways the ALP is trumpeting broadband access as the simple answer to the transition to an information economy. This is especially problematic when it refuses to relate this transition in any useful way to its history of trade unionism, and the reinvigorated understanding of workers’ rights to limited hours that we will urgently need with the widespread uptake of always-on technologies.

I’ll have more to say about this in the special issue of MIA I’ve been editing with Gerard Goggin that comes out next month. But it’s the idea that we should always be enamoured and charmed by the promise of more and better technologies (“high-speed internet 40 times the speed of what we have now”) that seems like an increasingly dangerous form of common sense at work in our culture today. Having started my interviews this week on how workers’ lives are being affected by new media and ICTs, it’s far from clear that more speed and more information is what we as a country desperately need.

And that’s why the movie is so strategically centred on the home, the loungeroom: while journalism (‘citizen’ or otherwise) is regularly thought of in terms of the voxpop on the footpath, playing ‘gotcha’ with sitting members or reporting on performances at carefully orchestrated public meetings, I think political feelings are instead decided in these quiet and distracted domestic moments, the cumulative effect of which makes certain people more or less confident or interested in participating in the so-called public sphere of consequential debate.

After posting the video last night I was lucky to be invited to the launch of the Australian Photojournalist, a publication coming out of Griffith University. The edition was launched by Peter Cave, long serving foreign correspondent for the ABC, and winner of 5 Walkley awards. His moving speech talked us through the editing process involved in just a couple of stories he filed from Iraq, including the capture of the first US Hostage, Thomas Hamill. It was an incredibly revealing insight into the skills and ethics involved in producing news stories, as well as the untold effects that the craft of this industry has on those who practice it. And it’s this level of detail, care and consideration that we tend to overlook when – as citizens, bloggers, writers, voters – we feel entitled to evaluate ‘the media’ that produce the information we use to bolster our preferred ideological readings.

Straight from the info sheet:

This research project seeks to provide a voice for ordinary workers to describe the impact of new media technology on their work and home life. It asks whether the independent, flexible and ‘mobile’ work practices made possible by new technologies influence traditional distinctions between work and home life as well as more general attitudes about the appropriate locations for paid labour. Participants will be interviewed once a year for three years in both their workplace and their home. Interviews will last approximately ½ an hour and will take place at different times of the year in each instance. The interviews are designed to allow employees to reflect on how their work and home life has changed over a distinct period of time and to comment on the role of technology in these changes. The evidence gathered by the project will provide an important basis for advising both employers and government on current trends in the workplace so that suitable policies can be formulated for the provision and the limits of technology use for work purposes.

The idea behind the study was to come up with some data to quantify the trickle-effect of the State Government’s significant financial, infrastructural and rhetorical investment in the idea of Queensland as the Smart State; that is, its performative and arguably quite successful management of the necessary shift to an information economy. We hear on a daily basis how many people are moving to the South East corner of Queensland to take advantage of the employment and lifestyle opportunities in this region. Yet we have very little research on what people’s work experiences are like at an organisational or individual level in the very industries that are touted as attractive.

On a broader level, much journalistic attention has been directed to the forms of independent labour developing in the creative sector of this economy, giving rise to notions of the “creative class” of entrepreneurs (and State Government-sponsored lecture tours for their authors). Far less attention has been given to the ways in which new forms of imposition, exploitation and self-surveillance may also accompany these significant changes in work life. The possibility that new technologies may add further layers to already existing inequalities in hierarchical workplaces is rarely entertained, much less accounted for, in available literature. My project sets out to fill this substantial gap in the “new economy” story.

So often it seems that the project-based, entrepreneurial dimension to creative labour is taken as the beginning of a wider shift towards the freelance workplace as norm. Certainly a lot of valuable research is showing the difficulties entailed in such a shift (the work of Ros Gill is one example), but so far we lack resources to describe the experiences of ordinary office workers in the present. A substantial amount of the content produced in the information economy still emanates from big organizations— corporations, government agencies, universities. This is particularly the case in cities like Brisbane: its smaller population may make it an ideal “second office” city for established organizations but it can’t offer the same prospects for freelance work as cities with higher urban density and stronger traditions of artistic practice.

The study attempts to document whether working conditions may actually remain the same within many workplaces, that is, whether the combination of bureaucratic and corporate modes of governance may prevent many workers from exercising much agency in their daily lives at all. Taking larger firms with a diverse range of employees into account will hopefully give some indication of the way changes to labour practice are (or are not) playing out.

We’ve been lucky so far in that UQ employees are signing on already, and the State Librarian has also agreed to let us interview workers at the newly refurbished State Library of Queensland (itself a development of the Smart State policy). Obviously we’re also keen to get other cultural and communication bodies involved, and not just state-funded ones. So while we’re in contact with employees at the ABC at the moment, we’re also wanting to talk to people from News Ltd. and other commercial partners.

If any of these workplace experiences sound like you, or you’d like your employees to participate in the study, please get in touch directly, as it takes a bit of scheduling to set these interviews up. I’d also welcome more general feedback below, but if you’d prefer not to comment publicly, my contact details are available here.

I don’t live on the south side, so unfortunately I can’t take advantage of the “Kiss and Ride” drop-off zone of a morning. But what a concept! From New Farm, travelling to UQ is a long but beautiful endeavor if you stick to the water: at this time of year the journey takes me from the blooming jacarandas at one side of the city to be met by a new family of ducks or a hungry flock of cockatoos greeting me by the lake at the other. When I arrive to scenes like this I have a hard time imagining a more beautiful place to work… at least until I head into an over air-conditioned, flourescently-lit tower and the demands of an Outlook Inbox.

For the first time today I walked over the bridge to work and was confused to find that none of the water bubblers were working. I tried

every

one,

and the most success I had was this:

I would have written this off as a drought-related water saving measure if one of the bridge’s key features wasn’t also out of service; the touch-screen story boards telling about the local area have been broken for months on end.

With the temperature already very warm in Brisbane heading in to summer, I wonder when the council plans to fix the water supply? Why is the bridge being left broken and neglected?

In December it will also be a year since the opening of GOMA and the redeveloped State Library of Queensland, two buildings that are also over-air-conditioned for my feeble thermostat, but which embrace the light and the sky and the feel of Brisbane like no other buildings I’ve seen or imagined possible. (The recently renovated Powerhouse comes close, but it still manages to convey a sense of being a little bit exclusive in parts.)

It’s wonderful to watch these grand new spaces gradually becoming inhabited: by cultured gentlemen snooping through expensive art books in the gallery store on the weekend, international students skype-ing loved ones with free wi-fi, yummy mummies inflicting babychinos on their poor children at the cafe, seniors meeting for cinema club on Sunday afternoon, the little skater dudes being shooed away from the enticing outdoor facades by SLQ security guards.

I have a new favourite cafe that lets me look out at the river through Moreton Bay Figs and laugh at the Riverside “Expressway” with its commuters stuck in gridlock. It sells everything in picnic boxes and you can borrow a rug and the paper while you eat on the grass.

This is the Brisbane I’m learning to live and love in. It might even be fair to say that these three pieces of infrastructure have made the difference between me wondering if I can live here, and believing it. If you haven’t tried them yet, they deserve your patronage. And can you help me make sure they’re looked after, please?

As part of the lead up to the election the NTEU UQ branch has organized a candidates forum at St Lucia campus for the seat of Ryan featuring Ross Daniels, ALP, Jim Page, Democrats, Evan Jones, Greens, Charles Worringham, Independent, and Michael Johnson, Liberal (to be confirmed). Qld Senate candidates have also been invited.

When: 12pm Thursday 18 October

Where: Physiology Lecture Theatre 360 (click for map)

The Forum will be chaired by the NTEU UQ Branch President, Dr Andrew Bonnell. Candidates will present a short outline of their or their party’s policy for higher education (both with respects to students and to the workers who work in higher ed) including such issues as:

University funding
University governance
Student support
The Research Quality Framework
Industrial Relations as it affects Higher Ed workers/students

This will be followed by questions from the floor, discussion etc.

Coincidentally, the request came the day after I gave a talk to 140 of the university’s closest industry “friends” about online intimacy and social networking. A lot of people in the audience seemed both surprised and interested in the dynamics I was talking about and also enthusiastic that research of this kind might help them in various ways. The State Librarian sitting at my table had some very hard questions afterwards, including what libraries should be doing about things like Facebook, and whether their role should involve documenting how these sites are being used. To me, anything would be more fitting in today’s inequitable information environment than the current pressure to provide the physical space and bandwidth to allow chatting, status updates and video downloads for rich kids who can afford to go to uni and therefore could do the same things at home. But as these tetchy comments only indicate, currently I have no good answers to any of these questions, though I’m certainly interested in exploring them.

Something else happening this week is the Australian Blogging Conference at QUT where I will be joining Axel Bruns and Jean Burgess in a session on “Researching Blogging and Blogging Research”. Our panel is scheduled at the same time as the politics and creative commons sessions, so I figure we’ll be struggling to get an audience. Then again maybe a few people will be just as tired as I am with the chauvinism of the journalists vs bloggers wars and trickle into our room.

This conference is being organised under the presumption that ‘everyone is a journalist and therefore everyone is on the record’. In some ways this makes me quite nervous, especially because my most enjoyable conference experiences tend to happen in the margins and often the local pubs surrounding the formal discussion. But the upside is that precisely because the conference remit is that participants will know as much about the topics as the session leaders, we are being encouraged to experiment with alternative forms of dialogue.

In this vein I thought it appropriate to invite those of you who can’t make it to Brisbane to offer your own thoughts on the topics covered in our session so that I can then report back. The initial questions we’re asking are:

* What’s there to research about blogging?
* What research methodologies can be used to research blogging?
* How do blogs support the research process?
* How do blogs contribute to disseminating research?

In the past, I’ve written a bit in response to the first question, and I think Axel’s got some of the best ideas about the second, so I’m especially keen to hear from those of you who have experience to share on the last two. But please leave a comment any kind by Friday if you’d like to be involved.

The extra money means I’ll actually have enough funds to do what I proposed to do in the APD application – that is, hire someone to help me with the interview side of things, and get the interviews transcribed professionally while I get on with other writing and reading. This is going to make a big difference to my current workload, so I’m very happy. Yay!

Below is a pic of me trying to kiss my award, sports lady style, but it was a bit dangerous to get too close:

The catch for getting the award and lots of champagne and turkey sandwiches last night is that tomorrow night I have to give an after dinner talk to the university’s industry “friends”. If only the trophy came with a wardrobe budget…

If you haven’t seen it yet, the You Decide website is recruiting ‘ordinary Australians’ to send in their own coverage of the imminent election campaign. Kiley and Barry’s video shows pretty clearly that the range of views we normally get from the general public in the mainstream media is quite limited. The website overall looks like offering a fascinating contrast to the agenda of the established news outlets, as well as an interesting way to hear about regional issues that struggle to be canvassed outside the local area. They are still looking for reporters, so why not offer your services?

For those of you who have asked about whether the event is being recorded, Radio National will be doing some audio and additional interviews with panelists, so keep an eye on their website.