Edges of my Life.

     With David Brill, American Southwest.      Transcripts old school .      Helen Caldicott in Nashville, Tennessee. 1978.       Flores, coast road to Tikal and the Jaguar Inn.        Guatemala. 1987     Morgan V8, Bonaire, Dutch Caribbean.   Leo Phillips.  my father and me. Miss Moon’s cottage, Mt. Dandenong,   Victoria.       Mapping a journey, lay of the land .      Melbourne Age, Saturday Review.  Office picnic with Geoffrey Wild and wife-to-be Libby mid sixties.       On location Nevada chasing the atomic bomb.          Gone feral.           Papua New Guinea highlands late sixties.                             Hinch and Laurie - late 90’s Gordon “Mr. Bear” Bennett and his lovely Ec...

  El San Salvador. Circa 1988 WPP notes The Camino Real Hotel. Saturday night. Two blocks from El Salvador’s Camino Real Hotel in the capital. Mariachi musicians in tight yellow pants and jackets cinched at the waist - guitars,violins and curvaceous bass fiddle. On the Boulevard los Heroes soliciting work. In the hotel entrance the attendant bows and clicks open the door of the shining Mercedes. A dark skinned Indian maid carries a small child in a ruffled white shirt to the limousine. The elegantly dressed couple slide in and the door clicks shut and they drive off into the night.  The affluent elite is cloistered from the war. They live in high-walled mansions with full-time, heavily armed body guards. There are said to be fourteen families that run El Salvador and this is the pattern throughout the Americas. If you have money and influence it is unlikely you’ll be drafted into the army.  That afternoon at the seaside town of La Liberdad we find a restaurant with a few ...

                           Kern Bullock sat astride his horse early one spring morning. It was May,1953 and he was moving sheep from Nevada across the state line to Utah on the trail home to Cedar City two-hundred miles north, "kinda watching the sheep grazing. I heard this noise above me and I looked up and there were these planes flying overhead. They looked military - then a few minutes later there's this big flash and it just blinded me - I remember covering my eyes and then I seen this cloud going up and up and it just started spreading out across the sky'." Between March 17 and June 4 that year, the United States government's Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) detonated eleven atmospheric nuclear bomb tests. The series was code-named "Upshot-Knothole".  It was 1982 and I was traveling out west on assignment for Australian Broadcasting, tracking the story of the atomic bomb and the deadly hangover that follows. ...

      R.I.P. Aussie and Squeaker   Vanderbilt Avenue storefront backyard, 2000

    The Unheeded Message of the Holocaust   An interview with Polish underground courier, Jan Karski. 1986. Audio   Jan Karski, Polish underground worker, Catholic – he wrote a book called “Story of a Secret State” (Houghton Mifflin, 1944) after the war - describes his experiences - visit Warsaw Ghetto - invited by the Jews - and to a concentration camp to see for himself - an eyewitness - not a Jew but a Catholic - to take back word of the Holocaust to Britain and America. Claude Lanzman’s ground-breaking film Shoah, explores Polish communities' passive participation and complicity in the Jewish holocaust. Jan Karski appeared and initially refused to be interviewed by Lanzman and stalked out of the room. The filmmaker finally  persuaded Karski to return and sit for his first interview following the war.   I'd seen Shoah in three long sittings over three days in New York. About a month later I was returning on the train from an a...

I was invited to write this piece for Project Censored  by its director Mickey Huff.  At the time I was interim general manager at KPFA, Pacifica Radio in Berkeley CA (2011-2013). Project Censored is a media research, education and advocacy initiative that champions the importance of free press. The project's mission is to expose and oppose news censorship and promote independent investigative journalism, media literacy and critical thinking.  The Pacifica foundation was founded in 1946 by poet and journalist Lewis Hill and a small group of pacifists, intellectuals and experienced radio people They did not have the same political or economic philosophy but shared a vision which supported a peaceful world, social justice and creativity. At 3pm, April 15, 1949, Lew hill sat behind the microphone and announced: "This is KPFA, listener sponsored radio in Berkeley, the first such radio station in the world”. At the time, less than nine-percent of the Bay area radio audience o...