Dear Andrew,
We got one point wrong on Media Watch and will correct this on air on
Monday night. On advice from the Australia Council we said Alison
Broinowski had received only two council grants. She did, as you wrote, get
three: in 1982, 1985 and 1987. But three grants so long ago still cannot justify
your abuse of Broinowski as an obscure, “grant fed” artist propped up by the
Australia Council.
Now to take the rest of your objections in order.
You say you have never accused Broinowski of being a traitor. But you
repeatedly accused her in the Herald Sun of betraying her country. You
accused her of taking the side of Australia’s enemies – the extremists who blew
up people in the Sari Club and apologists for those extremists. You
misrepresent her as endorsing a range of attitudes Asian bigots and xenophobes
display towards Australia. You accuse her of “exporting” an untruthful image
of Australia (“calumnies”) to the world both as an artist and a diplomat and
thereby doing “damage…to this fine country, particularly overseas.” Together
these accusations amount to a bizarre and unsubstantiated claim of betrayal.
You deny accusing Broinowski of believing Australia deserved the slaughter in
Bali. In fact you did so in a number of ways. Sure, you quote her disclaimer –
“I don't say the tourists deserved their fate but, with hindsight, what happened
to them is predictable” - but you then go on to claim she shares the views of
xenophobe critics who says Australia and Australians deserved the atrocity.
This is how you do it:
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First you cite her quotation of a Malaysian xenophobe who “condemns us
for having made the air of the bombed Sari Club reek of beer and sound
‘jagged with Strine’.”
Second, you nail the opinion to Broinowski. “Would a glass of wine and
Alison's private-school vowels make us perhaps less deserving of slaughter?
To reach this self-loathing judgement – that Indonesians would naturally
want to kill us for being allies of the democratic United States or for our
lifestyle – Broinowski must ignore….”
Third, having made it her opinion – her “self-loathing judgement” – you
then birch her for holding such views in light of a number of racist and
extremist statements by Asians hostile to Australia which she must
“overlook” to believe what she does. These quotes are, in fact, provided by
Broinowski in the book to show the depths and dangers of Asian prejudice.
She is reporting them, not endorsing them.
You deny “dishonesty” in your representation of Broinowski’s views in the
Herald Sun but the fact that your letter of complaint gives a far more
reasonable account of her arguments only emphasises the dishonesty you
showed originally in your column. It is too late now – after viciously insulting
her in print for endorsing the xenophobes – to claim you only ever thought she
was warning Australia to listen and learn from Asian bigots. It is too late and,
again, dishonest.
You ask the strange question: “How can you prove that I knowingly
misrepresented her views, rather than make an honest mistake?” If you now
believe what you said was, in fact, an inadvertent mistake – please say so and
we can be done with this.
You deny claiming the Australia Council funded her latest book. No other
interpretation of your opening attack on Broinowski is possible: first you
complained about her getting “so much help from the Australia Council to
write books you’ve never heard of” and then you moved straight into an attack
on her latest book. For you now to pretend you didn’t mean to convey that this
book, too, was funded by the Australia Council is simply disgraceful. You were
misleading your readers.
You didn’t like Media Watch’s quip that in your eyes Broinowski’s academic
career was her “worst crime of all”. But when we asked you for additional
material to back your abuse of Broinowski as a “grant fed artist”, you provided
details of a routine academic career – a handful of research grants – plus some
philistine rhetoric about “taxpayer-funded universities” which reeked of
prejudice against her in particular and academics in general. It is encouraging
to learn from your letter of complaint that you consider academic careers “very
respectable indeed” and we trust future columns in the Herald Sun will reflect
this view.
Nor did you like our remark that Broinowski's “ingratitude” is what “really
rankles” with you. In your letter of complaint you insist that you believe – as I
do – that artists must never be beholden to those who give them grants. But in
the Herald Sun your attacks on Broinowski were suffused with the notion that
this woman was betraying the country that supports her – there she is (at least
in your eyes) kept afloat by the Australia Council, yet out there betraying
Australia to the world. If you’d been thinking straight at the time, you might
have complimented her rigorous independence in The Herald Sun!
For a commentator so used to dishing out abuse, you seem remarkably
uncomfortable in the face of criticism. I note that in the days immediately after
Media Watch took you to task for your Broinowski column, you threatened a
defamation suit, sought to institute an official ABC complaint, protested to the
chairman, the managing director and a number of senior executives of the
ABC, demanded personal apologies from me, viciously abused and
misrepresented me in your column and advanced the strange claim that you are
the victim of a “campaign of state-sponsored political harassment”.
All your complaints will be addressed but, in the end, the uphill battle you face
is to convince your Herald Sun readers that you are being fair and truthful. We
suggest you concentrate on the task.
David Marr
Media Watch