Showing all posts about Australia

Text publishing bought by Penguin Random House. Exciting, right?

29 January 2025

Independent Melbourne based Australian book publisher Text Publishing was recently acquired by Penguin Random House Australia, a subsidiary of Penguin Random House (PRH), one of the world’s largest publishers. While the move has been hailed as “exciting” by Text and PRH, some literary commentators do not feel the same way.

Both parties say they are committed to retaining Text’s independence as a PRH imprint, but this isn’t always the long term outcome, says Misha Ketchell, writing for The Conversation:

But history shows that mergers often result in the dissolution of the smaller imprint. To take just one example, Penguin no longer publishes books under the McPhee Gribble imprint. It is precisely the question of which readerships the merged version of Text will cater to that will worry Australian readers and supporters of independent publishing.

Text obviously have their reasons for making the deal, and their independence as a PRH imprint appears to be hard wired into the acquisition agreement. Those concerned about the future of independent book publishing in Australia have reason to be fearful though. Text joins other previously standalone local publishing houses, Affirm Press, and Pantera Press, in being bought out by larger book publishers in 2024. Australia is running low on indie publishers.

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Good Luck, Babe! by Chappell Roan tops 2025 Hottest 100

29 January 2025

American pop singer and songwriter Chappell Roan’s 2024 track Good Luck, Babe! was voted the favourite song of 2024 by Triple J listeners in this year’s Hottest 100 music poll.

In taking out the top spot, Roan collected the most number of votes ever for a number one song:

The number of votes clocked isn’t the only landmark fact about Chappell’s win. ‘Good Luck, Babe!’ was her only eligible track for voting and her only song in the countdown, which makes her the first solo female artist to win a Hottest 100 with her sole entry.

There’s also good news for Swifties in the 2024 countdown, Taylor Swift notched her first ever entry into the Hottest 100.

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Colonising Mars the same way Australia was colonised

28 January 2025

Sussan Ley, deputy leader of the Liberal (conservative) opposition party in Australia, has likened Elon Musk’s plans to establish a colony on Mars, to the British colonisation of Australia:

Addressing the St Matthew’s Australia Day mass in Albury, Ms Ley insisted that British settlers did not land at Sydney Cove “to destroy or to pillage”, but in an experiment to establish a new society. “In what could be compared to Elon Musk’s Space X’s efforts to build a new colony on Mars, men in boats arrived on the edge of the known world to embark on that new experiment,” Ms Ley told the church service.

Despite their intentions, over ten thousand Indigenous Australians were killed in clashes with early Australian settlers, between 1788 and 1930.

Ley’s remarks were made on Australia Day, Sunday 26 January 2025. The day is often marked by protests in some quarters, and greeted with ambivalence by others. There are Australians who would like to move the date away from 26 January, being the day in 1788 that the British established a colony at Sydney Cove. Some Australians, particularly Indigenous peoples, feel that the 26 January date celebrates an invasion, rather than national pride.

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Demolishing the AC/DC house, and what little rock history Australia has

18 January 2025

I’m not really a fan of the band that was formed in Sydney in 1973, and is still going strong, but it seems odd that the house where founders, brothers Angus and Malcolm Young used to live, and founded AC/DC, was not worthy of preserving. For those not in the know, AC/DC are probably Australia’s version of the Rolling Stones. But last month, the residence, in the inner-west Sydney suburb of Burwood, was bulldozed to make way for a high rise apartment block.

This might sound like over-development on steroids, but many parts of Australia, including Sydney, are experiencing accommodation shortages, and high density housing is one of the solutions. While numerous people, including the local municipal council, were aware of the house’s history, this was not enough to spare the property. Mind you, I’m not sure how the house could have been kept, and somehow integrated in the much needed residential development.

For more about the story of the “AC/DC house”, and its demolition, check out this short YouTube clip by Sydney Morning Herald writer, Tom Compagnoni.

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Summer time forming La Nina possibly coming to Australia

8 January 2025

Tom Saunders writing for ABC News:

Your average La Niña forms in winter, peaks in late spring, then gradually weakens through summer. However, the current edition has not played by the rule book — for only the second time in 75 years, its onset has arrived in the middle of summer.

This is something I’ve been wondering about. Over the summer months especially, I keep a close eye on the ten-day weather forecast. I’m looking out for upcoming days where temperatures are expected to exceed thirty-degrees Celsius. This because we do not have air-conditioning in either of the places we stay at. So we plan we be elsewhere, where possible, on super warm days.

But, in scanning the ten day forecast for our part of the world, there is — as of when I write this — not a single day expected to reach thirty-degrees. The nearest is twenty-eight degrees. Weird, considering January is the warmest month of the year where we are. A surprise La Niña event, kind of, explains the generally lower temperatures.

To be clear though, La Niña, and El Niño weather events do not really influence temperature: they are more indicators of rainfall levels in the northern and eastern regions of Australia. Higher in the case of La Niña, lower for El Niño. But, higher rainfall usually means more cloud cover, which will in part moderate temperatures.

I’m all for not-so-warm summers. Temperatures in the high-twenties aren’t too bad. And providing the dewpoint level stays below twenty degrees, humidity levels aren’t too oppressive either. But I’m not so sure about the accompanying rains, which can result in extreme flooding in some areas.

A La Niña weather event is yet to be officially declared, while the Australian Bureau of Meteorology has moved away making such announcements (probably because people like me write blog posts like this), so we’ll have to wait and see. La Niña, and El Niño weather events however are one of sometimes several concurrent phenomena that influence weather across Australia, meaning certain sorts of weather cannot always be attributed to one particular event.

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Australia, land of the most expensive passport in the world

2 January 2025

From yesterday, 1 January 2025, the price of a ten-year Australian passport rose to four-hundred-and-twelve Australian dollars. That’s the cost of thirty-five pints of Victoria Bitter at the local pub.

Happy New Year.

As a comparison, the new price converts to a little over two-hundred-and-fifty dollars American, a little under two-hundred-and-fifty Euros, and about two-hundred British pounds. However, the hefty price tag is justified, according to a spokesperson for the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, who notes that the Australian passport is “a high-quality travel document”:

“The Australian passport is respected internationally as a high-quality travel document. It has a high level of technological sophistication, backed by rigorous anti-fraud measures, which ensures its integrity,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “This is a key reason why Australian passport holders receive visa-free access to over 180 countries.”

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I’ll just be asking for you… Telstra’s 2023 Christmas advert

23 December 2024

Let’s flashback a year. Australian telecommunications company Telstra might have hit the right note with its Christmas theme advertising in 2023, by way of this ninety second commercial. The song excerpted in the ad is Oh Christmas, by Brisbane based duo Zefereli. Listen to the full length version here. It may not happen often, but sometimes the big corporates get it right.

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Snow and heatwaves: this is Christmas in Australia

23 December 2024

Weather that is fine and not too warm seems to the Christmas Day weather forecast for most of Australia. But the days either side will be a different matter, writes Tom Saunders for the ABC:

The tumultuous week of variability will commence with a wintry Monday for the south-east, even cold enough for brief snow on the Alps, followed just days later by a blast of hot northerly winds and potential catastrophic fire danger.

Presently, day time high temperatures on this part of the east coast are forecast to be relatively mild. With the exception of Friday when the mercury is predicted to reach thirty-six degrees Celsius. I think we’ll be spending most of that day deep in the shade somewhere.

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Will Australian social media users need ID to prove their age? Maybe not

9 December 2024

At some point in 2025, Australians under the age of sixteen will no longer be able to operate social media accounts. I thought up to high school age, about thirteen, seemed sensible, but lawmakers decided otherwise. Anyway, I imagine the new regulations will require, eventually, those of us sixteen or over, to verify, or certify, that we are of the correct age.

With Instagram (IG), I’ve been a member since 2011. So unless I joined up when up when I was four years old, age verification seems pointless for long standing accounts. But not necessarily. There are situations where accounts may have changed hands. A page — or more specifically, a username — once established by a person of adult age, may now belong to someone under the age of sixteen.

I don’t know how often it happens, but social media usernames or accounts, probably change ownership on at least some of semi-regular basis. I’m talking about personal pages here, not accounts run on behalf of a business or organisation. These would most likely change stewardship when the person, maybe a social media manager, previously looking after the page, leaves that role.

I receive a couple of requests per year from people asking if I could “transfer” my personal IG page to them. They probably like the account name. I politely decline the polite requests (I’ve had a couple of not so courteous… demands before). I can only imagine the pressure people with IG handles, such as, well John, must be under to relinquish their usernames, but I digress.

To prove though we are the right age to be using social media in Australia, will we need to scan our driver’s licenses, or passports, into an app? A sometimes, cumbersome, awkward process. Please try retaking the photo of your passport in a better lit setting. Hopefully not. Instead, writes Stilgherrian, at The Weekly Cybers, everything we need may already be on our smartphones:

According to The Mandarin, tests of Australia’s Digital Trust Service (DTS), run by driver registry peak body Austroads, have shown that the credentials already in digital wallets can be used to verify proof-of-age at point-of-sale transactions without needing additional personal data.

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Australian high school drama Heartbreak High returns for third series

13 November 2024

The third — and it seems, final — series of Heartbreak High, in the second inception of the gritty Australian high-school TV drama, is on the way. Set at the fictional Hartley High, in Sydney, Heartbreak High originally screened between 1994 and 1999.

A rebooted version of the show debuted in 2022. Series one of the reboot was well received all around, and garnered a one-hundred percent Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer rating. Series two, while popular with audiences, did not however do so well critically.

The original nineties show was considered ground-breaking (read: in your face), and as I wrote before, Heartbreak High made my high-school days seem like a non-event…

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