© 2018 Greg & Sylvia RAY

Stop trying to think outside the square: a presentation for young journalists

IN 2005 I was invited by my union, the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance, to give a presentation to young journalists on "thinking outside the square". I suspect the attendees may have been rather bemused by what I offered them. Reading it again, 15 years later, there isn't much I'd change, however. "Thinking outside the square": it's a piece of jargon from those awful new-age management seminars of the 80s and 90s where they used a pat routine of clever tricks and illustrations to show people that their thinking was constrained. It’s become a cliché. Inside…

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Toilet rolls, bread rolls and miracles

Australia’s ludicrous toilet-paper fiasco makes me think of two things. The first is a South Pacific cruise my family and I once went on. The other is the loaves and fishes story from the Christian New Testament. As for the cruise, the reason it springs to mind is the behaviour of some of the passengers on the ship. To be honest, I knew how it was going to be before the ship even made it out of Sydney Harbour. The people on the upper deck, enjoying the spectacle of passing beneath the majestic arch of the…

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Read more about the article The Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918-20
People being inoculated against the "Spanish Flu" in Australia in 1919.

The Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918-20

On June 18, 1918, German gunner Herbert Sulzbach noted that “there is an epidemic on, what they call Spanish ’flu, so that even leave has been stopped”. It’s a throwaway war diary line about a virus that ultimately killed more people than the Great War itself. The war is estimated to have killed about 18 million (though that number must be greater when those who died later from the consequences of the war are taken into account), but the influenza pandemic killed between 20 and 50 million in the years from 1918 to 1920. Sydneysider Eric…

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