The Great Post Office Scandal

 

The fight to expose a multimillion pound IT disaster which put innocent people in jail

By Nick Wallis

This “factual thriller” from the journalist Nick Wallis details a scandal which has been described as one of the most widespread and significant miscarriages of justice in legal history. On 23rd April 2021, the Court of Appeal quashed the convictions of 39 former Subpostmasters and ruled their prosecutions were an affront to the public conscience. They had been prosecuted by the Post Office using IT evidence from an unreliable computer system called Horizon.

When the Post Office became aware that Horizon didn’t work properly, it covered it up. Nick describes how a group of Subpostmasters worked out what was going on, formed a campaign group and fought the government-owned Post Office through the courts to eventual victory.

My comments

I read about the scandal of the British Post Office computer system in The Guardian. The book on it details how the organisation was prepared to avoid investigating complaints about the system and instead assume it was foolproof, and blame the users of it for problems. This included forcing local post office owners to pay for supposed financial shortfalls, often taking them to court and having some falsely jailed. It is also a terrible reflection of the justice system in that courts were prepared to accept that a computer system couldn’t have bugs.

The system did not give the local users a decent ability to delve into transactions to enable an easy reconciliation of a days work. Instances are mentioned where, on advice from help desk staff a reversal entry doubled the error, yet they took no further and didn’t find out why this could happen..

Truganini

 

Truganini

Journey through the apocalypse 

Cassandra Pybus

 The haunting story of an extraordinary Aboriginal woman.
'A compelling story, beautifully told' - JULIA BAIRD, author and broadcaster

'At last, a book to give Truganini the proper attention she deserves.' - GAYE SCULTHORPE, Curator of Oceania, The British Museum

Cassandra Pybus's ancestors told a story of an old Aboriginal woman who would wander across their farm on Bruny Island, in south-east Tasmania, in the 1850s and 1860s. As a child, Cassandra didn't know this woman was Truganini, and that Truganini was walking over the country of her clan, the Nuenonne.

For nearly seven decades, Truganini lived through a psychological and cultural shift more extreme than we can imagine. But her life was much more than a regrettable tragedy. Now Cassandra has examined the original eyewitness accounts to write Truganini's extraordinary story in full.

Hardly more than a child, Truganini managed to survive the devastation of the 1820s, when the clans of south-eastern Tasmania were all but extinguished. She spent five years on a journey around Tasmania, across rugged highlands and through barely penetrable forests, with George Augustus Robinson, the self-styled missionary who was collecting the survivors to send them into exile on Flinders Island. She has become an international icon for a monumental tragedy - the so-called extinction of the original people of Tasmania.

Truganini's story is inspiring and haunting - a journey through the apocalypse.

'For the first time a biographer who treats her with the insight and empathy she deserves. The result is a book of unquestionable national importance.' - PROFESSOR HENRY REYNOLDS, University of Tasmania

My Review

This was praiseworthy book that gave me so much more than I expected. It was interesting to learn that the indigenous people were very dedicated to their family and fellow tribe members.  
It is such a painful history with enormous betrayal, especially by Robinson, and hate filled violence by the white invading settlers. At one stage there was a move to give the Aboriginal people the North East of Tasmania, but Robinson prevailed and they were denied this.
The research for this book was obviously extensive and it is written in easy that makes reading easy. 

Rating 5/5

Sunburnt Country

Sunburnt Country
The History and Future of Climate Change in Australia
Joëlle Gergis

What was Australia's climate like before official weather records began? How do scientists use tree-rings, ice cores and tropical corals to retrace the past? What do Indigenous seasonal calendars reveal? And what do settler diary entries about rainfall, droughts, bushfires and snowfalls tell us about natural climate cycles?

Sunburnt Country pieces together Australia's climate history for the first time. It uncovers a continent long vulnerable to climate extremes and variability. It gives an unparalleled perspective on how human activities have altered patterns that have been with us for millions of years, and what climate change looks like in our own backyard.

Sunburnt Country highlights the impact of a warming planet on Australian lifestyles and ecosystems and the power we all have to shape future life on Earth.

My Review

Actually not yet read, but when I first saw that the book Sunburnt Country was published, I thought I have read a lot of books on the subject and perhaps I will skip this one.  However after reading an article in The Age on 30 December 2018, I was inspired to buy the book.  I found from the article that Joëlle was someone to really look up to and a person who wanted to help save the world while there was time.

The Desert and the Sea

The Desert and the Sea

977 Days Captive on the Somali Pirate Coast
Michael Scott Moore


Michael Scott Moore, a journalist and the author of Sweetness and Blood, incorporates personal narrative and rigorous investigative journalism in this profound and revelatory memoir of his three-year captivity by Somali pirates—a riveting,thoughtful, and emotionally resonant exploration of foreign policy, religious extremism, and the costs of survival.

In January 2012, having covered a Somali pirate trial in Hamburg for Spiegel Online International—and funded by a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting—Michael Scott Moore traveled to the Horn of Africa to write about piracy and ways to end it. In a terrible twist of fate, Moore himself was kidnapped and subsequently held captive by Somali pirates. Subjected to conditions that break even the strongest spirits—physical injury, starvation, isolation, terror—Moore’s survival is a testament to his indomitable strength of mind. In September 2014, after 977 days, he walked free when his ransom was put together by the help of several US and German institutions, friends, colleagues, and his strong-willed mother.

Yet Moore’s own struggle is only part of the story: The Desert and the Sea falls at the intersection of reportage, memoir, and history. Caught between Muslim pirates, the looming threat of Al-Shabaab, and the rise of ISIS, Moore observes the worlds that surrounded him—the economics and history of piracy; the effects of post-colonialism; the politics of hostage negotiation and ransom; while also conjuring the various faces of Islam—and places his ordeal in the context of the larger political and historical issues.         

A sort of Catch-22 meets Black Hawk Down, The Desert and the Sea is written with dark humor, candor, and a journalist’s clinical distance and eye for detail. Moore offers an intimate and otherwise inaccessible view of life as we cannot fathom it, brilliantly weaving his own experience as a hostage with the social, economic, religious, and political factors creating it. The Desert and the Sea is wildly compelling and a book that will take its place next to titles like Den of Lions and Even Silence Has an End.

My Review

4/5

Quite an interesting story to read. As I am short-sighted I can sympathise with the author having to go almost a 1000 days without his glasses. Much of his time in captivity was boring for him and also for his captors, some of whom were treated him not too harshly but others were much less decent.

For a story where not a lot happened most of the time, it was still a good read, which is testament to the Michael Scott Moore who was both the captive and author.

Silent Invasion

Silent Invasion: China's influence in Australia by  Clive Hamilton

In 2008 Clive Hamilton was at Parliament House in Canberra when the Beijing Olympic torch relay passed through. He watched in bewilderment as a small pro-Tibet protest was overrun by thousands of angry Chinese students. Where did they come from? Why were they so aggressive? And what gave them the right to shut down others exercising their democratic right to protest? The authorities did nothing about it, and what he saw stayed with him.

In 2016 it was revealed that wealthy Chinese businessmen linked to the Chinese Communist Party had become the largest donors to both major political parties. Hamilton realised something big was happening, and decided to investigate the Chinese government’s influence in Australia. What he found shocked him.

From politics to culture, real estate to agriculture, universities to unions, and even in our primary schools, he uncovered compelling evidence of the Chinese Communist Party’s infiltration of Australia. Sophisticated influence operations target Australia’s elites, and parts of the large Chinese-Australian diaspora have been mobilised to buy access to politicians, limit academic freedom, intimidate critics, collect information for Chinese intelligence agencies, and protest in the streets against Australian government policy. It’s no exaggeration to say the Chinese Communist Party and Australian democracy are on a collision course. The CCP is determined to win, while Australia looks the other way.

Thoroughly researched and powerfully argued, Silent Invasionis a sobering examination of the mounting threats to democratic freedoms Australians have for too long taken for granted. Yes, China is important to our economic prosperity; but, Hamilton asks, how much is our sovereignty as a nation worth?

My Review

3/5 

A very interesting book that raises many worrying things that are happening in Australia. Several of the episodes are publicly known but much more is not and politicians and the media are mostly quiet about the situation.

Bad News

By Anjan Sundaram

Published 2016

My review

I found the book jumped about a lot and did start to wonder how factual it was.  I have discovered a few reviews and web information that casts some doubts but there is plenty of suggestions out there in various newspapers that all is not as it seems in Rwanda.  One also can't be certain of bona fides of the reviews that suggest it is all fiction and lies.

However I think some references could have been included to assist, for example where it was stated that the Millennium Challenge Corporation funds were forfeited. It would have reduced that feeling of uncertainty.

 

I did some searching on the internet and that did provide some indications that the country was not free and the press were heavily constricted.

 

Rating  2/5

Telagraph UK

For example http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/rwanda/7900680/Paul-Kagame-Rwandas-redeemer-or-ruthless-dictator.html#

By Richard Grant 22 Jul 2010

Twagiramungu persevered, even after two of his most prominent supporters disappeared without trace, and Kagame won 95 per cent of the vote.

 

The government has closed down two critical news­papers, and arrested a journalist for defamation (he compared Kagame with Hitler) and divisionism. A dissident general has survived an assassination attempt in South Africa, and a newspaper editor who linked it to the Rwandan government was murdered in Kigali. Two opposition parties have been prevented from registering, and the vice-president of one, Andre Kagwa Rwisereka of the Democratic Greens, has turned up dead from machete wounds. Political rallies have been been broken up violently by the police, and two Hutu opposition candidates have been arrested, one for divisionism, the other, Victoire Ingabire, for the Orwellian crime of 'genocide ideology’.

Is Kagame a benevolent dictator, the strong hand needed to pull Rwanda forward into a better future, or is he an incurable despot? If you hold him up to the light in the right way, you can see both facets glinting at once.

Washington Post

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/another-rwandan-dissident-assassinated/2014/01/24/10bff274-82ca-11e3-9dd4-e7278db80d86_story.html?tid=a_inl

By Lara Santoro January 24, 2014

But as human rights organizations keep noting, the survival rate among Rwanda’s dissidents is not h'igh .

Human Rights Watch

And certainly the Human Rights Watch report that  in 2015  "tight restrictions on freedom of speech and political space remained in place"   

https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2016/country-chapters/rwanda

Book Publicity

Hearing a blast, journalist Anjan Sundaram headed uphill towards the sound. Grenade explosions are not entirely unusual in the city of Kigali; dissidents throw them in public areas to try and destabilise the government and, since moving to Rwanda, he had observed an increasing number of them. 

What was unusual about this one, however, was that when Sundaram arrived, it was as though nothing had happened. Traffic circulated as normal, there was no debris on the streets and the policeman on duty denied any event whatsoever. This was evidence of a clean-up, a cloaking of the discontent in Rwanda and a desire to silence the media in a country most of whose citizens were without internet. This was the first of many ominous events.

Bad News is the extraordinary account of the battle for free speech in modern-day Rwanda. Following not only those journalists who stayed, despite fearing torture or even death from a ruthless government, but also those reporting from exile, it is the story of papers being shut down, of lies told to please foreign delegates, of the unshakeable loyalty that can be bred by terror, of history being retold, of constant surveillance, of corrupted elections and of great courage.

It tells the true narrative of Rwandan society today and, in the face of powerful forces, of the fight to make explosions heard.

Island Home: A Landscape Memoir

by Tim Winton

Published 2015

My Review

This is a short book dealing with what has happened to the land and people in Australia from Tim Wintons viewpoint. One message that struck me was the failure of people to really appreciate the land.  Different chapters dealt with quite varied subjects, such as his boyhood memories of places and others describing places visited during adult years.

The chapter (power of place)  talking about writing was less interesting to read and I found myself keen to get to the whereas others were quite a pleasure to read.  Overall I enjoyed the book.

Rating 3/5

Book Publicity

'I grew up on the world’s largest island.' 

This apparently simple fact is the starting point for Tim Winton’s beautiful, evocative and sometimes provocative memoir of how Australia's unique landscape has shaped him and his writing. 

Wise, rhapsodic, exalted – Island Home is not just a brilliant, moving insight into the life and art of one of our finest writers, but a compelling investigation into the way our country shapes us.

Quarterly Essay 60 Political Amnesia

How We Forgot How To Govern

by Laura Tingle

My Review

The situation of the change in the movement of people with knowledge is noticeable to anyone who has been around for a while and Laura Tingle makes the point very well how this reduces the advice flowing all the way through government agencies and to the Australian and State governments.  It has all come to a peak under the idiotic Abbott government. A book well worth reading.
Rating 3/5

Book Publicity

Whatever happened to good government? What are the signs of bad government? And can Malcolm Turnbull apply the lessons of the past in a very different world?
In this crisp, profound and witty essay, Laura Tingle seeks answers to these questions. She ranges from ancient Rome to the demoralised state of the once-great Australian public service, from the jingoism of the past to the tabloid scandals of the internet age. Drawing on new interviews with key figures, she shows the long-term harm that has come from undermining the public sector as a repository of ideas and experience. She tracks the damage done when responsibility is “contracted out,” and when politicians shut out or abuse their traditional sources of advice.
This essay about the art of government is part defence, part lament. In Political Amnesia, Laura Tingle examines what has gone wrong with our politics, and how we might put things right.
“There was plenty of speculation about whether Turnbull would repeat his mistakes as Opposition leader in the way he dealt with people. But there has not been quite so much about the more fundamental question of whether the revolving door of the prime ministership has much deeper causes than the personalities in Parliament House. Is the question whether Malcolm Turnbull – and those around him – can learn from history? Or is there a structural reason national politics has become so dysfunctional?”—Laura Tingle, Political Amnesia
Laura Tingle is political editor of the Australian Financial Review. She won the Paul Lyneham Award for Excellence in Press Gallery Journalism in 2004, and Walkley awards in 2005 and 2011. In 2010 she was shortlisted for the John Button Prize for political writing. She appears regularly on Radio National’s Late Night Live and ABC-TV’s Insiders.

Into The Silence

The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest
by Wade Davis

My Review

This was an intriguing book and, although I knew a bit about Mallory, it dealt in considerable detail and most insightful. The parts about the various characters lives prior to the attempts on Everest were very interesting and well written.  In particular the events of the first world war were quite eye opening for me as I was quite unaware of the culpability and absolute stupidity of the generals running the war and the extent of the carnage they caused.
 
It was the longest book I have read for  many a day and took a long time to read, but it never became tedious or heavy going.

rating 4/5

Book Publicity

A magnificent work of history, biography and adventure.

If the quest for Mount Everest began as a grand imperial gesture, as redemption for an empire of explorers that had lost the race to the Poles, it ended as a mission of regeneration for a country and a people bled white by war. Of the twenty-six British climbers who, on three expeditions (1921-24), walked 400 miles off the map to find and assault the highest mountain on Earth, twenty had seen the worst of the fighting. Six had been severely wounded, two others nearly died of disease at the Front, one was hospitalized twice with shell shock. Three as army surgeons dealt for the duration with the agonies of the dying. Two lost brothers, killed in action. All had endured the slaughter, the coughing of the guns, the bones and barbed wire, the white faces of the dead.
In a monumental work of history and adventure, ten years in the writing, Wade Davis asks not whether George Mallory was the first to reach the summit of Everest, but rather why he kept on climbing on that fateful day. His answer lies in a single phrase uttered by one of the survivors as they retreated from the mountain: "The price of life is death." Mallory walked on because for him, as for all of his generation, death was but "a frail barrier that men crossed, smiling and gallant, every day." As climbers they accepted a degree of risk unimaginable before the war. They were not cavalier, but death was no stranger. They had seen so much of it that it had no hold on them. What mattered was how one lived, the moments of being alive.
For all of them Everest had become an exalted radiance, a sentinel in the sky, a symbol of hope in a world gone mad.

Maverick Mountaineer

 

 

Maverick Mountaineer

by

Robert Wainwright

 

My rating: 4 out of 5 stars

 

My review

Interesting story of a very competent planner of mountain climbs and highly skilled.  Also an extremely good chemist
 
I did enjoy reading this and was quite interested in how advanced George Finch was as far as mountaineering equipment.  He made himself down clothing whilst all other climbers were in traditional woollen clothes and jackets.   He also used lots of layering with clothing to achieve levels of warmth.  Finch was a pioneer and advocate of using oxygen for Himalayan peaks much to the consternation of most others and had to fight hard to convince them.
 
A chunk of the book deals with the Everest expeditions of 1921  and 1922 and the rivalry with Mallory.  Because of the nasty nature of the English alpine club establishment George Finch was not asked to go on the ill fated 1924 expedition.  He was barred from the 1921 one and it was only because he was the best mountaineer living in England, although Australian by birth; a factor that also the stuffy establishment resented.

 

Book Publicity

The first full-length biography of George Ingle Finch - maverick Australian mountaineer, scientist, concert pianist and father of actor Peter Finch.

George Ingle Finch, mountaineer, soldier, scientist, rebellious spirit, boy from the bush, was in his day one of the most famous men in the world. In 1922 he stood at the highest point on Everest, a feat not bettered for 30 years. He invented the predecessor to the puffer jacket and pioneered the use of oxygen in climbing. A World War I hero whose skills also helped save London from burning to the ground during the Blitz of World War II, he was a renowned scientist who was personally chosen by Nehru, the first Indian prime minister, to help lead his nation into the modern world.

With a private life torn by war and misguided by social norms, a reputation as an outsider among the British alpine climbing establishment, and some rough and ready 'colonial' habits, Finch was a brilliantly colourful character - so why has he vanished from the pages of history? In this first full-length biography, Robert Wainwright surveys the man who is now best known as the father of Academy award-winning actor Peter Finch - but who was so much more.

The Well at the World’s End

Four Degrees of Global Warming edited by Peter Christoff

 

Four Degrees of Global Warming: Australia in a Hot World  edited by Peter Christoff

My rating: 3 out of 5 stars

 

 

My review

After reading some publicity and reviews of this book, I was expecting something that really would give me a feel for what conditions would be like in a 4 degrees hotter world.  In many ways the book did, but I felt it could have drilled down to scenarios that discussed everyday problems living would like.  Not trying to single out any author, but just to illustrate the point, the cost of health following the Queensland floods is presented as  being a small cost in comparison to to a 2 degrees world and petty cash in a 4 degrees scenario.   It would have been useful to try to put a dollar value on this down to the $ per taxpayer.  Insurance likewise could have been treated like this, because insurance companies have already made calculations so some of this information could have been used. To demonstrate the impacts.

The book is presented more as an academic book with all the cross references which doesn't make it easy for the general reader.

Book Publicity

At Copenhagen in December 2009, the international community agreed to limit global warming to below two degrees Celsius to avoid the worst impacts of human-induced climate change. However climate scientists agree that current national emissions targets collectively will still not achieve this goal. Instead, the 'ambition gap' between climate science and climate policy is likely to lead to average global warming of around four degrees Celsius by or before 2100. If a 'Four Degree World' is the "de facto "goal of policy, we urgently need to understand what this world might look like.

"Four Degrees of Global Warming: Australia in a Hot World "outlines the expected consequences of this world for Australia and its region. Its contributors include many of Australia's most eminent and internationally recognized climate scientists, climate policy makers and policy analysts. They provide an accessible, detailed, dramatic, and disturbing examination of the likely impacts of a Four Degree World on Australia's social, economic and ecological systems.

The book offers policy makers, politicians, students, and anyone interested climate change, access to the most recent research on potential Australian impacts of global warming, and possible responses.

A Matter of Principle by Conrad Black

 

My Review

A Matter of Principle by Conrad Black
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Reviews I had read prompted me to buy the book, but it did not live up to expectations.

He is somewhat a right wing character and dismissive of anyone with views not aligned to his. I am not sorry that he was unable to get control of the Australian newspaper group Black mentions he was trying to buy; we already have more than enough newspapers pushing right wing views.

So much of the book at least to the point where I stopped reading, which was just over 100 pages of the 590, dealt with tedious financial matters, lots of name dropping of people who has met and about the meetings. When Black discussed what went on in the writing and editing of papers things were somewhat more interesting. However I decoded to give it away as a quite uninteresting book as I felt it was a waste of my time and I would be better off reading something else.


View all my reviews

Book Publicity

In 1993, Conrad Black was the proprietor of London's Daily Telegraph and the head of one of the world's largest newspaper groups. He completed a memoir in 1992, A Life in Progress, and "great prospects beckoned." In 2004, he was fired as chairman of Hollinger International after he and his associates were accused of fraud. Here, for the first time, Black describes his indictment, four-month trial in Chicago, partial conviction, imprisonment, and largely successful appeal.

In this unflinchingly revealing and superbly written memoir, Black writes without reserve about the prosecutors who mounted a campaign to destroy him and the journalists who presumed he was guilty. Fascinating people fill these pages, from prime ministers and presidents to the social, legal, and media elite, among them: Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair, George W. Bush, Jean Chrétien, Rupert Murdoch, Izzy Asper, Richard Perle, Norman Podhoretz, Eddie Greenspan, Alan Dershowitz, and Henry Kissinger.

Woven throughout are Black's views on big themes: politics, corporate governance, and the U.S. justice system. He is candid about highly personal subjects, including his friendships - with those who have supported and those who have betrayed him - his Roman Catholic faith, and his marriage to Barbara Amiel. And he writes about his complex relations with Canada, Great Britain, and the United States, and in particular the blow he has suffered at the hands of that nation.

In this extraordinary book, Black maintains his innocence and recounts what he describes as "the fight of and for my life." A Matter of Principle is a riveting memoir and a scathing account of a flawed justice system.