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.

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.