Letter to the Editor:
While I am delighted that Cynthia Banham, in her piece on the conference on the ABC (The Trouble with Aunty, April 2), drew attention to my bringing a touch of Melbourne fashion flair to staid, casual Sydney by referring to my flashy green vest and red coat, her piece trivialised an excellent conference.
Her condescending coverage of Col from Wollongong exemplified my complaint about middle-class journalists sneering at working-class Australians for failing to express themselves in the nuanced language of the tertiary-educated.
Rather than displaying such class prejudice, she could have better spent the space mentioning the excellent paper by Tony Moore, publisher of Pluto Press. But that would have got in the way of the simplistic story of Right v ABC.
Banham's piece read like something written by someone with very little experience of life or of ideas outside the standard narrow media range -- thereby exemplifying the points Pru Goward and I both made about the narrowness of Australia's intellectual culture and the failures of contemporary Australian journalism.
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