The High Wood

We are pleased to present an extract from a previously undiscovered novel by Franz Kafka. It is entitled ‘The Hyperlink’ and seems remarkable prescient for its time.

ACMA: Mr Kafka, your website links to a site on the ACMA blacklist. Remove the link or you will be fined $11,000 per day.

Kafka: What list is that? Can I see it?

ACMA: No, Mr Kafka. The list is secret – we can’t tell anyone what’s on it.

Kafka: But my website only links to my wife’s Fluffy Toy Shop, my grandmother’s Stray Cat Welfare site and fifteen Federal Government websites.

ACMA: I’m afraid we can’t comment on any individual website, Mr Kafka.

Kafka: This is ridiculous. Oh very well. Which one do I have to remove?

ACMA: I’m sorry, Mr Kafka, but if we told you that we’d be telling you it was on the list and we’ve already told you that list is secret.

Kafka: So I have to remove all links from my website?

ACMA: Oh no sir. Just the one on the blacklist.

Kafka: Yes, but which one is it?

ACMA: I’m sorry sir, we can’t tell you that.

etc. etc.

Well, I never thought I’d say it, but I owe John Howard an apology. Sorry, John. I would have sworn that no other Australian government could have come up with the deceit and stupidity which characterised your time in power but I was wrong.

Senator Stephen Conroy, the Federal Communications minister, has come up with an internet filtering idea of which Franz Kafka would have been proud. The government will maintain a ‘blacklist’ of sites which ISPs must block. Even linking to one of these sites will be a criminal offence.

But, there is no way to find out what is on the list. Which means that there will be a sudden increase in the number of criminals in Australia – admittedly part of our proud tradition but we were doing fine anyway thank you very much. Revealing what is on the list is, in itself, a criminal offense.

Now, I’m completely in favour of prosecuting every child pornographer we can lay our hands on. I’m happy to fill Long Bay with them and if we accidentally lose the key it won’t affect my sleep. But, this is not the way to do it.

Ignoring for the moment the technical problems associated with filtering and the impossibility of dealing with secure, encrypted connections, there is simply no way we can both keep the list secret and guarantee that it only contains ‘bad’ sites.

For example, a recently leaked list shows that one Queensland site was on the list because the owner had committed the heinous crime of being a dentist. All right, none of us like going to the dentist but I don’t want to be prosecuted just because I link to his site. Especially given that I had no way of knowing (apart from his evil profession) that he was on the list in the first place.

While the technical problems have been exaggerated a little (Cisco make some very powerful and expensive hardware which can perform Deep Packet Inspection with very little loss of speed) this is not the point. It is (adjusts soapbox) a serious invasion of our rights. It is the classic totalitarian tactic of depriving the populace of information – in this case with the clever twist of making it illegal to try and find out what you are not being told in the first place.

However, we still live in a democracy. The fact that we put up with John Howard for more than ten years proves that. So, if the issue is seen to be sufficiently unpopular as to actually start costing votes, the pollies will take notice.

If we all make enough noise about it, Conroy will eventually get a tap on the shoulder and one of the party enforcers will have a little chat with him starting with the the dreadful words “Stephen, ma-a-a-a-ate…” and it will all be quietly dropped.

This is my little contribution. Please make yours. If nothing else, link to it – if you get told to remove the link we will at least know one item on the list.

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Last weekend, Pamela and I went up to Katoomba for the 14th annual Blue Mountains Music Festival. We stayed at the historic Carrington Hotel – built in 1882 and a most elegant place to stay. I always prefer to stay in such places, even if some of the room facilities are also historic.

There were six venues of varying sizes playing more or less continually. This meant there were more acts available than you had time to see (a welcome change from your average Science Fiction convention, concerning which I have written elsewhere). The Carrington (at the top of the hill) had two of the venus but the other six were at the bottom of said hill so we got quite a bit of exercise.

We ended up seeing the following (in chronological order):

ℵ Bluehouse: a real find. A pair of Melbourne-based female vocalists who were great. We bought the cd.

ℵ Blue Mountain Rain: a Blue Mountains based bluegrass band who don’t seem to have their own website. They overlapped with Bluehouse so we called in to have a look. They weren’t at all bad but the main problem I have with bluegrass is that the first song sounds fabulous; the second good but rather like the first one; the third is ok but really sounds a lot like the other two; the fourth one – I know I’ve heard this before, time to go and listen to something else.

ℵ Pugsley Buzzard: a gravel-voiced stride/blues pianist playing various classics (Your feets too big; closer to the bone). Took a little while to get going but great once he hit his stride (no pun intended). He was in the small ballroom at the Carrington and it was packed so we had to leave a bit before the end due to oxygen deprivation. Still recommended.

It was by now 4 pm and what with one thing and another we were very tired so we went and had a little nap before the evening’s festivities. Waking refreshed and groggy at quarter to six we headed down the hill looking for something to eat prior to a 7pm act we wanted to see.

We didn’t anticipate any problem finding something to eat – we had seen plenty of eateries earlier, easily enough to feed all the festival attendees. It was not until we walked past a long series of closed cafes that we realised that this is city thinking and probably most of the proprietors had in fact gone to the festival.

Eventually we found a place with an ‘Open for Dinner’ sign outside with a list of dishes of the Bangers and Mash variety. This would do, we thought. However, upon entering the waitress-person told us that they were only serving coffee and cake. But there’s a sign outside saying ‘open for dinner’, we protested. Yes, she says looking puzzled, it said that yesterday as well.

Finally we found a Chinese restaurant. It wasn’t high cuisine but it sufficed and, fortified by Won Ton soup and noodles we stepped out to continue down the hill. There was a major thunderstorm going on. The awning beneath which we stood did not continue all the way down the hill and we did not have an umbrella. Unwilling to sit wet and shivering through a concert we made our way back up to the Carrington getting only slightly wet in the process. It wasn’t what we had planned but the hotel also had acts going on so we went in to see:

ℵ Pat Drummond: an Australian singer/songwriter. Not bad but nothing special. I enjoyed his story of the fight between the locals and the council about the massive searchlight in the local lovers’ lane and how sharp-shooting and chainsaws finally won the day. There wasn’t enough to keep our interest beyond a few songs so we eventually left.

We thought about trudging back down the hill (the rain had stopped) but decided to wimp out instead and go to bed. We ended up watching a really bad movie (The Core) on the room tv – I’m not sure why we did that.

On Sunday, we had a lot more success in doing what we planned. We decided to eschew the horrors of the Pagan Poets’ Breakfast and have breakfast in the hotel instead. Around 10am we sauntered out – the first act we wanted to see not being until 11am. We passed a church advertising a Gospel service at 10am so we snuck in the back but they were dreadful so we snuck rapidly out again.

The following acts were on at the big tent venue with half-hour gaps so we grabbed good seats at the beginning and stayed put.

ℵ Grumpy Old Men: Eric Bogle, John Munro, Mike McClellan and Doug Ashdown. Not playing as a group but swapping songs around on stage for an hour. Some more entertaining than others (Bogle needs to chill out a bit more) but good fun.

ℵ The April Verch Band: given that our main reason for seeing this was because it was on between the other two acts it was a pleasant surprise. April Verch is a perky Canadian who specialises in fiddle-playing and Ottawa stepdancing (think Riverdance with more arm movements). In the final number she even managed both at once. The band was pretty good as well, including the most amazing tambour playing I have ever seen – he was actually playing tunes on it.

ℵ Paul Kelly: – with nephew Dan Kelly. Paul Kelly is something of an Australian institution. He ran through a few of his hits in a professional manner and was well supported by Dan. The sound man had the guitars mixed rather too forwards to it was hard to hear the lyrics at times (which was a pity because the lyrics are most of what the songs are about). Enjoyable but not spectacular.

This concluded the main acts we wanted to see. However we desperately needed toilets and the site facilities were, to say the least, primative. The men’s urinal, for instance, consisted of about three meters of six-inch plastic duct tube, cut lengthways and placed in front of a sheet of waterproof cardboard. Pamela refused to describe the women’s beyond stating that she nearly threw up. So, one of the acts being in the local RSL club we decided we would really like to see it so that we could take advantage of the RSL’s more sophisticated plumbing.

ℵ The Field: – laid-back jazz. Slide-guitar stuff – very melodic and ideal for going to sleep by. The drummer looked as if he had a very late night and was having trouble staying awake. Pleasant.

Left to ourselves we might have stayed longer – Bluehouse were playing again and we would have liked to have seen them – but Robert had been staying with friends since Saturday morning and we felt it would be a friendly act to take him back in a timely manner. Given the longish drive back from Katoomba we called it a day.

A good experience and one we hope to repeat next year. We haven’t been to enough live music recently and this has made us realise it.

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