The Ghost of Blogs Past

Curious, how some things come back to haunt you, isn't it? Like when Tim Blair's having a bit of a stuck-for-material day and decides to stick his head up his own blog and play Ghost Whisperer, calling up the spirits of the dead to haunt your nights of insomnia. There I am, on Tim's blog, listed as number one member of the Loser Club, with Chris Sheil, Tim Lambert, John Quiggin, Tim Dunlop, Wayne Sanderson, Gianna, Mathew Henderson-Hau, Antony Loewenstein, Margo Kingston, David Heidelberg and Anonymous Lefty. All of us with annoying little errors in our blog archives, duly noted by Tim.

My boo-boo, and it was a biggie - if you're going to stuff up there's no point doing it by halves, was verballing Andrew Bolt verballing Justice O'Loughlin of the Federal Court in Cubillo v Commonwealth. On February 22, 2004 so the two year anniversary will be coming up soon. Now there's an excuse for a piss-up.

The bugger of it is, that in a column of 28 September, 2005, Bolt cobbled together selected excerpts from sections 393, 394, 395, 511, 408, 1535, 1148, 1159, 1160, 1304 and 1305 of Justice O'Loughlin's verdict (in that order) to come up with this summary:

[Evidence] showed the primitive conditions under which the missionaries were living. It would be safe to assume that the conditions under which the Aboriginal people were living would have been no better . . . Cynical though it may be to some, the conditions at Retta Dixon Home [in Darwin, to where Cubillo was brought] were preferable . . .

I limit myself to rejecting the claim that it was a 'myth' to think of a part-Aboriginal child as an outcast in Aboriginal communities . . .

The evidence does not support a finding that there was any policy of removal of part-Aboriginal children such as that alleged . . . [Gunner and Cubillo] have failed to prove that the 'purpose' of their removals and detentions was (or included) the purpose of destroying their associations and connections with their mothers, families and cultures.

Woulda had him on toast there if it weren't for a small boy-who-cried-wolf issue.

Tim's blogging record is, of course, impeccably boo-boo free. OK, so there was that little dust-up with MediaWatch over a US Flag that turned out to be embarassingly Pentagon-debris-deficient but that was all David Marr's fault, really.