Good morning. There’s a gentle, sporadic kind of spring rain tapping on the roof outside as I write this – hopefully you get time at some point this weekend to curl up by a window and read. If and when you do, here are some of the most interesting things I saw on the Guardian this week.
To start with, one of the most powerful investigations our Australian team has published this year. A note: there’s distressing content in the stories told here.
1. Stories of survival from the Kinchela boys’ home
“All the boys have got the same story. When they came here, their name was taken away – they became a number.” Uncle Roger “Pigeon” Jarrett is one of 56 survivors of the Kinchela Aboriginal Boys’ Training Home, an institution that visited horrific violence and trauma on Stolen Generations children.
This week, Lorena Allam and Sarah Collard revealed that at least nine sites of possible secret or “clandestine” burials have been discovered on its grounds on the New South Wales north coast. Survivors are calling on the state and federal governments to urgently fund searches of the property – six months after the NSW government received a report pointing to the findings. (On Thursday, a leading human rights expert also noted that Australia is seen as “soft on human rights” because it has failed to confront its own history.)
“They just have to do the right thing and get it all done,” Uncle Roger says. “Because we’re just guessing until then, and we just want a bit of peace and truth. I’m 76. So I haven’t got that long left and I want to see it before I die.”
How long will it take to read: the video above is a bit over seven minutes. Read, too, the stories of the Uncles of Kinchela and their resilience in unbelievable conditions, and about their strong bond as they push for answers in this “urgent and unfinished business”. Also read the explainer on the ground-penetrating radar technology that could finally bring answers and the briefing notes on what happened to the Stolen Generations.
2. ‘Trenchant but understated’: the BBC’s first disinformation correspondent
Marianna Spring’s latest podcast, Marianna in Conspiracyland, is “so fair-minded that at times it feels like it is taking a set of scales to a gun fight,” writes Zoe Williams in her interview with the BBC’s first disinformation correspondent (and target of 80% of online abuse directed at the broadcaster).
Today’s conspiracy movements, Spring stresses, “aren’t reflecting back on past events. They want to find someone right now to blame, to be angry at, to hate … My worry is that when people truly believe this stuff, when the hate becomes so normalised, they go and do something extreme. I hope that by exposing it, I ensure it doesn’t happen. If we’re not talking about it, that’s when stuff happens.”
Practising what she preaches: “Her language is sober and restrained, her manner is nonconfrontational, she won’t opine without evidence,” Williams writes of Spring. “She almost seems to embody the liberal consensus in human form.”
How long will it take to read: a bit under five minutes.
Fun fact: Spring studied French and Russian at Oxford, and spent 10 months in Yaroslavl, “about four hours from Moscow … amazing, but pretty hardcore.”
3. An ongoing reckoning in Australian music
While we were walking home one night this week, a friend mused on the #MeToo ripple effect – how it’s easy to take the shift of the past five or so years for granted, but then (and not infrequently), it hits you: how much the social, professional and personal spaces we move through really have changed; how we all benefited from people’s courage to share their experience when it was uncomfortable, painful or plain risky.
One such person is Camp Cope’s Georgia Maq, whose keynote speech at a music industry conference this week tracked her journey “into being the woman I am now: strong, fearless and really, really annoying to anyone trying to exploit musicians”.
‘You will never get rid of me’: “The music industry didn’t teach me how to fight; it taught me that I needed to fight,” Maq said. “I am damn proud that dangerous men in this industry still warn each other about me.”
How long will it take to read: about four and a half minutes.
4. Finding a missing Proust quote, with(out) ChatGPT’s help
Novelist Elif Batuman asked ChatGPT to help her find a Proust quote. It politely offered her several responses, all vague and also … wrong. “My apologies for the confusion,” the bot replied when she pushed for detail, then suggesting she “delve into Proust’s monumental work in its entirety” to find what she was after.
But Batuman couldn’t sleep, wondering if she’d asked hard enough, if she’d asked the right questions (lol tag yourself!!). So she went back to the chalkboard, or whatever we’re now calling that, and tried again. And again. And again, really trying to help the bot help her. Her internal monologues along the way are a delight.
TLDR: ChatGPT isn’t (at least yet) all that reliable.
How long will it take to read: nine minutes (less if you glaze over and skim through all the robot Proust and settle in for the fun bits, which I would obviously never do.)
Further reading: Her novels! Of which I’ve only read The Idiot, I confess, but it’s very good fun.
5. Fighting in a war doesn’t stop your bills from coming
What happens to your business when your country goes to war? Serheii Ivin is an artisan toolmaker in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv. After a few months on the frontline, where both he and his employees continue to fight, he returned to his workshop to find a Russian missile had wreaked havoc. But he has – figuratively and very literally – forged on. “Someday the war will end,” Ivin told Jamie Wilson and Nick Hopkins. “People want to eat, they want to have a future. And the rest of the world needs tools.”
How long will it take to read: two minutes.
Further reading: If all the talk of woodcarving knives (and, I guess, the dispatches from an unrelenting war) gets you thinking about self-sufficiency, you could always go live on an island – but read these accounts first.
On a closing note: It’s an often brutal world, but there are still many luminous mysteries. Any theories on what this golden orb that appeared at the bottom of the sea might be? Send them to australia.newsletters@theguardian.com.
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