The Algorithm Age

Children's imaginations ran wild when a man from the moon with a pencil for a nose began to squiggle. Mr Squiggle lit up TV screens for 40 years — and now, decades after the kids' program last aired, the National Museum of Australia in Canberra is displaying hundreds of iconic Mr Squiggle items. The exhibit includes creator Norman Hetherington's artworks, scripts, and puppets. Hetherington operated and voiced the blue-haired, floppy, pencil-nosed puppet, with the role a perfect marriage of his skills as a cartoonist and puppeteer. Nineties kids will remember Mr Squiggle's sidekicks grumpy Blackboard, Bill Steamshovel and Gus the Snail. There was also Miss Rebecca, the daughter of Norman Hetherington and the show's last host. "The museum has done such an amazing job of collating it and restoring bits and pieces that needed a little bit of attention," Rebecca Hetherington said. "I'm so excited that...

Australia’s first truth-telling inquiry has found the British committed genocide of the Aboriginal people in Victoria during their colonisation of the country. The Yoorrook Justice Commission’s final report, tabled in the parliament on Tuesday, detailed atrocities like “mass killings, sexual violence, exclusion, linguicide, cultural erasure, environmental degradation, child removal, absorption, assimilation”. The “decimation of the First Peoples population in Victoria ”, the report said, “was the result of a coordinated plan of different actions aimed at the destruction of the essential foundations of the life of national groups”. “This was genocide .” The report recommended that the Victorian First Peoples be compensated, including financially, and asked the government to use a treaty framework to “provide redress for injustice which has occurred during and as a result of the colonial invasion and occupation of First Peoples’ territories”. This would entai...

Milan Kundera opens his novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting with a scene from the winter of 1948. Klement Gottwald, leader of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, is giving a speech to the masses from a palace balcony, surrounded by fellow party members. Comrade Vladimir Clementis thoughtfully places his fur hat on Gottwald’s bare head; the hat then features in an iconic photograph. Four years later, Clementis is found guilty of being a bourgeois nationalist and hanged. His ashes are strewn on a Prague street. The propaganda section of the party removes him from written history and erases him from the photograph. “Nothing remains of Clementis,” writes Kundera, “but the fur hat on Gottwald’s head.” Review: Memory Lane: The Perfectly Imperfect Ways We Remember – Ciara Greene & Gillian Murphy (Princeton University Press) Efforts to enforce political forgetting are often associated with totalitarian regimes. The state endeavours to control not only its citi...