Somewhere in an Indonesian shipyard, a new ferry for Kangaroo Island went quiet for three weeks. Dan Clarke, former South Australian Journalist of the Year, double Kennedy Award winner and Walkley winner, arrives with breaking news: Ruwi is back on the tracking signal. From there we cover his start as a messenger at The Advertiser, his move to the island, and his running of Island Independent and the Kangaroo Island News and Satire page. We also talk about why a small community needs a fourth estate even when some readers find the jokes too negative.

There’s no SA Drink of the Week in this episode.

In the Musical Pilgrimage, Steve Davis and the Virtualosos answer satire with satire. Schrödinger’s Platypus takes a $4 million pledge to bring platypuses back to the River Torrens and asks whether they are in the river, not in the river, or just useful for a press release.

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Running Sheet: Kangaroo Island News, Satire, and Frontier Journalism

00:00:00 Intro

Introduction

00:00:00 SA Drink Of The Week

No SA Drink Of The Week this week.

00:03:50 Daniel Clarke

Daniel Clarke first came to Kangaroo Island as a boy on family summer holidays at American River. He returned years later with his partner, who had never visited before. She fell for it straight away, and with two young children they decided it was the place to raise a family. He expected freelance work to be scarce. Instead, he says the island has given him the best stories of his career, one after another.

His path into journalism started with storm-chasing videos and the Clarke and Dawe segments on the 7.30 Report. He missed out on the university course and got a cadetship at The Advertiser, starting as a messenger. He describes that job, fondly, as the lowest rung in the building: making coffee, handing out faxes, collecting an editor’s dry cleaning, and once buying a cabbage for an editor. On night shifts, the sub-editors began testing him with headline suggestions. He still remembers seeing his “human shields” line in print the next morning, from a story that tied John Howard to the Iraq War protesters. Steve compares Dan to A.W. Merrick in Deadwood, the newspaperman who hauls a printing press into a gold-rush camp and learns the local power brokers push back. Dan knows the comparison well. He has lost friendships over his stories and still sees those people in the checkout line. But he insists he isn’t looking for conflict. His aim is simple: to make the island “a better place and an easier place for people to live.”

Then we come to satire. After one reader called his posts “misinformation dressed up as satire,” Dan posted a reminder about what satire is for, with a photo of Valerie, the famous missing sausage dog from his Australian Story documentary. His census parody neatly sums up island debate: islanders want visitors, but not too many visitors, and want cheaper ferries, but not so cheap that more visitors come. He says the piece simply repeats what he hears every day. Another post, about a large branch hanging over a bridge at Cygnet River, shows how absurd the jurisdiction problem can be: the tree stands on council land and the branch hangs over a state government road, so a year later it is still there. Dan argues that satire is “almost the softest way of getting a message across,” and that governments dislike embarrassment enough to act on it.

The SeaLink saga is the story Dan would most like to stop writing. The new ferries are more than two years late. The contract, signed under a Liberal government, apparently doesn’t even allow a fine. Almost 30-year-old vessels carry around a quarter of a million sheep off the island each year, and a planned three-day shutdown for ramp works lands in the middle of the sheep-moving season. Earlier cancellations have already cost small tourism businesses thousands of dollars. Steve links this to a wider frustration: governments pursue MotoGP deals while basic services such as freight lag behind.

We finish with Dan’s documentaries. Lost in the Woods, now on Binge, won him a Walkley. It investigates the collapse of the island’s blue gum plantations. Millions of tonnes of timber were planted for carbon credits but had no way off the island once the Smith Bay port was blocked, so the wood is now being burnt. Dan filmed logging from the roadside while koalas were still in the trees, and the footage became a major Channel 7 story. His point was that one person with a camera found what the government’s half-day investigation missed. Island of the Dead, on ABC iview through Compass, is very different in tone. It follows death doula Heidi Grieg and three women at the end of their lives who treated death as ordinary and let him film them. Two of them did not live to see the film. Then Steve asks for the headline for Ruwi’s eventual arrival.

Additional Resources
Kangaroo Island News and Satire (Facebook): news, parody, and the GoFundMe link in the About section if you’d like to help keep independent journalism going on the island

Island Independent: Dan’s news outlet

Lost in the Woods on Binge: the free trial is worth it for this Walkley winner alone

Island of the Dead on ABC iview (Compass): confronting, gentle, and paced to suit the story

Angertainment by Ed Coper: the book Steve recommends on how outrage drives what we pay attention to

Episode 122, Kangaroo Island: A Midsummer Night’s Gin, and Episode 315, from Steve’s visit to 5KIX FM, for more of The Adelaide Show on KI

01:01:04 Musical Pilgrimage

In the Musical Pilgrimage this week we listen to Schrödinger’s Platypus by Steve Davis & The Virtualosos.

A Glam Adelaide headline promised a “major push” to bring platypuses back to the River Torrens, backed by more than $4 million. Reading further, Steve found that the river doesn’t have enough water flow, that foxes, cats and dogs would eat any platypus released there, that there is no identified source of platypuses, and that the study behind the story was from 2022. He also noticed the timing, as the government was changing parklands rules to make way for MotoGP. With Schrödinger’s famous cat in mind, and knowing platypuses spend their days in burrows and their nights underwater, he wrote this song. A cheerful chorus carries a pointed message, and the late physicist turns up in person to explain the “monotreme paradox.” The song follows Dan’s approach to the news: stay calm, state the facts, and let the absurdity show.