Front row or death row

CHRISSIE Amphlett was a beautiful woman who was unafraid to be ugly. That was what I loved most about her: it was what made her such a riveting performer, as well as a genuinely intriguing personality. Fully aware of her sexual power, she nevertheless confronted her audience with songs that spoke frankly of love as a co-dependent act of submission, and occasionally of subjugation - even, sometimes, of humiliation.

But most of all, desperation. The Divinyls' first album was named Desperate. Pleasure and Pain - written not by Amphlett or her co-pilot, Mark McEntee, but by proven hit-makers Holly Knight and Mike Chapman - was the perfect vehicle for her: it was the tension between the vulnerability of the song and the unearthly presence of those uniquely phrased vocals that made Amphlett great.

Most of the best Divinyls songs utilise this dramatic tension: Boys In Town; Casual Encounter; Only Lonely; Elsie and the band's truest masterpiece, Back To The Wall: for all the tough rock-chick talk, Amphlett bled on record, and on stage, as freely as anyone. The difference between her and the vast majority of other female singers was that if you hurt her, she was gonna hurt you back, hard.

You've got the upper hand
But I've got nothing to lose
When I'm trapped in a corner like this
I might blow up a fuse

On stage, especially earlier in her career, she would throw shapes calculated not to titillate or to tease but to shock, offend, outrage and frighten. It was potent, sure, but it was also uncomfortable and confusing, because Amphlett didn't allow herself to be easily assimilated. Her act, exemplified by her wearing a school uniform with torn fishnets - a metaphor for defiled innocence - was a contradiction. Hunching her back, screaming with the primal force of a cornered animal, she presented herself as damaged goods, and was convincing enough to make you wonder if you might in some way be responsible.



From all accounts, she was as insecure as any performer. And maybe, as she grew older and presumably more at ease with herself, she also became more comfortable with expressing her sexuality in a more conventional way; both in her lyrics and in the band's videos. Or perhaps that was a price she was prepared to pay for the band's success in the age of MTV - I don't know.

Sure, I Touch Myself may the best song about pushing the hot button ever written, but still, I preferred the earlier, more challenging version, back when Amphlett didn't wear makeup, and her haircut was more severe. Back when she bared her teeth - knowing that they were jagged, and that there were gaps in her smile. Were the Divinyls getting started now, a manager or record company lackey might have told Amphlett to get that smile fixed.

I'd like to think she would have told them to go fuck themselves.

If you never saw Amphlett and the Divinyls in full flight, this performance of Elsie - wherein Amphlett inhabits the body of the song's subject with unhinged authenticity - captures her at a peak of provocation. Here, a lipstick is used not to accentuate the beauty of that famous pout, but as a tool of self-loathing; something to be smeared like dirt, instead of applied as polish.

Amphlett once spoke of performing as "front row or death row": whether you were male or female, there was no point being up there if you weren't going to let it all hang out. In America and England, Patti Smith and the Pretenders' Chrissie Hynde had already blasted open the doors for women who didn't want to be demure. In Australia, Amphlett was the first, the best and, for a long time, the only one of her kind. And perhaps she always will be.

Carrie & the Cut Snakes

BACK in 1990, when Uncle Tupelo released No Depression, the idea of alt-country probably seemed necessary. Garth Brooks’ self-titled album had been released the year before, and country music as a genre seemed to be losing touch with its roots: as the stars of the Grand Ole Opry drifted towards the excesses of arena rock, the signifiers (10-gallon hats, tassels and so on) were getting in the way of the substance.

By giving the genre the same kick in the pants punk gave to rock, the movement has been remarkably successful. It may not have spared us from Shania Twain or Faith Hill, but throughout the 1990s, artists as varied as Lucinda Williams, (early) Wilco, Gillian Welch and Steve Earle have reminded us of country music’s fundamental, deeply earnest mission: small stories of small lives, writ large.

So I’m not sure we especially need alt-country any more, any more than we really need alternative music. Which brings me, in a roundabout way, to the debut album by Carrie and the Cut Snakes, which I wouldn’t describe as alt-country any more than Carrie Henschell’s heroine, Dolly Parton.

This is, in case you’re wondering, a good thing. Henschell is a 20-something songwriter from Brisbane, whose parents live on a farm on the Darling Downs. The Cut Snakes aren’t yet a stable combination – Henschell’s progress has been delayed by shifting personnel – but that hasn’t stopped her and bass player/engineer Bradley Wright from assembling this nearly perfect debut album.

Henschell’s strengths are apparent from the brisk opener, “Can’t Call You”. First, she’s a excellent singer – distinctive and clear, albeit with occasional Australian vowels so flattened they might make Missy Higgins blush. Second, she’s smart. Her songs are insightful, witty and above all plain-spoken. There’s no bullshit here.

Third, she’s a terrific arranger – here are 10 songs, only two of them nudging over the four-minute mark, performed with verve and economy. After listening to this album for the umpteenth time since first hearing a burned version months ago (which Henschell nearly jettisoned), at least half the tunes are still swimming in my head.

The effect of a song as sharp as “If Love’s Not Growing It’s Dying” is like having the intelligence of Lisa Miller and the pop suss of Kasey Chambers wrapped in one package – or perhaps the Pretenders on a Dolly trip. “I’m not everything you want/And I’m not everything you need/I’ll probably never be/But I’m gonna make you notice me,” she yearns. It’s, well, special, if you get my drift.

“We Will Be Forgotten” is another winner, a heartfelt but never clichéd rumination on life’s big questions, with a swelling chorus inspired by the passing of a friend. “I don’t know how it started, and I don’t know how it will end/I don’t like puzzles with missing pieces, or guessing when there’s no answers,” Henschell sings, over some nicely understated organ playing.

“Love Song” risks outright sentimentality, and triumphs with immaculate self-harmonies and the sort of vocal patience that Elvis brought to songs like “Love Me Tender” – OK, it might not be in that league, but the song still aches with longing. “Isolated” is preceded by lengthy, almost a Capella intro before blossoming into a genuine boot-scootin’, honky-tonk rave-up with multiple time changes.

The clear highlight, though, is “Recklessness”. It opens unobtrusively, with subdued chords overlaid by a wash of steel guitar, before exploding into the chorus: “I need energy, I need fuel/I want answers, I want release/I need nourishment, I need care/I want overload, I want recklessness!” Henschell pushes her voice as far as it can go here; the sound of it cracking as she repeats the last line puts a lump in the throat.

A surprise is saved for last. “Sound of Silence” isn’t a cover of the Simon and Garfunkel classic, but a protest song by local anarchist/blogger Andy Paine. In a bit over three minutes, it contrasts the stories of a factory girl in India, a child soldier in Africa and a corporate office worker in Sydney to demonstrate how silence makes us complicit in the suffering of others. Paine needed someone to sing it for him and Henschell, a social worker by day, does it with sorrow and empathy.

This is a fine debut by a exceptionally talented new artist. The folks in Tamworth will rightly go ga-ga over this, but there’s also no reason why, like Chambers, Henschell and her Cut Snakes shouldn’t cross over to a wider audience.

Arse-backwards in Queensland's backwoods

IT’S one of those things that gives us poor Banana Benders our backwoods reputation. In 1987, just as AIDS crashed into the national consciousness via the Grim Reaper advertisements, a brawl broke out in the Queensland National Party – its moral façade soon to be torn to shreds by Tony Fitzgerald QC – over contraception.

Mike Ahern, the progressive health minister and future premier, took a proposal to Cabinet to allow the sale of condoms through vending machines. The premier, Joh Bjelke-Petersen, rebuffed him. When students defied the ban and installed machines around university campuses, police were despatched to rip them from the walls in the dead of night.

Without so much as a shred of irony, Bob Katter Junior – then the minister for Aboriginal affairs in Joh’s infamously corrupt government – defended the ban with these immortal words: “Condoms are despicable things that won’t prevent the spread of AIDS but will encourage the community to have sex with gay abandon.”

A few years later, Katter promised to “walk backwards to Bourke if the poof population of North Queensland is any more than 0.001 percent”, adding for good measure, “Mind you, if the percentage is what they say it is in the rest of Australia, I’ll take to walking everywhere backwards.”

Bob is, shall we say, not for turning. Less than two years ago, at a rally against same-sex marriage, he lamented what the word gay had come to mean. “No one has the right to take that word off us,” he spluttered, as if it ever belonged to anyone.

But Bob doesn’t want to talk about it anymore. Hasn’t talked about it since his Katter Australia Party broadcast advertisements ahead of the Queensland state election, which suggested that a centre-right government led by Campbell Newman would legalise same-sex marriage. He couldn’t have been more wrong, of course.

Later, Bob described the ads as a mistake “of major proportions”. Naturally, he meant a political mistake. It was politics, rather than principle, that forced the resignation of a Victorian KAP candidate, Tess Corbett, after she stated that paedophiles would be next in line to “get rights”.

And it was politics that forced the Katter Australia Party to suspend another Queensland senate candidate – the improbably named Bernard Gaynor – after he said he didn’t want gays or lesbians teaching his kids. Gaynor is fighting his suspension, claiming (with some justification) that Katter privately agreed with his comments.

Will Katter disendorse himself for his own long history of homophobic statements? He’s not saying. He wouldn’t answer when The Project’s Charlie Pickering asked him to repudiate the equation of homosexuality and paedophilia. “You are taking me outside the area of my concern,” he said. He was certainly out of his comfort zone.

Nor would he answer on Steve Vizard’s The Circle when asked what motivated his antipathy towards gays and lesbians. “The truth is I don’t think about it at all,” he said last June. “Never have, never likely to in the future.” Pressed, he buried himself in his own book on camera, presumably to remind himself what an incredible race of people Australians are.

One could speculate that all this was possible evidence of repressed sexuality on Bob’s part, because it’s obvious from his public statements over the years that he’s spent a lot more time thinking about it than he cares to admit. But, like so many ageing white men of his era, he’s befuddled by the shift in public mood.

Not so long ago, his views were cheered. Here in Queensland, before homosexuality’s decriminalisation in 1990, the Courier-Mail rendered the word “gay” as I just have, in quotation marks, and employed a prominent columnist who frequently spewed the sort of rhetoric that wouldn’t have been out of place in the Westboro Baptist Church.

Katter is regarded warmly by many Australians outside of his Deep North constituency. A contradictory man (his heroes are Red Ted Theodore and Black Jack McEwen), he has deservedly won admiration as a voice for farmers driven to the wall by deregulation and an all-powerful supermarket duopoly.

But, like Pauline Hanson before him, he represents a longing for old certainties and values that the rest of us mostly view as outdated at best, and bigoted at worst. Like Hanson, he has attracted candidates driven by fear and anger, confused and alienated by a country that no longer resembles the one they grew up in.

If Katter wishes for his party to attract credible candidates and become a force beyond the provinces, he needs to revisit this issue. He could start by having a conversation with his gay half-brother, Carl. Then he needs to have a conversation with himself about whether this is working out for him.

Otherwise he might as well begin the long march backwards to Bourke.


 

The feral menace and asylum seekers. No, really.

THE story of the Stephens Island wren is one of the more predictable parables in the annals of extinction. The wren was a tiny flightless songbird that lived on an island measuring just 150 hectares in New Zealand’s Marlborough Sounds, and it was doomed from the moment it was proposed that a lighthouse be erected there in the late 19th century.

The lighthouse was operational by early 1894. The wren was discovered a few months later, in the jaws of the lighthouse keeper’s cat Tibbles; the species was lost forever by the winter of 1895. As the Christchurch newspaper The Press editorialised at the time, “This is probably a record performance in the way of extermination.”

For years, poor Tibbles was held responsible for nibbling his way through the island’s entire population of wrens. In fact, the island was heaving with feral cats after the accidental escape of a pregnant female in early 1894. It took another three years for them to also kill off the Stephens Island piopio, a type of thrush.

I’m not sure which scientific or historical literature Adrian Franklin reviewed in his defence of the feral cat – he doesn’t say. Franklin claims detestation of introduced animals is linked to our national paranoia about, wait for it, asylum seekers. This seems rather a long bow to draw, but let’s come back to it later.

Franklin claims these (unnamed) scientists agree that there is no evidence linking feral cats to wild extinctions “apart from a few very exceptional island sites” – a rather cavalier dismissal of the fate of the Stephens Island wren, but then again, it’s only a kiwi, and I don’t mean that other flightless bird.

So why, Franklin asks, have cats not been reclassified as harmless animals? Why isn’t the innocent moggy naturalised, as in Britain? (I confess I nearly scratched my own eyes out at this point.)

Firstly, cats don’t act in isolation in the threat they pose to our native fauna. Habitat clearance, disease, grazing, changes to fire regimes, pollutants and, of course, other feral animals all play their parts. I look forward to Franklin’s defence of the fox, cane toad, carp, rabbit and non-native rats and roaches.

In Europe, cats, foxes and rabbits have all been part of the natural environment for millennia. That’s not the case in the Antipodes, where there are few land-based top-order predators. Introduced ones have filled the breach. In New Zealand especially, native animals have been annihilated by cats, rats, stoats and possums.

The feral problem is so bad in the Land of the Long White Cloud that many native birds – kokakos, kakapos, saddlebacks and others – are now largely confined to or have themselves been introduced (at considerable public expense) to islands where foreign predators and competitors aren’t waiting to devour them.

The picture is no prettier in Australia, where we hold the world record for mammalian extinctions: 22 have been extirpated since European settlement, with over 100 more considered endangered. Cats and foxes have played a determining role in most of these. The proof can be found in Tasmania, which mostly retains its mammalian diversity (aside from the elimination of its biggest top-order predator, the Thylacine).

Until their recent accidental or malicious introduction, foxes have not existed in the island state, and Tasmanian devils – the largest surviving marsupial predator – have probably kept a lid on feral cat numbers. The Tasmanian government is spending a fortune trying to suppress the foxes; it will need to, especially given the crash of the devil population due to facial tumour disease.

On the mainland, predator-free sanctuaries, such as those at Scotia in western NSW, are reintroducing quaintly-named animals like the bilby, boodie, woylie and numbat. Such sanctuaries may be their only hope. At Currawinya National Park in south-west Queensland, cats destroyed one of the last remaining wild colonies of bilbies last year after a protective fence was found to have rusted.

In Arnhem Land, the Australian Wildlife Conservancy recently conducted an experiment with the near-threatened pale field rat. The rats have been regionally extinct in Arnhem Land for years and had to be sourced from – surprise, surprise – predator-free Quoin Island off the Northern Territory coast.

The AWC set up two 10-hectare enclosures. One was secured with an electrified six-metre fence, the “control” enclosure was not. Twenty rats fitted with radio collars were introduced into each. Within a week of two cats finding the unsecured enclosure – captured on film by motion sensor cameras – the rats were gone.

I’m still not sure what all of this has to do with our national xenophobia over immigration. Perhaps, as one wag suggested on the Australian birdwatching forum Birding-Aus, when asylum seekers start eating us, Professor Franklin may have a point.

An edited version of this piece was published in The Age today. Disclaimer: I own a lilac-point ragdoll myself. She stays indoors.

 

Happy Birthday to Zoo

Note for overseas and interstate readers: The Zoo is a music venue in the quaintly-named inner suburb of Fortitude Valley, in my hometown of Brisbane. It's 20 years old this week, a startling achievement in an industry where places to play appear and often disappear in the space of 12 months. This is my happy birthday message to one of my favourite places, which changed the face of the Valley, and helped change the way we viewed our own city during a time of great change.

The Zoo was always different.

The first time I walked up that short but steep staircase, it was to see former Go-Between Robert Forster. The stairs brought you not to the entrance, but smack into the middle of the venue. There was a small stage in the far right-hand corner; a basic wooden platform less than a foot above the floor. I heard the cracking of pool balls as I walked in.

In the left-hand corner was the serving area. The conditions of the nascent venue’s license at the time meant that food had to be provided with drinks. Being an impoverished student (and a lousy cook besides), there were many times when the Zoo’s cheap, nourishing meals were seriously appreciated.

On the walls, covering most of the available space, hung paintings by various local daubers. So The Zoo was a gallery space, too, as well as a pool hall and venue. The dedication to promoting Brisbane’s musicians was matched by its philosophical alignment with, and commitment to the city’s artistic community.

That word: community. That was what made The Zoo different. When you went to see a show there, you felt like you were part of something special, vibrant and new.

Part of it came down to timing. The early 1990s was an era of transition for Brisbane. Queensland itself was in a process of profound social change. Musical change, too. The punk generation had grown up; the grunge generation was moving in. There was a feeling of political and cultural renewal.

Part of it came down to place. The venue was in Ann Street, Fortitude Valley, which a corrupt alliance of cops and criminals had called home for decades. The Fitzgerald Inquiry had seen them off – to exile, or to prison – but the Bjelke-Petersen years were not yet a distant memory, and the Valley could still be a little scary.

It was the middle of a recession, too. It seemed like every second shop in the Valley was vacant. The ultimate example was the old Target building, in the middle of the decaying, neglected Brunswick Street mall. That was where many of the bands that played at The Zoo – and would soon become household names – honed their craft.

That was important, because the cheap rents then available in the Valley allowed the musical community to set up house. The Zoo was among the first in, and it quickly became the new face of the changing district and, in hindsight, an early harbinger of its gentrification.

Anyway, I remember sitting on the floor with the attractive young lady whom I was (hopelessly) trying to woo. There were maybe 100 people sitting in a semi-circle around the stage, watching Robert hold court. He was playing an acoustic guitar. “I want to be quiet,” he sang. That was quite a statement in a post-Nevermind world.

The Zoo liked acoustic artists. Amid the tide of grunge, there was something of a folk revival happening. Mexican-American songwriter Rodriguez was as important a part of Powderfinger’s early makeup as Soundgarden, and arguably it was the former’s influence, more than the latter, that eventually turned them into million-sellers. Others, like ISIS and Paddy Dempsey, were beloved acts here.

Women always found a voice at The Zoo, too. Women ran the venue, after all, and there was a distinct absence of machismo in both the presentation and the atmosphere. There was no balding publican pulling beers with a tea towel slung over his shoulder; no security guards built wider than they were tall.

Instead there were two young ladies – Joc and C – who had a vision of the kind of place they wanted to run, and they had strong values. They didn’t sell cigarettes, or rum, and preferred not to book metal bands. The venue had no dress code, but you were expected to mind your manners. All of this commanded respect.

I have countless gigs and memories to cherish. The Dirty Three, just before their relocation overseas, with Nick Cave sitting in comes to mind. A young and messianic Ben Harper. The so-called Australian Go-Betweens show, marking the debut of the new line-up with Glenn Thompson and Adele Pickvance.

Even some of the less palatable aspects of the venue – like the unrelenting heat of a full house in summer – had its virtues. Perhaps my strongest recurring memory of being at The Zoo is just standing by the big timber sash windows, sucking in the fresh air while a storm raged outside; the rain making the city sparkle afresh in the night.

Over time, The Zoo grew and changed. Soon there was a real stage, and a real bar. You no longer had to order a meal to get a drink. The paintings on the walls disappeared. More and more international acts played there, though the commitment to local artists remained.

These days, Fortitude Valley might be regarded as a victim of its own success. Tens of thousands of revellers swamp the entertainment precinct every weekend. There’s more alcohol, more drugs, more violence, and I wouldn’t like to ask how much higher the rent is. But The Zoo has endured. Indeed, it’s something of a haven.

That’s because, despite the aforementioned alterations, what hasn’t changed are the values the venue embodies. Those values, above all, give The Zoo its atmosphere and warmth. It’s a culture, which everyone who works there buys into. There’s still no dress code, and you’re still expected to mind your manners.

So, with that, there’s really only one thing left to say.

Thank you, Joc and C, for the gift you have given Brisbane: from all the musicians who have performed on your blessed stage, and all the punters who have enjoyed so many wonderful nights here. May The Zoo endure another 20 years.

Look away: musings on Jimmy Savile

SABLE Starr was punk's Lolita. She was barely a teenager when she began attending shows in the early 1970s, quickly making her reputation as one of the leading groupies on Sunset Boulevarde. "Every rock star who came to Los Angeles wanted to meet her," model Bebe Buell remembers. That was rather too polite: pleasantries weren't all that were exchanged between Starr and Mick Jagger, Rod Stewart, Robert Plant, Marc Bolan, David Bowie and scores of others. Iggy Pop confesses baldly in the opening line of his song Look Away: "I slept with Sable when she was 13."

Starr's best friend at the time was Lori Maddox, another veteran of Rodney Bingenheimer's English Disco, the notorious Sunset Strip club where strict ID checks at the door ensured the girls were under 18. After losing her virginity at 13 – to, legend has it, David and then-wife Angie Bowie – Maddox was a precocious 14-year-old when Jimmy Page left his LA girlfriend Pamela Des Barres, author of the classic self-proclaimed groupie memoir I'm With The Band, to be with her.

Page dated Maddox for about a year before leaving her in turn for Buell, who was at the time dating Todd Rundgren (as well as Iggy Pop). A devastated Maddox later knocked on the door to Page's LA hotel room. Buell answered it, and although she kept the chain on, it didn't stop an enraged Maddox from trying to drag the older woman out by her hair. Page laughed sadistically from the bedroom as his two girlfriends fought over him.

Led Zeppelin's brutish manners were later laid bare in curdling detail by Stephen Davis, whose book Hammer Of The Gods set the bar at an all-time low for the rock-stars-behaving-badly genre. That was until the appearance of Mötley Crüe's stupendously vulgar The Dirt which, as one critic put it, made I'm With The Band read like a nun's diary. Each page contains an unforgettable anecdote, not one fit to be reprinted here. (Well, perhaps just the first line: "Her name was Bullwinkle. We called her that because she had a face like a moose.")

The mystique surrounding both bands was only enhanced by the publications of these two bestsellers. In the case of Mötley Crüe especially, The Dirt has done more to rejuvenate their fortunes than any of their unremittingly awful albums ever could. Their exploits are regarded with awe more often than revulsion. When you're a male rock star, conquests come naturally with territory, no matter how gross the underlying misogyny.

Not everyone got away with it, of course. Chuck Berry, without whom we may never have had rock & roll at all, served 18 months in prison after transporting a 14-year-old girl across state lines. The reputation of another originator, Jerry Lee Lewis, never recovered after his third marriage – to his 13-year-old first cousin – was revealed. But the imprisonment of Berry and the blacklisting of Lewis happened in the early 1960s, when the surrounding opprobrium had as much to do with the moral panic attached to rock & roll itself than any concerns about paedophilia.

I'd wager that some of our heroes are watching the gruesome revelations surrounding the life of Jimmy Savile with considerable discomfort. Many of them played for him and his attendant, adoring teenage crowds on Top Of The Pops. A man knighted for his charity work and widely loved for his carefully cultivated persona as a benign English eccentric has now been revealed as one of the country's worst sexual predators. And, like Iggy Pop, those surrounding Savile found it easiest to look away.

Savile, though, wasn't on stage – unlike the stars he introduced to the world, many of whom were probably indulging in behaviour no less reprehensible. While it's true that the early 1970s was a sexually freer, more liberal time, and that Pamela Des Barres was never anyone's victim, our fascination with the bad boys of rock remains undimmed. We love them as rogues; for living the untamed life that most of us never will. We view them through Savile's famous rose-tinted spectacles.

Sable Starr died three years ago, aged 51. She'd grown up to live the straight life, raising two children, but she remains publicly defined by her past as one of rock's super groupies. Johnny Thunders is remembered as the legendary New York Dolls guitarist, not the jealous boyfriend who mercilessly beat her up when she was not even 16. As for Iggy Pop, he tenderly recalls that he last saw Starr "in a back street with her looks half gone/she was selling something that I was on/look away, look away."

The price of outrage

SOMETIMES a story moves so fast it's hard to keep up with. Such has been the case with the saga of Alan Jones. I wrote an open letter to 2GB on Saturday evening, shortly after news of Jones' intemperate remarks to a gathering of Young Liberal students in Sydney broke. I then slept in on Sunday, prior to working my night job.

By the time I'd woken up, I'd already missed half the fun. Jones' press conference yesterday, purportedly to apologise to the Prime Minister, has already been much discussed, and derided, for its transparent insincerity. To say Jones "doesn't get it" doesn't cover it. I shook my head, went to work, and after getting home at six in the morning, I slept late again.

While I was blearily shoving cereal down the hatch at midday, a petition launched by change.org to remove Jones from his duties was collecting over 30,000 signatures. I would guess that very few of them listen to 2GB, but that didn't stop sponsors from withdrawing from Jones' program: luxury car maker Mercedes-Benz; supermarket oligarchs Woolworths; tea-makers Dilmah; Freedom Furniture; the list goes on. The moral question for them now is whether or not they'll resume their support for Jones when the opprobrium abates.

Jones has, of course, been pilloried from all quarters and all sides of politics, though, again, there's been discussion about the timing and tenor of the condemnations: compare Malcolm Turnbull's brisk and unequivocal condemnation to Tony Abbott's relatively tardy and tame one. That's all grist for the mill for commentators, and for the Labor Party. I'll leave that there and return to the central theme.

Jones' remarks would have created outrage at any time in any context. Outrage is, after all, part of his stock in trade. Nonetheless, it's the timing here that's really pushed his career to the limit; that forced him to "man up" (and note, even his apologies are gendered: the subtle implication throughout was that Gillard ought to do the same if she wanted to mess with the big boys).

Once, Jones would have scoffed at the most timid suggestion that he apologise. This time it's different. It's not just the sheer vindictiveness of what he said; it's that it marks the symbolic bottoming-out of our public discourse that has been an increasing topic of debate essentially since Tony Abbott assumed the leadership of the Liberal Party.

It comes barely a fortnight after The Daily Telegraph, a newspaper with more than its own share of print-version shock jocks, launched a war on Twitter trolls. That it was a journalist from the same newspaper that broke the yarn (along with, it should be acknowledged, Twitter user @greenat16) is a wonderful irony.

As I wrote to 2GB, I wasn't sure where they drew their own lines in the sand. But Australians, as I predicted, have drawn it for them, and sent a reminder to our political classes: the level of bile in public debate is starting to make us all sick. And, in this case, it's social media users that stood up to the real trolls in our society. Not the twerps on Twitter; the ones with real power and influence.

Alan Jones is as entitled to his views as the rest of us. All of us occasionally say things that transgress the bounds of good taste, and nothing Jones said to a private gathering of young Tories was, as far as I can tell, defamatory, discriminatory or an incitement to violence. The same can't be said of many of his previous utterances.

At the end of the day, the real question is why Jones and his ilk - Sandilands, Jackie O, Hadley and the rest - should be afforded the continuing privilege of a microphone. That's something that only their audiences, and the advertisers that enable their careers can really answer, but on the weekend they were reminded, again, that outrage cuts both ways - and trafficking in it comes at a cost.