In a scene straight out of childhood, I was sitting at the breakfast table with my father Jack Spackman, both of us with noses buried in the morning newspaper. It was one of the last times […]
It was a bleak day for Democracy in Queensland on Saturday, 31 January 2015. As voters went to the polls, something didn’t smell right. An important element was missing. And its absence was to cost […]
Any faint hope that a new year would shine a light in the growing darkness enveloping our planet was quickly shattered with the slaughter of a bunch of cartoonists working for an obscure publication in […]
The first thing the China Mail’s journalists did after deciding to stage their sit-in over the closure of the newspaper was to get the news out. The job fell to Linda Siddall and Debra Jopson […]
On Saturday 17 August 1974 a newspaper died but she did not go quietly. The China Mail was in her 130th year and was Hong Kong’s oldest English-language newspaper. The Mail was not a great […]
Why shouldn’t Hong Kong people decide what happens to Hong Kong? It’s a simple question with a straightforward and, I fear, unchanging answer – China won’t tolerate it. The received wisdom was that Hong Kong people […]
Reports of the death of democracy, friends, have been greatly exaggerated. An 11th hour boost to its flagging heart has demonstrated, just in time, that there’s life in the old girl yet. It turns out […]
It’s 1973 at the start of another long, hot summer in Hong Kong and already it stinks. The jokes about Hong Kong and its Fragrant Harbour have long been stale but visitors still crack them. […]
It’s Abbott Hour, when I settle down to the ironing and think about how much more it would cost to get it done commercially because something something carbon tax. Australia’s Minister for Women would, I’m […]
My youngest daughter the Little Chef has just left home. I’m coping with the grief by colonising her room and filling it with all my mouldering old newspapers, notebooks and boxes of letters – the […]
Copyright: Maria Spackman
