Pip Starr // Paddy McGuinness

Reclaim the Streets 7, March 1999. Hundreds of partiers in an ongoing Reclaim the Streets occupy several sites in Sydney, including the Eastern Distributor. Global Warming was still just a distant concept to most of us at this point in time, but by protesting about over use of the motor car we were obviously on the right track. September 11 was just another day on the calendar.

Barista and Takver have written further reflections on Pip’s life and times: these things happened (January 30) and The Passing of Pip Starr – Australian Activist Videographer (January 31).

Former PM Paul Keating, on the other hand, has some choice words regarding Paddy’s life and work. The late Paddy McGuinness was “a liar and a fraud” with the journalistic “morals of an alley cat”, former prime minister Paul Keating says. In a stinging opinion piece in The Australian Financial Review today, Mr Keating accused McGuinness of having a “prejudiced, capricious and intellectually corrupt mind that was all over the shop depending on what suited his miserable purposes at the time”.

Local documentary filmmaker Pip Starr has died. Pip committed suicide.

I believe that independent media is vital to democracy. Australia has one of the most centralized ownerships of media in the world, which is part of the reason for the woeful state of our democracy. The radical shift to the right that is happening in our country would not have happened without the support of the corporate media in Australia.

One of the beneficiaries of this rightward shift was Padraic ‘Paddy’ McGuinness, and he too has died, of melanoma (skin cancer) at the age of 69.

Quadrant editor Paddy McGuiness dies
January 27, 2008
AAP

PADRAIC ‘Paddy’ McGuinness, a former Sydney Morning Herald columnist and editor of Quadrant magazine, has died at his Sydney home aged 69.

See also : Sad, angry and confused, Richard Watts, January 23, 2008 | Obituary Pip Starr: Melbourne Activist, Craig Bellamy, January 24, 2008 | Pip Starr – An Obituary, chi too, January 25, 2008 | What a Starr., Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert, January 26, 2008 | Peter McGregor (1947–2008) | Jeff Riley

King : Now, Hamlet, where’s Polonius?
Hamlet : At supper.
King : At supper? Where?
Hamlet : Not where he eats, but where he is eaten. A certain convocation of politic worms are e’en at him. Your worm is your only emperor for diet. We fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots. Your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable service — two dishes, but to one table. That’s the end.
King : Alas, alas!