Development hell for freelance writers

We all know the phrase 'development hell' as it applies to the film industry. But you'll be surprised who else besides studio executives and independent producers spends a lot of time there – freelance journalists.

Frankly, if we spent as much time writing as we did developing material, we'd produce more content that Facebook.

Movie projects are born when someone has a great idea. Maybe they have a script they've written and really believe in. Maybe there's a novel or comic strip they can see great visual potential in and own the rights to.

If they're also a mining magnate or dotcom billionaire, they're ten steps ahead of most movie people – they can use their own money to get their movie made exactly the way they want. But most studio execs, indie producers or filmmakers work tirelessly to bring their project to life, often with nothing but belief in the idea to sustain it, forever waiting for The Call.

They have ideas and wish lists for casting, they imagine scenes and occasionally visit locations they fancy. They play their favourite songs and imagine them on the soundtrack. They tell people about it when the opportunity strikes, figuring they never know when somebody who hears the idea will know (or be) somebody important who can get something done. It's a process of occasionally stoking the embers of an idea alive, and it can take years.

It seems easy because we only ever see the success stories – they're the ones that get made, after all. But when they get made, it starts with a phone call or email that sparks off a period of unalloyed productiveness bordering on manic frenzy, a near-panicky period of the fevered business of creation. If you score name actors, they'll have only a certain period of availability. The skies might open up on the day of your big exterior shot. The financier's stocks might take such a battering their accountant convinces them to abandon media investments and go into natural gas fracking.

Even if things go right, the stories we hear from tiny productions of only a few grand right up to those costing hundreds of millions is always the same – there's never enough money or time.

And when your movie's finished, the distributor has the right to completely change it and edit it (unless you're clever or powerful enough to have final cut written into your contract – good luck if you're just starting out). They might buy the finished product and then bury it with no publicity and advertising budget whatsoever after deciding it wasn't worth the investment after all. The executive you've been dealing might leave or get fired, his or her replacement not nearly as excited by your movie as their predecessor.

The process above will be familiar to anyone who's ever written a magazine, newspaper or website article on a freelance basis. It starts with a great idea you think a) is worth sharing with the world, and b) you want to make a living out of.

We're sometimes jealous of our professional colleagues on staff at newspapers, magazines or major websites because they have a platform to write virtually whatever they want (no matter how vacuous or unoriginal) and they can bring the resources of their employers to bear to make it happen.

And not just material resources, either. If you want to interview some important people for a story, which do you think will get you further past their gatekeepers – telling them you're writing for The New York Times/Wired/South China Morning Post/Gawker or saying you're working on an idea you hope to get published somewhere?

After you come up with the great idea for a story, you'll enter the same development period a movie goes through. You'll do research, work a little on the structure, take a lot of notes, maybe have a document dedicated to marketing the idea to prospective buyers.

In some cases you might even write the whole thing just to see where it takes you and have a finished product ready to sell (upside; if somebody buys it it's all ready. Downside; if nobody buys it you've done a whole lot of work for no financial recompense – always shaky ground when you work for yourself).

You might have the perfect outlet for it, one that buys a lot of your work and gives you the go ahead quickly. Or it might descend into your very own development hell, one that can last anything from weeks to years (the oldest 'live' ideas in my stock of stories are easily a decade old).

Something will emerge that will give you a new angle or more material to contribute. You'll make notes as new ideas about it pop into your head unbidden. You'll read and discover more about the topic, find new angles, hear or read the words of people in the field who have the potential to comment or contribute. It will morph, evolve and change with your own tastes and knowledge.

Then one day out of the blue when you pitch or even mention it, you'll get The Call – a commission. Like a movie that suddenly finds itself with financial backing, you'll have an investor, albeit one that pays you when it's all over rather than funding the project up front (that is, pays you after you call and email them a few more times and then go through their accounts payable lady who's only at work Monday and Tuesday. Oh, and she's at a dentists appointment at the moment, can you try her back tomorrow?)

The project will move into the most intensive period it will ever see as you scramble to bring it to fruition. The publication is like the film distributor or financier – they'll probably never give you enough time or money to do it the way you originally conceived, so you'll work day and night to get it done, alternately panicking and cutting corners.

Resources you were counting on will fall through because they're not available until it's too late to use them. More recent developments might have rendered your original thesis outdated or useless. You'll have to kill countless darlings because of time, availability and other constraints but you'll probably also find new ways of doing it better.

Luck, talent and tenacity will see you turn it in before the deadline, and it's then out of your hands. Just like passing it off to a distributor who might bury it, decide to release it next year or re-edit it to get a PG-13 rating, the publication who's paid you for content now owns it, and they can do whatever they like with it.

By the time it reaches an audience an often-indeterminate time later (a process you'll likely have little to no involvement with) it might have been through the hands of an overzealous subeditor who's completely changed the subtext. They might spell your name wrong in the byline. If it's in print it might get chopped carelessly and bloodily in half because of a late ad booking, losing so much content it doesn't even make sense anymore.

Of course, we (aspiring producers and freelance journalists) all toil under such conditions because there's always a chance of being one of the lucky few. Your small indie movie might really catch on, build slowly because of great buzz and end up conquering the cinematic world. Films from Slumdog Millionaire to Beasts of the Southern Wild have done just that.

In the same way, your story might appear in its entirety the way you intended, with your prose intact and the resources you fought so hard to gather in time – interviews and comments by prominent people, images and video clips - present and well-displayed. It might similarly catch on, spread out far and wide throughout the social media universe and make (or maintain) your name.

But whatever your experience of the final result, next time you hear that a movie studio or production company is looking for a development executive, go right ahead and call them. You're well qualified.

Lad mags, porn and objectification

I understand and sympathise with the Lose the Lad Mag movement and the people who support it, but their efforts are misdirected.

Any man will tell you how tempting the lure of naked or half-clothed women is because of lad mags, internet porn and the average billboard. Emotionally and physiologically, we know they appeal to our deeper, reptile brains.

But intellectually, most educated men in the western world know the poses, the big hair, the clothes painstakingly crafted to look like they're falling off and all the digital manipulation that goes on after the picture is taken is a carefully constructed artifice, presenting a cypher no real woman could possibly represent.

Consider the reason we have such trouble staying clear of sugary, salty and fatty foods. In nature (unaided by human ingenuity, that is), deep fried chicken, ice cream and crackers slathered with cream cheese are as rare as eternally teenaged, 36-24-36-shaped women who are constantly sexually receptive and have blemishless skin, gravity defying breasts, heavy lidded eyes and a sultry pout.

But photography, printing, Photoshop, mass-produced corn starch and the refining of sugar have let us surround ourselves with everything that gives us our drives but which nature provides only scarcely. From the genes on up we know how bad it is for us but it just... tastes... so... good.

The image presented by lad mags, porn and their economic cousins are similarly an oversupply of a very rare quality we're programmed to spend our lives seeking but were supposed to find very rarely – surviving instead on real food and real sex appeal.

The objectification path

Here's what the anti-porn and anti-lad mag crowd have right. Whether it's the hardcore kind anyone can find online or the (almost innocent, by comparison) coquettish looks and colour-corrected breasts staring out of lad mags, porn across the whole spectrum provides a big step towards letting men objectify and dehumanise women. A big step, but not the first one.

That first step is as much a part of nature as breathing and sleeping, something that goes back to our grunting, hairy, stone-tool beginnings. It's a woman looking at a powerful, socially worthy man and imagining babies with him. It's a man looking at a young, fertile woman and imagining sex with her.

Of course that's a very simplistic generalisation, but as both visual and sexual creatures our first interaction with a member of the opposite sex in our natural state is to look at them. The factor that restricted further objectification used to be that – long before you could move on to sex with them – you had to navigate the delicate social process that preceded it, whether it was offering her food with soft, assuring vocalisations or taking her to the movies.

Going through that process meant you had to get to know and accept the whole person, which by its very nature removes any trace of objectification. As human society has become more complicated, that process of familiarizing ourselves with potential mates sometimes convinces us they weren't worth pursuing in the first place, no matter how visually attractive we first found them.

Porn (and the technology that enables it, from cave paintings to computers) has always been about taking that step away. As porn says to its consumer; 'here's a stand-in for a real woman; just a body part in some cases, and she's the perfect mate – as receptive as she is attractive. There's no social groundwork to lay to win her over and she doesn't care how fat your are or your social status'.

That means when a man looks at a naked girl in a lad mag or a porn video, he is absolutely objectifying and dehumanizing her. The reason that can be harmful is because as any psychologist will tell you, men who dehumanise women are more likely to harbour a whole spectrum of detrimental intent – from holding negative or sexist attitudes to rape.

Often in sexual assault a woman is reduced to a vagina, a set of breasts, a body, maybe even a stand-in for someone else her attacker really wants to hurt – from his suffocating mother to hatred about his own 'impure' desires. In some ways it's the ultimate in objectification because her heart, mind and the rest of her humanity aren't even considered to exist as she suffers for the object her attacker has made her.

And when internet porn, suggestive billboards, multi-million dollar advertising campaigns for jeans and fragrances, lad mags and beauty sections in womens' magazines also exist, we don't just have the opportunity to objectify women, we're encouraged to.

Looking too closely

So if objectification is the problem, lad mags are certainly responsible. Problem is – as the above paragraph suggests – they're just one head of the hydra. The hearts of those who want to ban them are in the right place, they're just targeting too slender a locus of the whole issue.

But they're easy targets. Stopping online porn is probably impossible at this point, so the next likely offender on the scale is porn in print, produced by highly visible businesses in our own legal jurisdictions against whom we can lobby and protest. It's an effort to show society that objectifying women is not okay, and a worthy one.

But where's the line? Do we ban womens' underwear in department store catalogues? High school dance dresses? Make-up? Do we forbid women from showing an inch of skin like the extreme elements of Islam do, restricting their freedom altogether instead of objectifying them?

There's actually only one place the line can be drawn, only one potential preventative measure to stop the objectification from hurting women as individuals. Broad-strokes institutional measures and blanket bans isn't it.

The line rests with every individual man who might be tempted by a lad mag or porn site and might enjoy himself using them, but who can turn off the computer or close the magazine and go back to his life where women are his family members, co-workers, bosses, children, lovers or friends. He might fantasise about some of women in his life, but it's impossible for him to objectify them by virtue of the fact that he knows them as people, not body parts or fantasy figures.

A well-adjusted man knows a woman in a magazine seemingly begging him for sex is a carefully constructed and empty symbol, and he probably knows very well he's objectifying the real woman who forms its basis by being a consumer of it. It doesn't mean he's going to go out and rape the next woman he sees.

Of course, we have to acknowledge that there are men who will do that, and porn/lad mags/department store catalogues aren't helping – they're making it worse. But it's also why our target to combat the objectification of women can't be one slender facet of its propagation like lad mags (or jeans billboards, or the catwalk model industry), and neither can it be about top-down blocks or bans imposed upon them.

The answer; there's no simple answer

What should we do as a society? That's far less clear – it's probably got a lot to do with healthy sexual education in childhood, exposing young boys to representations of strong women in their lives, breaking the cycle of domestic violence, punishing and judging rapists instead of their victims and making feminism a conversation for (and about) everyone.

Boys are going to grow up seeing naked girls in magazines. They're going to see a consumer culture that places a woman's physical attractiveness as her most important value. They're going to see women in porn videos who say yes to anal sex every time and let their partners ejaculate on their faces, and they're going to think all women do that (girls are going to see that and think so too). Those ships might have well and truly sailed.

The answer is to use information and education to promote the kind of respect well-adjusted men grow up with, and use it early when objectification starts to take effect.

A lot of people die in car crashes. But instead of banning cars, we try to influence behaviour in individuals and change culture – make drink driving something to be ashamed of, educate drivers about road fatigue, etc.

I know – cars provide far more benefit than detriment to society so in cold statistical terms. The same can't be said about lad mags, which merely contribute to a publishing company's bottom line and as critics claim, might do more harm than good socially.

But the point is that banning lad mags is both looking at the problem too narrowly and enforcing top-down measures that will just enhance the effectiveness of every other potential trigger out there. The solution is to be found much farther back in the objectification pathway. It's far more complicated and nuanced than blanket bans, and it should be preventative instead of reactionary.

Measuring humanity

Here's what's tricky about explaining humans in scientific terms. When you consider yourself, your mental state, it's a series of wildly shifting points along a huge number of spectra. How you're feeling at the moment exists anywhere along degrees of attractiveness, contentedness, creativity, arousal, relaxation, anger, a sense of romance – even states we think of as purely physical such as hungry or tired have uniquely emotional elements.

The shifts along spectra in those waking states fill your waking hours. From the inside, they define you – you live inside them and will never escape them, and that's the constraining envelope we think of when we describe ourselves with the attribution 'I'. Everything else going on – from breathing to muscle contraction, dreams, fatigue after exercising – we attribute with the word 'my'. They're things that belong to us and we control, regulate and live with, but they're not 'I'.

The interesting thing is all that stuff going on in our bodies but outside 'I' is our only insight into that constant inner state. We can measure the extent to which heart rate speeds up, the adrenal glands start to overproduce, the bowel decouples any nervous sensation that it needs emptying and our pupils dilate, and that can tell a scientist when we're in fight or flight mode. We can measure heart rate, nasal dilation and blood flow to the genitals to signify sexual arousal, but any measurement we can take of anything in the realm of 'my' is crude and doesn't tell anything like the whole story.

Why is that 'I' so locked off? How hungry, horny, relaxed, frightened or creative we feel– all those points on spectra that define us are very ill-defined scientifically. The only evidence we have that they exist at all is because we all live in them.

At least, I know I do – because I can never experience the same sense of immersion in what you're feeling, I can only assume you have it too because your actions in the social and physical environment are the same as mine, but for all I know I might be the only living thing on Earth, the rest of you cleverly-programmed robots that don't experience the sensation of an 'I' any more than the toaster in my kitchen does.

Empirically there's no such thing as sexual arousal, there's just increased heart rate, increased blood flow, pupil dilation and all the other physical hallmarks of it. Evolution tells us they must combine to form some function to the organism, but that doesn't explain the feeling going on in the 'I'.

It seems all the machinations in the realm of 'my' give rise to that locked-off experiential narrative, inform on it, serve and comprise it, but everything in that inside realm is impossible for science to measure. It's built on far too many varying factors from far too many independent (and interdependent) physical, psychological and physiological systems that our measuring equipment of today can ever hope to keep track of.

Will that always be the case?

Where's glamour gone?

You know what's missing from the world today?

Glamour.

You can see it (or the lack of it) everywhere – spheres of culture and economics that used to be hotbeds of glitz have been transformed.

Take air travel. There's a scene in Steven Spielberg's Catch Me If You Can where Frank (Leonardo DiCaprio) sneaks onto a plane posing as a pilot by looking the part – walking through the airport surrounded with beautiful air stewardesses who look like they just stepped out of the pages of a glossy fashion magazine. People stop to stare as they pass. Jaws drop at such clean, pristine perfection. Everything about air travel used to be about prestige.

Today, after years of economic transformation (and several bouts of economic carnage) and a vastly different business model thanks to the low cost carriers, planes today are little more than flying buses.

The whole mystique about air stewardesses being blonde-tressed, shiny-toothed angels of the air is long gone. The ones who are still female are more like school matrons on most airlines, and their idea of service is quite different than those long legged beauties leaning down to fill up a champagne glass with a dazzling smile.

If you're old enough to remember catching a plane in the 1970s you'll know people used to get dressed for it. Not in their Sunday best, mind, but look at the people standing in check in queues in airports today. There are so many thongs, singlets and boardshorts it looks like the ice cream queue at the beach.

We do that because we know there'll be no glitz to be found once we board – many airlines are so strapped for profits the fittings and fixtures haven't been changed since the 1990s.

The carpet's frayed, there are still ashtrays in the armrests, TV screen lowers out of the ceiling so everyone has to watch the same rubbish family film with the swear words cut out.

We stuff ourselves like sardines into seats that have lost more and more leg and head room throughout history, and we eat barely digestible slop you wouldn't pay $2.99 for on the ground because we're driven insane with boredom and discomfort.

Then when we get out at the airport at the other end, we'll meet as much glitz and glamour as a sports stadium after the game is over, probably with a little bit of vomit on the seats and everything.

Even pilots themselves are no more those polished, poised gentlemen of yore like Leo's character in Catch Me If You Can. I have a friend who flies the biggest, most advanced passenger aircraft in the world, the A380, between Sydney and London. Because he doesn't work for one of those ultracheap airlines (where the pilot's likely to break up a beer brawl), he can't get enough work and is barely paying his bills.

We used to assume pilots were well paid and taken care of, that they were happy and confident and in control. When we were sitting behind them in a plane we often prayed they were like that.

Now a few generations of transparency about lax safety standards, a few pilots going public about the appalling pay and conditions and movies like Flight that show the men and women with our lives in their hands as screwed up and depressed as any of us have made the cultural perception of the airline pilot quite different. Miners are likely to earn more money – in fact in Australia they're the only ones earning any money.

Here's another glaring example; Hollywood. There used to be a guy on Australian TV introducing movies called Bill Collins. I was a kid so I don't know if he's even still alive after all this time, let alone working. He's the sort of film critic there used to be a professional class of film critics was all we had, not armies of scruffily bearded kids running blogs.

Collins was the kind of guy who used to love everything made before 1965 and hate everything since, and his spot was called The Golden Years of Hollywood. I loved James Bond like most kids, and my introduction to the ones that predated my own existence was through Bill Collins.

At the time movies and Hollywood seemed all about tuxedoes and prestigious cars lining up at film premieres, stars smoking cool cigarettes and drinking martinis. Collins himself seemed all about that, with his smart suit and gilt-edged studio set. There was a professional class of person who worked in the film industry, and it was all about glitz.

What's changed that? A kid who picks up a $100 camcorder, shoots a movie in his backyard and today makes $100m blockbusters in the studio system. That's a figurative metaphor, but it's accurate. There'd be a time stars would be limo-driven from one party, event and shoot to the next wearing a sharp suit. At least, that was the illusion Hollywood crafted.

Today, it's not unusual to see superstars who earn multimillion-dollar salaries looking like homeless ex roadies, even in professional capacities while promoting films.

Of course, ostentatious displays of wealth have been very out of vogue for 20 years or more. There have been some very painful economic downturns in the memories of people still in the workforce right now, and coddled superstars swanning around on beaches in Belize enjoying the perks of a lavish lifestyle we secretly know they don't really deserve is kind of distasteful.

They know that and they know their appeal today is to appear just like us, hence taking every opportunity to tell reporters they live normal lives, take their kids to school, etc etc. Most multi-million dollar directors are closer in spirit to kids running around their backyards with cameras than the Alfred Hitchcocks, John Fords and Billy Wilders of the world.

It's true that we still have the statue of the lamb of pop culture, something false for us to worship even though we know she's a false god (Kardashian, Hilton et al). They lead lavish lifestyles and flaunt them shamelessly because it's part of the business model, and we hate them for it as much as we love them.

Surely that's part of the reason why pop culture figureheads like Kim Kardashian are so adored when honestly, we all know how dumb, talentless, etc she really is. It sounds ridiculous but if anything, the Kardashians are old Hollywood, the gilded class who flaunts wealth shamelessly as an aspirational totem for the rest of us.

Here's another example – magazine publishing.

In the postwar years there were few more glamourous occupations as working behind the doors of a glossy magazine. We still look on the industry with rose coloured glasses today (just look at heroines in pop culture fixtures like Sex in the City and The Devil Wears Prada, who are paid writers for hip magazines). The field swirled with terms that carried serious weight among the creative class, 'advertising', 'art direction', 'editorial'.

But today the technology that's wrought such changes on Hollywood is eviscerating the magazine industry like it did the music industry. Today magazine publishing gives you two choices – sit around with your head down until you get retrenched, or throw in the towel and freelance on a promise of regular work from a former colleague (which won't last) or try and get more than 20 crummy cents a word out of a host of publications who have 'no freelance budget'.

Now, before I go further, some clarifications.

First, I'm not sexist enough to suggest airline cabin crew should all be tall, blonde, leggy and female. They shouldn't even be all female. And hiring young hot chicks to be flight attendants is an abhorrent practise even if it would have resulted in only young, hot chicks serving you drinks on planes.

It's also a good thing airline travel has become so cheap. I wouldn't have been able to go anywhere near the places I've been on my income in the 80s or before. I'm sure there's going to be a monumental error because of cost cutting that will result in hundreds of deaths (if there hasn't been already), but it's a similar argument to the contention that we should ban cars because they kill so many people.

And I'm all for the possibility of kicking the doors of Hollywood in with talent alone. I don't have anything approaching the credentials to be a professional film critic or journalist, but I am one through a combination of talent, persistence and sheer arse (and also because many of the media I started writing for were as irrelevant as I was). I could step from one to the next through a ladder of achievement to the big leagues that simply didn't exist before. There was a time you had to be born into the big leagues or have a connection (I had neither), or be far luckier than I am.

The other huge caveat is that I've been alive long enough to know the healing power of nostalgia. Everything – everything – is said to be getting worse. Ask anyone in any industry and they'll tell you the heyday was about 10-20 years ago (no matter when you ask them), and it's just not the same any more.

Maybe planes were actually less comfortable then. They were full of smoke, for one thing. Maybe air stewardesses were dragons like they are now, and they were only ever leggy blondes in advertising and media – the only field for which we have a fossil record of those days.

Stars and celebrities were certainly as boorish, drunk, badly behaved and undeserving of all their fame and money as they are now. You could see it every time a studio closed ranks around a misbehaving star or scandal and launched a press lockdown. It was far easier to keep things out of the press than it is today, and the public (aided by magazines, ironically – the only ones selling) didn't have such an insatiable thirst to see the mighty fall. Despite how much stars want to appear human, there's nothing we love more today than them proving their humanity by doing something stupid.

Maybe all that glamour was a carefully crafted illusion and now that we live in a transparent age we're much more in control of our choices as consumers and citizens.

But every time I go to an airport, I can't help wishing just one six foot blonde amazon with a gleaming smile and one of those little pillbox hats would traipse through in her high heels and leave awe and envy in her wake.

Here's what's happened to Australia's international profile

Before the 1980s, we didn't have one. People just knew we were far, far away and had a lot of desert. Some more enlightened/educated foreigners might have known about the bushman/swag/larrikin legends that go all the way back to the Henry Lawson/CJ Dennis era, but we barely had a current national sense of self to promote or put forward.

If we had a profile among cineastes, it was that Australia was a weird, dark, scary and forbidding place. Movies set here were dystopian visions of dread and violence, from the implied destruction and racial unrest of The Last Wave to the apparent wormhole through space and time of Picnic at Hanging Rock. Even commercial efforts were dark – if it isn't enough Razorback was Australia's answer to Jaws, about a murderous animal stalking us, it made the outback a dark place fully of craggy, dead trees and drifting mists, where if you moved more than a few metres away from the road it was a death sentence.

Then, aided by the Tourism Commission, we changed direction abruptly. Paul Hogan invited the world (particularly Americans) down, promising them he'd stick an extra shrimp on the barbie for them, with sweeping vistas of beautiful red desert and the glory of Sydney Harbour in the background.

Soon, the world was watching us, and they fell in love with the gorgeous outback full of fluffy animals, friendly aboriginals and beautiful colours. The time was ripe for Hogan to capture such romantic longing and serve up an even bigger dose of it in Crocodile Dundee, a world away from the danger, despair and loneliness of the bush with it's romantic hues, dream-like quality and stunning natural beauty. Even the danger was photogenic, transformed into a rugged Tarzan rescue mythology as the rough and tumble hero saves the pretty damsel in her G-string swimsuit.

It was a glossy sheen that lasted for a long time and cemented the image most foreigners had of us, despite the fact that most Australians lived in the suburbs and were no more familiar with the bush or outback than they were the surface of the moon. From the time Europeans settled here Australia has been too harsh for expansion, and there have always been more rural Americans as a percentage of the population than rural Australians.

Why else did the world (particularly America) fall in love with Steve Irwin's antics than because he was a lite version of Crocodile Dundee, a lovable larrikin full of the catchphrases and vernacular they found so cute. I'd bet that even by well into the 21st century, the world had no idea how urbanised and industrialised Australia was, thinking we all ran around red, dusty deserts wearing khaki shorts, leaping on top of animals and shouting 'crikey!'

But change was brewing as far back as the mid 90s. Industries and events were jostling into position to recast Australia as a hub of culture and creativity. The Star Wars prequels and The Matrix were being shot in downtown Sydney. The Olympics proved we could put on a global event. Before long Sydney went from being just another big city to one of those global cities you see on handbags and glossy magazine ads alongside New York, London, Paris and Tokyo.

Now, two things are changing Australia's image all over again. First is that more people than ever are coming here. It might be because those tourism ads are working (though it's unlikely – see more below), but it's probably simply because travel has become so cheap in the online age and generations Y and beyond are seeing the world to an extent their parents never dreamed.

So stories are getting around – not just because foreigners are seeing the real Australia, good and bad, but because there are so many more voices to be heard. It isn't only that they blog and Facebook and post their comments into a chorus of unfiltered discussion, but Australians are too, from the lowliest culture watcher to the mainstream media (and new media) who discuss issues in our country to the world that are beyond shrimps and barbies.

And the presence of Fox Studios, the Olympics, George Lucas and the Matrix did something else – it gave us our own film industry that's joined the chorus of voices, and it's selling a very message to the world that's very different from cute animals and larrikin humour.

The industry that grew up around our sudden high creative standing has led to vibrant artistry in movies from Wolf Creek to Samson and Delilah, and neither racial intolerance nor a maniacal serial killer make good tourism commercials.

Unwittingly, this generation of moviemakers are forming our collective voice and making the official tourism picture of sandy beaches and wildflowers even less relevant.

Maybe that's why none of the tourism Commission campaigns since Hoges and his barbie in the 80s have been very well received. As sustained world attention turned on us and saw what we could do in everything from sport to movies, we gained a new confidence about our place in it. We wanted to be seen as writers, dotcom entrepreneurs and other sophisticates living in townhouses along Glebe Point Road buying chai lattes from groovy cafes, not ockers drinking tinnies of Fosters with 'Pommie Bastard' written on our T-shirts.

When the government tourism body featured a hot young girl in a bikini asking the world where the bloody hell they were, the backlash was deafening. They were obviously trying to recapture some of that 80s magic by selling us as laid back, friendly, informal and provincial, but they revealed themselves to be badly out of step with mainstream opinion. The chattering classes in the cities were aghast at being personified using such caricature. We'd moved on, and we wanted the picture of ourselves to do to same.

After only 30 years, the romantic ocker of beautiful bush and rugged, attractive living was over.

The Family of Middle America vs. Hollywood

There's a family somewhere of a teenaged girl, prepubescent boy, busy working dad and loving mom.

And I say 'mom', not mum, because this family isn't Australian or British. They're American. The girl wants to borrow the car on the weekend. The dad likes to play golf. The mom knows where all the oven mitts are stored. They have an SUV and a dog. They're not as worried about terrorists as the government wants them to be but they're careful. They're a lot more terrified of pedophiles. They know Iraq's all about oil but they don't really care, they're just pissed off gas is getting so expensive at the pump.

They might not know it, but they're the most powerful family on earth when it comes to shaping culture – not just in America, but everywhere from Amsterdam to Zanzibar.

How? You have to understand the term 'family' as a political concept rather than a group of blood relatives living in the same house.

The above description is mythical. It's the reason for almost everything that goes on in Washington because most of the people in America live in that mythical arrangement and thus form the biggest voting bloc for any political party.

Just like that mythical group has the most voting power, they have the most buying power when it comes to culture. And among the products entered into the ether of culture, movies are one of the most expensive.

When they cost upwards of $100 million to produce (and as much again to market) the people who invest in and make them have to ensure a lot of people see them.

They have to make them appeal to the broadest possible group, and the most represented group in the western world as a number is the mythical family.

The reason the US studios they don't make films specifically for black or gay or Muslim audiences is simply because there aren't enough people in those groups to ensure the studios return on investment. Or there are too many subcultures and the marketing wouldn't be able to target them effectively.

As movies get more expensive, they have to aim more broadly in economic terms. That means not including anything the mythical middle American family wouldn't get or agree with.

In Australia we're more urbane – most of us live in the cities. In America most of the population lives away from large cities and they're more conservative in their outlook. As a society they're much less accepting of gay people, black people in power, women in power and other concepts that have come of age in the last thirty to forty years.

So the bigger the film, the more it has to stay on that middle American straight and narrow to appeal to those people. If it's misdirected and doesn't get all those audiences, urban populations alone aren't enough to return the outlay of so much money to the studios and distributors.

And we all know the power of the movies. Along with commercial music publishing, movie production sets the tone for culture in all corners of the developed world. I often wonder if those studio executives and directors realise how much power they're holding in their hands.

But that's not where the buck stops. As the saying goes, we all work for someone, and the bosses of those Lamborghini-driving suits and producers are the mythical middle American family, looking at the marquee above the box office every Friday and Saturday night, making or ruining careers

Language; All We Need

There's a very famous experiment where a coupe of scientists brought chimpanzee babies up as humans from birth, speaking to them and treating them like their own.

The theory was that the chimps would end up able to; as they have extremely similar facial musculature as us, other primates certainly have the mechanics to speak.

But after several years of trying, all the animals could manage was a few rudimentary grunts and sounds that communicated certain simple desires like food or water.

The conclusion was that the human brain comes hard-wired for learning language, a hypothesis promoted by Chomsky and other leading linguists. Without consciously teaching a child how to speak (as we have to do for mathematics or writing), we do so simply by being around them in our day to day lives as they grow up.

That got me thinking about the difference between humans and animals, and I decided that maybe language is the only real difference, a talent our proportionately large brain must comprise of in at least a large part.

Watching chips communicate makes you realise that they're limited to a very basic set of vocalisations, gestures, postures and expressions. We see them shake branches and bark to ward off enemies or potential successors to their alpha male status, bare their teeth when angry, hoot when alarmed etc, but that's it.

It helps explain things if you consider that each animal (including us) has an inner life – a set of fears, desires, wants, needs and ideas. At their most basic, they're the same throughout the animal kingdom.

Every animal is essentially an island, cut off from every other life form because of the inefficiency with which they can communicate their inner life to each other, predators, prey or their environment.

The inner life of a human organism is a chicken and egg question; our inner life might not be terribly more complicated than that of a chimp as we feel fear for our offspring, the desire to mate or provide for our social group (family) or we clamour for access to land or resources.

But our powers to express that inner life are incredibly broad. We can describe every facet of our inner lives with extreme efficiency (just by making sounds with our mouths) to anyone else in our species.

What that's promoted after a hundred million years of evolution is what must be the most developed sense of empathy in the animal kingdom.

The chimpanzee has the mental and physical capabilities to construct a great and complicated society – maybe more so than us with our comparatively weaker upper bodies. But what restricts them is the ability not just to have an idea that could be construed as technology or invention (as many linguists believes, we see in words), but the ability to communicate that to his or her fellows.

Every chimpanzee would have to start from scratch and construct a great society completely on his or her own, the ideas and the method of execution cut off from his contemporaries simply because the extent of his powers to communicate with them are limited to shaking branches, thumping rocks together and hooting.

The human organism, by comparison, can be described as partly the hard-wired ability for language and partly the collected wisdom of his or her entire species.

When the first mud hut was constructed by inventive plains dwellers, the accumulated knowledge they realised in making it a success has led directly to the world of today with glass and steel skyscrapers reaching into the sky.

Long-term memory might be what we call the power to retain and recall all the information we can communicate to each other, but if you think of all the times you just haven't been able to remember some small detail about something and instead have had to look it up, that's the power of speech, not our extremely fallible memories. The power of speech can be thought of as collective memory.

Most things anyone in human history has learned or decided can be or have been bought to us because of the power of language (and reading, by simple extension).

Now it may be that the other animals are supremely more intelligent than us and have failsafe linguistic systems we could never recognise, let alone understand. It might be simply that they're content to involve themselves in the simple pursuits of food and reproduction rather than art, commerce or space travel. Maybe all we have that sets us apart from them is the power of ambition. If that's true speech among humans might be the most rudimentary form of communication among life on Earth.

But if casual anthropological observation bears out, the human race as a species is closer together than any other simply because individual experience can be disseminated through the whole collective in efficient terms that provoke the empathy language has prepared our brains to feel