In which the pond celebrates penny-a-line Murdochians ...

Now before anyone gets agitated, let the pond remind everyone that Dame Slap works without benefit of contract, and is a proud casual labourer, who scribbles on a "penny-a-line" basis - as do all the reptiles, aware that a penny is probably all their scribbles are worth ...

Of course there are a few ironies in this noble stand, not least the way the AJA was formed way back when ... (union propaganda here) ...

At the time, journalists were often working for "a-penny-a-line". As a reporter on a daily newspaper, you were probably paid in the region of £3 or £4 per week for working something in excess of 60 hours – across at least six days a week. That is, of course, if you were paid a weekly wage at all. One of the journalists working as a "penny-a-liner" was Keith (later Sir Keith) Murdoch, father of Rupert, who was scratching a living from piece work as a federal parliamentary reporter for The Age in Melbourne (the then national capital). 
The meeting was called by Melbourne Herald reporter B.S.B. “Bertie” Cook. He had begun work there, aged 12, as a copy boy. After 10 years he was a reporter earning £3 for a 70-hour week. Concerned by journalists' working conditions, he joined with colleagues in several failed attempts to form an effective industrial association. But in 1910 Cook saw an opportunity under the Conciliation and Arbitration Act 1904 for journalists to register as an industrial organisation. The Act provided that “an employer shall not dismiss an employee or injure him in his employment or alter his position to his prejudice by reason of the circumstance that the employee is entitled to the benefit of an industrial agreement or award”.

Indeed, indeed, and these days with the gig economy in full swing, how important it is to maintain every possible way of screwing people that can be found ... and as a noble gigger, who better a guide than Dame Slap, who after scribbling a column, will frequently duck outside to pull coffees as one of the inner city 'leets better known baristas ... before heading off across town to wash hounds for some of the eastern suburbs matrons ...

There's nothing like working for a billionaire for gruel and found to sharpen a revolutionary's sense of injustice, and so it is with the Dame ...

Now it's easy to see why Dame Slap is outraged. Here she is, working for a penny a line, and bringing her wage up to scratch by freelancing as a barista and a dog washer, and dammit, someone wants to shut down her entrepreneurial initiative.

It's outrageous ... so naturally she's calling for the complete casualisation of the entire News Corp workforce, even if at the same time it involves the brutalisation of the English language ... no sacrifice can be spared for this noble endeavour ...

It seems that Dame Slap is hip to the digital economy and simply abhors any sense of stability or a weekly pay cheque, and has her own schemes for a long and healthy retirement ... without any of those useless faddish fringe benefits that gig workers miss out on ...

Now just remember, everything you're read is a penny-a-line, and Dame Slap will work for whatever a generous soul decides to tip into the hat she's conveniently left on the pavement outside the bunker in Holt street, Surry Hills ...

Remember a coin flung in the hat will produce a cheery 'thank'ee guv'nor and a top of the morning to ye', rather than those caricatured impressions of the Dame advising a class of the benefits of a casual relationship with an employer ...

Work hard and certainly with no minimum wage or fringe benefits for you useless lot, and think yourself lucky if you can become a hapless cog in the machine ...

Indeed, indeed, screw the workers, the pond says, and remember, that also means screw the reptiles, and so to a cartoon for the day, with the immortal Rowe going all referential ...and more referring to Rowe here ...

Now it's only a slightly long bow to draw that image back to Dame Slap, thanks to this analysis of the original Fuseli ...

The painting was first displayed at the annual Royal Academy exhibition in London in 1782, where it shocked, titillated, and frightened exhibition visitors and critics. Unlike many of the paintings that were then popular and successful at the Royal Academy exhibitions, Fuseli’s The Nightmare has no moralizing subject. The scene is an invented one, a product of Fuseli’s imagination. It certainly has a literary character and the various figures demonstrate Fuseli’s broad knowledge of art history, but The Nightmare’s subject is not drawn from history, the Bible, or literature. The painting has yielded many interpretations and is seen as prefiguring late nineteenth-century psychoanalytic theories regarding dreams and the unconscious (Sigmund Freud allegedly kept a reproduction of the painting on the wall of his apartment in Vienna). (here)

Imagine Dame Slap crouched, hunched like a wayward beast, on the corpse of industrial relations, and there you have it ...