The northern end of Sandy Bay arcs from Short Beach, where the Four Winds was first noticed sinking in the early hours, around to Battery Point, a historic suburb of almost equal affluence. On the peak of Battery Point, at the intersection of Napoleon Street, Trumpeter Street and Marine Terrace, single vehicle access through Derwent Lane leads down to a small brown gravel carpark surrounded by a knee-high chain-link fence. This is Purdon Featherstone Reserve. The carpark leads onto the middle, and largest, of three wooden jetties preceded by a small black-on-white council sign that reads “Gross Load Limit 10 t”. The jetties are surrounded by mooring buoys.

In late January, 2009 the Four Winds was as visible and accessible from this point as it was from Short Beach where Susan Blythe Neill-Fraser had pulled the small white and blue dinghy across the sand at 2pm on Australia Day. The Four Winds was a distinctive 53 foot long ketch with a white painted steel hull and unpainted steel masts, waist high guardrails and dark blue sails. The ketch was segregated into seven compartments by five watertight bulkheads, each compartment monitored by 12 volt water sensors with loud alarms. It also had two bilge pumps set to automatic.

Painted across her stern was ‘Four Winds’ in blue floral text above the registration number.

For the uninitiated, a ketch is a double masted vessel similar to a schooner but its rear “mizzen” mast is shorter than the main mast; where the schooner has the opposite arrangement. The ketch is a popular distance cruising design that offers greater stability and control in volatile weather.

When the rowing coach saw the Four Winds in trouble he helped nearby uniformed police officers investigate with a dinghy. They saw blood drops on the Four Winds’ step, later shown in forensic photographs as diluted by marine police who arrived 30 minutes later. The constable entered the boat in ankle deep water and saw the key in the ignition, a carving knife and a torch. He called out, but there was no reply. The two bilge pumps were switched on but not working.

Later evidence taken at Constitution Dock and Goodwood would show scuff marks near the hatch, two rope burn marks and the relocation of a green rope; the epurb was missing and it was surmised that a 3 foot long chemical fire extinguisher had been removed from the boat. The winch had also been re-jigged so the rope wrapped around it the wrong way and the red winch handle was not correctly stowed in its locker. As none of the scuff marks were visible on the Four Winds the previous day they were taken as clues to Bob Chappell’s disappearance.

There was also a smattering of other evidence. Numerous DNA and fingerprint samples were taken from the Four Winds. The epurb was found discarded with two unidentified sets of fingerprints on its base. Neill-Fraser’s white and blue dinghy, the one she pulled up the beach at 2pm the previous day, was found loose on Marieville Esplanade with a rope inside. And a red Royal Yacht Club of Tasmania jacket was found rolled up on a fence in Margaret Street – it begins across the road from the Royal Yacht Club of Tasmania on Marieville Esplanade, passes the Sandy Bay Bowling Club Association then soon becomes Ashfield Street and spills onto Sandy Bay Road close to the shopping precinct. Neill-Fraser denied any knowledge of the jacket.

However, Neill-Fraser’s DNA was found in that red jacket and Margaret Street would have been a logical walking path back to her West Hobart residence.

[Update notepart 5 of this series has been indefinitely postponed until Susan Neill-Fraser's family decide its worth sharing their court transcripts. As I can't afford to purchase my own copy.]

Installments in the Neill-Fraser Story

• (i) Retirement dreams aboard the Four Winds
• (ii) Disarray & Sabotage on the Mooring
• (iii) The Scene at Marieville Esplanade
• (iv) The Ketch with a Billion Dollar View

The Royal Yacht Club of Tasmania and the Derwent Sailing Squadron share the harbour-side of Sandy Bay’s prestigious Marieville Esplanade. They stand alongside the Federal Casino as pennants of Hobart’s high society. Marieville Esplanade spans from the bottom of Queen Street away from the foreshore and spills onto a bustling Sandy Bay Road that links Taroona (driving south) to the Hobart central business district.

Across the road from Marieville Esplanade are the green ovals of the University of Tasmania with sprinklers beading circular sheets of crystal liquid under a mid-Summer sky; they tick-tick-tack their way toward the next alumni cricket match in concert with small white-sailed yachts that smatter the harbour in increments of dancing glitter. Along the foreshore, blonde middle-aged women throw sticks to untrained munchkins named Poppit and Sam and cyclists in orange and black spandex perch on one leg to replenish in the water views.

Police investigators took in the fresh salt air on Marieville Esplanade. They glanced along the waterfront, then out to the stricken Four Winds moored off Battery Point where Bob Chappell had vanished during the night. They filtered impressions of onlookers, parked vehicles and innocuous items around the crime scene that could provide vital clues for their investigation. A grey station wagon had been parked overnight.

Susan Blythe Neill-Fraser was contacted by police early on that first day with news of the Four Winds and questions about her missing partner. She presented with a bandaged hand and they described her as distraught but aloof. From that first day she was medicated and sometime that day she tried to see Dr Ian Sale, an eminent Tasmanian forensic psychiatrist who regularly testifies in criminal matters. She also presented to investigators as intelligent, a grandmother, a romantic fiction writer; she came from old money in a town that respects old money and belaboured an appropriate arrogance.

Because apart from her breeding, Neill-Fraser’s independent wealth, valued at over $1 million, included 80 hectares of farmland at Bagdad, 250 hectares at Old Beach, a home on the prestigious Marieville Esplanade and $90,000 in savings. The couple, who kept their finances separate, also co-owned the Four Winds and Bob provided a modest weekly salary to keep her in an appropriate lifestyle. The couple lived in a West Hobart residence within two miles from the crime scene.

Friends later indicated that Neill-Fraser was her own worst enemy during the investigation and put that arrogant self-privileged personality trait as the single most important driving factor behind early police suspicion of her involvement. Brett Meeker, Neill-Fraser’s ex-husband, later described her in conversation as “a difficult woman” who made enemies of the Police. Whereas, police investigators saw her as unhelpful at best and they grew to the conviction that she deliberately side-tracked their investigation to avoid detection.

It is almost impossible to say what Neill-Fraser thought on that first day. There seems to be a melding of two realities that say the grandmother was distraught and medicated over Bob’s disappearance, in contrast to the investigators’ perception that she presented as a cold and evasive fish. Because Neill-Fraser either hoped in the core of her soul that Bob would appear like a magical naughty sprite at the evening meal; or, she hoped with all the might of her bestial desire that his battered and discarded carcass would remain undetected.

Whichever of those two realities, she may have realised that the white and blue dinghy she pulled across the sand at 2pm on Australia Day had moved.

[part 5 of this series will be published on this website in the next few days.]

Installments in the Neill-Fraser Story

• (i) Retirement dreams aboard the Four Winds
• (ii) Disarray & Sabotage on the Mooring
• (iii) The Scene at Marieville Esplanade
• (iv) The Ketch with a Billion Dollar View

As Susan Blythe Neill-Fraser pulled her small white and blue dinghy up the small beach in the exclusive Hobart suburb of Sandy Bay she most likely looked out at the ‘Four Winds’ for at least a moment.

At 57 her dreams of travel and adventure may have out-scoped the more sedate retirement dreams of her long-time de-facto Bob Chappell. She may even have yearned for Galapagos in that moment as a family friend helped pull the dinghy across smooth white sand to the high tide mark. Nothing about that moment struck anybody as remarkable.

Bob, a 65 year old medical physicist, remained on board as the Four Winds slowly bobbed and swayed around its Sandy Bay mooring on the prevailing breeze, tide and currents. He would have been aware of the constant lapping of water against the hull and not-so-distant sounds from the nearby shore. He would have heard children playing, families enjoying their holiday and cars echoing from the cityscape as he performed minor repairs. He had every intention to stay overnight.

That was the moment where time stopped for Bob Chappell. At 2pm on Australia Day, 2009 the relentless life-clock in the sky took a last snapshot in sepia then faded Bob from Hobart’s face with a single sharp wink. The act of pulling Neill-Fraser’s dinghy across the sand at that exact point in time on that specific afternoon, however apparently unremarkable, was like taking an eraser to a blackboard. His body was never found and it is unknown exactly where or how he was murdered. Even the ‘why’ has been left to speculation.

A jumble of accounts are relevant to the next 18 hours. At around 4pm somebody saw a large grey dinghy with blue trimmings, with a tarp over the bow, tied to the side of the Four Winds. But police never resolved that question. Someone else said they saw a large grey dinghy later in the night and several people at various times, from land and water, said they saw “a woman” in a boat, one said possibly of middle age, although no two people saw the same woman in the same boat at the same time. And not a single soul could definitively state that they saw Neill-Fraser in any boat after 2pm on Australia Day.

By the next morning Bob’s outcomes could only be described as bleak. The Four Winds, still on her mooring, had her bow beneath the waves and police were summoned to investigate a potential crime scene. They found drops of blood on the stepladder, disarray in the wheel house and it soon became clear somebody intentionally opened the sea cocks and severed a sewage pipe in a failed attempt to destroy evidence.

Some items were missing: an epurb and possibly a fire extinguisher. Bob Chappell.

With growing concern, police scuba divers attempted but failed to locate Bob’s body in the deep harbour around the yacht and the event migrated from a crime scene into a murder mystery. Compounding that mystery, at least 21 people – tradesmen, police, search and rescue – were known to have contaminated Four Winds prior to the arrival of forensic investigators.

As the sun set over the Derwent River that first evening of the investigation the police were certain of two things. The first was that Bob Chappell was almost certainly dead. The second was that a murder conviction in Tasmanian courts without providing a body to the jury had never succeeded. Even if they uncovered a murderer after that point it would take a dramatic leap of faith for the Department of Public Prosecutions to pursue them.

[part 5 of this series will be published on this website in the next few days.]

Installments in the Neill-Fraser Story

• (i) Retirement dreams aboard the Four Winds
• (ii) Disarray & Sabotage on the Mooring
• (iii) The Scene at Marieville Esplanade
• (iv) The Ketch with a Billion Dollar View

It was Australia Day, 2009. There was no sense on the quiet Hobart waterfront that anything was amiss, no building expectation of calamity and no signal from a starter’s pistol to tell Bob Chappell his life was nearly over. Like most murder victims he had no idea his life would end in the approaching night and unlike most murder victims his body may never be found to fill in the back story.

Bob, 65, was a respected medical physicist at the Royal Hobart Hospital with dreams of retiring on a small yacht. The Global Financial Crisis had postponed that dream and extended his work-life for another 12 months but the conflict around that extension, or the postponement of the dream retirement, is said to have caused stress in his relationship.

Susan Blythe Neill-Fraser, 57, was Bob’s de-facto partner of 18 years. She was independently wealthy and received a weekly salary from Bob to maintain her lifestyle.

The couple had found the 53 foot ketch, Four Winds, at Scarborough Marina in Brisbane. It was a larger yacht than their initial plans and at $203,000 it was a lot more expensive than their budget had forecast. However, they agreed this was the yacht of their dream retirement and they invested equal shares in its finance.

After purchasing the Four Winds, two months before Bob’s murder, there was extensive trade-work undertaken at Scarborough Marina to make it seaworthy and through that month the couple raised concerns that their new purchase had been illegally boarded by strangers. The wheelhouse was never locked and nothing was taken but they noticed items had inexplicably moved. They also harboured growing paranoia about drug trafficking links in the Four Winds’ recent past and became even more curious after discovering “loose panels” that could have been used to secrete contraband. Luxury yachts are a growing concern to the Australian Federal Police.

Meanwhile, the bills for the Four Winds mounted and the monetary stress increased as their dream yacht absorbed tradesmens’ time and materials. The Four Winds was turning from their dream into a drama queen – there was later speculation they had purchased “a lemon” – and there appears to have been little joy left for the couple after that first month in Brisbane.

Then, as they sailed the Four Winds south toward Tasmania, their savings continued to deplete and serious equipment failure compounded their misfortune. It was in that circumstance Bob suffered through several grueling days of serious nose hemorrhaging and eventual hospitalisation before he was left behind.

In December, 2008 Neill-Fraser finished the voyage and they were re-united in Hobart in a less-than-warm wharf-side greeting. The couple was financially and emotionally strained and a tired Neill-Fraser, exhilarated by the trip but possibly with bigger dreams than her older partner, saw herself as the more competent sailor. She looked out over the deepest natural harbour in the Southern hemisphere and small world of the Hobart elite and dreamed of bigger challenges and experiences.

Four weeks later, on 27 January, 2009 Bob stood on the Four Winds moored off the exclusive suburb of Sandy Bay and probably thought about mundane things. He might have thought about dinner, what to buy somebody for a birthday present or something he read in that morning’s newspaper. He may well have taken in views of the Casino, the Hobart Bridge, historic Battery Point and the beckoning channel to the Great Southern Ocean that romances every expectant sailor.

He may have even thought about the person who would murder him in the coming hours.

[part 5 of this series will be published on this website in the next few days.]

Installments in the Neill-Fraser Story

• (i) Retirement dreams aboard the Four Winds
• (ii) Disarray & Sabotage on the Mooring
• (iii) The Scene at Marieville Esplanade
• (iv) The Ketch with a Billion Dollar View

He was more than old, Ebenezer Scrooge on a wintery night; an ordinary old man wearing a woolen coat, unimposing, my-height short, ten hairs left to the mottled skull, a thick German accent and that pre-death rattle of pseudo-religious regret abundant in the terminally old. The vernacular of death wafted between his sentences through charcoal rough nouns – veins… heart… pigs – and with defiant pride in the possessives – “I have veins to my heart taken from pigs.” The old man licked his words clean of the innocent, dished them onto slivers of old malice and disassembled them without their eyeballs into my Aryan ears.

He said “We loved Hitler.”

The bus stop was a dark-green-slat wood bench set in concrete stubs. An icy night wind scraped my right cheekbone beneath the skin and peeled involuntary tears from the folded corner of a tortured eye socket. The winter scuttled through the thick blue overalls with Darwinian finesse; invisible malicious ice-crabs that crawled into warm muscle and sinew to greet my boot at the ankle. When an old man tells you in the plural that he loved Hitler, life’s shoddy floorboards creak, just a little, under his feet.

“We loved Hitler”, he said. “Hitler cured crime. He sent the criminals to the camps. The first time, a warning; the second, the camps. If they stole a third time, they were dead. Hitler cured crime. He sent the criminals to the camps with the homosexuals. People loved him.”

The old man searched for my reaction. He said “We loved Hitler. When we stood in the crowd and Hitler asked us if we wanted bread or guns, we said guns. ‘Give us guns’.”

His marbled face lit with the memory of exuberant fanaticism, polished boots of the willing young and soft wet kisses from a lover’s white bed-linen. All old men were young men once, but not all young men will be given to grow old. And true love is a well trodden photograph from another reality, behind time’s glass, impervious to history, well-drunk in beers on bar-stools with old comrades; blooded medals left on a retreating battlefront and spent cartridges for the dead.

“The old men at the Polish Club say they asked for bread. ‘Give us bread’. ‘Give us bread’. They say they did not love Hitler.”

“But they asked for guns, I tell them. I was there. We all asked for guns when Hitler asked us what we wanted from him.”

“You have to understand that Britain declared war on Germany. We never asked for war with Britain. We said ‘Give us guns’ because we could not defend Germany with bread.”

“They don’t remember”, he said, “but I was there and every single person asked Hitler for guns.”

“Then he needed us to fight in the Balkans. I was hand-picked by Hitler – we were the best of the SS. We took no prisoners. They took no prisoners. If they killed one then we would kill a dozen. Women and children. Against a wall. I looked into their eyes and killed them with my bare hands for Hitler. That was how it was back then; them or us.” His body smarted to the revelation, a dying old man in a conversation that no longer mattered at the end of life, at the end of the world where young men hide to become old men and to fondle their photographs over beers with comrades.

“The war turned. I loved Hitler. We all loved Hitler. I was young and wanted to live so I sold guns to the resistance and fled to Poland. Many of us went to Poland; and when the war ended, we told them we were Polish-Germans. In those times, who was to know? It was the end of the war. There was chaos. Nobody knew.”

“And now the old men sit in the Polish Club and say they never loved Hitler.” He laughed.

“Now I have pigs’ veins in my heart. But I loved Hitler. I still love Hitler. He was a great man. And I betrayed him because I was young and wanted to live.”

After a silence, the New Norfolk bus arrived to a morose stop, opened its gallows door with a milky swish and cradled my own tired dark soul in its warm-faced heaters along a thick red rubber-band straight back to Hayes Prison Farm. My secrets were those of a young man, not to be shared with the old. A batman doona cover, The Clash playing ‘Guns of Brixton’, the ‘Romper Stomper’ soundtrack, broad silver communal six-headed shower poles and imminent irreversible parole.

But before they went down that route I’d have offered some food for thought.

Some Contracts may resemble Toilet Paper

The first point to clarify is the country the contracts apply to… where they were signed… the jurisdiction of any legal resolution – where you have to appear in court if the contract comes to a dispute.There are three major legal systems and they don’t treat contracts equally – Common Law (the British System), Civil Law (the European System) and Islamic Law. Each individual country also has it’s own business context including political risk and economic profile. And specific countries offer unique challenges to doing business that should be considered.

If the contract is Bulgarian then you might have to hire lawyers and attend hearings on specified dates in Eastern European Civil Courts.

On the other hand, if this is an Australian contract then how do you force the Bulgarian web design firm to appear on a given date in the appropriate court in Sydney? And how do you force them to adhere to the Australian court’s judgement? If you were awarded AUD$20,000 damages then how would you enforce that fine in Bulgaria? Or African or Middle Eastern countries? Or the United States where you might be sued on that contract, have to fly to appear with US lawyers and fight an extended and expensive legal battle with huge monetary consequences if you lose.

Were you to have a legal contract with an Indian firm… any court would take between 10 and 20 years to hear the case due to stress on the Indian legal system. You may never see a resolution.

The bottom line is that a contract you can’t enforce or that has you at such a disadvantage is worse than toilet paper to your business. It might lead to your being sued in a foreign country under a different legal system and possibly in another language.

Client Privacy and Security Concerns in a Wire Canoe

The next consideration has to be privacy and security. Were you to send client data (ie. access to database content or client files) to another country then THAT COUNTRY determines the appropriate privacy laws and enforcement. This was true when Telstra sent all of our Australian accounts offshore to Indian call centres exposing their customer base to increased identity theft. If the Bulgarian web firm stole and misused this customer data then it could kill your business.

At the same time the entire infrastructure of the online business is exposed to an overseas business entity that, let’s be honest, you really don’t know anything about. What are their business motivations and relationships? Have they used black hat search engine optimisation techniques? Did they insert malicious code? Are your website visitors going to be installing malware under your name? These cheaper Bulgarian web designers are being provided access to your passwords, file structure, email accounts and sensitive information.

If that isn’t bad enough – what are the consequences if they betray your trust? You could go out of business. You may have no financial capacity to recoup the loss or pay for the damages out of your own pocket. Just as any 60 year old pervert can say they are a 12 year old girl in an Internet chat room… anybody can tell you they run a web design business in Bulgaria.

A Dollar Spent Elsewhere doesn’t turn the Merry-go-round

Believe me, I’ve got an MBA and understand the ideals of globalisation and free trade as much as the next guy. But the reality is that by chasing the budget option off-shore there are hundreds or a few thousand dollars no longer circulating in your local community. That’s a bigger deal than it sounds.

When you spend dollars at the local grocer to buy milk then the grocer can buy shoes for his child and the dairy farmer can buy the newspaper. In turn the shoe seller and the newspaper seller receive their portions of that dollar and can buy goods they need or want for their families. Money isn’t a one-time transaction, it continually renews itself through a community increasing the social value of it’s footprint. Not investing in local talent is shooting your community in the foot – less money attracted for business investment, less money for schools and infrastructure, less money for the merry-go-round of opportunity for your own children.

Because what looks like a good deal – getting somebody to work at $5 per hour – is at the heart of it exploitative anyway. It’s no different than a large company moving production to India to avoid labour laws or safety regulations.

I’m not saying never to outsource overseas… but do it for the right reasons and be prepared to pay the appropriate value for their work. Make that decision with an understanding of the inherent business risk that comes with the decision.

There’s a saying in business – “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.” Whatever decision you make about your web design services be prepared to grab your wallet.

Born in 1926 and raised on his parent’s farm in Pjätteryd, a Småland province in southern Sweden, Ingvar Kamprad began his entrepreneurial career at the age of five selling matchboxes and pens to local villagers. At 11 he went into the garden seed business and as a teenager operated his business from a bicycle. In tumultuous political times, he also experienced a controversial nine year friendship with pro-Nazi leader Per Engdahl -who attended Ingvar Kamprad’s first wedding in 1950. Much of the groundwork behind IKEA can be identified in those formative years.

Kamprad founded IKEA, now one of the largest global retailers of furniture and household goods, in 1943 at the age of 17. The name IKEA stood for his own initials, E for the family farm called Elmtaryd and A for the village of Agunnaryd where he was raised. The business operated as a simple organisational structure out of a commandeered 2 metre square shed supplying locals with matches, lighters, wallets, watches and nylon stockings. IKEA pursued a cost leadership business level strategy and within two years was piggybacking mail order delivery parcels to the local train station on trucks carrying milk churns.

In 1948 IKEA expanded its product offering to include furniture sourced from local suppliers and the consumer market responded well. The product line was further expanded and in 1951 IKEA continued expansion through their IKEA catalogue strategy (still their major advertising strategy in 2010). The first IKEA furniture show-room was opened in Älmhult, Sweden in 1953.

In the next few years to 1956 IKEA embarked on vertical integration by designing its furniture. This was a direct strategic response (as part of an ongoing price war) in reply to the reaction they received from competitors who resented IKEA undercutting their prices. The competitors had called for a supplier boycott. Their response was driven by an awareness of IKEA, motivation from their market commonality and resource similarity (their similar size), and their ability to respond with appropriate and effective resources. However, IKEA’s tactical decision to allow customers to feel and experience their furniture proved decisive in the conflict. Kamprad then developed a secret network of suppliers to obtain his wood and fabric, with night time deliveries to hide the trucks. When supplies became harder to source – and Kamprad already knew the art of turning difficulties into advantages – he restructured his supply chain into Poland to capitalise on the competitive advantage of lower factors of production. This strategy saw IKEA prosper with a competitive advantage and much of the IKEA range is still manufactured in the Polish factories in 2010.

In 1956 Gillis Lundgren, a local draughtsman, realised that if he took the legs off a table he could fit it into a car boot – and the flat pack was invented. Ingvar Kamprad, being the entrepreneur, saw the implications of that insight and hired him as a designer. The flat pack gave another awesome competitive advantage to a cost leadership business model – it saved shipping air from the factory to retail outlets, it put the onus of assembly onto customers and it gave a competitive advantage to IKEA in the high volume low cost designer furniture market. And as IKEA expanded and internationalised it was effectively executing an integrated cost leadership / differentiation strategy – combining low cost economies with their clean Scandinavian branding.

A big part of the IKEA strategy, and core to IKEA’s success, is the part-truth / part-unsubstantiated / part-myth that has permeated the globe as the IKEA story and most of which has come directly from Ingvar Kamprad. Some of this is truth but other parts are debatable. Consider back to his roots among the pro-Nazis in Sweden – the Nazis understood the power of a good story to drive a cult following. Kamprad’s include the frugality stories of 30 year old IKEA furniture in his house; his writing of The Testament of a Furniture Dealer; the story of Kamprad’s childhood alarm clock being set permanently to 5.50am; the myth of clean green responsibility – when IKEA really buys its wood well below what could be legally purchased in China, and when IKEA has been caught red-handed exploiting child labour in Romania. Kamprad has also effectively used his apparent frugality to drive down supplier prices. All of this in spite of IKEA’s notoriously bad service, incomprehensible instructions, incomplete construction kits, out of stock notifications when customers reach their self-serve warehouses, and stores purposefully designed to force the shopper to spend an hour or more viewing everything IKEA wants to sell them. IKEA decides what you want and tells you, rather than using R&D to find out what you need. They place small items dubbed “hot dogs” (because of their ridiculously cheap price) around their stores and when you visit IKEA you find it difficult to not buy something you did not realise you even needed. A German social theorist named Theodor Adorno called it “retroactive need” and said this was a “key means by which capitalism perpetuated itself”. Another IKEA business level strategy is that when a competitor brings similar products into the market at a lower price IKEA rushes out a “stripped-down and even cheaper” version to squeeze “their rivals from above and below simultaneously”.

The IKEA international strategy uses a franchise corporate level strategy spreading risks and sharing resources. And as IKEA has moved into an ever expansionist mode, pursuing both multi-point competition and vertical integration to achieve market power, it found markets ready and willing to adopt the IKEA mindset of low cost, European designed furniture – “supplying Scandinavian design at Asian prices”. Britain, for example, was wallowing with a complacent Habitat (nicknamed “Shabitat”) which IKEA came to own. This was another key to the IKEA success story – timing. IKEA set up international distribution depots, automated warehousing full of flat pack products and licensed massive franchise stores globally that all paid three per cent straight off the top of sales back to IKEA. And profits had consistently, and still do, yield unprecedented industry margins of 17 – 18 per cent on all IKEA products.

However, it had stayed with Kamprad that IKEA had been treated badly in Sweden in the early years; Burkeman writes “[Kamprad was] obsessively aware of the risks his new company faced… [and] set about creating a business structure of arcane complexity and secrecy.” The ultimate business strategy, and one that maximised wealth for the Kamprads and provided an opaque protection for them, was the 1982 establishment of the IKEA Group and the Stitchtings where Kamprad passed over his shares to the so-called charity supporting “innovation in the field of architecture and interior design”. Most of which, like Kamprad living in Switzerland, had the express objective of tax avoidance in Sweden and locking up IKEA so that it couldn’t be ruined or sold by future Kamprads. He did not lock up the money. IKEA, with 135,000 employees in 290 stores in 36 countries and the Kamprad family-concentrated ownership hidden behind dubious financial wizardry, had income in 2008 of 22 billion euros. IKEA’s success has boiled down to good showmanship, luck and timing, strategic ruthlessness, obsession with mastering process efficiencies, financial skullduggery – great business, corporate and international strategy – and the ability to turn obstacles into competitive advantage. They produce 130 million copies of the IKEA catalogue to tell customers exactly what they do not yet realise they need in their homes. Their choice of a global strategy with corporate level franchise arrangements provides returns well in excess of competitors like Tesco. If only IKEA’s recipe for success came in a flat-pack box?

The way a tsunami works is that one morning you come out of your beach bungalow and notice the bay in front of you is empty. No water. No seagulls. No fish. For a moment your mind tells you that nothing is wrong… and if you’re lucky you’ll have the sense to run or climb or get out of the way of the inevitable surge.

Tasmanian Leader of the Opposition, Will Hodgman, made a strong point in Parliament on the 25th of August 2010 when he talked about the impending end of the post-Global-Financial-Crisis-stimulus. Those sustained strong economic gains in building and construction are going to wind down and there are no guarantees the private sector will pick up the ball and run with it. None. The trends in Tasmania show the faintest ripple of that incoming wave… rising interest rates, people not spending, a 30 per cent plummet in capital investment, 2200 full-time male jobs and another 400 part-time have been lost since March.

OK we can say “there’s a shift in the working patterns”… we can say that Labour have an Economic Plan and an Industry Plan and an Infrastructure Plan and a Jobs Creation Policy. At which point it’s easy to visualise David Bartlett standing barefoot as a ten-year-old staring out into a draining bay where pristine rocks and crabs and coral glisten and shimmer under a cloudless antipodean Autumn sky. The only sound is the rhythmic flapping of one big fish and a little voice in the Tasmanian psyche that should be instinctively telling government to run. There is an inevitable to be prepared for here that can’t be brushed away with another stimulus – we don’t have 500 million dollars to throw at the next Global Financial Crisis. And the government’s plans just aren’t showing any benefits.

In the 1920s Stalin went to the Russian economist Nikolai Kondratiev and posed a simple question – “what is better, Capitalism or Communism”. Although Kondratiev has been almost purged from history for his answer – the Kondratiev Long Wave that forces Capitalism into an inevitable deep depression that necessitates major war every 40 to 60 years – our modern Capitalist economies are geared precisely to fight against it. The last winter dip in the Long Wave was the Great Depression… followed by World War 2. Our summer Peak was in the 70s to the 90s. The leaves started falling off the trees a whole decade ago. This is a powerful economic theory – in 1938 Stalin had Kondratiev sentenced to prison and shot that very same day. Stalin tried to smudge the theory out of existence. The answer of Communism to avoid the inevitable rush into that metaphorical bay was to prop up industry with government stimulus at exactly this point in the Long Wave.

Mr Hodgman is correct when he says that Tasmania is under-prepared. The US stimulus is losing momentum and their labour market is struggling. Interest rates are rising. The European Union has had to bail out countries like Greece, Portugal and Spain with money they can’t afford or redeem.

“There are serious strains in the economy,” said Mr Hodgman, standing barefoot as the loudest economic noise in 70 years began to surge through his toes. Kondratiev’s legacy is inevitable. It’s the cycle of Capitalism.

“Excuse me mate, you wouldn’t have a spare 80 cents so I can catch a bus?”

“No.” There’s a shallow split epiphany that tastes like defeat to one and like kicking a stray cat to the other.

The man who said “No” leans forward on a metal slat bench in Hobart’s Elizabeth Street Mall. It’s an ordinary Tuesday outside Factorie…. music pumps across the cement tiles and thickens beneath the curved glass roof. The flower lady, with her puddles of pots and flurries of colour on top of long green stems, makes a sale to a man who looks like he could afford jewellery. Nearby, there is another polite request for 80 cents from the thin youth who may or may not need bus fare.

“Thanks.” The youth glides off through the lunchtime crowd along a widening concentric arc with the desperation of a needy seagull primed on the roof of a fish’n’chippery. It’s hard not to imagine the smell of cigarette butts and stale beer.

Within this immediacy, those in the begging arc do their best to avoid the youth’s surveillance. His familiarity with the process of begging 80 cents from strangers appears to be practised. The potential prey, in washed woolen jackets and white jumpers under red jackets and clip-clop-clip-clop high heels move their eyes downward and away as though looking for somebody who they know is never going to arrive and save them. To his credit, professionalism requires no discourtesy and he only approaches prey singled out from the general flock and vulnerable to the suggestion of “Yes”.

The man who said “No” watches as the 80 cent request moves politely from one mark to the next bending over at each and every alter to whisper in the least invasive voice imaginable a shameful sentence… “Excuse me mate, you wouldn’t have a spare 80 cents so I can catch a bus?” The game here relies on people not being practised at the art of saying “No”. As master of this game, the 80 cent request approaches and bobs and backs away almost in the fluid motion of the dandelion fairy but with the distinct sharp black pupil of the emergent seagull.

If someone were to flick half a potato chip into the air it’s hard to imagine this game would culminate in anything other than a Quentin Tarantino production with the engagement of a Samurai sword, a 360 degree swirl of murderous feathers and the scoffing of the potato-morsel in a greedy orange beak.

The 80 cent request bends to an American tourist who wears a blue jumper and a khaki cloth cap. “Excuse me mate, you wouldn’t have a spare 80 cents so I can catch a bus?”

The American pulls out a red polyester satchel with black trim and passes something quietly to the seagull who flies away immediately glancing back briefly into the eyes of the man who said “No”. The seagull disappears onto a Glenorchy bus at the 100 Stops in Elizabeth Street. Saved by the American.

“Constable Bomford was east of the train tracks… I’m on this side of the tracks which is uphill. Eventually we caught up with Constable Moore.”

“Do you recall what time it was you caught up with them?”

“I didn’t take notes but it was about 7.”

“What did you do once you arrived?”

The Constable sits back and draws a loud breath. He leans forward. Starlings and spiderwebs scatter around his eyes.

“I assisted Constable Moore with Mr Burton,” he said. “When I walked down the tracks I saw Constable Moore arrest him.”

The trial of three young men takes on its eighth day in Court 7 of the Supreme Court in Hobart, Tasmania. Unfettered boredom impels each defendant to take in the timber-lined hexagonal courtroom in disrespectful minutiae. The worn and grubby carpet has concentric circles of red squares on black pummeled through decades of court ritual. The lighting consists of large haphazard rectangles in the ceiling that are considered modern in architectural hindsight. At the front of the courtroom sits the petite figure of Justice Wood.

At breaks the defendants are shuffled through a side-door, down narrow concrete gallows-like steps into a barred holding cell. They endure gaol sandwiches and hard tongued tea within spitting distance of a communal lidless half partitioned shitter. The holding cell has a fixed wooden slat bench and out-of-date magazines… New Idea, Woman’s Weekly, National Geographic. Someone always paces. At the end of the break the men are shuffled back along the pheromone trail to Court 7, back up the gallows-like steps, back to the door that opens to a knock revealing the last sunshine of their citizenship. The three men are shuffled in, sat and forced to watch their lives evolve in fragments toward the inevitable jury verdict. It’s like throwing a vase at a brick wall in a museum and then being captured and made to watch it turn back into a vase as the movie-projector-man painstakingly rewinds the show-reel with a clumsy pair of nail clippers.

Justice Wood has mousey blonde hair that almost reaches the shoulders of her black robes. She wears a white closed-collared shirt and has the habit of putting her fingers to her face – to her lips, a finger in her mouth, a hand cupped under the chin. She sits in a high backed black chair behind the highest bench in the room. The defendants’ eyes run along the items on Justice Wood’s bench – a date picker, speakers, a glass and a jug of water… a small point-and-click camera. There are few things as excruciatingly mind-numbingly boring as being made to sit through a Supreme Court trial.

Above and behind Justice Wood is a carved wooden crest declaring Dieu Et Mon Droit, “God and my Right”. This is a French phrase passed on as the Royal motto of England from Henry V in the fifteenth century. The words are not about Justice or Truth. They are blunt words about the Power of the Crown over its subjects.