Paper Sings

“No one should be able to pull curtains of secrecy around decisions which can be revealed without injury to the public interest.” – Lyndon B. Johnson, 1966 But first, you have to know which decisions to ask about. I’m Daniel Madden, an Australian teacher, writer and father trying to reconnect with my daughter in Japan. I asked what my government could do to help. The answers eventually led me to ask for the paperwork. Paper Sings follows the trail through government letters, internal briefings and records released under freedom of information. What begins as a question for one department leads to another. An assurance sends us looking for a decision. A decision raises the question of who checked the result. There is a surprising amount of work involved in finding out what an ordinary sentence means. The consequences are less abstract. Parents and children grow older while their circumstances pass through offices, processes and reporting systems. I want to understand what those systems achieve for the people they describe and what could still be done. You may never have needed help from an embassy or a watchdog. But if you know the feeling of receiving an answer and still needing to ask the question, then join me – you’ll be in familiar company. Paper Sings. What the record reveals.