About Sub-Tropic

‘Sub-tropic’ stands for the vantage point, the region around Brisbane on the East coast of Australia. It is mostly temperate and sunny, but the climate can be torrid and disruptive; the mostly benign landscape, and the seas can turn out to be treacherous and rough. So it is a motto for dealing with the world.

Sub-tropic is the product of Dr Lee Duffield, journalist and academic from Brisbane, who calls it a place for information and “gems of wisdom”.

Lee Duffield was a journalist for more than 20 years with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, the first news editor on its youth radio network Triple-Jay, and the ABC European Correspondent at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Always mentoring and teaching Journalism at universities, “because journalism is good and needs to be better”, he became a full-time lecturer in 1997, at James Cook University then the Queensland University of Technology.

His specialised field of interests became international journalism, and internationalisation of the curriculum in higher education; new media, media in Europe, and development journalism, especially in the South Pacific region. Among several publications he has published three books: I, Journalist (2006) (principal editor), on new media and the new economy; Berlin Wall in the News (2009) (based on his doctoral thesis on the collapse of the Eastern Bloc), and Europe and the Media (2010)(principal editor), a symposium of Australian and European journalists and academics. He is editor of the concurrent publication EUAustralia Online, European news for Australia: www.euaustralia.com [.]

Why publish Sub-Tropic?

Lee Duffield says:

“I support liberal thought. It is the idea, that if a person can learn and grow, they will have less need to be told what to think and do; they will work it out for themselves every time. Learn anything, you can do everything. It does not prevent anybody receiving the teaching and support of any group they belong to. They will be better group members by also thinking out the message for themselves.

“The two key points are freedom and truth. Through freedom you get to truth. If you have freedom you can think; if lacking freedom you can try to get it, and sometimes just act as if you are already free. You recognise freedom through feeling, as it can be exhilarating; and the same with truth, it is nourishing when you recognise it, hear it and tell it. That becomes a code of life: freedom and truth.”

Sub-Tropic was originally a teaching site for online journalism, upgraded in 2015 for its present use.