I'm really annoyed that I can't make it to the Malaysiakini Anniversary Dinner (MAD) on Saturday.

Not for the sake of the food, though I assume it'll be terrific, or even the entertainment, which promises to be a blast.

But, foreigner as I may be, I feel like part of the Malaysiakini family, and therefore hate to miss out on such a significant celebration with my soul-brothers and sisters in journalism.

Ten years as the sole professional media organisation to stand for truth, freedom and justice in Malaysia is a magnificent achievement. But this story has been well and truly told over recent weeks by Janet Steele, Sim Kwang Yang, Steve Oh and Malaysiakini itself, so there's little left for me to add.

Except my thanks to Steven Gan, Premesh Chandran and the entire Malaysiakini clan for the privilege and pleasure of contributing in some small part to their magnificent mission.

In my inability to attend MAD in person, I can think of no more an appropriate tribute to this truly outstanding news portal than the message I expressed in the first weekly piece I wrote for it back in 2006, slightly edited for length (below).

Here's to Malaysiakini for 10 years of breaking the deathly silence that the Umno/BN government so desperately demands from the nation's media to cover-up its crimes and injustices.

And here's to the millions of Malaysiakini readers, subscribers and supporters around the world, especially those who like me are both mad and sad that they couldn't come along to MAD.

Meanderings of an ad-addled mind

Ahhhhh, what a liberating feeling. My first column for Malaysiakini .

A merciful release, for a few hours, at least, from writing for and about advertising. A field of literature, or perhaps more accurately illiterature, to which I've devoted most of my time for so long I feel I've been doing it ad nauseam.

But as I celebrate my freedom to write this column, I'm suddenly reminded of the stern lesson that previous forays into journalism have taught me: that rejection of concepts or copy by the odd advertising client is nothing compared with the pitfalls and terrors facing a journalist.

The pen may well be mightier than the sword, but it's no match for the scalpel-sharp pencil of a gimlet-eyed editor. And if your copy survives that ordeal relatively unscathed, it then gets to run the gauntlet of the readers, many of them not only brighter than any writer, but also better-informed, and with seemingly boundless capacity for responding with cutting remarks.

But as you see, I'm taking another stab at it anyway. For lots of reasons, some of which other writers have expressed more cleverly or concisely than I'm capable of.

English novelist Rebecca West, for example, said "I write in order to discover what I think."

Me too, as I find that composing and arranging my thoughts for discriminating and critical readers, as the illustrious Dr Johnson famously remarked of a felon's feelings at the prospect of being hanged next morning, "wonderfully concentrates the mind".

On a lighter note, but another one that I personally relate to very closely, as I love both using and misusing language, is the sentiment expressed by American humourist SJ Perelman, "I revel in the prospect of being able to torture a phrase once more."

Some of us writers try exercising and exorcising our angst by torturing, not just words and phrases, but ourselves as well. So I'm also in sympathy with novelist and screenwriter Graham Greene in his opinion that "Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic and fear which are inherent in the human situation".

Of all the reasons for writing that I've read or heard, however, perhaps the one I most admire, though I fear I'll never have the guts, let alone the grandeur, to emulate it, is Emile Zola's "If you ask me why I came into this world, I, an artist, will answer you: I am here to live out loud".

And live out loud Zola did. Not only creating a tremendous reputation as a "realistic" novelist, but then risking everything he'd worked for in his heroic and ultimately successful efforts to achieve justice in the so-called 'Dreyfus Affair', in which the French government of the day tried to pin a charge of espionage on an innocent junior army officer.

Perhaps the closest I'll ever get to Zola's magnificent motivation for writing is the lower-grade but nonetheless genuine urge powerfully stated by William Gass: "I write because I hate. A lot. Hard."

I know nothing else about Gass or his work, but I share his sentiments entirely when it comes to writing about some of the things I loathe most.

Do not be silenced

Like corruption, especially in high or privileged places; victimisation of the hapless and the helpless on every level from global to domestic; and people who fail in their duty to uncover and combat such evils, as the police, the judiciary and the so-called "mainstream" press in Malaysia and so many other countries around the world so systematically do.

Besides the urge to write about and maybe help right wrongs, not just in my native Australia, but anywhere and everywhere in the world that evil and injustice are abroad, and all the other rationales I've quoted, there's one more and most crucial reason that I'm thankful to Malaysiakini for giving me the opportunity to go on and on, ad lib.

I want my daughter Sammie, who, considering our considerable age difference I likely won't be here for as long as I dearly wish I could be, to know that I kept faith with the fact that she knows instinctively at her tender age and I hope she never forgets: that we all have the right to voice the truth and speak our piece.

And that we owe it to ourselves and our fellows to follow the dictum of the great British philosopher and pacifist Bertrand Russell: "Be isolated, be ignored, be attacked, be in doubt, be frightened, but do not be silenced."