More from The Australian on the Hoax.

Samantha Maiden’s follow-up story on the hoax is here. She focusses mainly on Windschuttle’s suggestion that I am the hoaxer.

(I am not Sharon Gould, I am not Sharon Gould. Repeat until absorbed.)

Just to clarify the sequence of events here.  (Although it was all in my original blog post).

I first heard about all this when the hoaxer approached me almost exactly three weeks ago. Windschuttle had already accepted the article some weeks before this. The hoaxer had therefore achieved his aim, but was deciding how to publicise the fact of the hoax. If I hadn’t been interested, I imagine he would have gone elsewhere.

I don’t know what Quadrant’s lead times are, but I imagine it must have been at least on the way to the printers at the time I found out about the hoax. Having said that, I did agree, as a condition of receiving the material, that I would keep quiet until Quadrant was out.I have already given my reasoning.

I published as soon as possible after that, despite some suggestions that I should wait to see what impact the story had. I wanted to publish soon in part so as not to let false claims lie on the public record.

I thought it possible that someone might pick up on the claim about the CSIRO putting genes into food crops and think this was a bona fide news story! Poor CSIRO!