Our collective waste

Type
Article
Category
Art
Environment

If someone told me a visit to the Western Treatment Plant, where half of Melbourne’s sewage is treated, would lead me to contemplate the Anthropocene and my place as a human on this planet, I wouldn’t have believed them. But there I was, in an area of the facility that contains the most concentrated result of treated human excrement. Surrounded by rolling hills of biosolids too contaminated by metals to be safely used, I thought about the human impact on the environment, of my own impact, and of how each of us successfully ignores the refuse left behind by our own body.

Boland photo_sewer project1
Pildora_lighht
Type
Article
Category
Feminism
The Body

Jagged little pill

Despite common beliefs about carefree gen-Y lifestyles, millennial women are not only using less birth control than our mothers, we are also having less penetrative sex with fewer sexual partners. When my twenty-one-year-old colleague said condoms were her preferred contraceptive, I asked what she does when her partners don’t want to use one. ‘I don’t have sex with them,’ she replied, with a ‘duh’ look on her face. Millennial women are more discerning about what goes into their bodies in more ways than one. Sexual freedom doesn’t just mean the right to have lots of sex, but also the right to decline.

THE-SELLOU crop
Type
Polemic
Category
Reading
Writing

‘Just a person’: race and the Australian literati

Writers’ festivals are strange institutions, often literature-adjacent rather than literary. Discussions tend to revolve around the idea of books rather than the books themselves: what a book means, how it was made, how the author feels about it. When we subject writers to interrogation before an audience, what is it we want from them?

dino
Type
Review
Category
Comedy
Queer politics

Too many onions in the soup: farewelling Hannah Gadsby

In Nanette, a brilliant meta-comic retrospective meets arts-as-activism performance, Gadsby revisits punchlines she’s been delivering onstage for years, as a gut-punch farewell. I remember these jokes from shows past: her slow, deliberate phrasing deployed to get our biggest laughs. But this time, she makes her audience pause to consider these stories. Are they jokes? Are they funny? Aren’t they horrific?

rich
Type
Article
Category
Activism
Poetry

'I come to explore the wreck': on Adrienne Rich and the arts

What I like and admire about Adrienne Rich, poet and writer, is that her activism didn’t directly occupy public space, but inhabited the sublime spaces between behaviour and language. The 16th of May commemorates the eighty-eighth birthday of Rich, a woman who, more than many, has influenced my views on art, feminism and the archetypes of femininity. She was political and actively so, famously declining the National Medal of Arts, and protesting the vote by House Speaker Newt Gingrich to end funding for the National Endowment for the Arts in 1997.

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Type
Article
Category
Australia
Refugees

‘Not a boat number’

Whether the deal is done or dumb, it seems politics is hyper bent on exploiting the defenceless for conservative votes, real or imagined. As a result, all over the world, refugees and asylum seekers are at the mercy of a series of craven and/or villainous bureaucrats and ministers. (See Immigration Minister Peter Dutton’s recent comments on the fate of 7500 asylum seekers in Australia: ‘If people think they can rip the Australian taxpayer off, if people think that they can con the Australian taxpayer, then I’m sorry, the game’s up.’)

VMAs
Type
Polemic
Category
Activism

Against choice feminism

Popular feminism once discussed systemic issues – that is, issues that occurred at a widespread, societal level – and sought to challenge and dismantle them. Of late, a lot of mainstream rhetoric has focused on whether, say, choices like plastic surgery are feminist (because ‘those who choose the scalpel route are doing so to compete in a culture where youthful beauty is beamed at us as the most desirable thing there is’). Or the choice to grow one’s armpit hair out, or not shave one’s legs, or not wear make-up, or not wear skirts, or go on a diet, or even invest in fossil fuels.

sarura sign
Type
Article
Category
Activism
Palestine

Report from the ground: Sumud Freedom Camp

On Saturday morning I woke up at Sumud: Freedom Camp. The camp is set up in Sarura, a reclaimed Palestinian village in the South Hebron Hills in the West Bank. It has been built on the principle of sumud, steadfastness. Between 1980 and 1998 the people of Sarura were expelled from their lands through the violence of the Israeli army into nearby villages and towns, such as At-Tuwani, Hebron and Yatta. They have remained displaced since that time, until Sumud Freedom Camp was established on Friday.

kitchen
Type
Article
Category
The law
Violence

Strange distinctions

I was hit often as a child. My stepmother was the worst culprit. Barely a day seemed to go by without a knuckle on the head or an appointment with the wooden spoon. Occasionally she bit me. I was hit if I forgot to do a chore, or if I glanced at someone in a way that annoyed her, smiled at the wrong time, spoke when I shouldn’t have spoken, or if I mopped the floors or dusted the shelves or washed the dishes carelessly. I developed a keen talent for tidying the house once I realised that nearby objects were among her favourite weapons.

Kneen crop
Type
Review

May in fiction

Kneen’s work is clever, metafictional and highly affecting. In this work nothing ‘niche’ about Kneen is toned down or apologetic; we have the identity politics, the questioning of social mores, and the joyful visceral fucking. It is sexy, but it’s also a scathing critique of the arbitrariness of gender, a treatise on the power politics of sex, and an exploration on what our technologies might do for us in a decidedly dystopian future.