Progressive culture since 1954
The dismissal of Dame Glynis Breakwell, vice chancellor of the University of Bath, over her annual salary of £468,000 (AU $812,500), has focused public attention upon this new breed of university moguls. It has raised eyebrows, particularly in Australia, where 12 VCs take home over $1 million a year, and Breakwell’s salary is only half that of our highest paid VC.
Could Australia be the only nation where, when we’re asked to name our ‘greatest leader’s’ key to success, we say: ‘he could certainly scull a beer’? The national broadcaster’s new two-part series, The Larrikin and the Leader, is (yet another) lush tribute thrown at Hawke’s aging feet. But all this might be yet another sign that we’ve too long had the beer goggles on when it comes to Bob Hawke.
This book is a glowing accomplishment, scathing and funny and apt in its lambasting of well-meaning Australians, so good it is atrocious. We can’t help but laugh along with de Kretser, just like we can’t help but ugly-sob when she rips her character’s lives apart at the seams. You might feel uncomfortably implicated somewhere along the line, but soon you realise the joke is not only on the tolerant, but on everyone. The lightness of the prose carries us into desolate landscapes, but we are never dismayed, only moved.
As queers with a stake in this party – and its proud history of protest – we consider the Liberal and Labor Party floats unauthorised arrivals at Mardi Gras; they’re dangerous vote-seekers jumping the queue, and they’re threatening to terrorise the values that we hold dear. So we handed out flyers with a grave warning, ‘The risk is real and growing. Illegal floats are stealing your blow jobs.’
Friday 25–Sunday 27 May, Queen Victoria Women’s Centre
Three days of feminist politics, feminist perspectives and collective solutions. Catch the editor of Overland Jacinda Woodhead, with fiction editor Jennifer Mills and writer Natalie Kon-yu in conversation on mentorship in the arts – then stick around for special event presented by Overland on writing and activism with Santilla Chingaipe, Tarneen Onus-Williams and Asher Wolf.
I flew to Hobart to pay my respects to an ecosystem already long gone. Tasmania’s giant kelp forests, Macrocystis pyrifera, once fringed the eastern coast. Each languid frond of these once-towering marine metropoles harboured multitudes of fish, invertebrates, plankton and algaes. But giant kelp forests are fragile. As of 2017, only five percent of the original Tasmanian kelp forests remained. For the Aboriginal community in Tasmania, the sea is women’s business, and so their relationship with the kelp forests is strong.
In the late 1970s in New Zealand, a group of young people in their twenties left their middle-class lives and got working-class jobs, joined working-class unions and lived in working-class communities. Why? They were activists and communists and they wanted to bring radical politics to the working class, to shift their focus from the university campus to the industrial workplace.
I am sitting down to write this on Human Rights Day, a national holiday commemorating the 1960 Sharpeville massacre. It is a day that evokes memories of state violence and institutionalised racism, of the apartheid government’s determination to brutalise and dehumanise non-white South Africans, but it also points to more recent processes of nation-building and (as yet unrealised) healing.
Earlier this year, the Australian Building and Construction Commission (ABCC) issued a directive that under the national construction code, building sites will not be allowed to display ‘images generally attributed to, or associated with an organisation, such as the iconic symbol of the five white stars and white cross on the Eureka Stockade flag.’ This seems like a good time to remember what the flag meant at its inception, and that its contemporary meaning is in fact deeply contested.
This scandal differs from the typical cycle of outrage: we’re not angry, we’re dejected. The reporting and comment have been elegiac. Commentators appear to be genuinely upset. ‘I have never seen such emotion and anguish on a national scale,’ wrote journalist Tracey Holmes. ‘Please tell me this is a bad dream,’ former Australian captain Michael Clarke tweeted. Speaking on ABC Grandstand the day after the event, a tearful Jim Maxwell sounded as if he was broadcasting from a funeral. So what exactly is being mourned?
The Nakata Brophy Short Fiction and Poetry Prize recognises the talent of young Indigenous writers across Australia. Sponsored by the University of Melbourne’s Trinity College, the prize alternates each year between fiction and poetry; this year’s prize is for the best poem (up to 88 lines) by an Indigenous writer under 30.