A mythopoetic reading of Tony Birch’s Ghost River
What I want to do in this essay is to offer a suggestive and perhaps even a provocative reading of Tony Birch’s Ghost River.
Queering the past: the learned absence of homosexuality in Australian history
Why has it never been brought to my attention, throughout my primary, secondary and tertiary education, that Australia has a vast queer history? Only independent research has led me to discover the extent of Australia’s homosexual colonial past. The teachers and lecturers of Australian history, whom I have been a student of, have never touched upon the country’s queer histories.
Festivals and censorship
Literary festivals and festivals of ideas are, almost by definition, curated, since directors necessarily choose between the potential speakers available to them to draw up their final program. If you attend a festival, you’re meant to notice the selection of guests, in the same way that art fanciers at an exhibition appreciate the careful juxtaposition of particular works. It’s thus entirely legitimate to criticise event organisers for programming certain speakers and not others. Indeed, it’s what you’re supposed to do.
An unguided tour through the communism of feeling: MoMA @ NGV
There is the possibility of something new – an experience, a fleeting change in our way of seeing – under this highly ritualised passage under the arch. There is respite from ritual anaesthesia and habit, and also new fantasies within to which we might succumb: Magnificent Modernism beckons.
Conflict avoidance
Shorten described Turnbull as ‘an advocate of great intellect and eloquence and as someone who came to parliament, relatively late in life, because he was driven by the desire to serve.’ It was all rather… chummy. So much for the supposedly fierce opposition between the two leaders and their parties; so much, indeed, for the notion that politics is fundamentally divided along lines of conflict (most notably, the conflict between capital and labour).