‘No matter the odds, no matter the size of the foe’: a report on Socialism 2018

Type
Article
Category
Activism

Again and again over the weekend, speakers disavowed electoral politics. Instead they argued in favour of popular movements to force change from below. As White put it: ‘Asking nicely doesn’t work.’ Examples from Australian history were frequently cited over the weekend: the Green Bans of the 1970s, the Aboriginal Tent Embassy, the massive protests that won marriage equality for Australians. In many cases, socialists were instrumental in inspiring or guiding the fight.

The Internationale
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Type
Article
Category
Literary ghosts
Refugees

Patrick Bateman on Nauru? The bizarre prison travelogue of Roman Quaedvlieg

The former Commissioner of Australia Border Force, Roman Quaedvlieg, took time out of pouring petrol on the au pair scandal last week to pen his reflections on a far bigger scandal that is somehow not really a scandal at all. Initially self-published, then re-posted on Meanjin, Quaedvlieg wrote about a trip he took to Nauru in the second half of 2015.

lel
Type
Article
Category
History
Queer politics

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.

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Type
Article
Category
History
Labour

Slow down, comrades! There’s more than one way to strike

In May 1925, Australian seaman and returned serviceman Noel Lyons was deported from New Zealand. His crime: encouraging fellow workers to slow down. The quality of food served to trans-Tasman seamen had always caused discontent, especially when compared to the fine dining lavished upon first-class passengers. The situation came to a head aboard the Manuka when the crew refused to leave New Zealand’s capital of Wellington until their food was improved.

Thindimage
Type
Essay
Category
Post-Phd

The forgotten working class

The academy is seemingly obsessed with the working class, but at the same time deeply disconnected from it. While most academics are happy to discuss the poor in theory, few are comfortable when confronted by the everyday drudgery of working-class life, and even fewer have direct experience of monotonous, often backbreaking labour. Of course, many young people and students have to depend on minimum-wage unskilled jobs at points in their lives, but for most this is just a transitory stage.

system
Type
Article
Category
Aboriginal Australia
Prison

Repetitions of violence: on David Dungay’s and Fazel Chegeni Nejad’s inquests

The Indigenous death in custody of Wayne Fella Morrison occurred less than a year after that of David Dungay. Both deaths evidence lethal practices of structural repetition in the correctional management of Indigenous inmates. Both deaths bring into focus the serial nature of the violence deployed against Indigenous prisoners across Australian states.

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Type
Polemic
Category
Culture
Politics

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.

Mills crop
Type
Polemic
Category
Climate change
Reading

Climate change was so last year: writers’ festivals and the great derangement

Nevertheless – contrary to Overington’s sneering claim that at literary festivals it’s ‘panel after panel on climate change’ – I was initially struck by the dearth of discussion on the subject at this year’s Adelaide Writers’ Week, despite its theme of ‘change’ and the presence of authors, such as Clive Hamilton, who have written extensively on the subject. After all, if writers’ festivals are to be platforms for, in the words of a recent Sydney Writers’ Festival statement, ‘urgent, necessary and sometimes difficult’ conversations, then clearly climate change must be the litmus test.

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Type
Polemic
Category
Sexism
Writing

Invisible, until … On harassment and power in literary culture

I’m friends with this hot young writer. He’s widely published, prodigious, pretty, too. I was at a massive international convention with him earlier this year, sneaking into parties we hadn’t been invited to, the crush of the hotel suites full of conversation with the biggest names in science fiction and fantasy. Standing in the corner with him, sinking free ciders plucked from a bathtub full of ice, when some publisher or big-name writer or other would come and interrupt our conversation to talk to him.

head
Type
Article
Category
Australia
Politics

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).

Spahr essay
Type
Essay
Category
Politics
Writing

How to teach writing

Almost all programs have some form of ‘workshop’, where twelve or so students sit around a table with a faculty member and talk about each other’s work. The workshop has some pedagogical conventions that are unevenly followed, but are still true at most programs – for example, that the person whose work is under discussion should keep silent for most of the discussion. Similarly, the aesthetics of the work should be analysed more than its content, political concerns, or relation to society.

CampbellRome
Type
Column
Category
Language
Writing

On archaic language

The English language isn’t what it used to be.

Migration, colonisation and trade encourage the borrowing and stealing of foreign words and phrases; internationalised stylistic choices seek common ground with speakers of multiple dialects. New technologies require new ways to discuss them, rendering older terms irrelevant. Moral standards change, meaning some euphemisms are no longer needed, while new ones arise.