An open letter from Manus to Minister Dutton concerning the Medivac Bill

Type
Article
Category
open letter
Refugee rights

Mr Dutton, how in all conscience can you continue to humiliate and dehumanise severely ill refugees in your own personal and political thirst for power? You continually use hate speech in order to prevent due justice to be given to us, the remaining refugees on Manus and Nauru. We are not responsible for shortages in hospital beds. We are dangerously ill only because many treatable illnesses and injuries have not been given adequate medical attention for years.

Manus
brooke adams
Type
Article
Category
Parenting
pop culture

Mo’ Moral, Mo’ Panic: the very predictable reaction to Momo

I, too, use parental controls for their devices and stare with some concern at the shouting YouTubers making slime and playing Minecraft. But it has helped me, in the throes of my middle-class guilt, to know that moral panics about children and technology, or children and popular culture, are a particularly common feature of mass media as it relates to modernity.

The cane toad was a failure
Type
Article
Category
Culture
Environment

‘The cane toad doesn’t know he’s wrong’: on conservation and culture

In Queensland we grow up with a conditioned disgust for cane toads. It’s a telling concern: they’re not from here. They first came across the seas to eat the cane beetles, sugarcane being one of the primary crops of local agriculture. But the beetles are high up in the cane and the cane toads can’t reach them, failing their first objective. From the few specimens brought over in a suitcase, cane toads have been spreading down the east coast and west across the top of Australia ever since.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
Type
Article
Category
Reconstruction
The city

Welcome to Christchurchland

It is the eighth anniversary of the earthquakes that devastated Christchurch, and much of the rebuild is now complete. The brash new complexes in the retail core scream ‘progress’, with multiple outlets competing for the high-end clothing dollar, while craft beer bars and gastropubs overlook the Avon River as it meanders through the city. This is Christchurchland, a city that hums with dystopian unease, with new developments that erase not just the history but also the very purpose of the city.

fraggle rock
Type
Article
Category
pop culture

Work your cares away: Revisiting Fraggle Rock

The year is 1982. US President Ronald Reagan is ankle-deep in his first term. Across the pond, Margaret Thatcher will soon be elected Prime Minister of the UK. Everyone’s shaking hands with free market capitalism, neoliberal ideals, and a hostile brand of shark-eyed individualism that will endure for decades to come. Jim Henson is having none of it.

Lynas
Type
Article
Category
Activism
Environment

The victory against Lynas and environmental solidarity

On 4 December 2018, the Australian rare earth mining company Lynas suffered a critical setback to its operations in the Malaysian city of Kuantan. The Malaysian minister of energy, science, technology, environment and climate change declared that the mining giant can no longer operate without a plan to safely dispose of its radioactive waste. The announcement came off the back of more than a decade of grassroots activism against the multinational company.

Tocarczuk
Type
Review

February in fiction

Koraly Dimitriadis hails from a strict Greek Orthodox migrant background and her work is a consistent and vividly burning ‘fuck you’ to tradition, to repression, and to the idea that we must accept the roles allotted us with strangled fortitude. If Dimitriadis’ narrative contains a recommendation it is that we get the hell out of there, wherever the oppressive there might be, and emerge, phoenix-like, from the ashes.