Progressive culture since 1954
It was a long summer. We saw unsettling things in the news, and we felt them at home – the unrelenting temperatures, steeped nights, no rain. That now-infamous global heat map showing Australia like a blistering boil of weeping red. The bloated fish after algal blooms.
The ideological ground occupied by Quadrant, Fox News, Quillette, The Australian, Sky News, Infowars et al. is founded on the same essential creed: under the banner of identity politics, the Left is undertaking a deliberate campaign to police speech and behaviour in order to create a society in which conservative dissent is erased
I have no reason to doubt Corbyn’s sincerity in rejecting antisemitism. The problem is that the rhetorical framing of his critique in moral terms of the defence of the economic wellbeing of the nation against ravaging international capital tends, unwittingly, to resonate with noxious forms of ideology and ressentiment.
When non-Polynesians represent people from the South Pacific, they play God with our lives and stories: they construct fantasies about palm trees, oceans, fresh air, fit Brown women in coconut bras and large Brown men yielding spears. At the heart of this issue is the fact that we are not the storytellers.
On this tenth anniversary, it feels like a line has been drawn in the sand. It tells me that cycles don’t have to repeat in an endless loop. Life has stopped fragmenting and there’s a celebration of regrowth even as we carefully remember the past. Today, ten feels like a full circle.
I’m devastated about Agnès Varda’s death, not only because the world has lost a great light but because she was still making art, and we’ve lost what she still had left to give us.
John Batman the mass murderer has become a Jesus Christ figure. By blaming him, White Australia absolves itself of the sins of the past. Perhaps he’s the saviour we deserve.
By partnering with Ramsay, Australian universities are lending their names to an institution that promotes a self-identified sympathiser of the far-right.
The Good University is an important book which should be read by anyone concerned about modern academia, both inside and outside the institutions. It should also be mandatory reading for all of Australia’s Vice-Chancellors.
By highlighting the movement’s role in actively constructing neoliberal society, Humphrys points to a future in which labour can unmake neoliberal society. If the complicity of the working-class was required to make Australia what it is today, then those same agents of history can withdraw their consent.
I fear for Hassan and Vivien and all the villagers and farmers who have worked so hard to maintain Battir’s terraces as a community-based enterprise of which they are rightly proud. The events of Christmas Eve also touch that place in me that fears for the survival of Palestine and my mother’s homeland.
When I first met Andrew, in the mid-1990s, he had already won the Vogel award for Praise and had written a play, Bait. Working alongside David Berthold, Bait was the result of Andrew’s time as a resident writer at the Queensland Theatre Company. As fate would have it, the company passed on producing it. Andrew’s time at the company was also over, and so that may well have been it for Andrew’s involvement in the theatre.
Irish short story writer Claire Keegan believes loss is at the core of every good story. ‘If you asked a character, “if you could do that again, would you?”, the answer should be no.’ These ideas apply to isolated stories but do not seem applicable to most collections, which comprise disparate, already-published stories.