Progressive culture since 1954
I used to be like you. I lived in the city, I became vegan and I went ‘to the country’ occasionally, getting angry at the lack of signage about the massacres through which my fellow colonists come to be here. I knew about the bees dying and REFLEX paper through Facebook, and I thought that the old growth forests, like the greenies, were somewhere ‘out there’, somewhere further away than Daylesford or Castlemaine.
Eurovision should be about coming together to celebrate diversity and inclusion. Building solidarity between LGBTIQ people and Palestinians must be a priority, and embracing this boycott is just the start.
A symbolic declaration of emergency may be a useful tool for building momentum for action, but we must not let this strategy creep into sustaining emergency powers that constrict democratic rights.
I base almost all of my work on being Arab. I cannot shake the compulsion to publicly claim my identity.
This is Cassilis, a place somewhere in Victoria, I can hear my mother saying through the grey-green sheet. Several nights like this, with the sheet between us, and I am pleased to say only the faintest sounds issue from the other side. Mostly I hear her tongue moving in her mouth and then, in the mornings, the soft swish as she fastens the five buttons along the trim of her coat.
Long long time ago, before the apocalypse, there lived an old woman. She kept the seasons in her body, the land rose and slept when she blinked. She held the tides in her breath, and the earth spun around the sun in rhythm with her heartbeat. She sang all the stories that were held in her body, and the songs became wind and rain and heat and language.
Talking to other women, we all seem to cycle through this: switch it on, swipe, start a bunch of awkward conversations, go on a bunch of terrible dates, get frustrated and tired, delete the bloody thing, before downloading it again a few weeks, maybe a few months, later. In a moment of weakness, we say, but it’s not that, or not exactly.
University students have a right to know the scale of sexual misconduct as an issue on their campus that pertains to their mental and physical wellbeing. Prospective students, as well as current ones, should be able to fully and easily inform themselves of the track record of the institutions where they will spend a significant portion of their time studying, and in some cases working or living.
‘Well, it’s just that no-one has ever wanted to come here,’ my cuñada tells me.
The Memorial redevelopment completes the transformation of the Anzac myth from one earlier generations would have recognised –a muted, reflective phenomenon, for all its ahistoricism – into the triumphalist spectacle it has become today.
If the main purpose of my work was to educate white people, I would have seen it as a failure after being rejected twice by white art institutions. I would have seen it as a failure after the predominantly white attendees of the music and arts night drew penises and wrote jokes on my work.
For years – because of my work and my children – I have been pondering the possible impacts of climate change, and what they might mean for motherhood, for the adults my children will become.
The Russo Brothers have redefined what it means to ‘take liberties’ with the source material. Beckett said the play should be set in a single interior? Then we’re going to use the whole universe. He ordered that there should be only four characters? Then we’re going to use hundreds, possibly thousands of them.
When access to public transport is stymied, so too is access to public life. Something as basic as getting from one destination to another becomes unpredictable and stressful. Since isolation and depression already disproportionately affect disabled and chronically ill people, and one in ten suicides are linked to chronic illness, access issues need to stir up more than a passionless afterthought.
It wasn’t until my twenties that I learned that Mum hadn’t just been involved in university activism but was a protester in high school, too.
I read in the Cambodia Daily that Survivor has wrapped up filming on Koh Rong, in the Gulf of Thailand, so I go to see for myself. It’s July, the wet season; by midday the sky is a silvery purple that deepens until it bursts in the late afternoon. I picture a barely inhabited oasis, rugged and poised, the kind of island I mentally synthesise when in bed watching Survivor, but with the remnants of a major US game show – discarded fibreglass reproductions of Angkor devas, a neat circle of attractive stones around a pile of ash.
Can you see this picture – in Ngiyampaa and Gamilaraay country?
in the outback, a Toyota police car cruised on a misty, quiet as death, night,
near the outback town of Wilga, a tidy town