Progressive culture since 1954
The reality is that we are constantly providing cover for terrorism. The problem is that we keep calling it national security. Noam Chomsky’s advice could be firmly applied to Australian TV Drama – ‘Everyone’s worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there’s really an easy way: stop participating in it.’
Gabbie Stroud’s memoir Teacher is almost militantly unhappy with NAPLAN, and gives it considerably more than a walk-on role. Rather, it is a main player: a powerful, insidious antagonist which emerges, along with other forces of educational standardisation, to drive Stroud in despair from the profession that she loves.
There is no reason why Australia cannot build up a worker cooperative sector employing tens of thousands of people in well-paid secure jobs over the next decade. These are just the sort of jobs that anchor communities and provide hope for those who would overwise depend on sectors such as the fossil fuel extraction industry.
What drives my work now, and what I think is a big question for us post-#MeToo, is the potential for erotica and sex-fiction writing and reading to play a part in creating a non-fiction world, or a new sexual reality for women.
Whether Abbott’s position is genuinely held or simply a vindictive political gesture is difficult to assess. I don’t think it matters as much as his goal – the goal of denialists more generally – to ‘keep minds turned off on the meta-level,’ as philosopher Elizabeth Minnich puts it, so there are ‘no questions about [the issue], no looking back and wondering, no reaching for connections to beliefs.’
To understand Australian concepts of enjoyment’, Donald Horne wrote in The Lucky Country, ‘one must understand that in Australia there is a battle between puritanism and a kind of paganism.’ Puritanical leisure, Horne felt, was the product of numerous religious sensibilities, yet ‘ordinary’ Australians – who Horne saw as white, middle-class suburbanites – tended to embrace an opposing view of their recreation: a worship of nature and the body for their own sake.
There have been three elections, four prime ministers and we are still being punished.
In reflecting on the campaign and result, I want to make some initial observations of whether there are continuing expressions of anti-politics in Australia. It is important to reflect on whether my original thesis of anti-politics holds up, and if it does how it might need to be refined in light of the past weekend.
Many of us are grieving today. There are jokes about moving to New Zealand, and memes about excising Queensland. More seriously, though, here are some initial thoughts to prompt discussion on what lessons there may be in this moment.
Bolsonaro is advancing his political agenda not by dictating what may or may not be taught, but rather by bringing to bear on students and academics the discipline of a market he commands.
Not awarding the Vogel’s this year is downright cruel. Mediocre books get published all the time, and some of them even win multiple awards: who cares if you give the Vogel’s to a manuscript that isn’t a work of utter genius?
In the aftermath of Saturday’s carnage, I have never felt more distant from the grieving white climate activists in Australia.
Overland is seeking fiction submissions for a special online edition themed around the future(s) you would manifest, to be guest edited by Eda Gunaydin.
Marie Kondo is a quiet delight, a soothing television presence in what, presently, are some very stormy seas. But I love her more because she is not just an antidote to these times of crisis – she speaks to them, too.
Where is this nation that is so imperilled by the calumnious voices of ‘anti-nationals’? Where is this nation that is so in danger of being overcome and overrun by destructive left-wing forces that all criticism of the government’s actions or policies must be stifled?
This is the third election we have witnessed since this inhuman offshore immigration detention poli-cy, Pacific Solution 2, was imposed on us. We have sacrificed six years of our lives to ‘protect the Australian borders’.
So if Crowe’s right, it’s not just ‘big ideas and ambitious plans’ that are dead to our politicians. It’s also, according to the best available science, a great chunk of life on Earth, with neither major party even trying to put forward the measures necessary to end extinctions.
That’s a bleak conclusion – but, in a way, it’s a bracing one since it clarifies, in the starkest possible fashion, the strategic perspectives in front of us.
Due to the extensive list of creative geniuses whose deaths were either caused or speculated to have been caused by the dreaded infection, syphilis acquired twisted positive connotations within European artistic circles during the Victorian era.