Progressive culture since 1954
These are strange and frightening times, and settling down to read nonfiction on subjects far removed from the COVID19 pandemic feels vaguely incongruous. However, books also help to fill what Evelyn Araluen terms the ‘deafening silence of quarantine’. In this age of #staythefuckathome, sharp anxiety and comfortable trousers, the following come recommended.
We can continue to deny a fundamental right in the name of investment opportunities, or we can imagine a future where everyone has a roof over their head. Now is the time to push for change and include in our demands a national housing guarantee. If the last few weeks have proved anything, it is that change is only ever a pen stroke away.
‘Education-focused roles’ are entrenching a permanently lower tier of academic workers – cheap teachers rather than rounded scholars, liable to be stuck for good outside the career they anticipate.
Artist Vernon Ah Kee is of the view that Indigenous communities should be advocates for refugees and engage with them more fully. It is in these solidarities that new doors can be opened: for researchers, for advocates, and for policy makers to gather evidence, build critical mass and mobilise for change.
Now is the time to learn from previous crises, and rather than accede to the power grab, start to question motives, demand transparency and accountability, and take part in a genuine debate about credible alternatives.
The more compassionate economic responses to this crisis have shown that the workings of our society could be changed at any time. Keeping up the political pressure to make currently-equitable changes permanent will require a lot of work, but the benefits will be beyond most people’s wildest dreams.
‘Don’t worry,’ the message was, ‘only the sick and the elderly are at risk.’ As though sick and older folks aren’t hearing these messages, too. As though age and illness don’t thread through all human lives.
This is how the circle closes in: what was previously read about from afar, is heard the next town over, then in yours. Then it’s friends of relatives, relatives of friends. Then suddenly, the connections are direct. Our colleagues, our students, our friends.
‘We have to be in the faces of these people because otherwise – silence is acquiescence. So I’m going to be in your face every single day, you people are going to know about me every single day. You’re going to be educated every single day. We’re not going away, we haven’t gone away in 250 years, you tried to wipe us away, we come back generation after generation, yeah?’
Westfield Chermy is one of our sacred sites / ehh gammin! / my grandparents came to Chermy in the early 50s / they had a house on Fee St / where my mother and her siblings grew up / they moved there after the two older children were born in Wacol / Mum was the second born in Fee St.
Now we know we’re essential, we know our skills are really valuable, we know we gotta turn up to work so people get fed. Now there’s a sense of urgency and commitment. We’ve gone from pawns to queens.
It may be easier, and more desirable in times of crisis, to focus on tall tales of nature rebounding in our absence than to truly reckon with our place in the global ecosystem. But reckon we must if we are to avoid, on the one hand, magical thinking, and on the other, environmental misanthropy.
If escape is a departure, as Tolkien claims, the direction we take to imaginatively shape new worlds and new futures is important. As we collectively escape the physical and symbolic barriers of the lockdown, we have the opportunity to gain a clearer view of our world so we can build a new and better one upon our return.