Progressive culture since 1954
When I first left New Zealand, I didn’t think I’d have to write a piece about how to go through quarantine on my return home. But now that we’re here, I hope the values of compassion and kindness that have become linked to Jacinda Ardern’s government can be shown to mean something. I hope they’re not just empty words. For the government, this is a real test of their commitments – and their values.
Allegory and Ideology by Fredric Jameson (Verso, 2019) is a book that I’ve been thoroughly looking forward to discussing. It is perhaps the seminal American thinker’s major reflection on literature, or at least his most major reflection on literature since his last major reflection on literature.
In its depoliticised form, ‘mental health’ can be used to explain just about anything. Most recently, New Zealand MP Andrew Falloon was caught sending pornographic images to several young women and invoked his grief at his friends’ suicides as the cause. Perhaps unusually, this time the excuse failed to work.
As a result of events that occurred in Redfern on 15 February a seventeen-year-old Indigenous boy named Thomas Hickey is gone from not only his mother, but from us – all of us.
Before I moved in with Chris, I packed everything I owned into two boxes and sold the rest on Gumtree. I hated the idea of getting attached to things. I had Jess to thank for that. Jess had been the sort of person rules loosened around. Within a month of us living together, they’d moved from smoking outside, to out the window, to a huge mason jar of cigarettes growing yellow and grey next to the bed.
While both of our largest political parties are so concerned about the possibility of a ‘too generous’ welfare system serving as a disincentive against finding work that they are both refusing to maintain it at its current, merely adequate level, Animal Crossing presents us with a fictional economy where people are allowed to choose to work to better their society.
Let’s dismantle the notion that we can be progressive except for Palestine once and for all. It’s not possible to be progressive without fighting for everyone.
Australia’s case of Dutch disease has real political dimensions. The Australian state has represents what we might call in vulgar Marxist terms an executive committee for the mining industry.
Today the site of the former UN base in Potočari is the Srebrenica-Potočari Memorial Center & Cemetery. There are 8,372 white headstones dotted around the green roof of the memorial centre to commemorate the genocide of Bosnians in Srebrenica, an event that has the distinction of being the single worst act of genocide committed on European soil since World War II.
The moon rises above clouds—
in the cold light, all is grey, and white.
Night sky turns on a paper wheel.
I remember the last pandemic to really hit Borroloola. The Hong Kong flu came in the 1960s and changed the way we lived forever. My mum sat us down and said, ‘this flu will come and kill our people.’
In response to the disastrous funding reforms announced by Dan Tehan in June, we’re inviting all our colleagues, whether academic or professional, ongoing or precarious, employed or currently out of work, to join an online National Assembly of University Staff from 2-3.30 pm on Tuesday August 4.
As well as having Aboriginal band No Fixed Address open for them at one gig, the Clash had veteran Aboriginal rights activist, Gary Foley, speak at many of their shows during their one and only tour of Australia, in 1982.