Poetry | The ordinary poem
there is a place more real than desire as real as a train or a brick or a sarcoma, words are cleaner there, swaying whitely like feathers in warm air, where dignity whispers like silk skirts.
Progressive culture since 1954
Security theatre in an age of anxiety
The truth is, there remains much capital – both political and monetary – to be made from security theatre and ‘law and order’ policy, particularly at a time of acute public anxiety around the social and economic consequences of COVID-19.
The true cost of reopening the Christmas Island detention centre
The ABF has insisted that no refugees or asylum seeker will be transferred to the Christmas Island facility upon its reopening, but only ‘those convicted of criminal offences’. Yet it has also indicated that moving higher-risk detainees to Christmas Island will allow the redistribution of other detainees within the network. This is a cruel development, and the human and economic costs will be considerable.
Loneliness without privacy: on isolation under lockdown
All our lockdowns are different versions of the same restrictions, from flats ringed with police to suburban houses and beyond. We’re trapped with each other without the possibility of solitude. As the online world takes over many of our social rituals, we are also lonely without privacy.
The posthuman philosopher
If robot philosophers were to ever turn that lens on themselves to contemplate their existence and their morphology, they would likely realise that their ancestors came to value the technological semblance of humanity higher than the vast majority of existing humanity. I wonder if they would find that ironic.
What is the Australian border?
If a nation is willing to detain and torture innocent men, women and children, for years on end and indeed indefinitely, all to protect its borders, it’s crucial to ask: what is the Australian border? Why is it so important, and so fragile that it needs this incredibly violent, elaborate and expensive protection?
A plague of the working classes
For every extra day of lockdown, for every extra quarantine measure, and for every additional restriction placed on Victorians, it is the corporations pushing insecure work and forcing workers to turn up to work who must bear ultimate responsibility.
‘Not Great Men’: Philip Brophy’s Priscilla Queen of the Desert revisited
Since the recent transference of Sydney ‘Glitter’ cycle film from screen to stage (Muriel’s Wedding, Strictly Ballroom), revisiting the critique of the ‘dumb semiotics’ of Australian cinema in Philip Brophy’s Priscilla, Queen of the Desert can widen our sense of how the Australian Dream road-movie is travelling.
The Victorian police strike and the language of protest photography
While other important labour protests around that time, such as the 1917 New South Wales Strike, were set both inside and outside of Australia’s largest cities, the Victorian police strike offered Australian newspapers the opportunity to capture disruption unfolding in an urban setting, where the vast majority of protests take place today.
Fiction | Late night shopping
This time I really did want to be offended. I wanted to be as bold in my rage as Sophia, as reactionary in my justified rebuke. But all I felt was a cold sweat and a sense that everyone else in that plaza was only sorry they hadn’t done it to me themselves. I knew that wasn’t true, but every time something like that happened, it felt like gospel that someone – anyone, everyone – wanted to hurt me.
Can the past be salvaged? Remembering Jack Mundey
The battle to save Kelly’s Bush – a public open space on the banks of the Parramatta River at Hunters Hill – is legendary, and was the catalyst that launched Mundey on a path that would bring him international fame, and guarantee him a place in the history of Australian urban political thought.
August in nonfiction
Sarah Burnside reviews new books by Penny Wincer and Ambelin Kwaymullina and a new essay by Judith Brett, with a focus on care.
Sergio: or the wretched of Lebanon, Iraq and East Timor
As an immigrant from the Middle East, whenever I watch a Hollywood movie set in the Global South I anticipate the reduction of the East into a set of stereotypes in direct opposition to the West. Where the Western self is rational, mature, civilised, the Oriental other is irrational, childlike, savage.