Progressive culture since 1954
Starting with the controversial declaration of English as ‘our national language’ (which has no basis in law), and ending on an anxiety-inducing TBC, the proposal is as offensive as it is worrying. Considering the strategic linguicide inflicted by colonists on First Nations people, and the historical use of language tests to discriminate against non-European migrants, since when has English, or its imposition, ever been democratic?
Arts scandals over the theme of sexual reproduction vary in their details, but there are similarities in that the undercurrent of feeling displayed by decision-makers sometimes breaks through the procedural surface of the discussion – or where it stays under wraps, as is the case with the Australia Council’s decision to rescind, it circulates beneath the official language as an electrified absence.
Judyth Emanuel’s Yeh Hell Ow is a work of suburban (high) modernism, a successor to Joyce or Woolf and worthy contemporary of Eimear McBride and Claire Louise Bennett, transplanted into tropical suburbs and surgically given a new tongue. It is a novel that plays on the unsteady, drunken relationship between sound and meaning and the equally unstable relationship between what we think and what we say.
The election means nothing has been resolved. Trump might be done but his defeat – if that’s what we’re seeing – wasn’t sufficiently crushing as to destroy his legacy. On the contrary, many would-be demagogues, both in the US and elsewhere, will see his surprisingly strong showing as evidence that the old culture war incantations still retain some of their magic.
The stupid thing is, I’m dressed up like it’s a job interview when it is most likely an exit interview. That’s the most likely of the two possibilities I can think of. The other is they have a special project in mind for me. ‘We need someone with, what’s the word? (breasts), a fresh perspective who can bring their, how do you say? (ovaries), energy to the project.
I have an intertextual relationship with the internet: my writing practice could not have existed without it, as much as I could not have grown as a person without it. Even if I’m not directly addressing online-ness in my work, I’m always in conversation with it.
Capitalism in crisis, faced with the inevitable consequences of its own internal contradictions, is the perfect nutrient for fascist ideas, for desperate terrors and paranoias that create demons and project them into the world.
On June 29, I submitted an opinion piece to ABC’s online platform Religion and Ethics. After one week of back-and-forth editorial interventions, it was published alongside an opposing piece by Bren Carlill from the Zionist Federation of Australia. It became instantly clear that Mr Carlill had written his piece directly in response to mine.
don’t want to w a l k any where any more lingering orientalism delivered to your door — guy does the guy collected guy’s collective events gaga does the gaga & yes when i think about it echolalia’s not that medical
The Test is a PR exercise and its omissions are glaring. Most notably, the issue of what actually led this immensely talented team to cheat in South Africa and the ongoing questions associated with it are never addressed. Instead, the viewer is taken through a tediously familiar narrative, littered with Anzackery and generalised notions of what it is to be ‘Australian’ as the team charts a heroic path from despair to triumph in the space of little more than a year.
My grandmothers are only two of the aged care residents who have died during the coronavirus pandemic. They didn’t die of Covid, and don’t appear in the daily tallies released by the state and federal governments. In fact, they are barely mentioned at all. But their deaths were nevertheless the result of a failed public health response and were caused by the pandemic as much as any Covid-attributed death.
It was a century ago on 30 October, that twenty-six women and men representing a few hundred socialists, women’s activists, anarcho-syndicalists, trade unionists and Labor Party members met at Trades Hall in Sydney to found the Communist Party of Australia.
Michalia Arathimos reviews new work by Laura Elvery, Hannelore Cayre and C Pam Zhang.