Progressive culture since 1954
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.
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.
Here it begins: Falid’s wife is Alexandra. She dies in the river. The river is dull. Its current is not too strong. I hear at the women’s meeting that no-one blames the river, no-one blames Alexandra. But this happens, still. She dies in the river and it is a beginning. Ounya is Falid’s daughter. She is born by Alexandra. She is hit by a truck after six years and this is where it ends.
The trends which are destructive of liberal education ideals must be understood not as aberrations, but rather as tendencies that have always been inherent in educational institutions. As Bertrand Russell remarked, ‘a certain percentage of children have the habit of thinking; one of the aims of education is to cure them of this habit.’ Recognising this, we need to ensure that the primary task of university education is not to make students job-ready, but to create critical, informed, and humane citizens, and a society in which the ideals of free inquiry are themselves the main measure of relevance.
Usually, when we say that a politician has immense charisma, it is taken to imply that they have no substance, which wasn’t true of Key just as it isn’t true of Ardern. You don’t occupy the centre of politics just by flashing a smile. You occupy it by articulating a set of values in which the social bloc that determines the outcome of elections wants to see itself reflected.
When I first visited Thailand, in 1985, both nations had cheap and efficient postal services. When I returned, twenty-five years later, that could only be said about one country – and it wasn’t Australia.
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.
Ania Walwicz taught us that art is central to being human. She recognised that to be an artist is also to be a teacher. She wanted to create a community and a movement, and when it suited, that community was also her court.
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