Progressive culture since 1954
Twenty years after Live Aid, came Live 8. This time Bono et al wanted to tap into the global anti-capitalism movement and convince the G8 to tackle poverty through legislation. Now Isol-Aid is here as the final evolution of the concept. The fantasy that popstars can save the world is on hold. Right now, it’s the music industry that needs saving.
If the changes were all taken up, the Aboriginal Heritage Council would move from being an advisory body to one with real power. The ability to enter land to investigate and to bring its own prosecutions would take away its reliance on the State Government to defend Indigenous heritage interests. Local RAPs would have the right to sue developers for civil damages over heritage destruction. They could refuse to approve so-called Cultural Heritage Management Plans (CHMPs), effectively vetoing development.
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?
Dr Kylie Moore-Gilbert was born in New South Wales and is an international expert in Islamic Studies, currently working at the University of Melbourne. She was arrested at Tehran airport in August 2018, and was subsequently convicted of espionage and sentenced to 10 years in prison at a secret trial. Her arbitrary detention by the Iranian regime is a grave miscarriage of justice, and an assault on academic freedom and the ability for scholars to conduct independent research.
Staff who do the bulk of university work know that wage theft is standard practice. For any senior manager to deny this suggests they are either wilfully ignorant, or they have been so far away from the ground of everyday teaching, research and administration for so long that they don’t know how universities actually work.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Michalia Arathimos reviews new work by Laura Elvery, Hannelore Cayre and C Pam Zhang.