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Last night, at Mungo MacCullum’s Overland lecture, I asked the journalist a question about the language of fear around asylum seekers: the terminology created at the time of the Howard government that has been adopted into common practice by many journalists.

Specific examples I gave were language about the rising tide or surge of boat people, as opposed to the ‘increase in the arrival of asylum seekers’, reports of vessels being secured and intercepted, rather than boats being met or boarded, and recognition that mandatory detention centres are actually jails.

My question, specifically, was what role journalists, particularly purportedly progressive journalists should play – what responsibility they have, if any – to rewrite this language of fear around the asylum seeker issue. ... read more

Written by Maxine Clarke on 31-03-2010, 13 user comments

Jesus vs Christ

It is said that popular culture is becoming increasingly infantilising. JK Rowling made it acceptable for adults to sit on the train reading a book about magical boarding schools, infused with the nostalgia of books from our own childhoods (Anthony Buckeridge’s Jennings, Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising), but the process was already well underway when Hedwig and Hagrid were first put to paper. As the average age of the cinema-goer decreases, so the market-enslaved Hollywood studios grind the common denominator of characters, themes and jokes lower with each summer season. Films for the very young are the exception, since filmmakers must cater to both their ostensible audience and the parents who accompany them. I remember the songs in their soundtracks from my own youth, and the cultural references and allusions are often, sadly, more diverse and engaging than in films supposedly for grown-ups. ... read more

Written by Joshua Mostafa on 31-03-2010, 1 user comment

Meanland extract – The lowdown on the eReader

Roughly 5 million eReaders were sold around the world in 2009. For the uninitiated, the world of the eReader can be positively perplexing, brimming with assumed knowledge.

The Kindle is possibly the most recognised reader, with the much talked about but as yet unreleased iPad a close second. Then again, a quick Google search reveals there are hundreds of eReaders available: the Onyx Boox 60, the nook, the Pocketbook 302, the Cybook Opus, the Amazon Kindle DX, the Kindle 2, the eSlick Reader, the Cybook Gen 3, the Librie – you get the general idea. ... read more

Written by Jacinda Woodhead on 31-03-2010, 1 user comment

On not being able to care

For a couple of days I’ve been immersed in Jacqueline Rose’s volume of essays, On Not Being Able To Sleep, and mostly reading it at night when, as it happens, I haven’t been able to sleep. Jacqueline Rose is a Professor of English at some exalted establishment in the UK, and has written compellingly and with amazing insight on psychoanalysis, feminism and literature. Rose, born into a Jewish family, is well known for calling a few years ago for an academic and cultural boycott of Israel. Her book States of Fantasy, on the role of the unconscious in the histories of Israel and South Africa, is pretty amazing too.

On Not Being Able To Sleep has an essay on Australia, which Rose was supposed to deliver a decade ago to the Brisbane Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies – a body I studied with for several years to great personal benefit – but was unable to. That essay looks at Howard’s victory in the ‘election of shame’ of 1999 and the weirdness of Pauline Hanson, and the place of Australia and Aboriginal culture in the thought of Freud and Jung, who were also both invited to Australia a hundred years ago, but who both didn’t make it here either. ... read more

Written by Stephen Wright on 30-03-2010, 33 user comments

On the [il]legality of drone attacks

The Lede blog in the New York Times today has a post by Robert Mackey, ‘Drone Strikes Are Legal, U.S. Official Says’. Highly recommend reading.

I’ve embedded a video from the post in which Harold Hongju Koh, the US State Department’s top lawyer, defends the 'legitimacy' of drone attacks and targeted assassinations.

As Mackey points out, Koh was a strident critic of the Bush Administration’s policies when he was the dean of Yale Law School; he even described America as part of ‘the axis of disobedience’ alongside North Korea and Iraq.

Hard to imagine now.

... read more

Written by Jacinda Woodhead on 30-03-2010, 6 user comments

Get your opinions off my fallopian tubes

Me: I really don’t want to have a caesarean. I don’t think I’ll need to, but if I do, I’d like it on record that I’d like my tubes tied while they’re in there

Doc: (guffawing) You’re what, nearly thirty?

Me: Sorry, how is that relevant?

Doc: Well, it’s just that that’s a pretty major decision to be making at this point in your life…

Me: Uh…so is having children isn’t it?

Doc: Have you umm, spoken to your partner about this?

Me: (raising an eyebrow) I don’t think any partner of mine would have a problem with what I want to do with my own body.

Doc: (stares at me oddly) ... read more

Written by Maxine Clarke on 29-03-2010, 12 user comments

Where have all the young things gone?

Last weekend Canberra was pumping with ideas. Borrowing from K Rudd, this year the annual Manning Clark House Weekend of Ideas was titled ‘Fair Suck of the Sauce Bottle: A Celebration of Australian Language’. The sauce bottle didn’t feature much, but the evolution and current usage of language was discussed, dissected and debated.

Jack Waterford's dictionariesBarrister and philologist Julian Burnside was eloquent in his reflection on the specific language surrounding refugees which he described as ‘an exercise in double speak’. He went on to say: ‘I don’t mind when people misuse language but when they deliberately use language to anesthetise or mislead I want to reach for my revolver.’ He talked about how the word ‘illegals’ shaped public perception of refugees as criminals, therefore making it acceptable to lock them up. In reality refugees are ordinary people, including children, who have escaped horrendous situations only to be placed indefinitely behind razor wire without a trial. But this deliberate use of language took away refugees’ humanity in a political ploy to prevent the general public from realising what the government was actually doing. ... read more

Written by Irma Gold on 26-03-2010, 24 user comments

The mountains couldn’t walk away – a review

Poetry review
The mountains couldn’t walk away
Andrea Demetriou

'The mountains couldn't walk away'If only the mountains could have walked away, Andrea, if only. If only they had picked themselves up and treaded over the invading Turks on that dark night in Cyprus in 1974. Instead, to this day, they are a constant reminder of what we lost with the Turkish flag carved and painted on the soil and the words: ‘Proud to be a Turk’. The mountains are a daily slap in the face to any Greek-Cypriot driving towards the divided Nicossia. Because my parents were born in the now unoccupied south of Cyprus, I was never told firsthand what it was like to flee the north – well, that is, not until Andrea’s poetry spoke to me. ... read more

Written by Koraly Dimitriadis on 26-03-2010, 4 user comments

Sisters on the planet

Recent International Women’s Day (IWD) celebrations raised the question of what is the appropriate balance between celebrating successful Australian women, and the noteworthy achievements of women elsewhere who face great hardships.

Along with many others, I had the opportunity to celebrate the bravery and resilience of women depicted in a series of short films called Sisters on the Planet. These are stories of the achievements of women living with little access to essential resources.

The films are a result of an IWD collaboration between Sustainable Illawarra and Oxfam Australia (who support a group of women leaders fighting climate change in their communities). The informative and inspirational films depict the daily efforts and worries women face in providing for their families and communities. ... read more

Written by Sharon Callaghan on 25-03-2010, 4 user comments

Nudists beware

Nudes are in the news again. Specifically, under-age nudity has reared its terribly inappropriate head recently with the abolition of the artistic purpose defence in child pornography cases. It’s never been more exciting, or perhaps dangerous, to be doing stuff in the buff.

The reforms to current child pornography laws emerged from the NSW Child Pornography Working Party which, set-up to examine the state’s child pornography laws and sex offence sentencing in the wake of the furore Bill Henson’s photographs created in 2008.

Artists who create images of nude children would have to pay $500 an image to get Commonwealth classification to make absolutely sure they would not be prosecuted under the new laws. That seems like a stretch in a profession where au naturel photography and making shit-all profit go hand in hand. This may mean artists will not bother to have their work classified at all and risk prosecution, or not even produce the pictures in the first place. I’m not sure which is worse. ... read more

Written by Peter Francis on 24-03-2010, 2 user comments

Becoming vegetarian

My name is Georgia, and I am a vegetarian.

I know that in writing that, I have already turned a significant proportion of my audience. The omnivores among you are rolling their eyes, skimming by, and looking for something else to read that will hopefully be less moralising and self-righteous. The vegetarians among you are probably already irked I've structured my introductory sentence as though stating I am an alcoholic or drug addict, conditions that while increasingly understood and even forgiven by society are hardly desirable to have on a resume. The vegans among you have sniffed condescendingly, but are possibly still reading.

I am a vegetarian, but I have only recently become one. Maybe that is why I am currently more interested in the politics of vegetarianism than I am in the actual eating of vegetables. (And other things, people. Vegetarians also eat things beside vegetables, let's keep that in mind). ... read more

Written by Georgia Claire on 24-03-2010, 32 user comments

Meanland extract – SXSW: forecasting how we will read, write and create

‘It puts you in the position of a journalist, in a way’, said Margaret Atwood late last year when asked how the Internet has changed her relationship to her readers. ‘You become the journalist of yourself. Which is really weird.’

Margaret Atwood has not only enthusiastically embraced life online, but has also gone one step further, into innovation, into throwing parties in her kitchen that are live-streamed on Twitter, iPhones and the web. Atwood is a huge Twitter fan, declaring that ‘Twittering’ is the most fun to be had on the Internet. (Twitter creator Jack Dorsey feels similarly about Atwood.) ... read more

Written by Jacinda Woodhead on 24-03-2010, No comments

Reading between the covers

I read to live. My house is full of books, far more than I could ever read and I have to ration my book buying. (Imagine having an e-reader that could hold another 1500 books!)

Last Wednesday I found myself accidentally caught up in the debate about e-books versus the printed book. In the afternoon I came across Zoe Dattner and Louise Swinn from Sleepers Publishing on camera, talking up the e-book on their Twenty-first Century Bookshow. With howling babies in the background, they were close to selling me the idea of these ‘devices’, as they called them, which would make life so much easier and take up so much less space.

That same evening I went to the Athenaeum Library to hear Kay Craddock, who owns an antiquarian bookshop in Collins Street, speak about collecting books. There I discovered I was not a book collector, as I buy books mainly to read them, not to cherish them. But Kay’s talk did fill me with regret that I had not cared more for my books. I should have kept their dust jackets intact, taken them off the shelves more often, and run my hands over them to lubricate the leather binding. And I shouldn’t have written my name in them, not unless I plan to be famous, which I still do…as an author, in case you are wondering. ... read more

Written by Carol Middleton on 23-03-2010, 4 user comments

The marginal and the imaginary

For years I have been writing a book of essays in my head. I used to keep a written list of their titles on my desk, but otherwise made no other notes: The Happiness of Bees, The Name of the Machine Is Money, Why Socks Lie, Sentences Spoken By Grass, Dead Matches On A Stove and so on.

Books and assorted things

Somewhere in there, hidden in the chaotic uncatalogued library of my mind, are also essays on books and on music, with titles such as You Got The Tambourine Wrong And Now My Whole Life Is A Misery, Joe Strummer’s Geographies, Why Writers Eat People, A Biography of Tintin’s Parents and so forth. ... read more

Written by Stephen Wright on 23-03-2010, 25 user comments

Getting naked for a cause

Bike loveAnyone who claims Canberra is a boring, stuffy place wasn’t down by Lake Burley Griffin yesterday for the World Naked Bike Ride. On a glorious day with a sky full of scribbled cloud, cyclists left their clothes at home in favour of outfits constructed mostly from paint.

The ride is intended to expose the dangers cyclists face as well as the negative consequences of our dependency on oil and other forms of non-renewable energy. Serious stuff, although it’s questionable as to whether this message was really conveyed by everyone getting their kits off and splodging paint in strategic places. But then I suspect there were as many different reasons for being there as there were people. The world event organisers do admit that ‘too many people are coming to the event without really supporting the primary focus of the ride’. But let’s face it, where else do you get the opportunity to paint your bits in gold glittery flames and parade about proudly hands on hips (if you’re that way inclined). ... read more

Written by Irma Gold on 22-03-2010, 1 user comment