Blog

On raising children and community

Some time ago I was offered a short term position as a special needs teacher at an international school in Kuala Lumpur. With my partner, Liza, on maternity leave this was an ideal opportunity; she could have a holiday of sorts with our three-month-old daughter, Ksenya, while I worked. We’d been to Thailand when Ksenya was two months old so had an idea what it would be like living in South East Asia with an infant. Little did we realise that after a few months living in Kuala Lumper we would view returning to Australia with trepidation because of the cultural anxiety surrounding children and how this affects social relations between children and adults.

Within three weeks of being offered the job we were waking to the sound of temple bells and horns mingled with the haunting murmur of the call to prayer, the grind of the monorail and the ever present undulating white noise of Kuala Lumpur’s traffic. Our weekends and holidays were filled with indulging in the great variety of cuisines available in Malaysia and travelling through the ethnically mixed South to the predominantly Malaysian Muslim North East, and all points in-between. ... read more

Written by Rohan Wightman on 20-07-2010, 8 user comments

Reinstating the Racial Discrimination Act and other election promises

With an election called it soon won’t be long before the list of election promises start filling screens and printed pages around the country. Promises from the last election will be brought up and assessed as to whether they’ve been broken, kept or whether they’re in progress. The adjective ‘core’ and ‘non-core’ may be resurrected. A volley of statements will be bandied about and decisions will be made on which statements to believe more than others.

With all that in mind, I can’t help but think of one promise from the last election that the Rudd Government made: the reinstatement of the Racial Discrimination Act in the Northern Territory. The Act was suspended when Howard and Brough rolled out the Northern Territory Emergency Response in 2007.

On 21 June this year, after months of stalling, and even more of planning and writing, the federal Senate passed legislation which they say reinstates the Racial Discrimination Act. The emphasis is on ‘they say’, for as Jayne Weepers, Senior Policy Officer with the CLC, pointed out in an email sent to Jenny Macklin’s office and published on the Stop the Intervention website: ... read more

Written by Scott Foyster on 20-07-2010, 1 user comment

Notes toward an understanding of the festival-spectacle complex

1.0 In 1967 TJ Clark, latterly ensconced in brilliance and tenure at Berkeley, was a PhD student at the Courtauld and a part-time acolyte of Guy Debord. Together with Donald Nicholson-Smith, Charles Radcliffe, and Christopher Gray he wrote ‘The Revolution of Modern Art and the Modern Art of Revolution’ in which he avers, bracingly:

Most of the crap passed off as culture today is no more than dismembered fragments – reproduced mechanically without the slightest concern for their original significance – of the debris left by the collapse of every world culture. This rubbish can be marketed simply as historico-aesthetic bric-a-brac or, alternatively, various past styles and attitudes can be amalgamated, up-dated and plastered indiscriminately over an increasingly wide range of products as haphazard and auto-destructive fashions. But the importance of art in the spectacle today cannot be reduced to the mere fact that it offers a relatively unexploited accumulation of commodities.

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Written by Penelope Aira on 19-07-2010, 4 user comments

It begins

And so to an election on 21 August. It's not an inspiring prospect: a contest between two candidates, each of whom could plausibly be described as the most conservative leader their respective parties have ever fielded.

About Tony Abbott, nothing need really be said. He is precisely what he seems, an amalgam of John Howard and Torquemada.

As for Julia Gillard, the speech with which she launched the campaign epitomised both modern Labor and its new leader. The slogan 'Moving Forward' is, in its own way, a minor masterpiece, a distillation of contemporary Laborism into the purity of a Zen koan. For what does it mean, this phrase that Gillard repeated an astonishing thirty-five times in a single press conference? In some respects, that's the wrong question, since the power of the slogan lies self-evidently in its emptiness. 'Moving forward' simultaneously implies that the government is building on its achievements ('moving forward' as 'getting on with the job') and that it's entirely disowning them ('moving forward' as 'leaving the Rudd era behind'); it suggests a break from the Howard years without implying any differentiation from Howard policies (for, as Tony Wright points out today, if one is moving forward, one neatly ducks the issue of whether one is lurching to the right). Indeed, the obvious comparison is with Newspeak, a lexicon that Orwell explains in terms that every ALP candidate would understand perfectly. 'For the purposes of everyday life,' he writes, 'it was no doubt necessary, or sometimes necessary, to reflect before speaking, but a Party member called upon to make a political or ethical judgement should be able to spray forth the correct opinions as automatically as a machine gun spraying forth bullets'. ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 18-07-2010, 19 user comments

A response to harvest

My curiosity piqued by a question beneath a review on our blog of the latest harvest, I hurried home to read its editorial. And read its editorial I did – with a burgeoning sense of unease.

The editorial responded to Ted Genoways’ article in Mother Jones earlier this year, ‘The death of fiction?’ Genoways argued that many factors contributed to the demise of the literary journal, and literature, but that a major cause was the preponderance of writing courses manufacturing writers who write more than they read and care little for the outside world:

At the same time, young writers will have to swear off navel-gazing in favor of an outward glance onto a wrecked and lovely world worthy and in need of the attention of intelligent, sensitive writers. I'm not calling for more pundits—God knows we've got plenty. I'm saying that writers need to venture out from under the protective wing of academia, to put themselves and their work on the line. Stop being so damned dainty and polite. Treat writing like your lifeblood instead of your livelihood. And for Christ's sake, write something we might want to read.

... read more

Written by Jacinda Woodhead on 16-07-2010, 30 user comments

Farewell Jessica Anderson (1916–2010) – and thanks

I can’t let the death last week of Australian writer Jessica Anderson go unremarked. Why? Because although she twice won the Miles Franklin Award (1978 and 1980) and her novel Tirra Lirra by the River has been on high school reading lists, Anderson was for most of her long life marginalised, a misfit, a sensitive and creative woman in 20th century Australia. And she writes about similarly marginalised people. She said: ‘I was very much, and always have been, preoccupied with people who are strangers in their society.’

I agree with Clive James when he says that ‘Culture builds itself like a coral reef and like a reef it entails much sacrifice’ – and I think we have writers like Jessica Anderson to thank for whatever Australian literary culture we can claim today. They are the bedrock of our literature and they paid the price – poverty, alcoholism, disappointment, frustration, madness – of creativity in an overwhelmingly philistine nation. ... read more

Written by Jane Gleeson-White on 15-07-2010, 11 user comments

Poetry review – My father’s tools

'My father's tools'My father's tools
Tom Petsinis
Arcadia

The relationship between father and son is explored in Tom Petsinis’s sixth poetry collection My father’s tools, published by Arcadia. The poetry, accompanied by the artwork of Jim Pavlidis, is series of poems, each named after a tool in Petsinis’s deceased father’s toolbox. Although each short poem can be enjoyed in isolation, the power lies in reading them together, chronologically. As a whole, the collection paints a portrait of a complex relationship – father and son – beginning at the surface and chiselling deeper to its core. ... read more

Written by Koraly Dimitriadis on 15-07-2010, 5 user comments

Meanland extract – A Gutenberg moment?

The arrival of the iPad in Australia has been greeted with everything from quasi-religious reverence to cynicism. The Steve Jobs camp has largely been focused on the language of revolution – a savvy if slightly hubristic move from the Apple marketing department. ‘It’s already a revolution and it’s only just begun,’ the voiceover in the commercials declared, with Jobs himself calling the iPad ‘a truly magical and revolutionary product’ at the launch earlier this year. If ‘revolutionary’ has become Apple’s key selling point for the masses, then drawing parallels with the invention of the Gutenberg press comes a close second, especially for winning over aficionados of print. Even Jonathan Green of ABC’s Drum admitted ‘This could be something of a Gutenberg moment, a technical innovation that will revolutionise how we communicate and distribute ideas.’ ... read more

Written by Jessica Au on 15-07-2010, No comments

Fiction review – Slice of Life

Slice of life Slice of Life
Paul Haines
The Mayne Press

Genre publishing exists like a hidden enclave in the broader Australian culture, replete with its own publications and personalities, politics and institutions. Hidden away in this world are number of highly talented writers whose work deserves much greater recognition than it receives. At the literary end of this spectrum is the work of Ben Peek or Deborah Biancotti. Closer to the genre side of things stands Paul Haines, whose second collection, Slice of Life, was recently published by The Mayne Press and has been shortlisted for the Sir Julius Vogel Awards. ... read more

Written by Rjurik Davidson on 14-07-2010, 1 user comment

Daniel Ellsberg: The Most Dangerous Man in America

Most kids experience an amount of emotional turbulence on the way to adulthood, and I was no exception. And although there were aspects of my adolescence that make me cringe to this day, I could always be certain that at the end of the school day, I had a home to return to with my own bedroom, a dinner table, heating in winter and a backyard to assist in the fantasy of one day playing for the Australian cricket team.

I mention this because the foremost image remaining with me after a viewing of The Most Dangerous Man in America – a compelling documentary on Daniel Ellsberg who leaked a comprehensive RAND Corporation study officially titled United States-Vietnam Relations 1945-1967, otherwise known as the Pentagon Papers, to the New York Times in 1971 – is of a young Vietnamese girl in obvious distress as US marines burn her village to the ground. Such images help explain why Ellsberg sacrificed a promising Government career to inform the American public that the Vietnam War had been packaged and sold as containment of the Communist threat, when in fact the historical record, as recorded in the Pentagon Papers, illuminated fervent imperial ambition across successive US administrations. ... read more

Written by Dan Bigna on 13-07-2010, 3 user comments

Frank national conversations

It's often assumed that elected politicians with anti-immigrant policies must be ‘pandering’ to crude popular sensibilities, rather than having their own agenda.

This is a tenacious ideological myth (if these are anything to go by): consider the standard historiography on the so-called White Australia policy. The notion that a politically marginal labour movement could dictate immigration policy would have seemed laughable to late-colonial state managers, who by the 1880s had their own internally coherent position on the matter (and already the legislation to back it up). Here's Andrew Inglis Clark in 1888: ... read more

Written by Nick Siemensma on 13-07-2010, 3 user comments

Metaphorically leaking

As far as metaphors go, the destruction in 2001 of the twin towers of the World Trade Centre could be regarded as both the most potent and vilest in the world’s history. It was both a tactical, quasi-military strike against the most prominent architectural symbol of American global power and a pointedly symbolic blow, which drew, in the semiotic sense, on its biblical forerunner, the collapse of the Tower of Babel. To add to its potency, in hindsight at least, it can be regarded as a harbinger of the collapse of the global financial system. A very disconcerting element of prophecy appears to have been at work even if there is no substantive link between credit default swaps and planes smashing into buildings. Would that it were not so, but metaphors are slippery like that, which brings me to another contemporary metaphor, the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. ... read more

Written by Boris Kelly on 12-07-2010, 6 user comments

The Muslim voice pushing through

The politically conscious hip-hop group The Brothahood ask ‘Why?’

Five Muslim spoken-word/rap artists born in Australia with Lebanese backgrounds, The Brothahood are smashing stereotypes with their album Lyrics of mass construction, and tracks like ‘Why?’ When I accidentally stumbled across them a few months ago I was asking myself why haven’t I heard of these guys? All of Australia needs to turn off their televisions and listen:

Now if a wake up one morning and grow myself a beard /
people start talkin and getting themselves scared /
but – Mr Goldberg he lives down the block /
when he grows a beard no-one ever gets a shock /
why when my sister walks properly dressed /
she wears a headscarf they think she’s oppressed? /
then you got the nuns dressed in black and white head to toe /
but no-one questions them – why – i dont know

Hesh, Ahmed, Moustafa, Jehad and Timur work full-time jobs, live on opposite sides of the city in suburbia and struggle to find time to come together, but when they do, they produce raw and confronting material that challenges the propagandist mainstream newsfeeds the Australian public sees every day. They may not have flashy video clips but the content is honest and allows the Muslim voice in Australia, commonly silenced by fear, to be heard.

Only recently introduced to their work, by the Nothing rhymes with RRR podcast, my initial reaction was: why aren’t these guys funded by an arts council? Why do these guys have to struggle to create? Governments complain of the racism in Australia but do nothing about it. Why not start by funding people like The Brothahood and other diverse voices from different backgrounds? Only through art can we appreciate the many cultures we have in Australia.

The Brothahood began their career years ago as spoken-word artists performing with a beat boxer and have since incorporated music in their performances. Their track ‘The Silent Truth’, a response to the Cronulla riots, was featured on Triple J’s Unearthed in 2007:

I can feel ya eyes on me but i aint in the wrong /
keepin to yourself scared that my beard hides a bomb /
tensions climbin higher than that ape king kong /
label me a thug coz i'm from Lebanon /
butcha WRONG, im like any other aussie /
try to ride a train but u always gotta stop me /
coz of 9/11 now you all wanna wanna drop me /
little do you know that your thinkins kinda sloppy

But The Brothahood don’t only write about issues faced by Muslims in Australia. My favourite track is ‘Act on It’, which voices anger over the state of Israel and the suffering of Palestinians:

It was born on injustice, theft and murder /
Driving Palestinians out further and further /
Now don't get me wrong Judaism ain't to blame /
But we must understand that Zionism ain't the same /
Now I know you're mad at me, blunt brutality /
The Z ain't got no links to Jewish spirituality /
Huh, now you wanna twist, call me terrorist /
Yes, I'm anti Zionist, Expect me to resist

This Thursday morning, 15 July from 9–9:30, I’ll be interviewing Jehad from The Brothahood on 3CR’s Spoken Word program (855 AM). We’ll be discussing spoken word, lyrics and politics. You can also listen online at www.3cr.org.au

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Written by Koraly Dimitriadis on 12-07-2010, 8 user comments

Finding Clarke and Dawe

This Monday morning, I've decided to share my growing appreciation of John Clarke and Bryan Dawe:

On asylum seekers

Gillard's first interview as PM

Written by Jacinda Woodhead on 12-07-2010, 1 user comment

Now, I’d like to share my thoughts on refugees

Anxiety – Rob CorrI had thought with the election of the Rudd government in 2007, and the abandonment of the frankly shameful Pacific Solution, Australia had moved on from its most disgusting phase of xenophobia. Unfortunately, the last three years, and more specifically the last six months, have proven me wrong. And with Julia Gillard, a prime minister whom I really want to like, introducing what is now being called the East Timor Solution, it may be time to correct a few misconceptions.

All of the rhetoric about asylum seekers seems to come back to the phrase ‘boat people’. They’re ‘queue jumpers’, they’re ‘illegal immigrants’, they pay people smugglers; they’re doing something somehow wrong. Ignoring for a moment seeking asylum is completely legal, the majority of asylum seekers don’t even arrive by boat. Over eighty percent of asylum seekers arrive on planes, on existing visas, and then either apply for refugee status or overstay illegally. Even the government’s own immigration website states that ‘[t]he majority of asylum seekers are people who have arrived in Australia legally and subsequently apply for protection’. So, just for starters, the majority of asylum seekers aren’t boat people at all. ... read more

Written by Georgia Claire on 9-07-2010, 31 user comments