Progressive culture since 1954
M.J. Moriarty of Redfern found his wife dead in the kitchen with her throat cut. A married woman named O’Connor died suddenly at Armidale. The coroner refused to give a death certificate until the contents of the stomach had been analysed.
Australia is a country with no constitutionally enshrined freedom of speech, necessitating case-by-case precedents to set the limits of public disclosure. This year is shaping up to be a defining moment in whether Australia sees itself as a country that rewards people speaking out against wrongdoing, or one that censors free speech to save government embarrassment and in which, in the words of David McBride, ‘only truth-tellers get punished’.
And these passengers, along with the driver, will be unhappy, both as a result of the time you’ve wasted fumbling at the scanner with your bus pass and because of the smell emanating from your long, matted hair, which they’ll have to endure for the rest of your trip. They’ll whisper among themselves as they glare at you and make mock retching gestures.
If ‘Omelas’ shows us that people can act in wilful ignorance of inequity, it also shows us that people are entirely capable of forgetting inequity altogether. Further still, it suggests that those conscious of the child in the tower are morally capable of calculating its impact upon the world and proceeding anyway. By personifying this calculation of human life, Le Guin shows us that injustice is often a product of a system of justice.
A sitting disability is a severe and legitimate physical disability, comparable to a mobility impairment. It is time for anti-discrimination principles to be applied to us, rather than sarcasm, humour or ill-informed advice, so that we may enjoy full participation and inclusion in society.
It’s been one year since the Attorneys-General failed to raise the age. Since then, the ACT has announced its intentions to go at it alone and change the laws to keep ten-year-olds out of prison. The question now, is will other states and territories show the same political courage and take the action that so many Australians, doctors, lawyers and families are calling for and raise the age to at least fourteen?
Congratulations to our incredible authors, and a special congratulations to our winner!
What happened at Canterbury is now happening in universities around the Anglophone world. Even if most news coverage of higher education focuses on quarrels over curricula and freedom of speech, humanities departments have in fact experienced a far deeper realignment, one that is three decades in the making.
The dedication of Farmers or Hunter-? to ‘Enkidu and Gilgamesh’, is something of a sleeper. In his interview with Stuart Rintoul, Sutton said that he sees ‘the birth of reconcilement’ in the Epic of Gilgamesh which is one of the earliest literary creations to emerge from the Fertile Crescent of Mesopotamia. It was there that farming began, along with all its infrastructure of metalworking, urbanisation, writing, patriarchal theocracies, monarchies, armies, and colonisation.
The rulers of global capitalism chose Genoa to use mass violence to break the anti-capitalist movement. They failed. In the face of police terror, a common chant arose: ‘They make misery, we make history.’ Most importantly, however, the Battle of Genoa demonstrated to many that the state is not neutral.
To consider my turn to Get Ready With me videos as a coping mechanism during a time of crisis is to explore my relationship to the future. Against the backdrop of an uncertain future, I view it as a nihilistic impulse – a deeply gendered way of negotiating crisis and break in belief or enthusiasm for alternative futures.