Progressive culture since 1954
25 years ago, on 15 April 1991, the $40 million, three-year long Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody submitted its final report.
25 years on, the bulk of these recommendations continue to be ignored despite their relevancy being as acute today as they were a quarter of a century ago.
New World Summit (NWS) is an artistic and political organisation founded by Dutch artist Jonas Staal in 2012. Resembling an alternative United Nations, the Summit was initially convened to invite groups blacklisted during the ‘War on Terror’ – and thus excluded from formal democratic processes – to a series of ‘propositions for alternative parliaments’.
Australian schools are failing all their students – not just those who identify as queer in some way.
One might be under the impression that transgender people have never been so visible nor been so accepted, from the Time Magazine cover declaring the ‘trans tipping point’ to the coming out of reality TV star Caitlyn Jenner, to more meaningful progress in access to medical treatment and human rights across much of the world. But visibility has always been a double-edged sword for transgender people, and while there have always been transphobic responses to trans gains (Germaine Greer, for instance, has been predictably awful for forty years), it was inevitable at some point that a substantial political backlash would emerge.
South Sudan is land-locked, sharing borders with Uganda, Central African Republic, Ethiopia, Kenya, Democratic Republic of Congo and Sudan. Like its neighbours, the country continues to endure the after effects of colonisation, having been occupied in the twentieth century by British interests. Much of the land is swamp or tropical forest, and the country hosts one of the largest wildlife migrations in the world.
Facing each other across Lake Burley Griffin are two government buildings collecting information about the lives of Australians. On one side is the National Library, a concrete and marble edifice inspired by ancient Greek temples and open to the public seven days a week. Facing it are the new ASIO headquarters, the one-way glass exterior symbolising an organisation keen to see everything happening outside, even as it hides everything going on inside.
Encounters: Revealing Stories of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Objects from the British Museum is nearing the end of its time at the National Museum in Canberra. I have no wish to dismiss the significance of this large-scale exhibition, the engagement with communities and the hard work of many Indigenous and non-Indigenous curators coming at these issues from the inside. But we should also be prepared to look critically at the consequences of acknowledging and listening, as if this were a political end unto itself.
This sordid tale is as intriguing as the true crime genre gets. Already tackling such a popular genre, the series further sates an audience who demands mystery, harrowing discoveries and twists at every turn. To generate this level of viewer interest, Ricciardi and Demos have structured the series with a similar format to current popular drama television: the slow burn of the series and its gradual revelations (such as Brendan Dassey’s episode four confession to assisting Avery in murdering Teresa Halbach, followed by his increasing unreliability) keeps the audience engaged, with twists scattered formulaically.
When witches become palatable, they became controllable: I’d rather be a mad, dangerous, powerful crone than teen-screen friendly commercialised wank fodder, be it literally or – for the many feminist academics who went gaga for this mode of supposedly ‘progressive’ representation – something more symbolic.
These days if you enter a McDonald’s restaurant in Australia or New Zealand and order a medium frozen Coke, they ask you if you wouldn’t rather have a large one, since they both cost $1 anyway. And why would you have the smaller one, when after all you can stop drinking it whenever you want? This basement price for the beverage – part of a promotion that began two years ago – could well be below cost, and seems designed to get you into the restaurant in the hope you will be persuaded to consume something else as well.
If the overreacting author is unknown (and a bit insane), all the resulting publicity will be bad, as it will probably be if an author tracks down and stalks someone who gives them a going-over on Goodreads. In the latter case, though, the author may be seen as bravely standing up to ‘the Goodreads bullies’. The democracy of the internet. Authors hate that, in inverse proportion to their success and/or talent.
In a piece for Griffith Review’s recent edition on ‘Fixing the System’, Gabrielle Carey muses that Australia does not have a strong essayist tradition, and suggests that our ‘zealous commitment to egalitarianism’ might play a role, noting that ‘[i]f all people and opinions are equal, then there is no room for giving authority to a person or allowing them to lead the conversation’. This is an interesting theory, but I’m not sure about it.
In the context of the census as a piece of national infrastructure, trying to raise a boycott doesn’t resemble a reasonable personal protest; it’s more of a distortion, and the ramifications can be severe. After all, to be not counted is to go underrepresented. That might be alright if you’re a North Shore libertarian, but selling a boycott to people who might have needs that require enumeration so services can be better provided tends towards the plain irresponsible.
A modern-day sugar tax is not about punishing a particular group and has a far more utilitarian basis. The concept of it is based on its function as a disincentive to change a set of unhealthy behaviours. Paternalism is often widely applauded – like compulsory minimum education, vaccination, drivers wearing seatbelts. Such laws are not immune to critique, nor should they be, but that’s ultimately how societies like ours can move along in roughly the right direction.
The police fan out, forming a gauntlet alongside the queue. The military precision of the manoeuvre belies their unease. Any Sydneysider who has been to a rally in recent years, or lives in a neighbourhood containing marginalised communities, such as Redfern where I do, will attest to how grim the force has become. But this lot crack awkward jokes. They glance around warily.
Despite more than 60 per cent of NSW voters opposing proposals to crack down on coal seam gas (CSG) mining protesters, the Baird Government passed the Inclosed Lands, Crimes and Law Enforcement Legislation Amendment (Interference) Bill last week, increasing penalties for protesters and expanding police powers.
In my playthrough of controversial mobile phone game Survival Island 3, I didn’t meet a single Indigenous Australian.
It’s the largest document leak in history: 11.5 million files and 2.6 terabytes of information detailing how our global elite avoid their responsibility to the rest of us. The Panama Papers have allowed us to peek behind the Wizard of Oz’s curtain and glimpse the very mortal old men pulling the levers of state. But we already know they play by different rules. We have long known, for instance, that the global elite use tax havens. Yet, what’s truly damaging about these leaks is that they demystify the process.
Since at least the 1970s, writing on the experience of women in cities has focused on the ways in which the built environment acts as an expression of or enabler for the violence enacted upon women’s bodies: sexual assault and other violent crime, and the spatial separation of supposedly ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ space – that harmful dichotomy of public and private dividing the home from the street and workplace.
Buy Me Once (BMO) is a form of green or ethical consumerism which believes that ‘with every dollar you spend you have an impact on the planet and its people’. The benefits aren’t just individual: as more consumers move towards an ethically or environmentally positive product (or away from a negative one), the theory is that businesses will take notice and change their practices on a larger scale. We want ‘to challenge manufacturers to build products that don’t break so easily. (We know they can!),’ says the BMO website. Yes, they can, but will they?
But surely the question of genius is not an economic concern? Or is it? We certainly live in a world where economics is central in all areas of life, including art.
Genius is a tantalisingly vague concept. And yet its historical association with dead white males such as Leonardo da Vinci and Albert Einstein, and in contemporary times, with Steve Jobs and the still very much alive Stephen Hawking, suggests its distinctly masculine character.
But really, isn’t nurturing the penniless avant-garde something we should all embrace? If we sincerely believe in the great life of the imagination, the radiant promise of its daily emergence in literature, music, art, and film, and in deep reflection and complex thought – all those inalienable horizons to being truly human – then we should also step-up and protect the imagination from the many equally great forces that humanity casts against it daily.
With the release of ‘Formation’ and Beyoncé’s performance at this year’s Super Bowl, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) campaign pierced living rooms across the United States. Complete with Black Panther salute and iconography, accompanied by a film clip with a hurricane-drenched landscape and graffiti reading ‘stop shooting us’, a movement that had been demonised by the mainstream media and the right was given a heroic performance in what is, arguably, capitalism’s ultimate spectacle.
Jamaica is a beautiful place, the book announced. It explained that it was almost always some mild kind of summer. Everything that grew there – mango, banana, sugarcane – was rich and sweet, and the fields were lush and green. The brown-black soil was almost like compost, not the kind of sandy dirt or terracotta clay you reached after half a foot or so of digging in our veggie garden at home.