Progressive culture since 1954
Climate change presents a unique opportunity to remake society to be more just, more caring and less exploitative and greed-driven. It is in Indigenous knowledge systems that we will find the blueprint for building that society, and it is in the Indigenous struggle that we find the blueprint for dismantling the failing system imposed on us.
Everyone involved in this case on the family’s side desperately hopes to see a legal victory. And right now, that’s probably the only hope. But the lawyers can’t save everyone.
I will remember him as a small figure standing behind a shop counter, surrounded by piles of books and receipts, discussing Lance Sharkey and the internal history of the Communist Party with a browser who patently isn’t going to buy anything at all.
Various arguments have been made to explain hypertext fiction’s lack of mainstream success: that hypertext narratives impose impossible cognitive demands on readers; that the inability to establish meaning and coherence leaves readers always floating on the surface, never fully immersed; or (to stay on the theme of immersion) that we just want something we can read in the bath.
Island has a distinct focus arising from where it is published, and it continues to publish, champion and develop Tasmanian writing and ideas. But the magazine has been defunded by Arts Tasmania, and it will suspend publishing if extra support isn’t forthcoming.
After an extensive application and interview process, Overland is thrilled to announce the appointment of our two new co-editors, Evelyn Araluen Corr and Jonathan Dunk, who will begin their editorship in late 2019.
A couple of Thursdays ago, the Queensland government quietly extinguished the Wangan and Jagalingou traditional owners’ native title over 1385 hectares of land that includes the Carmichael mine site. Families have been camped on the land near the mine site, anticipating forced removals.
What’s happening in Indonesia is a product of the same logic that drives Australia’s presence in Nauru and Papua New Guinea. It is part of a series of punitive measures that push a hard border out from Australia’s geographical shores and into neighbouring countries.
Dan Tehan’s ‘university foreign interference taskforce’ has gone relatively unnoticed in the mainstream press, yet it’s imperative that progressives on campus oppose such moves to impose more government scrutiny on academics and their conduct – particularly one that so deliberately fans the flames of anti-Chinese racism.
Letting go of the crude idea that we can win against climate change is not ‘giving up’ but an moment of important reckoning, realignment and reflection. What is it that we will have to grieve and let go of? What must we work as hard as possible to save? How are seemingly unrelated movements like refugee action groups, Aboriginal language revivals, queer community health projects, progressive literary journals, also and already forms of climate action?
That is the last time I will ever shave to make up for somebody’s bad acting abilities.
The philosopher Judith Butler argues that gender is produced through performance: ‘Gender identity is the stylized repetition of acts through time.’ As an adolescent girl growing up in the 60s and 70s, I understood that performing the domestic work my mother did, including her craft work, would shape me into the kind of woman I didn’t want to become. I did not want to be my mother. I did not want my life to be controlled by a husband, and to be limited by and to the domestic.
Social relationships are breaking down. According to an OmniPoll survey from July 2018, the number of close friends Australians have has declined from an average of 6.4 in 2005 to only 3.9 today. In other words, the rate at which relationships break down no longer keeps up with the rate at which they form. In turn, more and more Australians are becoming ghosts in their own communities.