Thinking about Jägerstätter: the making of moral meaning
Is Jägerstätter’s sacrifice best understood in religious terms, or can it be conceived within a secular moral framework?
Progressive culture since 1954
Agents of care
If there is a better word than war for what we are experiencing, it is care. What matters now is how a society cares for all its members, especially the most vulnerable. How a culture values the workers who are most essential, who do the bulk of that labour of care. As the cracks widen in the world’s economy, we are offered a chance to recalculate these values. There is a possibility that our mutual care, our shared vulnerability, will remain visible in future.
Your teenage reading will haunt you forever
Years after reading Flowers in the Attic, dark wardrobes and creaky houses and simmering men and thwarted women still lurk in my imagination. The book took lodging in my brain at a critical point, never to be evicted.
Romancing revenge: violent masculine (anti)heroes and other dangerous objects
Even as they are ‘just’ entertainment, these fictional narratives of popular film still teach and tell stories about angry men and their relationship to violent retribution which overlap with everyday gender politics. They also function as cultural capsules which capture the fears and tensions of the time.
Cereal, circumcision and tax evasion: a history of John Harvey Kellogg
The success of Kellogg’s breakfast cereal led an Adventist baker who had trained under Kellogg at Battle Creek to move to Australia and begin production of the first Sanitarium products in a bakery in Northcote. This would go on to spawn the country’s most iconic, sports-star beloved, wheat-based national hero: the Weet-Bix.
Stay at home! The politics of COVID-19
The left cannot let this crisis go to waste. People need to be prioritised over markets and economies, which are terms that homogenise and disguise massively unequal distributions of power and wealth. Let the markets crash; look after each other instead. Mutual-aid societies might open up greater networks for later political activity. And the demands of employers need to be resisted before we walk into the trap of a future they have been planning for us long before COVID-19 ever made their task easier. Stay at home, but reach out, start thinking, strategising, and planning.
Forbidden mourning: how COVID-19 threatens our collective memory
It’s hard to calculate what knowledge would we lose in Aotearoa, in Australia, in the UK, if we busy ourselves with predictions instead of focusing on the fact that each victim has a name, a face, a story. After the World Wars, it took historians decades to realise that we needed to recover and tell the anonymous stories of those who lived and died in wartime, too long reduced to numbers of casualties or little arrows on a map. We have no such excuse now. The world’s collective memory is at stake: protect it, record it, cherish it while we still have a chance.
Capitalism’s coronavirus crisis and its impact on workers’ bargaining power
In Australia, as elsewhere, the challenge to workers now could scarcely be greater after three decades of neoliberalism bearing down on them in the form of (in)human resource management and anti-union governments. Even the global financial crisis of 2008–2009 gave workers little respite – indeed, neoliberalism was, paradoxically, strengthened and emboldened as there appeared to be no mainstream alternative to it. Now the country is facing a crisis in which the worst is yet to come, for Australia is several weeks behind the European epicentres of the likes of Italy and Spain.
On the wrong side of the ditch
This feels like a formative moment of consciousness – the realisation that we are all now more vulnerable, and that this is the time to form broad and deep networks of our own while also demanding the full protection of the state we have contributed to. Ehara taku toa i te toa takitahi, engari he toa takitini – your strength does not come from you alone, but from the strength of many.
2019 Winner of Queensland Poetry Award's Older Emerging Poets Mentorship Prize: Julie Manning
If it were a thousand-limbed Monkey Puzzle seeded against the odds by continental seabirds, or a Mesozoic Bunya Pine cast out from ancient lands it would be celebrated as a rarity, but its aetiology is unknown
On panic buying
The images of working people fighting each other over toilet paper shouldn’t fill you with feelings of contempt or superiority because you’re not ‘stooping’ to that.
Only the lonely
When the public hearings for the NSW Special Commission of Inquiry into the Drug ‘Ice’ began in May this year, my brother Mitchell had just been released from prison for the eighth time.
FAP winner – Cartoon: All the way with O’Shea
Winner of the 2019 Fair Australia Prize – Cartoon, Adam Adelpour, on the 1969 general strike and work of Clarrie O’Shea.