Progressive culture since 1954
This is an elegiac book, curiously devoid of anger, notably short on politics, suffused with discontented restlessness but paradoxically passive. It is difficult to see where it will take its likely readership except into a place of disconsolate bias confirmation.
Putting prisoners and their unfree labour back into the historical picture not only tells a more realistic story of the past. It also tells us a lot about capital accumulation and its reproduction through related forms of labour—free and unfree, waged and unwaged.
On December 17, when we reach the end of the state of emergency declared under the Biosecurity Act 2015, prisons will continue to permanently traumatise over 42,000 prisoners held across so-called Australia, as well as over 1400 prisoners detained in immigration prisons.
For over 40,000 years, the Yarra has been actively cared for by the people of the Woi Wurrung and Boon Wurrung nations. These communities are still today fighting for the river.
will is standing the closest to the auctioneer (ian.). it is spitting. it is hot, then cold. wearing jackets of duck down. edelweiss. eight dogs mark their way around a spool of buyers. it is a buyers’ market. it is 3 hazelnut court. it could be 16 cherryberry drive. it could even be 92 foregone road. we are on the hill, jolly like a dog, watching will.
Instrumentalisation of knowledge by politics runs deep in Australian history: Cook’s very act of appropriation of the continent for the British Crown in 1770 was accomplished under the cover of a scientific mission to Tahiti to observe the transit of Venus. Two hundred and fifty years on, university managers are putting the finishing touches to the total annexation of learning by the market.
I had to innovate. I had to create a game that put the onus of invention and self-revelation back onto the players. And this is how I came up with my piece de resistance, my submission to the games hall of fame. It’s called ‘Which One Are You?’
Eight years ago, I wrote a short piece for Overland called ‘Pay the Writers’. I was fed up with being asked to work for ‘exposure’. It was a time when a lot of writing work was moving online, and this work was often unpaid. Writers were at risk of losing our incomes entirely. If anything needed some exposure, it was the working conditions of freelancers.
I’m suggesting that to watch Succession well, we should start by thinking about how its representations are mediated. This is to determine Succession’s mode of representation by thinking carefully about how its style interacts with the thematic conceit of the show, which is to do with information media, and a billionaire American family.