Progressive culture since 1954
Australians are bombarded with a deficit view of Aboriginal people, so much so that we often become complacent, and doubt that solutions can be found. Rarely do we listen to the solutions that Aboriginal people find for themselves.
In the beginning, Godzilla was about us. The monster was made to show the ways in which we fail ourselves and harm each other. 1954’s Gojira, directed by Ishirō Honda for Toho studio, was the first in a franchise spanning more than 30 films. Gojira famously drew on Japan’s recent experiences of nuclear horror: the city-destroying, unfathomable monstrosity of Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
In 2011, Egypt was a country that offered hope to people across the region, and across the world people were inspired. Millions took to the streets, at considerable risk, and for too many, at considerable cost. In just two and a half years, the fight for democracy was reversed, if not entirely defeated.
The prominence of women in a movement so dedicated to male supremacy generates certain obvious contradictions which have, just now, spectacularly come to a head.
The poems themselves, though, leave little room for luxury. They are dizzying, blistering, attention-demanding. ‘The optional anchovy’ is an ode to takeaway pizza, ‘a query or two’ gives voice to a gnawing scepticism of the over-complication and perhaps over-consumerism of queer culture, while ‘pro-tractor’ is a real cat-scratch of a poem, refusing to be forgotten and moving deliriously between deceased estates, organic vegetables and psephology.