Progressive culture since 1954
The First World War ushered in new modes for thinking about sexuality and politics. Dead Letters captures a moment of transition, an instant in which ideas we now take for granted still contended against ideas now forgotten.
The open letter below, encouraging the University of Melbourne to divest from Wilson Security, was sent to Vice Chancellor Prof Duncan Maskell in June.
There is a period in many little girls’ lives, around the age of ten, where they go completely wild. Not in the sense of Girls Gone Wild, which depressingly clogs up the search results, but in the most natural sense of the word – feral and free.
The real threat to liberty of expression and inquiry on campus comes from the unconstrained power of senior university management to accept strings-attached funding, dismiss staff, discipline students and ban speakers.
Democracy is built on the mandate of the dead. From education to employment: the inheritance of the young is determined by those whose stake in the polity is spiralling toward the grave. Well beyond the point of mortality, the polity is shaped by the decisions the dead once made. It is the living who cast votes, but it is the dead who demand a reckoning for them.