In the 1975 ABC-TV documentary, Their Ghosts May Be Heard, a young Caroline Jones journeys to the west of Paraguay to introduce her Australian television audience to ‘The Paraguayan Australians’ – the descendants of Australian shearing families who sailed from Australia to South America in 1893 to found the ‘New Australia’ colony. Their re-born Australia was to be a whites-only socialist utopian commune, located in the jungly western district of Caaguazú in landlocked Paraguay.

In a competitive, capitalist culture, the descriptor ‘brilliant’ tends to refer to somebody who makes connections others have not, or perhaps to have made them faster, or first. It is to burn the brightest, to out-do, to dazzle to the point of disbelief. Brilliance, in this sense, is the fake currency of the elite humanities academy – the fissile defence that protects against wrongdoing; the light that shines so brightly it cannot touch, nor recognise, shadow.

In February, Mexican journalist Martín Méndez Pineda walked over the border at El Paso and presented himself to the immigration officers, saying he feared for his life and was seeking asylum in the United States. Méndez Pineda was detained and held in federal custody for more than 100 days. On 16 May, facing the certainty of indefinite detention in the US, Méndez Pineda ‘agreed’ to be deported, and was walked over the border, back to Mexico, and to the people who want him dead.

As Jennifer Bagelman observed in research with the Glasgow City of Sanctuary, sanctuary measures such as employment programs and social events, all aimed at a future that is still in abeyance, can simply feel like ‘dependency, uselessness, and invisibility’ for people who have no other choice but to rely on the self-congratulatory services of the sanctuary city, all while having no certainty about whether a life without the need for sanctuary will ever be possible.

There’s one thing that baffles people who probe further and ask about our political structure and history, though, and that’s our apparently unbroken relationship with the British arrivistes of 1788. For many modern states like Mexico, revolutions and the birth of republics mark the ‘natural’ history of a people becoming a sovereign nation, and are thus tied to the personal identity of citizens as proud and independent people.

In May this year, for example, Amnesty International launched a video that went viral, depicting a simple ‘empathy experiment’. They put refugees from Syria and Somalia opposite people from Belgium, Italy, Poland and the UK and invited them to look into each other’s eyes for four minutes, uninterrupted. Take four minutes to look into the eyes of another, the video suggested, and you really see them as human and complex, which builds the intimacy needed to reduce oppression.

I’d never experienced women-only passenger cars before, though they are regularly proposed for Australian cities for the same purpose they have in Mexico, along with many other countries such as Israel, Japan, India, Egypt, Brazil and Malaysia – that is, to reduce the incidence of sexual assault and other violence against women occurring in public spaces by physically distancing men. Women-only sections on public transport are intended to keep us free from violent behaviours such as catcalls, groping, stalking, bashing and rape simply by segregating men.

Nunca había vivido vagones exclusivamente para pasajeras, aunque sí son frecuentemente propuestos para ciudades australianas con el mismo propósito que tienen en México, junto con muchos otros países como Israel, Japón, India, Egipto, Brasil, y Malasia: es decir, de reducir la incidencia del abuso sexual y otros tipos de violencia en contra de las mujeres que ocurren en público, al alejar a los hombres de ellas. Secciones en el transporte público exclusivamente para mujeres pretenden protegernos de las conductas violentas, tales como los piropos, la manoseada, el acecho, los ataques violentos, y la violación, al simplemente segregarnos de los hombres.

Until last Friday, around twenty homeless people had set up camp in Melbourne’s City Square, creating shelter where it elsewhere eluded them, as a public petition for more secure, affordable housing in Australia’s second most populous city. The presence of the camp was also a visceral risposte to claims, which appeared in the mainstream media last week, that homeless people had been behaving unpalatably, including asking passers-by for money in an aggressive fashion.