It’s often suggested, from different quarters, that Western classical music is losing a certain cultural salience, that it no longer connects to society at large in the ways it has in its prior history. But there is an associated question, concerning whether or not there are more meaningful ways of framing the music we make, and present to the public, in particular social and political contexts.

When I wrote two years ago in the pages of Overland that there were no rationally persuasive reasons for Julian Assange to be imprisoned in a British high-security prison, I didn’t suspect that nothing would have changed two years down the track. I was naïve: I believed in the exercise of justice.

The coalition government, Labor opposition, and much of the Australian intellectual, cultural and media commentariat has in recent years consistently betrayed, not merely an important Australian citizen, but the very ethos we like to imagine is uniquely our own: the capacity to adjudicate moral conflict with decency and good sense, an attention to facts, and an egalitarian concern with a ‘fair go’ for all.

Is Jägerstätter’s sacrifice best understood in religious terms, or can it be conceived within a secular moral framework?

the all too public ‘lyrical age’: a decade of ironised nostalgia. (Cf. Kundera’s Life Is Elsewhere, Kerouac, Hesse. Films of G van Sant, G Armstrong, B Ellis. East of Eden, the origin myth. All ‘those indies.’ The music, the music – too profuse to list. Retro R & B on the car stereo: the late 60s, the 70s, all over again.) Life is always elsewhere, especially when it most palpably isn’t. The emergence from crepuscular puberty into the high self-romance that follows.

Wikileaks was quick to post to Facebook a video of Žižek endorsing Trump as his candidate of choice. A post-election interview has him repeating, somewhat chastened in the rainy streets of Manhattan, that Trump is unconscionable but preferable to Clinton. What do his claims amount to now that that possibility is fact? What might before the election have passed as a hope for a radical displacement of what Žižek calls ‘status quo’ Democratic exceptionalism, now promises something more radical than even Žižek had in mind.

We searched you in the hollows And we searched you in the fen We took you down for mercy

Some months ago, Overland published an essay in which (as a scholar of Buddhist non-violent resistance) I detailed the now 120 self-immolations of Tibetan monks, nuns and lay-people, a number not including the case of an Englishman, a young man whom I knew and who was also an ordained monk in the same Tibetan Buddhist tradition as the majority of his Tibetan cohorts.

In Tibet, 2012 was the year of great burning. By 10 December, the International Day for Human Rights, ninety-five ethnic Tibetans in the formerly Tibetan now Chinese territories of Qinghai and Sichuan, and in the Chinese-occupied Tibetan Autonomous Region, had set themselves aflame. Of these, seventy-eight are known to have died.