Progressive culture since 1954
The idea of a public or collective space is inherently fluid, and perhaps contradictory; a matter of constantly shifting definitions. What we witnessed on the sixth of January at the US Capitol building was, among other things, a dispute about what a public institution is, and what it owes to which citizens.
I dedicate my life’s work to all past and present Iranian writers and thinkers who have been imprisoned, tortured, executed and exiled. We live in the age of new catastrophes. An exile’s life is about fighting against oppression in the country of birth, gaining knowledge, demanding justice and freedom for all the world’s people.
The ‘white imagination’ imagines itself as limitless – boundless, colourless, neutral and universal. Within the white imagination there is an invisible charter of rights that I hear frequently quoted, touted, lauded: it is my right to imagine whatever I want! My imagination is free!
Resistance, in Latin, means to ‘stand firm against’. The same word, in another cosmos, is resistor, an electronic component that absorbs energy across a potential difference. With such a voltage difference, the electrical energy passing through the resistor is transformed into heat.
Wholesale collapse of Earth’s planetary systems that sustain life as we know it is happening unevenly across the world. The poorest populations are already experiencing this. As the basic prerequisites of life – water, food and energy are becoming more contested. Political violence is on the rise.
It’s nighttime in the desert, moments before the opening credits of the acclaimed feature documentary In My Blood It Runs. We’re in a dusty yard enclosed in cyclone-wire fencing with 10-year-old multi-lingual Arrernte/Garrwa healer Dujuan Hoosan. He’s running joyfully, a…
Underfoot is a series of virtual multimedia tours uncovering the secret histories of Footscray. Two old friends, both long-time Footscray residents, bring an intimate lens to local history as they travel through the archives looking for people like them: queers,…
Ray Filar writes that sex work is service work, that capitalism dangles money and celebrity as gains one can make in the field of ‘erotic professionalism’. This illusory and elusive promise of autonomy, wealth and desirability elides the precarity and complexity of how race, gender, ability, class, and technological advances facilitate disparities in sex workers’ experiences and expectations.
It shocks them to discover the sun is not a thing of beauty. The mother and the boy venture outside and though it is morning, the heat thrashes their skin. Hats are pitiful protection – little wonder the locals don’t wear them. They hurry back inside. This house was built in the 80s and retains its orange lino kitchen and ineffectual fans.
Joe Crow never imagined he would live to see a day like today. The love of his life turned into an echo. The emptiness in his future overwhelming. Shan gave away her capacities to endure. He started back-tracking in time. Complexities of events. How did it come to this?
From the veranda of her house on the hill, Maria watched the sun rise from behind the ocean. The air was cool and wet and the bare rolling hills beneath her cradled the remainder of the mist. Going up the hill behind the house, the property was wrapped in bush – mostly gums. They seemed to her, swaying and impatient, like a brutish, sieging army.
There’s a huddle of garden gnomes on the gravel strip outside the roadhouse. A huge hand-painted red sign advertises: Sale: Nomes. 2 for 1. Sandy hauls the heavy steering to the right and shudders the Holden off the red dirt highway. Maybe they’ll have urns. It’s midday but she doesn’t need fuel or food, not yet, so she pulls up just outside the window of the pre-fab hotbox that houses the sole cashier, presumably the procurer of the nomes, and yanks the handbrake up.
I would like to try to find it again, this time without laminated map, without compass worn like a whistle. I hated school camp up to when group 3 snowballed off a ridge track into an accidental valley
out on the circle where swallows cut sky we settle, invade thigh-high grass picnic on each other stein for deleuze, a rug’s thickness shy of the australian gothic
Down by the carousel fishermen are back in droves. Nights there’s talk of what comes next. A rainbow lingers over the city—the baby waves
Citation (use of) as a form of resettlement that can be used at the level of the line 3D printing of ventilators and native vegetation repeating wilderness exactly
they sailed into some savage country in 1926 on the ss victoria, incarcerated by a map of ideal drawings, dim in the hold. tea in the great depression was surreptitiously sipped. the spoons moved slowly. work involved a great deal of manual labour, oftentimes harsh.
She loved to look like lovers and to be dressed all in white. The hems of her trousers tolling out like great balloons and with the waist pulled tiny tight, she sprang up high into the sky like that
He held up her portrait, close, noticing things about flesh, then looked away at the mountains and through the green window. Then he looked, a third time, into his mind.
Eucumbene has fallen below the stump our old lives lift their lips through the water surface to sip air. In the umbrage of our kitchen my mother is frying trout, there are crumbs on the bench, flesh sticking to the pan, butter smokes
1. Black Uncle takes us walking on Yuin Country. He shows us overgrown bush grape vine wrestling with sarsaparilla and gums. He tells us blackfullas would have burnt this back long ago, if they were…
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