Progressive culture since 1954
‘Raise a glass to absent friends!’ with a swish of blonde with an actual wine glass raised to show my bare arm’s slope; and I lean back, so they draw close, a stage-murmured disclosure: the word’s round fal-lope along my tongue. Men draw back, bodies rigid in their stools; the women, forward for gossip or to bask in the boldness of my moment.
By continuing to allow the police to march as a float, the Mardi Gras board continues to stand by their record of racial violence. In allowing the police to march, Mardi Gras tells every Aboriginal family who’s had someone they love killed by a cop or died in their custody that it’s the police who they prefer to celebrate. Mardi Gras tells me, a gay Aboriginal man, that the parade isn’t for me.
We can hold an idea in our minds, such as the statement ‘women are better at endings than they are at beginnings’, explore it, see what it offers, before letting it go. Just as we can hold desire before it scatters and reforms. We can take pleasure from a particular mode of submission until it no longer serves us. Endings well up from deep within, called up by who knows what, and arriving at who can guess what time.
It is tempting to dismiss Evans as unhinged, but it would be a mistake to view his radicalisation trajectory in isolation. Since the onset of the pandemic, some quarters of the wellness industry have been taken in by conspiritualist ideas, including those of QAnon. Militant wellness – think singing bowls, praise for Trump and the use of weapons – is now a thing.
The stories shared in the Ngaga-dji Report detail serious breaches of First Nations young people’s human rights and a failure of the Victorian Government and affiliated agencies to uphold them. The stories reveal chronic structural discrimination and ongoing systemic failures to respect, protect and fulfil young First Nations people’s rights in child protection, juvenile justice and out-of-home care settings.