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The telling of stories is at the heart of making a new world. They have inherent within them seeds of many possible futures, that take root in the most rocky of soils and surprising places of uncertainty, creating strongly blooming imaginations that have decided to live for ever.
The rush to pay tribute to the cosmological colossus had an air of reflex about it. People paid respects, but many were not entirely sure why. He'd be missed, but in what way? Such is the way of celebrity, even those rare intellectual ones who burst the barrier of mass marketing. They become symbols in their time, ciphers of an age.
Huang's article 'What Australia gets wrong about Chinese New Year' caused an uproar, with many comments about the Mandarinisation of Chinese culture. I had a moment of pleasure imagining telling my mother that, according to this writer, she's doing Chinese New Year wrong. My mother has an excellent range of Cantonese epithets.
When New Zealand singer Lorde cancelled her 2018 concert in Israel, she joined the ranks of artists who boycott Israel to protest its occupation of Palestine. The Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement is contentious in Israel/Palestine activist or Jewish circles, with some calling it anti-Semitic.
Assuming the world is a stage upon which we are the pre-eminent player is problematic when applied to real life, particularly if we happen to have some advantage which allows us to get away with the illusion for a time. The perils of such hubris can be seen particularly acutely in the current Syrian situation.
My astute mother was the first to suspect Maggie of taking and selling my clothes to fund her addiction. After that, my friendship with Maggie fell apart. I began to hate her and wanted nothing to do with her. This year, that all suddenly changed.
Born a few months after Shelley drowned and desperate to understand the living Nature the Romantics had known, Matthew Arnold too found the natural world had gone silent. Where Wordsworth had heard 'strange utterance [in] the loud dry wind' and 'the sky seemed not a sky / Of earth - and with what motion moved the clouds', Arnold sadly concluded that 'the world, which seems to lie before us like a land of dreams, so various, so beautiful, so new, hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light ...'
In the Christian gospels the child is the exemplar, par excellence, of what God's world is meant to look like. In social policy, on the other hand, the child tends to be portrayed as a powerless innocent. In recent years, the Catholic Church has failed the standards of both gospel and society: on the one hand by discounting the importance of children and not listening to children, and on the other hand by not having appropriate practices and policies to ensure the safety of children.
This week, the Australian Human Rights Commission released Change the Course. It is a landmark report into sexual assault and harassment at universities. The undertaking was propelled by survivors, student leaders and support organisations.
This is a deliberate subversion of typical, destructive Western tropes by Coppola, in which it is the male character who is objectified by the female gaze. In this she probes how this particular man either thrives under or is stymied by such objectification. John is more than aware of the sexual and romantic stirrings he has aroused among his new companions. But in his assumption that his objectification is empowering, he has utterly underestimated the emotional and psychic complexities of those doing the objectifying.
Paul Kelly in the Australian makes the case that the decline in Christian faith made evident in the recent Census is in large measure responsible for the widespread loss of trust in the political system throughout the West. There are inevitable limitations to such broad brush arguments. Lack of trust in politics and institutions is not new. From the Roman Empire to contemporary China authorities who do not ensure an adequate supply of bread to their citizens can expect to meet distrust, unrest and replacement.
Modern Australian history is bookended by the arrival of white settlers in which Indigenous Australians were expelled to the margins, and by the arrival of people seeking protection who were also expelled to the margins. Between these bookends lie the events, the people, the relationships, the enterprises and the experiences that compose the story of Australia. The bookends, though, are a bit shonky: not ideal for supporting proudly the heft of the history that lies between them. They need fixing.