Keywords: Black Friday
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Tseen Khoo
- 08 August 2017
6 Comments
The Melbourne Writers Festival (MWF) starts on Friday 25 August. It’s a good time to consider what such a festival says about our local cultures, as well as being a perfect time to think about how you relate to that culture.
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AUSTRALIA
- Celeste Liddle
- 28 July 2017
38 Comments
As the news came through that the man who had run down young Elijah Doughty in Kalgoorlie last year had escaped a manslaughter conviction and instead had been sentenced for three years for the charge of reckless driving causing death, I saw Aboriginal community members dissolve. Many expressed grief for Elijah's family and community. Others set about highlighting how there is rarely any justice in this system for Aboriginal people.
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EDUCATION
- Frank O'Shea
- 06 July 2017
2 Comments
Paddy was a mediocre teacher, even if that is the unreliable opinion of a colleague who has great sympathy for what must go on in an English class. He had a weakness not uncommon among the literati and which may well have been a reaction to the rigid pieties of his Tory background. In his case, the consumption of alcohol caused him to become tiresomely scrupulous, seeming to lose the capacity for dissimulation and verbal artifice that are necessary qualities for life in the modern world.
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AUSTRALIA
- Frank Brennan
- 31 May 2017
6 Comments
Indigenous leaders this last week have called for the creation of two new legal entities. They want a First Nations Voice enshrined in the Constitution, and a Makarrata Commission set up by legislation. The Makarrata Commission would supervise agreement making between governments and First Nations and engage in truth telling about history. The envisaged destination is a national Makarrata (or treaty). So the immediate constitutional issue is the creation of the First Nations Voice. There is no point in proceeding with a referendum on a question which fails to win the approval of Indigenous Australia. Neither is there any point in proceeding with a referendum which is unlikely to win the approval of the voting public.
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AUSTRALIA
- Fatima Measham
- 25 May 2017
3 Comments
None of what continues to unravel in the Philippines is a shock. In August last year, barely more than a month from inauguration, Duterte mentioned the prospect of martial law in relation to his drug war. Duterte is the sixth president since the 1986 People Power revolution that overthrew Marcos. He is a close associate of the dictator's children. Martial law was long in play before the incidents in Marawi this week, and is in character for an ex-mayor with alleged links to 'death squads'.
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AUSTRALIA
Friday 5 May is the 25th birthday of the introduction of mandatory detention in Australia by the Keating government. It is by no means a 'happy birthday'. Rather it is a sombre reminder of how control, power and political vilification can be used for political ends. There are now more sections in the Migration Act dealing with statutory bars, mainly directed at asylum seekers, than the total number of sections in the whole of the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901.
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RELIGION
- Michael McVeigh
- 24 April 2017
3 Comments
The transition from Easter to Anzac Day in Australia can be a strange one, particularly when the two celebrations come in the space of two weeks as they do this year. At Easter, we move from the terrible desolation of Good Friday to the joy of Easter Sunday. It's the foundation story for the Christian faith, and speaks of the arrival of new life and hope for the world. Anzac Day forces Christians to confront a different reality - that this new hope has yet to be fully realised.
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RELIGION
Last Sunday, I headed to a Buddhist temple in Springvale, in Melbourne's outer south-east. I wasn't going for a Songkran festival (Thai New Year), and it wasn't a regular part of my routine. I was going because my mother wanted to pray for her eldest sister, who had died on the Friday. My mother is a temple frequenter. I am not. But I was thankful for the immediacy with which she felt she was part of a worshipping community, even though she'd never before been to that particular temple.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Peter Evans and Brian Doyle
- 10 April 2017
8 Comments
Yes, you did follow him into the palace courtyard. You had boldly vowed to follow him to the end. Now you are there. They are torturing him within as you sit with the guards without, outside in that damned courtyard and wait by the dying fire. 'What am I doing here?' you ask yourself, uneasy and lonely in the dark glow. 'But at least I am here.'
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AUSTRALIA
- Neve Mahoney
- 08 February 2017
3 Comments
Last year, I attended the AFL Pride Match with the LGBTI youth group Minus18. As I walked to Etihad Stadium, there was something profoundly emotional about seeing rainbows mix with football colours. A huge part of my childhood was no longer alienated from my lived reality. Yet as the game went on like any other, the whole experience recast itself. I felt more and more conspicuous, and I wondered how safe I'd feel if I were watching alone, waving a rainbow flag.
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INTERNATIONAL
- Fatima Measham
- 24 November 2016
5 Comments
Technicalities seldom withstand moral grievance. So it is with Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte's justification for allowing the remains of a reviled dictator to be buried at Libingan ng mga Bayani - the Heroes' Cemetery. Young Filipinos, observing recent political disorder, had begun wondering whether Marcos was really that bad. But the disgusted response of millenials and others to the sneaky burial suggests that the pushback against historical revisionism is paying off.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Carol O'Connor
- 21 November 2016
6 Comments
Counting angels dancing on a pinhead? How about, making count the stranger who stands right in front of me ... Love lies hidden. Quick! Look under the moss, hear the stone sing ... Mother Earth is groaning ... Dislocation. Disconnection. Displacement. Only you, only you, only you can take us home.
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