“I like beautiful melodies telling me terrible things” Tom Waits. For me there is no more powerful Tom Waits song than Georgia Lee, a song from his 1999 CD Mule Variations, which is arguably his finest CD. The song very nearly was dropped from the CD, but Wait’s teenage daughter apparently convinced him to include […]
Arts & Letters – Page 2
“He basically waged war against the West Australian government. He collected an enormous cache of documentation; he was going to run this huge High Court case based on legislation back in the late 1800s to try to achieve land rights for Aboriginal people. Pretty much to his dying day he was in there boots and […]
“In essence, the leitmotif of his work is about power and the abuse of power as well as the resilience of ordinary working people to this abuse… It is an art of engagement – engagement for change.” (John Green, from the Introduction to Ken Sprague – People’s Artist.) People continue to ask about this powerful […]
This photo from 1953 shows four-year-old Ross Munro and his neighbour Phillip Noble playing in an asbestos sandpit in a residential backyard in Wittenoom in WA’s northwest. Residents purchased the deadly tailings which were commonly used as sandpits in backyards for the purposes of children’s play and also to reduce dust around houses. When I read Chris Hedges […]
“Here I have a voice impassioned, here I have a life embattled and angered, here I have a rumor, but here I have a life” Miguel Fernandez Gather This Voice/Take up this Cry “Goodbye, brothers, comrades, friends. Let me take my leave of the sun and fields” The last words of Miguel Hernandez scribbled on […]
‘Poetry can capture the ambiguities and pain of clinical practice as well as its passion and delight. Poetry is perhaps the cleverest acknowledgement that the world is an instrument of healing’ Howard F Stein ‘Being a trans disciplinary scholar is both a blessing and a curse. I find that I and my ideas often do […]
Thanks to Lyle Daggett‘s excellent blog A Burning Patience I discovered the poetry of Carol Tarlen. Lyle Dagett’s piece about Carol’s poetry is here. Of her poetry Lyle Daggett writes: I found it a deeply powerful collection, tough uncompromising poems of the daily struggle of working-class life, the frequent hardship and bitterness, and the unforced […]
Miles Away by Geoff Goodfellow (from Poems for a Dead Father) I remember my feet on the cold kitchen lino that morning a teenager with bumfluff & pimples i was leaning over the kitchen table most of its red & white marbled laminex top covered in the morning newspaper as i stood above it all […]
‘To publish Eduardo Galeano is to publish the enemy: the enemy of lies, indifference, above all of forgetfulness. Thanks to him, our crimes will be remembered. His tenderness is devastating, his truthfulness furious’ John Berger ‘In this world of ours, a world of powerful centers and subjugated outposts, there is no wealth that must not […]
My name is Tauto Sansbury. I was born on Point Pearce Mission in 1949. By the time you read this letter I will be 66 years old. By now I should be a fully initiated man speaking my native tongue, telling my stories and handing them down to my children, grand children and their children. […]
General News
- 5 Apr 2019
Public rental homes – ‘social housing’ – surprisingly to many only account for 4 percent of Australia’s 9 1/2 million households. There are only 400,000 public rental homes nationwide. Within these homes, after the homeless, live the poorest Australians. Only […]
(0) - 2 Apr 2019
We’re at the end of 2019’s first quarter and tragically the Australian suicide toll stands at 750 thus far. Suicide is the leading cause of unnatural deaths, yet suicide prevention is not a national priority. The Australian suicide toll is: […]
(0) - 1 Jan 2019
We rail against homogeneity while beneath it all, the ambience and veils of the eclectic, we long for homogeneity, at least in the name and form of equality. Critical class and race theories abound but all remain manifestations. Windows into […]
(0) - 1 Jan 2019
There is more homelessness than is reported. Youth homelessness is on the increase. It’s complex in terms of the spectrum of issues; complex life circumstance dynamics that led to homelessness, including family violence and/or neglect of the needs of children, […]
(2) - 30 Aug 2018
The death of a child is always heartbreaking but when it is by suicide it is as devastating as it gets, with long term negative psychosocial effects for those left behind. There is a whole different level of anguish and […]
(0) - 22 Aug 2018
Future generations will damn the present for its atrocities as we damn and indict the past for theirs. The offshore custodial predicaments that have degenerated to indefinite immigration detention will cast a dark pall of grimness and aspersions into the […]
(0) - 8 Jun 2018
It’s been many a year since I reviewed my position in so far as an Australian republic is concerned. I know that from my arrival here 43 years ago I have always felt extremely uneasy about the fact that the […]
(0) - 3 May 2018
Over the last five or six years I have written extensively about the sheer discrimination that is present in our migration system here in Australia. That discrimination is not on the basis of race (that is another angle altogether – […]
(1) - 24 Apr 2018
Many reckon they understand the accumulation of life stresses hurting those who live below or in close proximity to the poverty line. Poverty and suicide intersect. Poverty and incarceration intersect. Incarceration and homelessness intersect. The layers of stresses and the […]
(0) - 22 Apr 2018
Wheelchairs for Kids is one of those one in a million charities where everyone is a volunteer, where no one draws any form of remuneration. In its three decades since establishment, it has donated rough terrain children’s wheelchairs to 73 […]
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