In August this year, Sky News broadcast an interview with a Neo Nazi (who thinks you should beat women to control them). In the ensuing backlash, head of Sky News Angelos Frangopoulos said: ‘It was an error of judgement and we have taken action to ensure our standards, which we are proud of, are maintained.’ A few days after that, a newly-minted Australian Senator said, in his maiden speech: ‘The final solution to the immigration problem of course is a popular vote.’ And a little later, a blatantly insincere defence of the phrase, on the grounds that the words had… [Read more]

Paul Keating once called the Australian Senate unrepresentative swill, but the truth is, the description applies just as well to the House of Representatives. Its members are increasingly drawn from a smaller and smaller section of the population, and in fact, an inordinate number of them are political operatives of one sort or another, ushered into parliamentary seats where, especially in safe seats, they become virtually immovable. So whereas less than one per cent of Australians work as political consultants or lobbyists—in fact, the number is so small, statisticians can’t even measure it—a massive 11.9% of them sit in parliament…. [Read more]

It has been announced that the judge’s copy of the 1960 Penguin unexpurgated edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover from the 1960 trial of Penguin Books under the Obscene Publications Act of 1959 is to be auctioned. This is exciting news to those of us who still wonder nearly sixty years later why the then highly illegal acts of heterosexual buggery that are at the core of the book’s plot were never mentioned by the judge in his summing up and directions to the jury. But it’s not actually the most interesting copy of the Penguin paperback that was on trial. That copy lies… [Read more]

My death is going to be like the Victoria’s Secret lingerie show except her secret is that she died still very hot My funeral is going to be a parade with my coffin a big black obelisk draped in cherry-blood pom-poms and people marching beside me with placards reading ‘I wish it had been me instead :(’ Sexy cheerleaders cartwheeling everywhere singing ‘Oh grilly you’re so pretty can’t you understand/I really want to DIE now that you’re already dead!’   If it wasn’t already taken by a copyrighted television show I’d call the perfect planning and execution of my death:… [Read more]

In 1814 Francesco Goya completed his painting Third of May 1808. Today it is housed in the Prado Museum in Madrid. It has come to be regarded as perhaps the first modernist work and was used by Picasso as inspiration for Guernica. It depicts a Spanish dissident at the moment of his execution by Napoleon’s army. Bodies lie at his feet and others await their fate nearby. His face depicts the emotion of his final moment and kneeling, he holds his hands up to the night sky. The soldiers point their guns at him as one, doing their ‘duty’ without… [Read more]

Around the time of the most recent spate of gendered violences reported in and around Melbourne in June, things started to feel…troubled. The sensation was familiar but difficult to place. Perhaps the word ‘sensation’ isn’t terribly precise; it wasn’t quite vivid or specific enough to be déjá vu, nor did it engage any of the corporeal modes of perception that so often trigger memory. It was just this…atmosphere. Over the last few weeks, as I’ve watched with a confusing mix of hope and horror as Dr Christine Blasey Ford attempted to bring US Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh to accountability… [Read more]

In The Australian Idea of a University, Glyn Davis leads us briefly through the development of the Australian university sector since the establishment of the University of Sydney in 1850. He describes the eventual establishment of similar institutions across the nation, all modelled upon the same Metropolitan University template: a city-based campus, focused on educating local students into the professions, tied to the life of the surrounding town. Davis outlines various attempted alterations to this model, that were initiated over the last ~ 150 years, but ultimately concludes that Australian universities remain effectively homogenous: method and content of offerings is… [Read more]

To paraphrase Jeanette Winterson in Art Objects: in a sane society, art is not optional. Some might argue that our society is no longer sane. Would a sane society lock children in detention; continue to treat our first peoples as second-class; characterise our Muslim citizens as terrorists and our newly arrived neighbours from Africa as gang members; allow us the dubious honour of having the worst species extinction rate and one of the worst deforestation rates of any country in the world? I don’t think so. We need art now more than ever if we want to tease sanity out… [Read more]

Taylor Swift—the darling of the American heartland and whose melodious roots lie in the conservative world of country music—recently announced her support for two Democrat candidates in the lead up to the US midterm elections. Folks formerly known as Swifties have demonstrated the end of their fandom by burning their merch. T-shirts and caps and posters are all being set ablaze to protest Swift’s apparent partisanship. This is not the first time that fire has played such a key role in conservative backlash. In 2017, the Keurig coffee machine company pulled their advertising from Sean Hannity’s chat show on Fox…. [Read more]