Tag: politics

Un/telling y/our story, part four

Amelia Walker Acknowledgement: I live and write on the lands of the Kaurna people. I pay respect to Kaurna Elders, and to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Sovereignty was never ceded. This always was, always will be Aboriginal land. The seminar room is filling up, colleagues and students ambling in, finding seats. I nod silent greetings to those I know, grinning as though everything is normal, as though I haven’t just recognised an uncomfortable parallel between myself and one of western thought’s most reviled figures. Surely that’s overblown. Heidegger was a card-carrying nazi (Ettinger 10). I’ve simply failed…

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Un/telling y/our story, part three

Amelia Walker Acknowledgement: I live and write on the lands of the Kaurna people. I pay respect to Kaurna Elders, and to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Sovereignty was never ceded. This always was, always will be Aboriginal land. What does it mean to have loved someone who later loved fascism? The question consuming me as I gaze through the bus window at streets you and I once walked together mirrors one Derrida might have pondered after learning of de Man’s past writings. With them, fascism came before the friendship, so “later” would have been “earlier”. Still, the…

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Un/telling y/our story, part two

Amelia Walker Acknowledgement: I live and write on the lands of the Kaurna people. I pay respect to Kaurna Elders, and to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Sovereignty was never ceded. This always was, always will be Aboriginal land. I’m still on the bus. That’s a lie. Or is it? As I commit these words, it is later, many laters. I’m curled on a couch, notebook on knees, its pages filling with blue scrawlings I cross out, rewrite, cross out, rewrite, letters smudging as my frantic hand drags across not-yet-dry ink. Now I’m at a desk, squinting as…

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In Sickness and in Health

 by Tara June Winch We’re home now; I’m at that vantage point, sorting boarding pass stubs into the recycling, shaking the sand out of bag linings, looking back at photographs, at diary entries without dates; looking back with the fogginess of a fresh return. Earlier this week in the AirBnb on the headland in Tamarama, I wrote: “Disney channel is on in the background. There is nowhere to hide on the road. There is no time, no length of quiet in my mind to write. We’ve been sick too, I couldn’t write then also, but I didn’t fight through that…

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Nothing makes poetry happen

by Liam Ferney Chris said he’d start World War 3. Rand told on Chris but nobody listened. Donald said he’d confiscate the bad kids’ Facebook. Jeb said Donald was chaos. Donald called Jeb names. Ben said he could kill thousands of children because he’s saved thousands of children. Or something. Nobody understands Ben. Wolf’s parents made him invite Carly and John but they just stood in the corner. No one spoke to them. Ted said Marco said. Marco said Ted said. And they all said Barack was bad and he wasn’t doing anything, but given the chance they’d do exactly…

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By Hope

by Fiona Wright I want to start with a digression. On election night in 2007 – the night of the Ruddslide – I went to three different parties in the back streets of Newtown. I started in a somewhat unsound sharehouse, where the finishing touches were being made on a piñata shaped like Howard’s head as I arrived. I moved on to a poet’s house, where there was a 1969 ‘Don’s Party’ theme, changing into a second-hand, high-necked, purple paisley nylon dress from Madame Scrag’s along the way. At the third party, I mentioned that I was going to re-hem…

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