If I could share a meal at a table with a small group of people from any time in history, Isabella Baumfree would be one of them. Perhaps, just perhaps,…
Misogyny is a nasty word. It implies much more than sexism; it indicates a hatred of women. That’s why, in the overall view of the current political debates I must…
FAUSTUS: Ah, Faustus. Now hast thou but one bare hour to live, And then thou must be damn'd perpetually! Stand still, you ever-moving spheres of heaven, That time may cease,…
“Behead all those who insult the prophet!” So read the banner in Sydney on Saturday, in a protest ignited by a film released in the United States. Really, the lack…
… What folk is this, which seems by pain so vanquished?" And he to me: "This miserable mode Maintain the melancholy souls of those Who lived withouten infamy or praise.…
A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its adversaries but rather by the fact that these adversaries finally die, and a new generation grows up familiar with the…
What if you slept? And what if, in your sleep, you dreamed? And what if, in your dream, you went to heaven and there plucked a strange and beautiful flower?…
Charity begins at home. Some agree, some do not. But the simple fact is that our treatment of those close to us sets the foundations for our behaviours toward others.…
Only one essential is missing from our happiness – pleasure through comparison, a pleasure which can only be born from the sight of the unhappy, and we see none of…
Memory is a funny thing. When I was in the scene I hardly paid any attention. I never stopped to think of it as something that would make a lasting…
Lies, I know, can be so furbished And disguised in gorgeous wrappings That their skinny carcasses Not a soul would recognize. That's what you've been doing now, With your wonderful…
The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting. Milan Kundera One of the first Communist texts I read, following the French edition of Quotations from…
It was freezing last night where I slept in my travels, below freezing in fact. In Bangerang country, home of the Yorta Yorta people, Mother Nature may have frozen the…
Canberra's Billabong Aboriginal Development Corporation is the ACT's finalist for the National Landcare awards, Indigenous section. Responding to a question from the ABC’s Rural programme, Billabong’s founder and chairman Jim…
Everywhere, people attach powerful emotions to the deaths of others and feel the need to dispose of the bodily remains of the dead in a suitable manner. In Australia, there…
Jimmy Governor after his arrest – source Singleton Library I killed the school-teacher and Mrs Mawbey. … My missis was always telling me that Mrs Mawbey was always getting on…
Last week, I came across this post by Cate via a mutual friend. I asked if Blak and Black could republish it, to share it with a more diverse audience…
I am not pessimistic. I just see everything as it is. When one lives in a society that is essentially not free, it is the obligation of every thinking person…
You cannot believe how much you have to deceive a nation in order to govern it Adolf Hitler – Mein Kampf Has anybody else noticed how frequently Prime Minister Julia…
Melanesia and Indigenous Australia: white privilege and the ‘rule of law’ … first, I made him know his Name should be Friday, which was the Day I sav'd his Life;…