On May Day 1946, eight hundred aboriginal pastoral workers struck in the Pilbara, initiating the longest strike in Australian history up until that point. The demands of the strike were basic and laid bare their horrible conditions. They wanted equal wages with their white counterparts, as the men were either paid a fraction of the […]
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August the 14th 2022 marks the tenth International Memorial Day for the World War Two “comfort women”. The Friends for “Comfort Women” in Sydney (FCWS) with the help of Bill Crews Foundation and Uniting Church Ashfield, successfully hosted a commemoration event on the 7th of August 2022. It was 1991 August 14th when late Hak-Sun […]
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Another victory for the tenants movement! SEQUR member David was not evicted, thanks to union mobilisation, the grassroots community, and left-wing solidarity.
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d soft drink company Lemon and Paeroa have announced today their planned expansion into the Australian hard drink market, and yours truly was invited to their headquarters to sample some of the new drinks soon to be available in their cabinet.
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An Anarchist Perspective on the Federal Election Let me start out by being totally unambiguous on our position: Anarchists are not opposed to voting or democracy. In fact, we freaking love it. We believe that truly democratic control of all aspects of our lives must be essential if humanity is to save itself from certain […]
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I feel the pain of the Ukrainian people. They found themselves in the middle of a new conflict right after they had just recovered from a civil war raging there half a decade before. They are losing their homes and loved ones to a clash of two governments. Nobody deserves to suffer because of some political mind games.
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It’s not incidental that when we think occult and gothic, we often think of deletants and dandies of salons and cobblestones of the 19th century. It is the likes of storytellers such as Oscar Wilde, Mary Shelley, & W.B. Yeats, whose writing inspired centuries of belief about the occult, but from whom we rarely see […]
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Yeats’ ‘Easter 1916’ poem addresses the rising, and it vacillates between admiration for the rebels and criticism of Britain’s response, in particular reckoning that everything now is different: “All changed, changed utterly: / A terrible beauty is born”. Note the oxymoron: Yeats writes in another poem “Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone”. He thus questions whether the deaths were needless, as England might have granted Ireland its freedom without the rebellion.
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There are a host of reasons for the decline of unionism. But more than anything else, we can blame forgetfulness. I’m coming back to Vonnegut here, whose socialism came from humanism, not from Marx. In America, whom Australia inevitably follows, Vonnegut thought that the majority of people were unaware of the great contributions of socialism “to elevate the self-respect, the dignity and political acumen…of our working class”.
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Something sorely lacking during my own time spent at university was a sense of community. The majority of my first year had been spent behind a computer screen and I had quickly learnt that trying to make friends through a zoom chat is not an easy feat.
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