Arena Magazine articles from April 2008

Arena Magazine archives from April 2008

Food Riots: System Breakdown.(EDITORIAL)(Editorial)
April 1, 2008... The new realisation in the West that the availability of food is a major concern in many countries around the world came with a jolt. Quite suddenly newspaper reports were agog with accounts of food riots in up to ten countries, the fall of one...

Why Tibet?(EDITORIAL)(Editorial)
April 1, 2008... Curious that the business pages of The Age (9 April) should run an article by journalist Michael Backman musing on the Tibet protests and the western attitude towards Chinese suppression of Tibetan culture. It was an ambiguous piece, seemingly...

Even the Eskimos agree.(climate change)
April 1, 2008... Over the summer, an advertisement for air conditioners appeared around Australia, spruiking the company (which shall remain nameless) as 'The world leader in air conditioners: even the Eskimos agree'. This message was emblazoned across the...

Iraq: the conquerors return.(AGAINST THE CURRENT)
April 1, 2008... It has been little over seven months since the British army began their slow and ignominious retreat from Iraq. In September 2007 the bagpipes played with all the expected pomp and ceremony as the union flag was lowered over the military bases...

Mr Rudd: nuclear safeguards?
April 1, 2008... We are often told that the nuclear safeguards system ensures Australian uranium will not be diverted to produce nuclear weapons. But there is a risk of diversion, and claims to the contrary are dishonest. Indeed there is growing recognition of...

Supersizing the US election.(AGAINST THE CURRENT)
April 1, 2008... The Democratic Party, once so pleased with the strength of its potential presidential candidates, is now in danger of losing the unlosable election. The Texas and Ohio results are rapidly receding into the past without either Senators Clinton...

Re-localising food production.(AGAINST THE CURRENT)
April 1, 2008... I was once cornered by a climate sceptic, who proceeded to tell me, at great length, that global warming was just an invention by us 'watermelons' because it gave us a way to scare people into accepting our green Stalinist agenda. It's a...

Lower your ears, a photographic series.(Brief article)
April 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Over a number of months I documented the simple act of getting a haircut. Using portraiture and evoking the aesthetic of early documentary photography, I photographed the participants of the free haircutting sessions...

False Gods and similes.(LETTERS AND COMMENT)(Letter to the editor)
April 1, 2008... The problems to be resolved in order to forestall further depredations on the environment of our planet are such that, as Stephen Ames says in 'Instruments of Idolatry' (Arena Magazine 92), we are required to turn our lives around. Towards...

Who let the class out?(LETTERS AND COMMENT)
April 1, 2008... Dave Melzer makes some interesting points in his commentary on Australian cricket, but these sentiments might equally be present in commentaries found in the popular and broadsheet press. This is a shame as what I find lacking in an otherwise...

Thanks.(LETTERS AND COMMENT)(Letter to the editor)
April 1, 2008... Dear editor, I am writing this note to say 'thank you'. I came across your organisation whilst researching the government's 'Indigenous Intervention', the topic of my Inquiry Project for Political and Legal Studies (I am currently in...

Seasonal change.(apology for the aboriginals)
April 1, 2008... An early Easter came even earlier this year in Australia. On 13 February a long 'winter' ended with the national Apology for the past crimes, mistakes and sufferings caused by settler society against Australia's Indigenous peoples. On that...

McCain switches torture vote (a satire).(bites: BRIEF NOTES ON NEWS AND VIEWS FROM AROUND THE WORLD)
April 1, 2008... In a struggle to find his own identity in the presidential race, Senator John McCain declared last week that harsh interrogation techniques 'aren't all that bad' and may have inadvertently 'made me the man I am today'. After modifying his...

Renouncing liberalism.(David Mamet )
April 1, 2008... The playwright and screenwriter David Mamet recently sent conservatives in the United States and Australia into a tizz by announcing that he had renounced liberalism. Mamet, whose screen credits include Wag the Dog, a satire about a Washington...

QED for Benazir.(Poem)
April 1, 2008... QED for Benazir She bumped her head and now she's dead not the gun not the bomb it's what they said from a to zed not the gun not the bomb a bump on the head is how she's dead....

The raw and the cooked.
April 1, 2008... Even before Melbourne and the rest of south-east Australia sweltered in a record-busting heatwave just a few days short of the autumn equinox, trying to maintain my summer vegetable garden had become a dispiriting task. Staged water...

After the apology: Patrick Dodson speaks at the National Press Club.(ESSAY)(Essay)
April 1, 2008... I acknowledge the Ngambri-Ngunnawal peoples and thank the National Press Club for their kind invitation. It was raining in Darwin when I left a couple of days ago and the wet is still settled on the land. The wet season will remain for...

Knowledge now: its unintended consequences: Geoff Sharp identifies the university as the new engine of neo-liberal capitalism and asks if we are in touch with the unintended consequences of this historic alliance.
April 1, 2008... Just a few weeks ago at the University of Melbourne Robert Manne presented twenty essays entitled Dear Mr Rudd (Black Inc. 2008) to Glyn Davis, the Vice-Chancellor of the University. Glyn Davis, readers will recall, once worked in close...

Robert Manne, the apology and genocide: Patrick Wolfe challenges Manne's credentials on indigenous matters and finds his definition of genocide questionable.
April 1, 2008... Robert Manne enjoys an immunity from left-wing criticism that is not of his own making. Through the Howard era in general, and the culture wars in particular, Australian public discourse became so debased that we were left with Melbourne's...

G20--the legal aftermath: Victoria Stead sees an attempt to depoliticise protest behind the extraordinary charges brought against the G20 arrestees.
April 1, 2008... It has been a year and four months now since 2000 people took to the streets in protest against the meeting of the G20 economic summit in Melbourne. Over three days, people engaged in occupations; street theatre and a Carnival Against...

Setback: Robert Nelson offers a provocation against gardens in this on suburban sprawl.(Essay)
April 1, 2008... I love gardens. They are an adorable amenity, a balm to the eye and the feet in an age of machines and skyscrapers. In prosperous and spacious countries like Australia you can still enjoy a secluded spot, a quiet stretch of verdant land, a...

Not seeing what is there: in eastern Arnhem Land, Frances and Howard Morphy tap into Indigenous people's own visions for their future and the future of the homelands movement.
April 1, 2008... In October 2005 we attended a meeting called to discuss regional economic development at a homeland settlement in eastern Arnhem Land. We will call it 'X'. It is the largest of the region's homelands or outstations, with a stable population of...

Australian Guantanamo: Pamela Curr asks if strategies of systematic de-humanisation in Australian detention centres owe anything to US torture techniques.
April 1, 2008... My father had a rawhide whip that his father had brought from Africa. He told us that it was a symbol of man's inhumanity to man. As young children even before we really knew what the words meant, we knew that this whip was a thing of dread....

Slide Show.(Poem)
April 1, 2008... SLIDE SHOW Here we are in what I'm pretty sure is called a belvedere. I have forgotten to bring my camera. Each stone-framed sector of the view is a page from an unfinished book of hours. Not far from where a forgotten...

Megalomania II.(Poem)
April 1, 2008... MEGALOMANIA II It can be sane to remember how petty your foibles are in the scheme of things, except you don't know that, you don't actually know that, because of how consequences ramify. You could be making a memory...

Utopic.(Poem)
April 1, 2008... UTOPIC A glimpse and a whiff of a gymful at work on the smart offspring of the humble dumb bell, defining obscurer muscles for display in the merciless light of summer beaches-- couldn't they capture some of that...

China Mieville's imagination.(ARTS AND CULTURE)(Essay)
April 1, 2008... At odd moments and in odd places I have begun to feel as though I am in the world created by the novels and short stories of China Mieville. The first came with the overgrown canal boats and barges in the Zeeburgedijk district of...

Terror Australis.(Watching Brief: Reflections on Human Rights, Law and Justice)(Book review)
April 1, 2008... Watching Brief: Reflections on Human Rights, Law and Justice (Scribe, 2007), by Julian Burnside. Julian Burnside's latest book is a lucid account of two key issues in Australian law and politics: Australia's abysmal treatment of asylum...

Byzantine Cosmopolis.(Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire)(Book review)
April 1, 2008... Byzantium (Allen Lane & Penguin, 2007-8), by Judith Herrin. There was never anything like it: not a city but the world city for over a thousand years; her domes, towers and colossal walls dominated the crossroads between East and West,...

Nothing left but sinners and victims.(COOPER'S LAST)(Essay)
April 1, 2008... That an institution such as the Catholic Church could release a list of contemporary 'sins', only to have it subsequently mocked or ignored by most sectors of the mainstream media, suggests both the declining force of mainstream religion and...