Craftier than producers of earlier kitsch, producers of new Aboriginal kitsch position themselves as socially minded, decolonising agents. New Aboriginal kitsch mimics characteristics of decolonisation in an attempt to fool people into celebrating colonising forces, by making them think they are celebrating decolonising forces. It dislocates the ethical component of the formative action from the aesthetic, reaching for pure affect.
My mum passed away on the 31st of January, 2020. In the year following her death, I had a whole series of strange interactions with wild birds that felt emotionally charged and made me think of her. This is a record of that time. Later on, I discovered that the word which describes this phenomenon is 'Augury'.
(Note on access: download the pdf for the special issue 'Ancestors’ Words'. Then scroll to page 18.)
I have to bring under your notice with extreme regret the medical treatment Aboriginals receive in this town. On June the 28th one named Billy Kickett…a fine specimen of health and strength, was taken ill. His companions sent for the doctor to go and see him. The doctor gave them a bottle of mixture instead. The poor fellow grew worse and died yesterday, as it were, like a dog, no medical assistance.
Under Hitler’s fictitious and cynical categorizations of the Jews as a race, bound by eugenic claims that would be 'substantiated' in horror, we weren’t Aryan, we weren’t citizens, we weren’t white. But when the boat carrying my grandparents and my father crossed the equator, and the hemispheres shifted beneath the waves, a transmutation took place, one that rippled like a tide from the banks of Australia’s shores and back toward them again: 'not-white' became, in policy and thought, a less pressing category than 'not-black'...To be European became geographic, not ideological; almost as soon as we stepped upon the shores, we became cosmopolitan and the persecution ceased.
To get to Chitral, I had to travel through Peshawar. I stayed there overnight for my bus that left in the morning. I liked the city – the blooming jacarandas, the gaudy rickshaws. When I was a little boy, my parents used to bring me to Peshawar to visit my uncle’s family who lived in the Meteorological Colony, next to what is now the Intercontinental Hotel and what was then a paddock. Years later, a terrorist bomb blew up the hotel and shattered the windows of their house, but in those days there were no terrorist bombs.
This autograph book: a metaphor for things I long for – everyone forgiven and forgiving, every story heard, page after page after page.
Illustrator and comics artist Kim Lam shares in fascinating detail about the making of Good Boy, her zine about the canine after-life.
The Rainbow Bridge is a popular poem oft-referenced in the pet and vet world... I wanted to reimagine the Rainbow Bridge by bringing focus back onto the experience of the afterlife-traversing pet. And to tell a story that offers a non-waiting, soft-closure, less human-centric end-of-life experience.