Mutual Care
Tiffany Tsao • 8 July 2022
This edition pulls together non-fiction about pulling together: the strength and joy that true community can provide, but also the severe harm that a lack of community can cause. What are our responsibilities to each other? What happens when we fail to furnish one another with mutual care and moral support? Conversely, what hardships and oppressions can friendship help us endure and combat? How can community help individuals flourish, and how can we as individuals flourish our community?
It’s NAIDOC Week. We start by directing attention to the radio broadcast Beyond the Bars and the life-affirming and dignity-restoring work they’ve been doing every NAIDOC Week since 2002.
20 Years on the Inside
Beyond the Bars is a live radio broadcast that gives Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander inmates in Victorian prisons space to share their opinions, stories, poems and songs, connecting them to culture and community. This six-episode podcast series, hosted by Vickie Roach and Kutcha Edwards, was created to celebrate Beyond the Bars’ twentieth year. A good place to start is the first episode: 'White Man’s World, Black Man’s Jail'.
Vickie Roach: I was institutionalised as a kid, and I understand what it’s doing and why it gets done. It’s to remove you from any connection to, you know, if you’re supposedly hanging around with the wrong crowd. What it does is, well, it makes you – being institutionalised – reliant on the system itself. You can’t sustain life without it. So it becomes a business for the people involved...'You build it, we’ll service it, and we’ll keep these no-gooders to one side, away from society.' But society is the problem.
You can visit 3CR Community Radio’s website for recordings of this year’s Beyond the Bars broadcasts (the last one aired earlier today). Past years are archived there as well.
(Related listening: where are you today by the Manus Recording Project Collective, recommended by past guest editor Jon Tjhia.)
Not Your Miss or Madame: A Three-Act Meditation on Love, Opera and Friendship
Women, slaves, lower classes, and migrants, while siphoned by their masters into the lowermost foundations of Western society, 'in many ways...provide one of the richest archives of friendship practices throughout history'...Friendship proved a necessary salve for the violence of labour and unnaming, and a means of survival, solidarity, and secret-keeping. The name that your master discarded was salvaged by your friends.
Money Against Eternity
I ask Mason whether, during this time, he was ever discouraged from gambling. It never happened. He remembers how, in one small venue where the staff knew him by name (to be fair, not a club), 'I would put $50 in the machine, and before that first $50 was through, I would have a beer sitting next to me.'
Writing About, For and Within Communities
It seems I have been writing about my community all my adult life, firstly as a teacher working with children in schools and community art centres and, more recently, as a visual artist and poet. Most of my writing springs from my great interest in and concern for our past stories. Our cultural history has survived dispossession: ties to Country continue to sustain Aboriginal people today and, as a poet, I feel impelled to write to this power.
Jemi Gale: donut king (paintings about love)
Understanding the donut as a metaphor of consumption we better see the importance of protection and perseverance against the outside ('Everyday I don’t') and the importance of embracing the outside of friendship and community ('You / Me / One / Hug'). Gale’s embrace of sugary, pop, 'grotty' aesthetics tries to hold understand love but not capture it, she lets it run wild, and runs with it.
Announcements:
Add to Cart Magazine, a relatively new addition to the Australian online lit scene, is taking submissions for all manner of experimental ‘fringe of the fringe’ work, including nonfiction.
Have something non-fiction newsworthy to share? We’re only an email away: editor@thecircular.com.au