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The country’s most recent conflict — ongoing skirmishes with Russian-backed separatists in Crimea, Luhansk and Donetsk, just 230km east of here — had been memorialised at an open-air exhibition: a latticework of bronze flowers had been superimposed upon an ambulance wrecked in battle; bullet-ridden place names from affected villages were lined up like a column of condemned POWs.
I was invited to read the poetry at Eureka Street by Morag Fraser, sometime in the mists. She shouted me coffee at the Chinese place across Victoria Street from the magazine’s Richmond offices. That was nearly twenty years ago. As we crunched on fortune cookies, she popped the question. I’ve been editing poetry at Eureka Street ever since and have only chosen to let go of the job this summer.
When COVID-19 first arrived, it was described as the great equaliser. Infection could happen to anyone. Your race, creed, or the balance of your bank account didn’t matter to the virus that was spreading. But after a summer of dodging the virus and hunting for rapid tests, it is abundantly clear this isn’t a pandemic of equals. Now we have the data which quantifiably measures just how Australia's socio-economic fault lines were exposed and exacerbated by COVID-19.
In recent years, Australia Day has been a holiday without title. It has been marketed as a day for all Australians, but is held on a date is seen increasingly as the beginning of the dispossession and humiliation of the First Australians. As a result it is generally received as an opportunity to laze around undisturbed by serious thoughts about Australia.
Unlike December 25, September 26 is a World Day that passes by in silence. It calls for the Elimination of all Nuclear Weapons. Nuclear power is too mysterious to understand, too horrific to dwell on, and too far away to take responsibility for. It and its destructive power are unthinkable. And yet it continues to press on us, most recently in the announcement that Australia will build nuclear-powered submarines.
It was reported recently that Coalition MPs have been calling for an expansion of the government’s school chaplaincy program in order to reduce the mental health impacts of climate change ‘activism and alarmism’ on children. Yes, that’s right, they want to address the mental health impact of activism, not the impact of the actual, visible effects of climate change itself, or the very real threat that it poses to children’s futures.
In times of unexpected or inexplicable crisis, humans all over the globe regardless of race, religion, lineage or historical evidence, will often turn to myth, the occult, each other, to their until then untested and unimpressive leaders, or to a hoped-for apparent miracle to explain what seemed otherwise beyond explanation.
Peace, laughter and lightness during dying might seem unlikely, but such experiences are common, not rare. Seeing and sharing in these sudden, strengthening consolations (and receiving them in my own griefs) have taught me about our awesome potential to transcend suffering, and confirmed why we don’t need euthanasia or assisted suicide.
In a recent speech to business leaders, Prime Minister Morrison made the remarkable claim that ‘we are going to meet our [climate change] ambitions with the smartest minds, the best technology and the animal spirits of capitalism.’ This is straight from the neoliberal playbook, the doxa that the role of government is to get out of the way to make room for those animal spirits so as to pander to the fantasies of the wealthy few.
Sitting at my garden table one warm February day watching birds dash from paperbark to Tasmanian blue gum to palm tree, I realised with a satisfying jolt that I had been present for every season of this singular year; I had journeyed in sync with my surroundings on their year-long journey around the sun.
I flip his collar, air chill, damp, my quick fists burrowing into jacket pockets. I long for an angel with Edie’s face, convent-innocent, unlike mine, who might understand, even share, my boyish dream of making the big time.
What does Christmas mean for you? What does it have in store? Preceding and in the midst of the annual celebration of life and hope that is Christmas, we will always have those, as H L Mencken noted, are obsessed with the ‘haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy’.
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