Edition 8
People like Us
- Published 7th June, 2005
- ISBN: 9780733316081
- Extent: 264 pp
- Paperback (234 x 153mm)
This can be affirming, but fear and envy can also flourish.
Are these divisions inevitable, necessary, or desirable? Can empathy be learnt? Is a civil civic conversation possible, or are retreating into defensive ghettos?
What is the role of the arts in challenging this retreat? Is this a moral issue or an economic one, can the two be separated?
Is a new Australian ethos emerging – if so what is it?
To what extent is the political environment responsible for these divisions – or a product of them?
Writers include: Margaret Simons, Frank Moorhouse, Robyn Williams, Ann Curthoys, Julian Burnside, Marion Halligan, Carmel Bird, Matthew Condon, Merle & Sigrid Thornton, Melissa Lucashenko and many more.
In this Edition
The trouble with empathy
No doubt the finite and meagre nature of our feelings does prevent us from extending our sympathies to those whom we have not seen in the flesh. It should not be so, and would not be with one who had nurtured his heart with...
The rhetoric of reaction
RHETORIC WAS UNDERSTOOD by Aristotle to include those many, often refined, techniques of argumentation unavoidable in domains of life, such as politics and law, where persuasion is necessary but conclusive demonstration is unavailable. It is unavoidable, significant and there are good and bad forms of...
Who let the dogs out?
WILLY IS A young Palm Island boy, full of life and with more than a fair serve of natural chutzpah. His grandmother, Aunty M, whose house I'm camped in, tells me he's good at maths as well as footy. Willy wants to play for...
The painter and the writer
JOANNA LOGUE HAS been responding to the landscape around her home, Essington Park, near Oberon on the western slopes of NSW, for about seven years. She has made earlier work from the urbanscapes and landscapes of her travels – for example, the Manhattan series...
Ties that bind
Shortlisted, 2006 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, John Curtin Prize for JournalismWHAT DID WE think we were doing, the day we went to Narre Warren? Research, I could say, seeing that I had this piece to write. Or perhaps it was tourism, or anthropology. I...
God’s only excuse
Those who can induce you to believe absurdities can induce you to commit atrocities.– Voltaire"HE'S PARTY, I'M sure." My mother was reading the newspaper and drinking her 10th cup of teaof the morning. Tea was made by dripping hot water from the kettle onto...
Imagination the everyday art
A WRITER, AN actor. A mother, a daughter. The mother captured and lingered in the public memory when she chained herself to a bar in the quest for equal rights, the daughter has claimed an enduring place for herself and the characters she has...
On feeling superior
THE CURRENCY IN Australia is comedy. We rely on it, we use it in every situation, we convert everything into it. The only television programs that become part of our long-term cultural identity are comedies – Graeme Kennedy's In Melbourne Tonight, The Mavis Bramston Show, The Comedy...
Welcome to my world
THE CHILEAN SUPREME Court last year handed down a ruling stripping the 88-year-old former dictator, General Augusto Pinochet, of immunity from prosecution for his part in the kidnapping, torture and disappearance of 19 political dissidents. In the reign of terror accompanying the September 1973 coup...
Something to remember me by
IN THE SUMMER of 1992, the Aboriginal band Sunrize, a group of heavy rock musicians from Maningrida in Arnhem Land, decided to pay me a visit in Sydney.I'd toured through the Northern Territory outback with them a few years earlier and it was now...
Black unlike me
A WINDSWEPT WINTER'S day in February 1992. The Decatur branch of the First Union Bank. Newly arrived in Atlanta, Georgia, I am trying to open what the Americans call "a checking account". Seated opposite me is an elegant young black woman, dripping with costume...
Five acts of friendship
To fall in love is to create a religion with a fallible god. – BorgesAct I – THE Polish Girl (1986): The Polish girl is dead, so she is not at the centre of this story. But, like Stephen Jay Gould's spandrels bridging the arches in...
Some clubs I have known
THE PLEASURE OF the club is a guilty pleasure, a pleasure of satisfaction sitting at the edge of arrogance, the accomplishment of acceptance, the brio of belonging. How can I reject it? Could I possibly join a club that would have me as a...
Tales from the desert camps
GETTING WORK IN Australian detention centres was once surprisingly easy. First, you sent your CV to Australasian Correctional Management's head office in Sydney and within a couple of days you got a call asking when you could start. No formal interview, just questions about...
Australia by numbers
IT WAS AN embarrassing moment, probably the most embarrassing moment experienced by the Australian Bureau of Statistics this century. On a Friday in December 2004, the bureau was forced to reissue a report it had published two days earlier. In deceptively bureaucratic language, the...
A school reunion
CITIES ARE SOCIALLY stratified. The nobs live where the views are best. The workers live in the valleys and the flat wastelands. It is possible to live in a certain part of an Australian city and never meet an Aborigine, a Jew, an immigrant...
Featured Contributors
Melissa Lucashenko
Melissa Lucashenko is an award-winning Goorie author of Bundjalung and European heritage. Her first novel, Steam Pigs, was published...
Bruce Elder
Bruce Elder is a journalist, writer and commentator and has been involved in writing over sixty books as well...
David Sornig
David Sornig writes fiction, memoir, essays and criticism. His novel, Spiel, was published by UWAP in 2009. He reviews...
Sigrid Thornton
Sigrid Thornton has appeared in numerous stage, film and television productions, including Betrayal, The Man from Snowy River, All the...
