Posts tagged 'lunchbox soapbox'

Poetry’s fortunes in the wider world can seem grim at times but for lovers of poetry – its writers and readers – the form is more often than not little less than an obsession. As such, the poetry community can be deeply divided.

Last month, local slam poet Emilie Zoey Baker came into the Wheeler Centre to deliver an impassioned defence of slam poetry. She began by defining slam poetry: “Slam, if you’re not sure, is a short form usually only a few minutes long. It’s a good-natured poetry battle where poets perform their work individually or in teams … It works on the idea that poetry is for the people, that you don’t need a degree or a doctorate to judge poetry. It’s about what you like, what you feel, what inspires you to whoop and cheer.”

In June, Emilie was the subject of a feature published in The Age on how slam poetry might make for good television. The piece provoked Christopher Bantick to pen an op-ed in The Australian in reply, suggesting that slam poetry was a low form of poetry.

As a testament to the levels of passion in the poetry community, Emilie’s Lunchbox/Soapbox video has triggered more comments (14 at the time of writing) than videos we would consider far more controversial. Yesterday, a blog post by Australian poet Alan Wearne published by Wheeler Centre resident organisation SPUNC takes up the cudgels again. Alan is publisher at a new poetry imprint, Grand Parade Poets, whose first publication features the poetry of Benjamin Frater and Pete Spence.

“If you allow this toxic combination of religion and politics to become too closely entwined, then you’re in trouble.” In her recent Lunchbox/Soapbox, Dr Susan Mitchell spoke on the topic of her newly-released polemic on opposition leader Tony Abbott, Tony Abbott: A Man’s Man (watch the video). She explored at some length the influence of the Catholic Church on the man many are inking in as a shoe-in for prime minister following the next election. Tony Abbott, Mitchell argued, “has allowed religion and politics to become entwined.” Indeed, if Abbott were to become prime minister, he would be the first practising Catholic prime minister of Australia from the conservative side of politics (there have been, by our count, three on the Labor side: James Scullin, Joseph Lyons and Ben Chifley).

Mitchell, adjunct Professor of Creative Writing at Flinders University, a radio and television broadcaster, and a former opinion and humour writer for The Australian, presented Tony Abbott as a man who sees things in black and white. She attributed this to his Catholic faith, listing key Catholic mentors in Abbott’s youth. Father Emmett Costello, a Jesuit priest in Sydney’s Riverview College, trained Abbott in Churchillian rhetoric and encouraged him to enter politics. At university, Abbott was a protégé of B.A. Santamaria, an influential anti-Communist journalist and Catholic activist who believed the Church should instruct Australians how to vote and, Mitchell contends, taught Abbott that “politics is a way to give glory to God in the human sphere”. Another Jesuit priest at Oxford University encouraged Abbott to take up boxing. At the age of 26, Abbott chose to enter St Patrick’s Seminary in Manly. He later discontinued his religious studies and became a journalist, writing for The Catholic Weekly for a time.

While Tony Abbott has never shied away from acknowledging the importance of the Catholic Church to him as a person and as a politician, he is nevertheless capable of having a foot in both camps (Church and state) when the situation requires it. How does he justify this? In a speech he gave in 2004 to the Adelaide University Democratic Club decrying the annual number of women having abortions, he had this to say on how Christian politicians should juggle their responsibilities to Church and state.

“Despite the debt that political institutions owe to the West’s Christian heritage, there is the constant claim that Christians in politics are confused about the separation of church and state. There’s also a tendency among Christians in the community to think that Christians in politics have to sell out their principles in order to survive. Christian politicians are often warding off simultaneous accusations that they are zealots or fakes. Indeed, the public caricature of a Christian politician is hypocrite or wuss, in denial about the ruthlessness and expediency necessary to wield power, or too sanctimonious to be effective … Christians are not required to right every wrong. Christian politicians are not required to promote policies for which there is no demand in the community.”

The next Intelligence Squared debate on 15 November at the Melbourne Town Hall will debate the proposition, ‘The Catholic Church is a force for good in the world’.

(Click to watch video.)

(Click to watch video.)

In his recent Lunchbox/Soapbox address, Bruce Guthrie, former editor of The Sunday Age, The Age, Who Weekly, the Weekend Australian Magazine and Wish, gives his take on media old and new and on the Australian Murdoch press in particular. He describes the early years of web journalism in Australia as lacking in imagination – a fatal flaw in the new digital journalism environment, according to the authors of a major new report released last month.

Authored by Columbia University’s Bill Grueskin and Ava Seave, The Story So Far: What We Know About the Business of Digital Journalism recommends that “companies ought to regard digital platforms and their audiences as being in a state of constant transformation, one that demands a faster and more consistent pace of innovation and investment.” The report foresees journalism as a profession that will continue to face resourcing shortfalls indefinitely: “Journalists must be prepared for continued pressure on editorial costs.”

The report recommended that online newspapers no longer publish shovelware, that they develop more nuanced relationships with advertisers, that they embrace content aggregation but enhance their own original content, that they get used working in a leaner resourcing environment, that they invest in multiple mobile delivery platforms, and that paywalls be introduced alongside an enhanced content experience. Here’s some analysis by Forbes blogger Nathaniel Parish Flannery and a slightly more critical response from Reuter’s Felix Salmon.

(Click to watch video.)

Lawyer and acclaimed author Larissa Behrendt came into the Wheeler Centre last Thursday to deliver a Lunchbox/Soapbox on why overcoming indigenous disadvantage is proving to be so difficult. In a wide-ranging discussion, she touched on self-determination, the Northern Territory intervention, the suspension of the Racial Discrimination Act, mutual obligation and the failure of government vision.

ABC 774 morning presenter Jon Faine came into the Wheeler Centre at lunchtime yesterday for the first Lunchbox/Soapbox of the year. Jon expounded on the question, ‘We are amongst the luckiest people on the planet – so why are we developing a culture of complaint?’

Jon had an op-ed on the topic published today in The Australian. In it, he wrote: “…if something goes wrong, it is always someone’s fault. ‘They’ should do ‘something’ about ‘it’. Where does this culture of blame come from? And since when did whingeing become a defining characteristic and an inseparable part of the over-invoked great Aussie spirit?”

Lunchbox/Soapbox is an old fashioned Speakers' Corner in the middle of the city at lunchtime every Thursday. Coming up in the series: Sophie Cunningham on humanity’s failures to adapt, Larissa Behrendt on why overcoming indigenous disadvantage is so hard, and Dave Graney on social networking.

So what do you think? Have we become a nation of whingers? Got a gripe about all our grumbling? Or maybe you’d like to protest that we could do with a bit more complaining? Go ahead – whinge to your heart’s content.

Travel Writer Rowan McKinnon

While I don’t disagree with some of what Andrew Mueller says in his Lunchbox Soapbox – about newspaper travel sections being beholden to advertisers – I think his premise and manifesto are wrong and mischievous. Indeed, I suspect Mr Mueller is somewhat disingenuous in this infotainment piece, but the speaking circuit is a nice gig, so lets not let a little authenticity get in the way.

“Almost all modern travel writing is atrocious,” says Mueller. “Staid, timorous, trivial and fatuous.” He then proceeds to trivialise excerpts from an unnamed travel writer and unnamed publication – mercilessly taken out of context and read to a tittering audience. A cheap shot it seems to me. I, like Mueller, am a fan of rock music and I wondered whether I might similarly defile the whole of modern music by quoting – out of context – an especially egregious rhyming quatrain:

See the primitive wallflower frieze When the jelly-faced women all sneeze Hear the one with the moustache say “Jeeze I can’t find my knees”

          Bob Dylan – Visions of Johanna

It clearly follows that all rock ‘n’ roll sucks.

Mueller’s polemic seems to be that commercial considerations – aka advertising monies – prohibit commissioning travel editors of newspapers and magazine from publishing quality travel articles. That’s not been my experience.

Moreover, he asserts that sponsored travel – ‘contra deals’ where resorts and airlines provide free services in exchange for publicity and coverage – is the only kind of travel that gets written about in newspapers and magazines.

I have two problems with this: Firstly, it’s patently untrue. Travel writers pitch articles to many newspaper section editors including news sections, lifestyle and leisure lift-outs, opinion sections, features as well as travel sections – anywhere you might get published. Advertorial content just doesn’t cut the mustard beyond the travel pages. Secondly, are we to assume that travel writers cannot say anything intelligent, thoughtful and interesting about a destination if they’re on sponsored travel (provided that interest is clearly disclosed)? I don’t think so. Yes, it colours the article, but it doesn’t necessarily delegitimise the story. (Lets be clear – after 15 years as a professional travel writer I’m still waiting for my first all-expenses-paid deluxe travel junket. All offers graciously accepted.)

I do, however, agree that much travel writing is tedious and laden with clichés. But that’s not the writing I read, and not the content I want to write. Instead I’m looking for a story, not of beaches and swaying palms, but of people I can empathise with, engaging with their environments and beguiling me with their quirks and customs.

Travel writing does not suck, certainly not ‘almost all’ of it. The best can be hard to find, not least because it’s hard to do and hard to get published. But great travel writing is edifying and transformative, redolent of humanity’s shared experience, foibles and triumphs.

Some of the most interesting travel writing is appearing online in the blog space. The blogosphere can be a little self-referential and in need of a good edit, but players I like include Chuck Thompson, Brian Thacker and video blogger Natalie Tran for Lonely Planet. Andrew Mueller’s amusing musings can be found at www.andrewmueller.net.

Rowan McKinnon is a Melbourne-based freelance travel writer, consultant and lapsed rock muso. He’s worked Australia, the Caribbean and the USA, but mostly specialises in the island states of the South Pacific. His website is ‘under construction’, as is his first novel. He’s teaching the Victorian Writers' Centre course Travel Guidebook Writing 101 as part of their Summer School.

Click to watch video.

One of the big issues that cost the government at the Victorian State Election was the environment. Mark Wakeham spoke just before the election at our final Lunchbox/Soapbox about the challenges facing the Baillieu Government including closing Hazelwood Power Station (“the most polluting power in the country”), the Murray Darling Basin and logging in the state. As we face another new paradigm, Wakeham looks at the absence of environment policy from the Coalition.

Click to watch video.

As the state election approaches, Victorians identified public transport as the number one issue that would effect their voting. As a senior lecturer in public transport at RMIT, Paul Mees takes the temperature of our often overheating system of trams, trains and buses.

Looking to other cities – including Vancouver, Perth and Zurich – Mees searches for solutions to smart card ticketing which cost $1350 million at last count. He looks at our car dependent workplaces and universities, wondering why we can’t co-ordinate services to big institutions. He wonders if it’s all part of the plan for our our tangled network of PT then why can’t we fund and manage our services better.

I often think everyone should ask themselves the basic question that I pose to myself each day: What would I do if I was fleeing for my life and trying to save my family? I know I would do whatever it took. I would get on a boat – no matter how dangerous – and would pay every last cent I had if it meant my family could live another day. Wouldn’t you do the same?

In the nine years since I started the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre, I have sat face to face with thousands of asylum seekers, trying to provide them with support and legal advice. There is a lot I notice in those moments: the look of fear, despair and uncertainty on people’s faces; the weariness of a life lived on the run from persecution; and the slump of bodies overwhelmed with experiences of loss and grief.

The memories sit deep within me. I don’t want to forget a single one. I’ve held a man in my arms as he wept uncontrollably, having just tried to take his own life. I’ve rushed to the hospital at 3am to be at the bedside of a 10-year-old little girl after she tried to hang herself with a bedsheet while in detention. I’ve struggled to find a way to conjure up some hope – many thousands of times over – as the words “I don’t want to be here”, “I’m scared that my government will kill me if I go home” and “I am losing all hope” have all been uttered to me.

In these moments I feel, and waver between, so many emotions: from compassion and deep sadness at how much people suffer and sacrifice to be free, to amazement at the courage and resilience of people who have risked their lives to keep their families safe from harm, and a deep sense of anger at how our government treats people seeking asylum.

Never in those moments do I look at the person as someone to fear, or someone whose plight should be politicised. I look and think how easily that could be me, my mum or my sister. I remind myself that life is a human lottery; that I could have been born anywhere and it could so easily be me fleeing for my life on a leaky boat, begging for Australia to show me some compassion and care about my human rights.

Image courtesy of The Big Issue

I also think how, apart from Indigenous Australians, most people’s forebears came on a boat to Australia as migrants. The only difference is that they were welcomed and wanted. Today, everywhere I look, the message is the same. It’s Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott vowing to be ‘tough’ on asylum seekers and stop the boats. Or our mainstream media telling me that we are being swamped by refugees. I wonder how a moral and humanitarian issue has become a political one. I question why, in a country as multicultural, peaceful and prosperous as ours, we fear people arriving by boat.

In the past, I have naively thought the facts would bring an end to the fearmongering – by explaining to people that we receive just a few thousand asylum seekers each year, and that they pose no threat to our way of life or sustainability. I want to explain that 99.99% of people who entered Australia last year did so by plane; that Australia takes just 0.03% of the world’s refugees and displaced people; and that there are 76 countries that take more refugees than we do, based on wealth.

These days, I talk about a much simpler truth: the moral responsibilities that come with living in a free and democratic country, and what it means to be an Australian. This means we have a moral duty to act and show compassion to vulnerable, innocent people who are fleeing for their lives.

Being Australian should count for something greater than pandering to baseless fears. We should stand up for what is moral and just. The idea of turning back the boats or being tough on people who are fleeing war and torture represents the worst in us as human beings.

I know that, deep down, we are far better than this.

Kon Karapanagiotidis is the founder of Melbourne’s Asylum Seeker Resource Centre. For more information, visit asrc.org.au. Article first appeared in The Big Issue, Ed#361, 17–30 August, 2010.

So who won the election? While most of us are still scratching our heads over the federal election, political commentator George Megalogenis is sifting through the tea leaves and looking at how effective a new government can be in a hung parliament. This week he brings his political insight onto a special crisis-edition of Lunchbox/Soapbox to tell us what Saturday’s results mean.

His first take on the polls over at his Meganomics blog looks at how the country was carved up. He suggests “The path to minority government for the Coalition is through the bush, with the backing of the two independents in NSW and a third from Queensland.” And for Labor the path is more difficult, “three bush independents would need to find common purpose with an inner-city Green from Melbourne and a left-leaning Tasmanian independent”.

By Thursday’s Lunchbox/Soapbox the landscape will have shifted again and Megalogenis could be interpreting a new parliament.

Gay Rights activist and today’s Lunchbox/Soapboxer, Rodney Croome has taken aim at our new Prime Minister Julia Gillard on her views on same-sex marriage in his post for ABC Unleashed.

At issue is an amendment to the Marriage Act in 2004 which banned the recognition of same-sex marriages including those made in countries where gay marriage is legal. While civil unions exist and there is some recognition of same-sex couples, Croome says they are “an unsatisfactory substitute for marriage”.

For Croome the disappointment with Gillard is greater, because while other PMs have been in marriages themselves, Gillard is not. “As a partner in a de facto relationship, Gillard understands the profound importance of couples having the choice to marry and the equally profound indignity that comes from that choice being circumscribed by prejudice or law.”

Watch Rodney Croome’s Lunchbox/Soapbox talk

The piece points to inter-racial marriages as being viewed with more tolerance than same-sex unions and how the choice to marriage is a decision about controlling your life as well as having important legal value and moral value. Croome concludes with an appeal to Gillard: “I can only hope our new Prime Minister comes to realise what a terrible injury she is inflicting, not least on the principles upon which she has founded her own personal life.”

Libraries are places where books talk to each other. But are their seductive whisperings in danger of being drowned out by the roar of phone-using, iPod wearing, internet surfing hordes?

This is an issue that has been debated openly in the Age and on the State Library of Victoria's website. Tomorrow Shane Maloney will reflect on the role of libraries in his experience as a reader and a writer, and speculate on their fate in the face of a culture with little regard for the values they embody.