Posts tagged 'lunchbox soapbox'

Christine Gordon, bookseller and Stella Prize committee member, delivered our Lunchbox/Soapbox on International Women’s Day, to a rousing crowd response.

She talked about why sharing women’s stories is central to the success of feminism, reflected on some of the storytellers who’ve resonated most in her life – and explained why we need to give stories by Australian women their proper due. Here is the edited text of her talk.

There are so many options when talking on International Women’s Day.

I could talk about the history of this fine day. I could talk about gaining the vote, gaining the right to work, to education, to divorce, to have an abortion, to choose a certain lifestyle. I could talk about my anger – or indeed, the collective anger of women. I could talk about my pride in being a feminist, or the collective pride of feminists, for all that has been achieved and all that will be achieved.

But what I remember after listening to someone talk is not statistics, nor facts: I remember stories. That’s why I work in the book trade, as opposed to nuclear science.

Stories – my stories and other women’s stories – are what bring me here today.

Stories are what The Stella Prize is all about. The Stella Prize, an Australian version of the UK’s Orange Prize, will be an annual prize for the best book by an Australian woman writer published that year. The concept emerged following a panel held at Readings, on the 100th International Women’s Day, on the under-representation of women writers in our reviewing and prize culture. Conversations after the event led us – a group of passionate readers, writers and publishers – to begin the arduous task of setting up a prize to raise awareness of Australian women writers. We have some way to go, but we are determined; excited about both the process and the end result.

It seems right and just to me that such a prize should exist. Feminism – and International Women’s Day – is about sharing stories. Today, I want to reveal the journey of shared stories that led me here.

Growing up, I was one of those kids who read. I lived on the outskirts of Melbourne, on a hobby farm surrounded by paddocks. Some weeks, I would read a book a day. It was my transport. I favoured stories written by women; stories written by Australian women. Some of those books, some of that writing, stays with me now.

Puberty Blues: After reading it, Chris Gordon knew ‘that I certainly would not be jumping into the back of a van at the whim of some bloke who doesn’t even know the meaning of angst’.

Let me paint you a picture.

It’s 1981. I’m a relatively sheltered 13-year-old, catching the bus to my all-girls’ private school. I’m wearing a kilt and a blazer. There is a kerfuffle on the back seat. Sailing over heads, a tattered copy of Puberty Blues lands in my lap. Written by Gabrielle Carey and Kathy Lette, it’s a proto-feminist teen novel about two 13-year-old girls from Sydney who attempt to become popular by integrating themselves with the ‘Greenhill gang’ of surfers. On that bus trip up the Calder Hwy, the back-seat tough girl (you know the one) grabs it from my lap with a snarl. ‘Give it ’ere,’ she says. ‘That’s mine.’

It took me another year to read the book, when a copy (that very same one, I believe) did the rounds of Year Eight. We schoolgirls talked about it endlessly. I had no idea people lived like this. More importantly, I had no idea why they wanted to live like this. I guess that was the whole point of the book.

I knew then that I certainly would not be jumping into the back of a van at the whim of some bloke who doesn’t even know the meaning of angst. Oh no: I was meant for better things. From that moment on, I knew I was a feminist.

It took me another few years to really work out exactly where I positioned myself. I found out mostly by talking too much – but in the end, it was by listening to other women’s stories.

Publisher Louise Swinn says she is ‘in this fortunate position of having people’s stories in my head all the time’. I appreciate what she means. Knowing other people’s stories (fictional or not) is a passport. One of the gifts Lette’s novel gave me back then in the early 80s was a love of the Australian woman’s voice; a voice that doesn’t bullshit. The Australian woman’s voice is the voice of honesty.

Sophie Cunningham’s Melbourne takes in the Melbourne literary scene, with frequent mentions of writers like novelist Helen Garner and historian Robyn Annear. Again, it is a gathering of women’s take on the world, to make sense of your own landscape and your own truth. Looking at a bookshelf is like looking at a person’s diary. There it is: all laid out; harbouring secrets and desires among the words of others.

‘What was impressive about Damned Whores and God’s Police was its call to arms – to join this vast, optimistic political movement.’

Towards the end of my high school years, I was given a copy of Anne Summers’ book, Damned Whores and God’s Police. It is the story of Australia and the women that helped shape it as the nation we know today. A missing chronicle of Australia. It drove me to preach out loud (and often) on my soapbox about the need for women’s rights. It gave me the anecdotes I needed when justifying my position.

What was impressive about Damned Whores and God’s Police was its call to arms – to join this vast, optimistic political movement. Summers taught me that being a feminist wasn’t just about saying no. It means engagement. I wanted that engagement. I wanted choices. And I wanted to be noticed. I wanted to be part of a collective that stood up and transformed the environment we lived in. I learned you do that best by sharing stories and experiences. You can change the world by forming friendships – or indeed, by forming committees. Dare I say, The Stella Prize is a beautiful example of that.

The original cover of Monkey Grip: ‘I read this book because I was working out who I wanted to be.’

My memory of reading Helen Garner’s coming-of-age book Monkey Grip at university was actually all about the mutual analysis of it, the mystery and possibilities of the characters. I read this book because a friend gave it to me. It was the topic of conversation over many long nights. We couldn’t work out if we wanted to be playing starring roles in the novel or to be better, more smug, than those inner-Melbourne urbanites. (I was living in Brunswick at the time.)

I read this book because I was working out who I wanted to be.

The group of women friends I made in that first alcohol-fuelled year at university are the very friends I tried all of my beliefs on before I went public. They were the first to hear me read passages from Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch, to dish politics, to wear purple for International Women’s Day. And they were always the first to hear me cry. Now, of course, we continue to swap books, TV shows, quips about our lives – and we do so with the knowledge that all of what we are now, all of our politics and meanings and quirks, can in some way be attributed to one another.

Monica Dux, in an essay for Kill Your Darlings, wrote that the difficulties people have had in judging the legacy of such a book like The Female Eunuch is that the personality of its author tended to get in the way. Does this happen to male authors? Are their personalities ripped apart and displayed with public glee?

‘It’s not easy to talk about so celebrated a publication without lapsing into clichés and banalities, and repeating the things that have already been said, not once but dozens of times.’

Monica knows though, that these accounts need to be told over and over, to all and sundry, because there is always a teenager, just over there, waiting to hear.

Kirsten Tranter is committed to supporting younger writers. In an article for the Wheeler Centre last International Women’s Day, she wrote: ‘I think the future belongs to the young women starting to shape the literary landscape, such as Angela Meyer’s super-sharp Crikey blog Literary Minded and the editors of the new magazine Kill Your Darlings.’ This is true. Different influences, experiences and histories must be recorded, must be reviewed, applauded and built on, for feminism to stay vital and current.

Every ten years or so, a feminist must reinvent, repurpose, or reinvigorate a belief. Being a feminist allows us to continue to be active and to give continual support to those striving for equality and respect.

There is an inspiring passage in Anne Summers’ introduction of the newly released version of Damned Whores and God’s Police:

‘I don’t want to wait until I am 98 to try and explain to a 25-year-old what moved me and so many of my generation to activism and revolt. I want, while there is still some chance of communicating, to tell you the story of the modern women’s movement. I want you to know how it started, what we did, and what it did to us. In hearing our story, I hope you will also learn something about yourselves, about where you stand in this great movement of change, and that it might just move some of you to reach out for the torch. It is time for it to be passed.’

To finish, I want to tell you another couple of tales about women who write about how it is.

Thea Astley’s Coda: ‘There are four ages of women: bimbo, breeder, babysitter, burden.’

I’m going to start with a quote from one of my all-time favourite books, Thea Astley’s Coda: ‘There are four ages of women: bimbo, breeder, babysitter, burden.’

Coda did not win prizes like Astley’s other work; perhaps because it is about an older woman. But did have an impact on me. Kathleen, the strong and funny heroine of the novel asks herself as she reaches the ‘burden’ stage of life, what am I going to do with myself? She wants to remain independent, but she also needs people to recognise that she now needs support. In her candid prose, Astley is showing us a woman who refuses to be invisible.

Thea Astley published her writing for over 40 years, from 1958. At the time of her death in 2004, Astley had won more Miles Franklin Awards than any other writer. She won the prize four times.

Miles Franklin: Her gender influenced the critical reception of My Brilliant Career.

Let me tell you another story…

It is about a woman called Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin: also known as Miles Franklin. Her best known novel, My Brilliant Career, tells the story of an irrepressible teenage feminist growing to womanhood in rural New South Wales. This heroine, Sybylla, is one of the most endearing characters in Australian literature; she obviously had much in common with Franklin herself, who wrote the novel as a teenager.

It was published in 1901, with the support of Henry Lawson. Remember, International Women’s Day was not even official until 1910. As Franklin had feared, her gender influenced the critical reception of My Brilliant Career. When her identity as a woman was made public, judgements about its literary merit were common.

After its publication, Franklin (who could not survive as a writer) tried a career in nursing, then as a housemaid in Sydney and Melbourne. It’s interesting to note how many Australian women writers have had jobs as teachers, nurses, cleaners to support their art. (Ah, women’s work: never quite done.)

While working in these roles, Franklin contributed pieces to the Daily Telegraph and the Sydney Morning Herald under the pseudonymns ‘An Old Bachelor’ and ‘Vernacular’. During this period, she wrote My Career Goes Bung, in which Sybylla encounters the Sydney literary set. The book, sadly, proved too hot to publish; it did not become available to the public until 1946.

Franklin was committed to the development of a uniquely Australian form of literature. She actively pursued this goal by supporting writers, literary journals, and writers' organisations. She has had a long-lasting impact on Australian literary life through her endowment of the Miles Franklin Award, Australia’s most prestigious literary prize.

Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin is set to have still more of an impact on Australian literary life – Australian women’s literary life – through her actual namesake, The Stella Prize.

Let me finish with the words, the honest, no-bullshit words, of a great Australian author, Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin, from My Brilliant Career:

As a tiny child I was filled with dreams of the great things I was to do when grown up. My ambition was as boundless as the mighty bush in which I had always lived. As I grew up it dawned upon me that I was a girl, the makings of a woman, only a girl, merely this and nothing more. It came home to me as a great blow that it was only men who could take the world by its ears and conquer their fate, while women, were forced to sit with tied hands and patiently suffer as the waves of fate tossed them hither and thither, battering and bruising without mercy.

Here, on 8 March, 2012, on the 101st International Women’s Day, let us ensure, together, that this does not happen.

Christine Gordon is events coordinator of Readings and a committee member of The Stella Prize. This is the edited text of the Lunchbox/Soapbox she gave on International Women’s Day 2012.

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.