December 8 – 14, 2018
News
Comment
Comment
Hannah McGlade
Raising black women’s voices
“Black women know the Australian state was built on such violence and that the instruments of law, the police and courts, can never really be trusted to protect black women’s bodies. We know that the Australian legal system’s tolerance of sexual violence towards Indigenous women is deeply seated in Australian history. ”
Letters, Cartoon & Editorial
Culture
Profile
The Native Cats’ music for Tasmania
As The Native Cats, Julian Teakle and Chloe Alison Escott make poetic and unusually stripped-back music that riffs on gender and sexuality by way of a James M. Cain pulp novel. “Life after transitioning is the closest that you ever get to time travel, in a way,” Escott says. “You try to be somebody that you wish was there in the past. You see people who remind you of yourself at a certain time, so you think, ‘What’s the thing that I can say or do for this person?’”
Film
Climax
What starts as a dance film to rival Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz switches to giallo horror as the diverse cast of Gaspar Noé’s Climax descend into a lysergic hell.
Portrait
Indigenous fire educator Victor Steffensen
“‘Sorry about the tools, eh,’ says Victor Steffensen as I climb into the dusty cab of his LandCruiser. Steffensen reverses into the main street of Kuranda in Far North Queensland. He waves to a group of men who are chatting in the deep shade of a Moreton Bay fig tree. ‘Kuranda mob,’ he says, his friends’ kids, grown up. He drives slowly. Town feels sleepy, quiet, already hot at 10am. Groups of tourists flock together, looking dazed. The heat is unusually dry for this time of year, and it’s unusually hot. The next couple of days, maximum temperatures hit the low 40s. Queensland catches fire; firefighters battle 110 fires across the state.”
Books
Life
The Quiz
Quotes
SCHOOLS
“Take, for example, the situation of … a conservative Catholic school and you’ve got a child who wants to run a gay club within the school.”
The Liberal senator cites the prospect of children starting a gay club at school as grounds for discriminating against queer students. It’s not a “gay club”, Amanda – it’s called a “debating society”.
REFUGEES
“We’re going to make it as cumbersome and expensive as possible.”
The Danish People’s Party immigration spokesperson describes the remote island where his country will hold rejected asylum seekers, which currently houses the crematory for a laboratory researching contagious animal diseases. And people say Australia doesn’t do enough to export its inventions.
UNDERSTATEMENT
“Labor has chosen to allow terrorists and paedophiles to continue their evil work in order to engage in point scoring.”
The minister for defence castigates the Opposition for holding up his party’s encryption bill. The other evil work is done by those hackers who like porn tweets from your account, but that’s a different matter.
CAREER
“I say to women, if you want to go further up the ladder, what you should be doing is working through lunches, working later.”
The billionaire mining magnate offers sage career advice to help young women compete with male peers in the business world. Sad desk lunches are, of course, the key to corporate success, though inheriting $75 million from your parents doesn’t hurt.
IRONY
“It’s really disappointing what Malcolm Turnbull has done. He’s destroying his own legacy by his own hands.”
The former deputy prime minister laments the former prime minister announcing support for the national energy guarantee. Joyce is, of course, a world expert in clumsy self-sabotage.
CRIME
“I can surely be more sensitive to people’s personal space, even in the midst of my planetary enthusiasm.”
The astrophysicist responds to various accounts of unwanted touching and one accusation of rape. He says in one case he was looking for Pluto in a woman’s tattoo and in another he was offering a “special handshake”.
