It is summer and the lockdown is easing; I went to pick up my disreputable, battered guitar from a studio where I’d left it lying, the week before the virus took hold. Such a beautiful morning. The clouds are massed on spires like whipped cream on biscuits and the trees bend in all along the […]
Hey Europe! It’s like this. We stole the whole world from everyone. Retired behind desks to administer the plunder, lost our fitness. So we envy the godlike build of men who spent generations labouring enslaved. Fantasise about their sexual prowess/accuse them of rape. Racism is envy. Now we mistrust everyone because they ‘want what we […]
It is my birthday tomorrow and I’ve woken up in Africa! Beautiful Ghana of the glorious peoples. At the spanking new immaculate airport a man was bobbing at his keyboard and singing, in the arrivals hall, “And you’ve all arrived safely on this Wednesday night, hope you’ve had a great flight, welcome, welcome.” My flight […]
Two men unfolded themselves and stood up. One of them grabbed my hand. I was passing in front of the crowded colourful stalls which sell Bob Marley t shirts and long Ghanaian dresses. They had jangly sandals on display and drooping felt hats so dusty and untouched they might have been made for Stevie Nicks. […]
It’s a beautiful night in Ghana and the moon is very full. Immodestly so. What need has a moon of modesty? She has already pledged her love. “I will follow you though it turn me in circles all the rest of my rocky dry days.” I am sitting nursing a less and less cold beer […]
The narrative of the powerful older woman in our society is a dangerous and poisoned one. She is the evil stepmother, the wicked witch. Past her breeding prime and she knows too much. So if she survives dunking and burning, this must be proof of her ‘pure evil.’ Meanwhile, the macho demagogues, some of whom […]
The Senate and the House. They are just going to do so much damage. I can hardly breathe, hardly swallow, it’s like iron in the chest. Now we see how dangerous our fears are, how fatal this cleaving to the lying pseudo-certainty that fist-raising white men seem to offer – in the face of unprecedented […]
I spend a lot of time in this household running downstairs to close the door and just breathe. I duck out to coffee houses and get sane again. I spend time among the trees, or failing that, among the pot plants. This morning a friend of my father’s, a gracious fellow whom Dad first met […]
Today a very fortunate wander took me into a place I adored: several places and all of them new. I couldn’t handle the surly manner and derisory service, the lack of smiles from the waiters who work year in, year out with tourists treating their town like a fun park, nor my fellow tourists themselves, […]
A man in front of me got up from his bench and ambled towards the train. He was huge and had that loping, awkward walk of a boy who’s been called too big all of his life. I’d say 6’5″ or 6″. As we both sat down on opposite benches he pulled out a book […]
The term “white trash” is so racist and offensive I cannot believe people ever use it. Like “female doctor” it has built into it the assumption that the norm for trash (for doctors) has been subverted here: that surely the usual condition of trashiness is blackness. It disgusts me that people use this term with […]
Tonight I walked into a Chinese restaurant alone and was seated at a tiny table in the centre of the crowded room. The smaller tables were set out in pairs running the length of the long restaurant; the gap between my table and the couple next door was about four inches. Idly I eavesdropped on […]
It fascinates me how people invariably preface racist statements with the words, “I’m not a racist or anything, but: [other people are inferior or flawed].” As they say, you have to ignore everything that comes before the “but.” The thorough-going unseen privilege of those who feel most entitled to thus pronounce on other people’s worth […]
Beautiful African woman, standing with her back to the street in a luscious canary-yellow dress. She is facing the vast windows of a display of swank cars, why? The windows rise away into the night above her head like an airport. Ah, I see. Beautiful African man, whom I didn’t see until he moved, in […]
Yesterday I entered into a conversation with someone asking, Why don’t the moderate Muslims speak out against terror? I provided link after link as her evasions & demands grew more particular. Those were Americans, how about an Australian. Oh but that’s an Australian woman, why aren’t the Muslim men speaking out? Oh, that was a […]
But it’s not bigotry, it’s just smallotry, littlotry. What’s happening in Australia this week, laws being rewritten to accommodate cruelty, underlines the unease I have always felt about the sneering term ‘political correctness’, which seems to me to substitute rules for real empathy. Once the heart enlarges enough that other people’s humanness can be, must […]
Could our fear of brown-skinned asylum seekers with unfamiliar cultural origins actually be self-hatred? Years ago it was embarrassing in Australia to confess to “the taint” of convict ancestors. Then it came to carry a cachet. It’s true we would undoubtedly respond with more compassion as a nation if boatloads of stricken Finns, Belgians and […]