Beautifully written stories on politics, social movements, photography and books

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Protesters swarm Melbourne CBD after lockdown announcement | Video

From TOTT News Powerful scenes were witnessed on the streets of Melbourne overnight, just hours before the city entered its fifth lockdown, as angry protesters marched through the CBD. Concerned citizens filled Melbourne’s CBD from around 7pm to oppose the… Continue Reading →

Heavy-handed Covid Policing: The Discriminatory Sweep of Southwestern Sydney

By Paul Gregoire: Sydney Criminal Lawyers Blog. On 3 July, the initial, and thought to be only, Saturday of the “soft” Sydney lockdown, premier Gladys Berejiklian at her 11am announcement, jovially empathised with locals about the weather being “great” and asked… Continue Reading →

Occupied Sydney: Police Cars Flood Streets for Covid Compliance

TOTT News NSW Police have come under criticism for launching a ‘high-visibility operation’ across Sydney’s south-west to ensure public compliance with state health orders. A viral video has revealed a snippet of Sydney’s lockdown nightmare, with dozens of police cars… Continue Reading →

The Horrifying Rise Of Total Mass Media Blackouts On Inconvenient News Stories

By Caitlin Johnstone Two different media watchdog outlets, Media Lens and Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR), have published articles on the complete blackout in mainstream news institutions on the revelation by Icelandic newspaper Stundin that a US superseding indictment in the case against Julian Assange was… Continue Reading →

Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

By Caitlin Johnstone In Tolkien’s Middle Earth, the affairs of men are dominated by a cabal of wizards who understand the esoteric art of using language to manipulate reality in a way that advantages powerful rulers — Oh wait sorry… Continue Reading →

Australian Government Prosecutes Those Who Expose Corruption, While the Real Criminals Walk Free

By Paul Gregoire: Sydney Criminal Lawyers Blog As the prosecutions of prominent whistleblowers are slowly proceeding through the courts in Canberra, a growing number of citizens are questioning why this nation’s authorities persecute and penalise those who expose corruption, while… Continue Reading →

Yuri Gagarin’s Boomerang: The First Person To Return From Space And His Encounter with Australia

By Alice Gorman, Flinders University Sixty years ago, Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to travel in space when he completed his historic orbit of Earth on April 12, 1961. It was an extraordinary achievement, but created a… Continue Reading →

By Australia’s Mehi River: The Craft and Art of Jupuul Mari

By John Stapleton Mehi means girl in the gamilaraay dialect Miyaay. Moree is Mari and Mari means man. That is just the way whitefellas take our language and put it in their phonetic context. Because our language is not written,… Continue Reading →

Secret: The Making of Australia’s Security State

By Brian Toohey This the Preface from Brian Toohey’s latest book Secret: The Making of Australia’s Security State. Step by step, a succession of new laws and policies have provided the building blocks for Australia to become a country in… Continue Reading →

Acedia: The Lost Name for The Emotion We’re All Feeling

Jonathan Zecher With some communities in rebooted lockdown conditions and movement restricted everywhere else, no one is posting pictures of their sourdough. Zoom cocktail parties have lost their novelty, Netflix can only release so many new series. The news seems… Continue Reading →

Magic, Culture and Stalactites: How Aboriginal Perspectives are Transforming Archaeological Histories

By Bruno David, Chris Urwin and Lynette Russell, Monash University, Jeane-Jacques Delannoy, Universite Savoie Mont Blanc and Russell Mullett, Indigenous Knowledge New collaborative work at an Aboriginal cave in eastern Victoria, just published, shows the stark difference between contemporary archaeological… Continue Reading →

The Yield

By Tara June Winch One I was born on Ngurambang – can you hear it? – Ngu–ram–bang. If you say it right it hits the back of your mouth and you should taste blood in your words. Every person around should learn the word… Continue Reading →

Sound Clown: The Music of Ian Purdie

Amazing to me, now that I’m old, is that for such an impatient person I was able to devote the thousands of hours to playing guitar that it takes to become competent on the instrument. It seemed when I was… Continue Reading →

No Breakfast with Anthony Burgess

A TRULY VICIOUS HANGOVER fogged every sense, the morning I interviewed Anthony Burgess in London back in the 1980s. There was no better place to be than the English capital, which was spinning through a centrifugal moment of cultural incandescence…. Continue Reading →

The Kashi Vishwanath Express: The Photography of Russell Shakespeare

Compiled by John Stapleton Apart from walking, one of the slowest ways to travel the 794 kilometres from New Delhi in the state of Uttar Pradesh to Varanasi on the Ganges is the Kashi Vishwanath Express. Multi-award winning Australian news… Continue Reading →

Sydney’s Song Before Sunrise: The Photography of Tim Ritchie

By John Stapleton Crisis turns into salvation at every step. For Tim Ritchie it is literally true. “I am a diabetic and eight years ago my doctor told me to walk 10,000 steps a day, but even then my blood… Continue Reading →

Art for Trying Times: Titian’s The Death of Actaeon and the Capriciousness of Fate

By Alastair Blanshard, The University of Queensland Why do bad things happen to good people? It is a question that seems particularly pertinent during times of pandemic. Disease is no respecter of virtue. It is just as likely to strike… Continue Reading →

Anthropocene: The Age of Humans

The Anthropocene Project is a multidisciplinary body of work by photographer Edward Burtynsky, filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal and cinematographer Nicholas de Pencier. The project’s starting point is the research of the Anthropocene Working Group, an international body of scientists who argue… Continue Reading →

Only The Lonely: An Endangered Bird Is Forgetting Its Song As The Species Dies Out

By Ross Crates, Dejan Stojanovic, Naomi Langmore and Rob Hensohn, Australian National University. Just as humans learn languages, animals learn behaviours crucial for survival and reproduction from older, experienced individuals of the same species. In this way, important “cultures” such… Continue Reading →

The Myth of Black Opal: Lightning Ridge and the Fiery Guardians of Eternal Love

The picture above was taken in 1909, at the height of what was known as the Three Mile Rush. The bicycle polisher rigged up in the centre of this picture was being used to rub down opal. The commercial potential… Continue Reading →

Ancient Undersea Middens Offer Clues About Life Before Rising Seas Engulfed The Coast

By Katherine Woo, Geoff Bailey, Jessica Cook Hale, Jonathan Benjamin and Sean Ulm The world’s oceans hold their secrets close, including clues about how people lived tens of thousands of years ago. For a large portion of humanity’s existence, sea… Continue Reading →

Fundamental Rights in the Age of Covid: The Best Of Our Archives.

By Professor Augusto Zimmermann The Covid-19 pandemic is a turning point in history. Government measures to fight Covid-19 have deeply affected fundamental rights, particularly freedom of movement, expression, privacy and association. I am delighted to announce the publication of ‘Fundamental… Continue Reading →

Benevolence: An Interview with Julie Janson

The Darug people are an Aboriginal Australian people who survived as hunters in family groups or clans, scattered throughout much of what is modern-day Sydney. For one of the first if not the only times Benevolence presents an important era in Australia’s history from an… Continue Reading →

Be still, My Beating Wings

Hunters Kill Migrating Birds on their 10,000km Journey to Australia By Eduardo Gallo-Cajiao of The University of Queensland It is low tide at the end of the wet season in Broome, Western Australia. Shorebirds feeding voraciously on worms and clams… Continue Reading →

The Day A Life Turns Upside Down Usually Starts Like Any Other

Multi award winning journalist Leigh Sales investigates how ordinary people endure the unthinkable. As a journalist, Leigh Sales often encounters people experiencing the worst moments of their lives. But one particular string of bad news stories – and a terrifying… Continue Reading →

Kylie Tennant’s Hut: Bushfires Destroyed the Writing Retreat of an Aussie Literary Icon

By Brigid Magner, RMIT University The Black Summer bushfires may have ended, but the cultural cost has yet to be counted. Thousands of Aboriginal sites were likely destroyed in the 2019 bushfires. But at present, there is no clarity about… Continue Reading →

The Big Clean Up: One Family’s Story Of Losing Everything: The Photography of Dean Sewell

By John Stapleton After years of drought, last year Australia had one of its worst bush fire seasons on record. This year Australians have shivered through the coldest and wettest summer in living memory. The east coast has been inundated… Continue Reading →

Gilligan’s Island, Sydney: Borrowed Sorrow

Terror in Australia: Workers’ Paradise Lost On Oxford Street in Central Sydney, where I lived for some months while researching Terror in Australia: Workers’ Paradise Lost, the homeless, were regularly moved on; rough sleepers driven from public view. Drunks, wayward, schizophrenics, Sydney’s… Continue Reading →

Fermi’s Other Paradox

In the summer of 1950, four nuclear physicists were walking to lunch from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. Their names were Emil Konopinski, Herbert York, Edward Teller, and Enrico Fermi. One of them was not human. On… Continue Reading →

A Rare Bird — The Black Swan

By David Haworth, Monash University The black swan is an Australian icon. The official emblem of Western Australia, depicted in the state flag and coat-of-arms, it decorates several public buildings. The bird is also the namesake for Perth’s Swan River,… Continue Reading →

AI could cause ‘1984 by 2024’, says Microsoft President

George Orwell’s dystopian vision of the world in Nineteen Eighty-Four “could come to pass in 2024” if artificial intelligence is not better regulated, the President of Microsoft has warned. A new documentary shines light on the dark side of artificial… Continue Reading →

Radicals — Remembering the Sixties

Extract: By Meredith Burgmann and Nadia Wheatley  We stand in Sydney’s Town Hall Square, two women in our seventies, holding handwritten placards. Meredith’s says, ‘Remember John Pat. 1966–1984’. Nadia’s says, ‘Solidarity! Black Lives Matter’.  We have stood here before, many… Continue Reading →

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