Week beginning 7 September 2023

Barbara Pym, her novels and her relationship with her sister, Hilary, are at the forefront of my mind this week. I have just attended the Barbara Pym Conference on the theme of sisterhood, so Some Tame Gazelle (first published 1950, Virago Modern Classics 2009) is an appropriate place to begin.

Barbara Pym’s first published novel was Some Tame Gazelle, which she began in 1935 and redrafted until its first publication in 1950. This was a fictional account of herself and her sister as contented spinsters, enjoying a life of happily unrequited love, and a comic proposal in Barbara/Belinda’s case, and for Hilary/ Harriet of flirtations, a constant admirer, and an ill-judged proposal. Barbara Pym’s friends from Oxford also feature, in varying comic and unappealing guises. The Bede sisters were to appear briefly in a future novel, An Unsuitable Attachment, still happy spinsters, but now seeing the world with the assistance of one of Harriet’s devoted curates following in their wake.

However, while I was at the conference the novel that most frequently came to mind was Excellent Women (first published 1952, Virago Modern Classics 2008).

Excellent Women, written between 1949 and 1951, and published the next year, the second novel to be published, features Mildred Lathbury, a spinster who to all appearances, has the features typical of her unmarried state. She is contrasted with Helena Napier, a vivacious anthropologist who, with her husband Rocky, complete with the glamour of his navy days flirting with Wrens, moves into the flat above Mildred. That they must share a bathroom is a lingering concern for Mildred, whereas Helena is serenely unaware of the niceties, dedicated as she is to her work. Rocky provides Mildred with some romantic moments that wilt like the mimosa she buys, but Everard Bone, Helena’s co-anthropologist is more likely to provide a future, even if that, as Mildred ruminates, is making an index or washing dishes.

Excerpt from The Reality behind Barbara Pym’s Excellent Women: The Troublesome Woman Revealed, Robin R. Joyce, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2023.

An Excellent Woman of Delicious Intent


Excellent Women, Pym’s second published novel, is a more sophisticated
work [than Some Tame Gazelle]. While Pym continues to use comedy and irony, the significance of Mildred Lathbury’s control of the narrative must not be underestimated.

Throughout the novel Mildred’s dual voice undercuts her public utterances; assumptions about spinsterhood; and convention. Pym’s use of the dual voice for Mildred’s observations works against the typical understanding of a spinster: she is expected to be ‘involved and interested in other people’s business’ (EW, 5) ‘mousy and rather plain [… dressed in a] shapeless overall and old fawn skirt’ (EW, 7) or ‘fussy and spinsterish’ (EW, 12). However, throughout the novel Mildred’s observations and internal voice, juxtaposed with her conventional behaviour and utterances, give her authority. Doan’s explanation of Pym’s double narrative helps to describe this feature of Pym’s writing when she says ‘On the surface, the reader is presented with a narrative voice fully compliant with normal social expectations […]. Yet underneath this veneer of mild-mannered conformity, another voice speaks to challenge, even to ridicule, a social order that calls for the repression of unkind retorts. […].

Contrary to the view that spinsterhood is synonymous with sadness, the
spinsters in Excellent Women exhibit a range of feelings and personalities.
Only one is a figure of sadness and hers is an affected sorrow. Pym describes
Winifred Malory as of a ‘romantic, melancholy nature, apt to imagine
herself in situations […who] kept by her bed a volume of Christina
Rossetti’s poems bound in limp green suede’ (EW, 40-41). Mildred affects
no sorrow. Although she also has a volume of Rossetti, she is more inclined
to read a book of Chinese cookery (EW, 21). Mildred is open to the new
experiences the Napiers bring into her life. At the same time, she continues
to enjoy her annual meals with William Caldicote, uninhibited by any
possibility of romance; outings with Dora Caldicote; her relationship with
the Malorys; her church activities and part-time work on behalf of
impoverished gentlewomen. See Books: Reviews for the remainder of this excerpt.

After Covid comment: Barbara Pym Annual Conference in Oxford; Heather Cox Richardson; Cindy Lou; Heather Cox Richardson.

Covid in London, Oxford and Cambridge

Here, some people are wearing masks, and the hand sanitation stations remain. Mask wearing is not significant on the tube, although some commuters are taking precautions.

Barbara Pym 28th Annual Conference September 1 – 3 2023, St Hilda’s College Oxford

This week I went to the Annual Barbara Pym Conference held in Oxford in September. The North American Barbara Pym Conference is held in Cambridge USA in March. I have attended both in the past, and they are a joy in both venues.

However, the modernisation of St Hilda’s where Barbara Pym attended Oxford University in the 1930s is rather disconcerting. The accommodation is far easier to navigate than the Hall with its stairs and old-fashioned bathrooms (or even shared bathrooms – reminiscent they may be of Mildred Lathbury’s concerns in Excellent Women, but reminiscing can only go so far!) On the other hand, I miss the hot Vernon Harcourt Room where the presentations used to take place, and the SCR where one could imagine Barbara at work or play (we did end up being in this room, where the team I was on came second in the trivia quiz). The old buildings remain, and registration took place in one of these. Again, Excellent Women takes up a theme that applies: Helena Napier cuts through the ideals associated with old buildings in preference for new when she imagines Mildred’s former home as ‘a large. inconvenient country rectory with stone passages, oil lamps and far too many rooms…One has a nostalgia for that kind of things sometimes. But how I’d hate to live in it’. Yes, the Vernon Harcourt Room often saw participants giving into jet lag with the heat, and the stairs were an uncomfortable climb!

Tomorrow the presentations will be as excellent as ever, and perhaps the shiny new buildings will eventually become as much part of the Barbara Pym history as the ones more closely associated with her. In the meantime, reading a Barbara Pym novel must suffice. Here, I return to Mildred from Excellent Women with some comments on this most splendid of Pym’ novels with its juxtaposition of Mildred the spinster and Helena the married woman, its anthropologists and the siblings from the vicarage. The hallmarks of a Barbara Pym novel woven in a style that allows for the ‘warm bedsocks’ nature of Pym’s work to be appreciated at the same time as my feminist approach to Pym’s work gets a hearing.

St Hilda’s

Dinner was held in the modern Pavilion. Another disappointment- oh for the grand old dining room! But even this dismay turned to joy when the large soulless windows gave diners the chance to see a magnificent sunset.

The AGM heralded a new committee and Chairperson, as well as some changes to the constitution. Both appeared to have been well considered by the outgoing committee and members and were accepted without much debate. The Conference Dinner was held in the familiar older part of the St Hilda’s complex – a welcome return to chandeliers and white tablecloths .

Conference Speakers

And then on to the first speakers of the conference. The papers were markedly different, demonstrating the ability of the organisers to ensure the appeal of the conference to a range of audience members. The first speaker, Jutta Schmidt, with the topic of sisterhood in literary families, gave an excellent run down of some of the writing sisters we know – and, so appealingly, some we did not. It is always pleasant to have confirmation of ideas and knowledge, and in some cases, this is what this presentation achieved. A reminder that the relationships between the Bronte sisters were not amicable, compared with the high esteem that Jane and Cassandra Austen held for each other, was noted. This relationship could not compete with the sometimes vitriolic ‘sisterhood’ between A.S. Byatt and Margaret Drabble. Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolfe were linked to the title of a Barbara Pym novel, An Unsuitable Attachment, an example of sisterhood and friendship rather than the antagonism between other couples. Less well-known literary sisters were a particular joy to hear about. The Porter sisters, Jane and Anna Marie provided a different story, perhaps one that resonates with Barbara Pym’s experience in the 1960s, with their sinking into oblivion. Before this occurred, they were famous amongst British novelists in the nineteenth century, paving the way for the sisters Bronte and Jane Austen. They published twenty-six books. Devony Looser has written Sister Novelists: The Trailblazing Porter Sisters, Who Paved the Way for Austen and the Brontes to celebrate their work, and hopefully upgrade our history of women writers.

Kate Murphy, a historian and author of was the next speaker. Before she began researching for this paper her knowledge of Pym was scant. However, her work on the women in the BBC (Behind the Wireless: A History of Early Women at the BBC) made her eminently suitable for talking about Barbara’s sister, Hilary who worked for many years at the BBC. Kate cleverly wove together her formidable knowledge of that institution, and her new appraisal of Hilary Pym into an excellent presentation. By the end I felt that I knew so much more about Hilary and her working experience, alongside the familiar story of Barbara Pym and her writing and work at the African Institute.

Kathy Ackley later gave a presentation on her personal relationship with Hilary Pym, using letters, meals with Hilary and discussions over several years of Kathy’s Pym authorship (The Novels of Barbara Pym) and involvement with the Barbara Pym Society. Having the two perspectives of Barbara’s sister was a marvellous contribution to the conference.

Amongst the other papers was a spirited talk on bringing Pym to film; Some Tame Gazelle and its presentation of Harriet/Hilary (and Belinda/Barbara) at the BBC; and Barbara Everett’s accessible and academic talk about the Pym sisters and Barbara’s work.

The conference, as always ended with a read dramatisation of one of Barbara Pym’s work. This time Some Tame Gazelle was the inspiration for a humorous end to the conference. The very contented spinster sisters, having rejected a proposal of marriage each was indeed a suitable finale for this conference about literary sisterhood.

Yvonne Cocking, now in a wheelchair (see Photo above), wrote the play keeping faithfully to Barbara Pym’s words, and deftly moving between scenes in her inimitable way (Yvonne has produced numerous Pym short stories and novels for these dramatisations). Yvonne is a star of the Barbara Pym Conferences, and it was thrilling to see her in her familiar role.

Punting on the Cherwell – there were enough breaks in the program to enjoy walks around the gardens and to admire punters on the Cherwell.

The participants were a diverse group, with long term members and newer members who enjoy Pym’s work and want to know more about this wonderful writer. Young and older mingled happily during presentations, coffee breaks, meals, and wandering around the gardens. Barbara Pym’s work, the conference organisers and participants make the newest Pym reader welcome, along with those to whom her work and conferences are so familiar. It was splendid, as Barbara would say, to return to St Hilda’s, old and new friends, and an abundance of insights into the joy of being a Pym reader – and, of course, a listener at a very splendid conference.

On my return to London there was yet another reminder of a Pym novel at Paddington Station –

After all, who can forget Sophia’s mother’s concern that she lived in North Kensington, rather too close to the Harrow Road? See Barbara Pym’s An Unsuitable Attachment for this gem. On the sign is the address of one of the flats I lived in while I was in London – oh dear! far too close to the Harrow Road.

Heather Cox Richardson Letter from an American

Yesterday, Vice President Kamala Harris arrived in Jakarta, Indonesia, to attend the U.S.–Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Summit and the East Asia Summit. ASEAN is a political and economic union of 10 member states in Southeast Asia whose combined population is more than 600 million (almost twice the size of the U.S.); the East Asia Summit expands ASEAN with several more nations. At meetings today, she emphasized the U.S. commitment to Southeast Asia and the Indo-Pacific. “We are a proud Pacific power, and the American people have a profound stake in the future of the Indo-Pacific,” she said.

Harris noted that Americans “share historic bonds and common values with many of the people and nations here” and that the region shares the same interests in security and prosperity. Commerce between Southeast Asia and the United States supports more than 600,000 American jobs, and ongoing economic cooperation offers enormous potential for growth. “It is therefore in our vital interest to promote a region that is open, interconnected, prosperous, secure, and resilient.” She announced the establishment of a U.S.-ASEAN Center in Washington, D.C., to deepen the economic and cultural engagement between members of the two entities.

She emphasized that the United States is committed to the Indo-Pacific and that it is “committed to ASEAN centrality.” 

As the press was leaving a photo opportunity between Harris and Indonesian president Joko Widodo, the White House pool reporter called out two questions, one to each leader. The White House pool reporter is the one designated by all the other outlets to represent the press for the day. This reporter, Patsy Widakuswara, is an Indonesian American and the White House bureau chief for the Voice of America, the government-owned but independent U.S. broadcaster around the world. Indonesian officials physically blocked Widakuswara, told her to leave, and banned her from any other events. 

“It was tense, but I didn’t feel anxious or panicked or anything like that, because I knew that I was just doing my job,” Widakuswara told Liam Scott of VOA. ”And I also knew that the VP’s office would stand by me.”

And stand she did. Harris refused to enter the summit room until the entire press pool, including Widakuswara, was inside. Indonesian officials later expressed their regret, said her shouts raised security concerns, and reiterated support for press freedom (although Reporters Without Borders ranks Indonesia 108th out of 180 countries for press freedom). 

A spokesperson for the U.S. State Department told VOA: “A free and independent press is a core institution of healthy democracies and is vital for ensuring electorates can make informed decisions and hold government officials accountable.”

Harris’s defense of freedom of the press, a key pillar of democracy, stands out today as judges enforced the rule of law—the central pillar of democracy—in important ways.

This morning, U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan ruled that Trump’s liability for defaming writer E. Jean Carroll had already been established by the jury in May and that the jury in the January trial will only have to decide how much money to award her. Kaplan also refused to cap the damages. The jury in May awarded Carroll $5 million. 

In Austin, U.S. District Judge David Ezra ruled that Texas must remove the barrier buoys and razor wire it has installed in the Rio Grande by September 15, and he prohibited Texas governor Greg Abbott from installing any others without proper approval. Ezra, who was appointed by Republican president Ronald Reagan, found that the United States was likely to win a lawsuit against Texas on the grounds that the state violated a federal law by affecting the navigation of the river and that the state cannot usurp the power of the federal government to enforce immigration laws. 

About 80% of the barrier was initially in Mexican waters in violation of international treaties, and the Mexican government has formally protested it three times. Texas Republicans are calling for Congress to defund the Department of Homeland Security until they are satisfied with its border policies. The court found “that Texas’s conduct irreparably harms the public safety, navigation, and the operations of federal agency officials in and around the Rio Grande.”

Texas has already appealed today’s decision. 

In Florida, Yuscil Taveras, the IT worker at Mar-a-Lago who alleged that Trump and his aide Walt Nauta and property manager Carlos de Oliveira tried to delete incriminating videos concerning the handling of classified national security documents from surveillance cameras, has reached a cooperation agreement with special counsel Jack Smith’s office. In exchange for not being prosecuted for his own part in the activity, Taveras will testify against the others.

Los Angeles Times senior legal affairs columnist Harry Litman wrote, “This was coming but important that it’s here…. Now [the] question is: how can Nauta and DeOlivera not do the same?” 

In that same case, Katherine Faulders and Mike Levine of ABC News reported today that voice memos made at the time by Trump lawyer Evan Corcoran show that he warned Trump in May 2022, just after the Department of Justice issued a grand jury subpoena for all the classified documents he had at Mar-a-Lago, that he had to comply and, if he didn’t, that the FBI might very well search Mar-a-Lago. Trump had asked “what happens if we just don’t respond at all or don’t play ball with them?” Despite Corcoran’s warning, Trump continued to suggest lying about the documents: “Wouldn’t it be better if we just told them we don’t have anything here?”

Another lawyer warned Corcoran that Trump would “go ballistic” if Corcoran pushed him to comply with the subpoena. When the FBI did, in fact, search the property the following August, Trump called it “a “shocking BREAK-IN,” with “no way to justify” it. The FBI found more than 100 classified documents still in Trump’s possession. 

Today, six Republican and unaffiliated Colorado voters, including former state, federal, and local officials, sued the Colorado secretary of state and former president Trump to keep him off the 2024 ballot. Represented by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), they argue that Trump is “disqualified from public office under Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment” and therefore “does not ‘meet all qualifications for the office [of the President] prescribed by law.’” They believe the secretary of state must exclude him from the ballot because he is “constitutionally ineligible” to hold the office.

Like freedom of the press, the rule of law is central to our democracy. Its slow gathering of information and argument, weighing of evidence, and eventual verdicts is not foolproof, but it creates space to approximate the idea that we are all equal before the law. Today in Indonesia, the vice president defended freedom of the press. In contrast, faced with the inexorable march of legal processes that finally appear to be catching up to MAGA Republicans who appear to have considered themselves above the law, those same MAGA Republicans are trying to destroy the rule of law itself.   

Today on Trinity Broadcasting Network, which senior NBC News reporter Ben Collins says bills itself as the largest Christian television network in the world, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee opened his most recent episode by saying that if former president Trump loses the 2024 election because of the many indictments grand juries have handed down concerning his behavior, “it is going to be the last American election that will be decided by ballots rather than bullets.”

—Notes:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2023/09/06/remarks-by-vice-president-harris-at-the-11th-u-s-asean-summit/; https://www.voanews.com/a/indonesian-officials-harass-white-house-pool-reporter-after-harris-widodo-meeting/7257121.html; https://www.dallasnews.com/news/2023/09/06/judge-orders-texas-to-remove-border-buoys-from-rio-grande-rejects-abbott-invasion-claim/ https://www.dallasnews.com/news/politics/2023/08/10/texas-says-shallow-river-makes-buoys-legal-amid-gop-calls-to-defund-homeland-security/ https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.txwd.1172749163/gov.uscourts.txwd.1172749163.50.0.pdf https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/06/politics/mar-a-lago-it-worker/index.html https://www.citizensforethics.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/2023-09-06-08-43-07-Anderson-v-Griswold-Verified-Petition-2023.09.06.pdf https://www.citizensforethics.org/news/press-releases/lawsuit-filed-to-remove-trump-from-ballot-in-co-under-14th-amendment/ https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/06/politics/e-jean-carroll-trump-defamation-lawsuit/index.html https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.543790/gov.uscourts.nysd.543790.214.0.pdf https://abcnews.go.com/US/trump-warned-fbi-raid-mar-lago-team-feared/story?id=102932105 Twitter (X): neunderscore__/status/1699479199407342034 harrylitman/status/1699502422299926871

Cindy Lou eats in Lincoln

Lincoln Hotel

I enjoyed the dinner with its excellent menu choice, evidence of a good chef, service with a smile, and some amusing asides. For example, my joy at seeing samphire was to be served with the fish became disappointment when broccolini replaced it. The explanation was that the samphire was not up to standard – but one could buy it locally! The entree of brie on beetroot with a crisp toile was delicious, and the fish meal was good – but would have been excellent with the samphire.

Breakfast was a pleasant enough buffet, but the coffee left much to be desired. The view, however, had the promise of magnificence.

I just received this Letter from an American and felt it worthwhile posting before publishing this week’s blog.

Heather Cox Richardson

Today, at the initiative of the George W. Bush Institute, U.S. presidential foundations and centers for thirteen presidents since Herbert Hoover released a statement expressing concern about the health of American democracy. The statement notes that while the diverse population of the United States means we have a range of backgrounds and beliefs, “democracy holds us together. We are a country rooted in the rule of law, where the protection of the rights of all people is paramount.” 

“Americans have a strong interest in supporting democratic movements and respect for human rights around the world because free societies elsewhere contribute to our own security and prosperity here at home,” the statement reads. “But that interest is undermined when others see our own house in disarray.” Without mentioning names, it called on elected officials to restore trust in public service by governing effectively “in ways that deliver for the American people.” “The rest of us must engage in civil dialogue,” it said, “respect democratic institutions and rights; uphold safe, secure, and accessible elections; and contribute to local, state, or national improvement.” 

Traditionally, ex-presidents do not comment on politics, and this extraordinary effort is the first time presidential centers have commented on them. Because this step is unprecedented the Eisenhower Foundation chose not to sign, although it commended the defense of democracy. But the centers for Hoover, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Baines Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama all did.   

That the executive director of the George W. Bush Institute felt obliged to take a step that is a veiled critique of today’s Republican Party—Bush’s party—is a sign of how deep concern over our democracy runs. David Kramer, the Bush Institute’s executive director, said the statement was intended to remind Americans that democracy cannot be taken for granted and to send “a positive message reminding us of who we are and also reminding us that when we are in disarray, when we’re at loggerheads, people overseas are also looking at us and wondering what’s going on.”

While concerns about the weakening of American democracy have been growing since the beginning of the century, the 2024 election presents new challenges. The campaign season is heating up just as state and federal prosecutors are beginning to hold senior figures accountable for their attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. 

This timing means that on top of the usual partisanship of this era is layered a political fight over holding leaders accountable for crimes. On the one hand, we are seeing the release of increasing amounts of damaging information about right-wing figures. On the other hand, we are faced with the determination of right-wing leaders to stop the prosecutions. Since the best way to do that is to make sure a MAGA Republican wins the White House, we are in the midst of a storm of disinformation designed to undermine the key institutions of our democracy, particularly the rule of law. 

In disbarment proceedings yesterday in California, Trump lawyer John Eastman refused to answer a question about whether he and others seeking to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election discussed getting Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA), the most senior member of the Senate, to preside over the counting of electoral votes on January 6 in place of Vice President Mike Pence, who had made it clear he would not go along with the president’s scheme to refuse to count votes for Biden in states Trump falsely maintained that he won. Eastman declined on the grounds of attorney-client privilege. When asked, he said his client was Trump. 

Los Angeles Times legal analyst Harry Litman said: “That’s going to have to come out, and it’s a whole new nugget” about what was going on in Trump’s orbit to overturn the election results. 

Today a Washington, D.C., jury found Trump’s former trade advisor Peter Navarro guilty on two counts of contempt of Congress for defying a subpoena from the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol. A jury found another Trump ally, Steve Bannon, guilty of contempt of Congress in July 2022, but he is appealing the conviction. Navarro took to social media to say that he was “doing my duty to God, country, the Constitution, and my commander-in-chief.” He, too, is appealing his conviction. 

Navarro’s attempt to cast himself as a patriotic victim—although it was a jury of his peers who convicted him—is part of a larger attempt to portray the rule of law as persecuting patriots. Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, who yesterday was sentenced to 22 years in prison for his part in the conspiracy, abandoned the humble pleading he engaged in before the sentencing and turned to positioning himself as a political prisoner who is imprisoned for “speaking the truth.” (He also asked for donations to help his family.)

As they try to portray the rule of law as political persecution, Republicans are attacking the Department of Justice. Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH), chair of the Judiciary Committee, today made more accusations about the department’s handling of the case against Trump for stealing national security documents. 

Also today, Fulton County, Georgia, district attorney Fani Willis responded to Jordan’s earlier demand to see communications between her office and Department of Justice officials investigating Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. Jordan has suggested that normal communication was improper. 

Willis told Jordan that his attempt to interfere with and obstruct her office’s prosecution of state criminal cases is illegal and unconstitutional, and urged him to deal with the reality that two separate grand juries made up of ordinary citizens reviewed the evidence and decided that Trump had committed crimes. She called out his attempt to spin the case for political gain and suggested that instead he address “the racist threats that have come to my staff and me because of this investigation,” attaching ten examples of those threats. 

Other countries are pushing the disinformation that splits Americans. A report published last week by the European Commission, the body that governs the European Union, says that when X, the company formerly known as Twitter, got rid of its safety standards, Russian disinformation on the site took off. Lies about Russia’s war against Ukraine spread to at least 165 million people in the E.U. and allied countries like the U.S., and garnered at least 16 billion views. The study found that Instagram, Telegram, and Facebook, all owned by Meta, also spread pro-Kremlin propaganda that uses hate speech and boosts extremists. 

The report concluded that “the Kremlin’s ongoing disinformation campaign not only forms an integral part of Russia’s military agenda, but also causes risks to public security, fundamental rights and electoral processes” in the E.U. The report’s conclusions also apply to the U.S., where the far right is working to undermine U.S. support for Ukraine by claiming—falsely—that U.S. aid to Ukraine means the Biden administration is neglecting emergencies at home, like the fires last month in Maui. 

Russian operatives famously flooded social media with disinformation to influence the 2016 U.S. election, and by 2022 the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) warned that China had gotten into the act. Today, analyst Clint Watts of Microsoft reported that in the last year, China has honed its ability to generate artificial images that appear to be U.S. voters, using them to stoke “controversy along racial, economic, and ideological lines.” It uses social media accounts to post divisive, AI-created images that attack political figures and iconic U.S. symbols.

Today, President Joe Biden extended the national emergency former president Trump declared on September 18, 2018, before that year’s midterm elections, “to deal with the unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States constituted by the threat of foreign interference in or undermining public confidence in United States elections.” Biden noted that the internet has “created significant vulnerabilities and magnified the scope and intensity of the threat of foreign interference,” and thus the national emergency must be extended for another year. The original executive order provided for sanctions against foreign people or companies who try to influence U.S. elections.

In the impeachment trial of Texas attorney general Ken Paxton, we are getting a ringside view of a justice system in which equality before the law is replaced by MAGA Republican ideology. On Tuesday, Vianna Davila and Jessica Priest of the Texas Tribune and ProPublica reported that while Paxton’s office engaged in nearly 50 lawsuits against the Biden administration, it has refused to represent state agencies in court at least 75 times, forcing those agencies to turn to private lawyers and then to bill their expenses to Texas taxpayers.

Paxton appears to have used the powers of his office not to help the people who elected him, but to advance an ideological agenda along with his own interests. 

—Notes:

https://www.bushcenter.org/publications/reaffirming-americans-commitment-to-a-more-perfect-union; https://apnews.com/article/united-states-democracy-presidents-threats-joint-statement-5530a89df2c41d58a22961f63fb0e6ff; https://www.ajc.com/politics/willis-blasts-congressmans-interference-in-fulton-trump-probe/IU5USCA3H5A3RJKTMT2WFCL3VU/;https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/c1d645d0-42f5-11ee-a8b8-01aa75ed71a1/language-dehttps://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/09/01/musk-twitter-x-russia-propaganda/; ​​https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/03/politics/2022-election-security-fbi/index.html;https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/24/politics/china-influence-washington-protests/index.html;https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/07/politics/chinese-operatives-ai-images-social-media/index.html;https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2023/09/07/press-release-notice-on-the-continuation-of-the-national-emergency-with-respect-to-foreign-interference-in-or-undermining-public-confidence-in-united-states-elections/;https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2018/09/14/2018-20203/imposing-certain-sanctions-in-the-event-of-foreign-interference-in-a-united-states-election;https://www.politico.com/news/2023/09/07/john-eastman-disbarment-chuck-grassley-00114416;https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/09/07/what-we-know-about-grassley-pence-jan-6/;https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/prosecutors-set-urge-conviction-trump-ex-adviser-bannon-2022-07-22/;https://www.reuters.com/world/us/former-trump-adviser-navarro-convicted-contempt-congress-2023-09-07/;https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/jim-jordan-investigate-doj-trump-classified-documents-case-rcna103910;https://www.texastribune.org/2023/09/05/ken-paxton-state-agencies/;

Twitter (X): RonFilipkowski/status/1699913232683831694; harrylitman/status/1699797988904984989;kathleen_belew/status/1699836405583868231

Week beginning 30 August 2023

Eliot A. Cohen The Hollow Crown Shakespeare on How Leaders Rise, Rule, and Fall Basic Books: New York, 24 October 2023

Thank you, NetGalley, for providing me with this uncorrected proof for review.

This is an exciting read, from an author whose political experience and preceptive approach to politics, power and Shakespeare is only occasionally influenced by his own politics. Eliot A. Cohen’s The Hollow Crown Shakespeare on How Leaders Rise, Rule, and Fall is a book to be read, savoured, read again, and used to interpret both modern and historical politics as well as every time you read or see a Shakespeare play. Although his political plays with their power-oriented characters predominate, there is an occasional reflection on a wider range of Shakespeare’s work. Readers of this book will find it difficult to watch any of Shakespeare’s plays without thinking about the way in which Cohen might approach them. This is an added joy to this thoroughly compelling work.

The book is divided into three sections: Acquiring Power; Exercising Power; and Losing Power. Chapter 1, Why Shakespeare? And the Afterword, Shakespeare’s Political Vision provide sharp and detailed bookends to the sections. Cohen acknowledges that Shakespeare’s political views, if any, were not known. Nor are they conveyed sharply through his work. As Cohen observes, Shakespeare’s characters are ambiguous, their arguments and stances are ambiguous, the plays do not simplify the political themes he addresses. However, as Cohen also observes, the questions and themes inform aspects of power, and it is these he addresses in detail. See Books: Reviews for the whole review.

After the Covid update: Vote Yes and date announcement to be announced; Are the Greens going to elect Trump (again)?- Bob McMullan; Slavery stole Africans’ ideas as well as their bodies: reparations should reflect this; Canberra welcomes spring early: London gardens next week!; Last supper? – Jane Goodall; Letter from America – Heather Cox Richardson.

Covid update

Australia cases – Updated 28 Aug at 7:06 pm local

Confirmed 11,576,428

Deaths 22,696

Global cases – Updated 28 Aug at 7:06 pm local

Confirmed 769,805,366

Deaths 6,955,484

–

There were 160 new cases recorded on 25 August, with 7 in hospital and none in ICU or ventilated. Three deaths were recorded in this period.

 

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is expected to announce the voice referendum date as October 14.© Bianca De Marchi/AAP PHOTOS

Are the Greens going to elect Trump (again)*

Bob McMullan

There are some worrying signs in recent polling which raise the disturbing possibility that a third-party campaign by the Green Party may once again divert enough votes from the Democratic Party candidate, in this case almost certainly Joe Biden, to get Donald Trump over the line in some key states and thereby deliver another Trump victory.

As this would be devastating for all the policies the Green Party supports it is worth considering how such a perverse outcome may come about.

It is early days yet, and I am more optimistic than some about Biden’s prospects, but the alarming possibility of a further and more dangerous term for Trump is realistically possible.

Harry Enten, the respected CNN analyst, wrote recently that “The chance of Trump winning another term is very real”. I am more optimistic about the probability than Enten, but his conclusion is correct, there is a real chance of Trump winning again.

Enten points out that no-one in Trump’s current polling position in the modern era has lost a presidential primary that didn’t feature an incumbent.

And while it is early days in the presidential election proper Trump is currently competitive in a contest with Biden.

Anyone thinking of becoming involved should measure their impact against this awkward reality.

A quick glance at history illustrates the potential problem for the Green Party.

There is no doubt that Ralph Nader cost Al Gore the 2000 election, with all the consequences that followed from George Bush’s election.

The data is clear. In Florida, the key state in deciding the outcome of the 2000 election, the final margin in favour of Bush was a mere 537 votes. Ralph Nader received more than 97000 votes in that state. If only 1% of them had voted for Gore he would have been President.

And election results have consequences. Bush was not as dangerous as Trump for American democracy, but there is little doubt that if Gore had been the president there would have been no invasion of Iraq.

What a difference that would have made to global peace and stability.

It is arguable, but not so obviously clear, that Jill Stein cost Hilary Clinton the 2016 election and therefore gave us the first iteration of Donald Trump as president.

The underlying evidence suggests that Stein definitely won sufficient votes in some key states to make the difference between Clinton winning and Trump. For example, in Michigan, Trump won by 10000 while the Greens candidate received more than 50000 votes.

In 2024 the potential for the most likely Green Party candidate, Cornel West, to help to elect Trump is emerging as a possibility. The first sign was a recent Emerson poll in Michigan. Between Biden and Trump, the poll indicated a probable tied vote. But when West was included in the question, Trump won by 2%. Another recent poll showed West having a similar net impact, this time in New Hampshire. Biden was clearly ahead in both surveys, but the inclusion of the Green Party candidate cut Biden’s margin by 2%.

Of course, the Green Party have every right to run a candidate and advocate for their preferred positions. And I don’t suggest the election of Trump is in anyway part of their motivation.

However, when potentially disastrous consequences may flow from actions you are considering I believe any failure to take them into account constitutes wilful neglect at best and dangerous adventurism at worst.

Ralph Nader may have been able to say that the impact of his candidature could not have been foreseen.

No-one in 2024 will have the same excuse.

  • First published in Pearls and Irritations, and The New Daily.

Slavery stole Africans’ ideas as well as their bodies: reparations should reflect this.

Jenny Bulstrode

Lecturer in History of Science and Technology, UCL.

Sheray Warmington

Honorary Research Associate, UCL

    Published: August 24, 2023 10.32pm AEST

    The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

    Republished from The Conversation under Creative Commons Licence

    In a speech to mark Unesco’s campaign for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition, UN secretary-general António Guterres told the United Nations general assembly earlier this year that the inequalities created by 400 years of the transatlantic chattel trade persist to this day. “We can draw a straight line from the centuries of colonial exploitation to the social and economic inequalities of today,” he said.

    Guterres’ words were echoed by Judge Patrick Robinson of the international court of justice, who has called for the UK to recognise the need to pay reparations for its part in the slave trade, telling The Guardian on August 22 that: “Reparations have been paid for other wrongs and obviously far more quickly, far more speedily than reparations for what I consider the greatest atrocity and crime in the history of mankind: transatlantic chattel slavery.”

    Investment into the trafficking of African people in the Caribbean created a lucrative economic system that helped Britain develop into a global economic superpower. The consequences continue to be felt today – not only in vast inequities in the distribution of wealth and resources, but also in the denial and effacement of the people of African descent whose skills and knowledge helped power that industrial and societal transformation.

    This year marks the 240th anniversary of arguably one of the biggest thefts in the history of intellectual property. The so-called “Cort process”, patented by the financier Henry Cort between 1783 and 1784, has been called one of the most important innovations of the British industrial revolution. Yet recently published findings show the process was first developed by 76 black metallurgists, many of them enslaved, in an 18th-century foundry in Jamaica.

    The foundry was forcibly shut down for presenting too much of a threat to Britain’s economic and political domination. We know some of these black metallurgists’ names: Devonshire, Mingo, Mingo’s son, Friday, Captain Jack, Matt, George, Jemmy, Jackson, Will, Bob, Guy, Kofi and Kwasi.

    Stolen heritage

    African enslavement may be considered one of the quintessential depictions of global theft and destruction in human history. In 2018, Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy’s report on the restitution of cultural heritage pointed out that 90% of sub-Saharan Africa’s material cultural heritage is held outside the continent. From the kidnapping of Africans from their homelands, the eradication of native populations, to the forced loss of African culture, history and identity, the damage that chattel enslavement has done continues to permeate development and economic discourse the world over.

    But as the global reparations movement gains traction it opens a new discourse about the debt owed for that which was stolen. It also highlights the need to create a robust educational system aimed at highlighting the realities of slavery and colonialism. The history of the black metallurgists is just one example of the contributions of people of African descent to the wealth of European and US societies today.

    For much of recent history, institutions in the global north have dominated the narrative of where and who drives innovation. But history – and history taught in schools – must also recognise and name enslaved Africans as true innovators of their times. In Florida, the governor and Republican presidential hopeful, Ron DeSantis, has introduced new educational standards which teach that some enslaved people benefited from slavery. History must challenge this constant narrative of black bodies merely being machines.

    Truth and reparation

    In the search for truth and reparation, truth of brutalities inflicted alone is not enough. There must also be truth about the pioneers and innovators of colonised and enslaved societies – such as the 76 black metallurgists – whose ideas changed the trajectory of civilisation and who laid the building blocks for growth, change and development.

    The simultaneous theft and denial of black innovation has served a purpose for the global north. The Caricom Reparations Commission, notes that one of the main policies of the European colonisers was that there should be “not a nail to be made in the colonies”. A fundamental part of the global north’s accumulation has been to create captive markets and maintain those markets post-independence. Colonies and post-independence states alike have been actively deprived of the developmental apparatus to create a thriving society.

    Resource extraction during this period was not merely centred on sugar, tobacco and cotton. It also drew on intellect and innovation which was stolen from the colonies and used to help build the prosperous nations of the global north.

    Reparation is not only about money. It is also about recognition. Alongside the names of freedom fighters such as Sam Sharpe and Queen Nanny, children must learn the names of black innovators. Part of truth and reconciliation must be this re-centring of black identity as part of a decolonised education system across former colonial and colonising states.

    It must be a curriculum which includes the names and identities of enslaved African people whose skill and knowledge both challenged and transformed the global industrial and economic system. Through this, descendants will gain an understanding of the importance of their own history and ancestral cultures and all it contributed.

    Recognition of the theft of black intellectual property provides a starting point for quantifying the harms that were done and continue to resonate to this day. This is necessary for any process of truth and reconciliation.

    Quantification and monetary reparation, while necessary, are not in themselves enough. They must be combined with institutional recognition through an education system that acknowledges the role of enslaved African people in both challenging and driving forward the economies, scientific innovations and cultures of European enslavers.

    Canberra welcomes spring early: London gardens next week!

    Below is a follow up to the story posted on the week beginning 16 August 2023. I wonder what other people think about Jane Goodall’s reflection on the ABC audience of Kitchen Cabinet? I believe that they are fully capable of dealing with everything served up in this political program that dares to be a little different – a basket? a gathered full skirt replete with petticoats from the 1950s? Is this really a problem? A risk that Annabel Crabb will be swallowed? I do not think so. The Hollow Crown, reviewed this week takes a more academic approach to politics and politicians, joining the many approaches, including Kitchen Cabinet, to this topic that should be in the public arena. Goodall’s claim that ‘Crabb’s enterprise serves only to inflame the ferocity’ is at best overstated. It is melodramatic to suggest that Annabelle and the ABC are now, or will at any time in the future, be in the same category as former President Trump and Fox News.

    Last supper?

    Inside Story Books and Arts

    In its attempt to be light-hearted, Kitchen Cabinet has steered into dangerous waters.

    JANE GOODALL TELEVISION 24 AUGUST 2023 1366 WORDS

    Time to draw a line? Opposition leader Peter Dutton dining with Annabel Crabb. ABC

    “What big teeth you have, grandma!” We all know what comes next. And so does Annabel Crabb, dressed in a sweet fifties frock with a basket on her arm, as she arrives at the front door of some smiling politician for another episode of Kitchen Cabinet, now embarking on its seventh season.

    The Red Riding Hood persona is surely tongue in cheek, but Crabb is taking a real risk by evoking a fairytale figure who proved terminally naive: quite literally, since she was swallowed alive. Whether or not there’s a wolf in the house, Crabb can expect savage attacks in the surrounding media environment.

    In another reversal of traditional symbolism, rather than discovering a wolf in the guise of a trusted human, she is about to use a cheerful domestic setting to reveal the human who, in political guise, may have inspired fear and loathing. “Every single politician we elect has a backstory that dictates the way they behave in politics, and whether you love or loathe them, it’s always worth knowing that story,” she says.

    Given the temperature of responses to the program, that has proved a too-easy assumption. This week’s episode with opposition leader Peter Dutton showed, not for the first time, that Crabb’s enterprise serves only to inflame the ferocity. For Charlie Lewis, writing in Crikey, the “cosy and humanising profiles of people responsible for variously sized portions of national shame” come across as “a prank on everyone involved.”

    Amy McQuire’s excoriating review in New Matilda, prompted by the season five episode featuring Scott Morrison, was circulating again on social media in the lead-up to the Dutton appearance. McQuire calls the program “ridiculous, sickening,” “junk food journalism.”

    The chorus on Twitter, where #KitchenCabinet has been trending since the start of the new season, has been virulent. A photoshopped image shows Crabb lunching with Adolf Hitler, whom she describes as “good company” and “funnier than I was expecting.” Other posts focus on those who have suffered the consequences of Dutton’s political decisions: the Biloela children, Reza Barati and others held in long-term detention, communities in Melbourne vilified in response to his “African gangs” claims.

    These and other highly charged issues, including Dutton’s current campaign for the No vote on the Voice, are raised over a lunch of chowder cooked by the opposition leader in the kitchen of his beautiful old Queenslander house. He seems to take Crabb’s insistence that some of his public remarks are straight-out racism in his stride, without seeming riled, excessively defensive or especially embarrassed.

    Crabb encourages him to talk about his life before politics, including the experience of attending violent crime scenes as a police officer. In answer to Crabb’s suggestion that he might suffer from PTSD, he says that probably most police officers do. That exchange triggered his antagonists, who saw it as a bid for sympathy put forward by Dutton himself.

    Distortions like that are par for the course on social media, where criticisms of programs and presenters often take the form of personal abuse. The problem has been serious enough for Leigh Sales, Stan Grant and Hamish Macdonald to leave political roles at the ABC, and has led to the broadcaster’s recent decision to withdraw its program accounts from Twitter.

    While the personal abuse is intolerable, the reactive high dudgeon is often too sweeping. Professional journalists, especially if they have a television profile, are prone to characterising social media users as a rabid species, demented by a diet of disinformation and immune to reason or civility. But something of vital importance gets missed: behind the apparent savagery lies an essentially human response that warrants serious attention. Seen collectively, the attacks on Kitchen Cabinet are not in the vein of criticism or argument but are manifestations of a visceral moral outrage.

    This is what Crabb in her smiling Red Riding Hood persona has failed to take account of. “Sometimes people who disagree with each other, and even people who agree with each other on some things, do not have conversations with each other,” she says. “And I think that’s madness.” Is it? Suggesting that the reaction reflects a pathological refusal to have conversations across lines of disagreement is missing the point by a country mile.

    “The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction”: the poet William Blake might not have written that line if he’d been around in the age of social media, but it remains a succinct and unforgettable evocation of wrath as a moral force, and one that may be collectively generated. Blake himself wrote under its influence in response to the social cruelties and political degeneracies of the industrial revolution.

    We in Australia may no longer send children down mines or up chimneys, but we do put them into solitary confinement, isolate them in island compounds, and subject their parents to prolonged and abject misery. As we’ve learned from the robodebt debacle, we drive people to suicide through government-initiated programs of extortion. We create pariah communities through the racial stereotyping that is sometimes explicitly promoted by elected politicians.

    Is it really so incomprehensible that many people take offence at being vicariously invited by the national broadcaster to have a chatty meal with those seen as instrumental in perpetuating these kinds of torments? Or if we do decide to spend half an hour in this way, and we find the company genial and good-humoured, and the host quite a decent bloke, where does this leave us?

    Kitchen Cabinet started out as an experiment in genre-crossing: equal parts reality TV, chat show, cooking program (the dessert recipes are posted on the ABC site) and political inquisition. Crabb’s deliberately ingenuous persona was presumably intended to push the dial to the lighter end of the spectrum, but she was an experienced enough journalist to know how to introduce more serious registers as the conversation rolled along.

    Guests have been chosen from across the political spectrum, with a predominance of women, and they do tend to open up in unexpected ways, offering new perspectives on the personalities and motivations of those in power. But personal trust in politics is a high-risk investment.

    In season one, lunch with National Party senator Nigel Scullion, Indigenous affairs minister at the time, involved a trip up river in the Northern Territory to catch crab and giant prawns that he cooked on a makeshift barbecue. “How do you fit into the Senate?” Crabb asked. The Australian people shouldn’t be represented in parliament just by lawyers, he responded; there should be tradies and fishermen too.

    He sounded like a good bloke. Referring to the Warramirri people as “my mob,” he talked of his responsibility for finding better ways to address disadvantage in Indigenous communities. Barnaby Joyce, too, sounded like a good bloke when he weighed in against “back-pocket politics” and “the clever club” of lobbyists, mining companies and foreign investors in season two.

    Five years later Scullion was in hot water with allegations he’d given Indigenous funding to his own former fishing-industry lobby group, and Barnaby Joyce had resigned as leader of the Nationals over an affair with a former staffer, with attendant allegations of nepotism over the appointment of his new partner to an unadvertised position. In retrospect, the good bloke talk does seem rather… disingenuous.

    Many of the other guests on the program no doubt really are good people who maintain ethical standards and principled positions in situations of evolving complexity. But it would be impossible to draw a line between those who should and should not be featured in this pseudo-innocent format. Might the best thing therefore be to draw a line under it? There was, after all, a seven-year gap between this season and the last.

    True, we’d have missed out on engagements with some of our most interesting and dynamic female politicians: Dai Le, Linda Burney, Anika Wells, Lidia Thorpe. The diversity of the current parliament, according to Crabb, was the compelling case for another season. Perhaps, though, it’s a sign of a lack of new ideas at the ABC, and a compelling case for a different kind of program.

    JANE GOODALL

    Jane Goodall, Inside Story’s TV critic, is an Emeritus Professor with the Writing and Society Research Centre at Western Sydney University. Her latest book is The Politics of the Common Good (NewSouth, 2019).

    Letter from America – Heather Cox Richardson

    On this date in 1920, the U.S. Secretary of State received the official notification from the governor of Tennessee that his state had ratified the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Tennessee was the 36th state to ratify the amendment, and the last one necessary to make the amendment the law of the land once the secretary of state certified it. He did that as soon as he received the notification, making this date the anniversary of the day the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified. 

    The new amendment was patterned on the Fifteenth Amendment protecting the right of Black men to vote, and it read: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.“ Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”

    Like the momentum for the Fifteenth Amendment, the push for rights for women had taken root during the Civil War as women backed the United States armies with their money, buying bonds and paying taxes; with their loved ones, sending sons and husbands and fathers to the war front; with their labor, working in factories and fields and taking over from men in the nursing and teaching professions; and even with their lives, spying and fighting for the Union.

    In the aftermath of the war, as the divided nation was rebuilt, many of them expected they would have a say in how it was reconstructed.But to their dismay, the Fourteenth Amendment explicitly tied the right to vote to “male” citizens, inserting the word “male” into the Constitution for the first time.

    Boston abolitionist Julia Ward Howe, the author of the Battle Hymn of the Republic, was outraged. The laws of the age gave control of her property and her children to her abusive husband, and while far from a rabble-rouser, she wanted the right to adjust those laws so they were fair. In this moment, it seemed the right the Founders had articulated in the Declaration of Independence—the right to consent to the government under which one lived—was to be denied to the very women who had helped preserve the country, while white male Confederates and now Black men both enjoyed that right.“The Civil War came to an end, leaving the slave not only emancipated, but endowed with the full dignity of citizenship. The women of the North had greatly helped to open the door which admitted him to freedom and its safeguard, the ballot. Was this door to be shut in their face?” Howe wondered.

    The next year, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony formed the National Woman Suffrage Association, and six months later, Lucy Stone and Julia Ward Howe founded the American Woman Suffrage Association.The National Woman Suffrage Association wanted a larger reworking of gender roles in American society, drawing from the Seneca Falls Convention that Stanton had organized in 1848.That convention’s Declaration of Sentiments, patterned explicitly on the Declaration of Independence, asserted that “all men and women are created equal” and that “the history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her,” listing the many ways in which men had “fraudulently deprived [women] of their most sacred rights” and insisting that women receive “immediate admission to all the rights and privileges which belong to them as citizens of these United States.”

    While the National Woman Suffrage Association excluded men from its membership, the American Woman Suffrage Association made a point of including men equally, as well as Black woman suffragists, to indicate that they were interested in the universal right to vote and only in that right, believing the rest of the rights their rivals demanded would come through voting.The women’s suffrage movement had initial success in the western territories, both because lawmakers there were hoping to attract women for their male-heavy communities and because the same lawmakers were furious at the growing noise about Black voting. Wyoming Territory granted women the vote in 1869, and lawmakers in Utah Territory followed suit in 1870, expecting that women would vote against polygamy there. When women in fact supported polygamy, Utah lawmakers tried unsuccessfully to take their vote away, and the movement for women’s suffrage in the West slowed dramatically.

    Suffragists had hopes of being included in the Fifteenth Amendment, but when they were not, they decided to test their right to vote under the Fourteenth Amendment in the 1872 election. According to its statement that anyone born in the U.S. was a citizen, they were certainly citizens and thus should be able to vote. In New York state, Susan B. Anthony voted successfully but was later tried and convicted—in an all-male courtroom in which she did not have the right to testify—for the crime of voting.In Missouri a voting registrar named Reese Happersett refused to permit suffragist Virginia Minor to register. Minor sued Happersett, and the case went all the way to the Supreme Court. The justices handed down a unanimous decision in 1875, deciding that women were indeed citizens but that citizenship did not necessarily convey the right to vote.

    This decision meant the fat was in the fire for Black Americans in the South, as it paved the way for white supremacists to keep them from the polls in 1876. But it was also a blow to suffragists, who recast their claims to voting by moving away from the idea that they had a human right to consent to their government, and toward the idea that they would be better and more principled voters than the Black men and immigrants who, under the law anyway, had the right to vote.

    For the next two decades, the women’s suffrage movement drew its power from the many women’s organizations put together across the country by women of all races and backgrounds who came together to stop excessive drinking, clean up the sewage in city streets, protect children, stop lynching, and promote civil rights.

    Black women like educator Mary Church Terrell and journalist Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, publisher of the Woman’s Era, brought a broad lens to the movement from their work for civil rights, but they could not miss that Black women stood in between the movements for Black rights and women’s rights, a position scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw would identify In the twentieth century as “intersectionality.”

    In 1890 the two major suffrage associations merged into the National American Woman Suffrage Association and worked to change voting laws at the state level. Gradually, western states and territories permitted women to vote in certain elections until by 1920, Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, Idaho, Washington, California, Oregon, Arizona, Kansas, Alaska Territory, Montana, and Nevada recognized women’s right to vote in at least some elections.Suffragists recognized that action at the federal level would be more effective than a state-by-state strategy. The day before Democratic president Woodrow Wilson was inaugurated in 1913, they organized a suffrage parade in Washington, D.C., that grabbed media attention. They continued civil disobedience to pressure Wilson into supporting their movement.

    Still, it took another war effort, that of World War I, which the U.S. entered in 1917, to light a fire under the lawmakers whose votes would be necessary to get a suffrage amendment through Congress and send it off to the states for ratification. Wilson, finally on board as he faced a difficult midterm election in 1918, backed a constitutional amendment, asking congressmen: “Shall we admit them only to a partnership of suffering and sacrifice and toil and not to a partnership of privilege and right?”Congress passed the measure in a special session on June 4, 1919, and Tennessee’s ratification on August 18, 1920, made it the law of the land as soon as the official notice was in the hands of the secretary of state. Twenty-six million American women had the right to vote in the 1920 presidential election.

    Crucially, as the Black suffragists had known all too well when they found themselves caught between the drives for Black male voting and women’s suffrage, Jim Crow and Juan Crow laws meant that most Black women and women of color would remain unable to vote for another 45 years. And yet they never stopped fighting for that right. For all that the speakers at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Equality were men, in fact women like Fannie Lou Hamer, Amelia Boynton, Rosa Parks, Viola Liuzzo, and Constance Baker Motley were key organizers of voting rights initiatives, spreading information, arranging marches, sparking key protests, and preparing legal cases.And now women are the crucial demographic going into the 2024 elections. Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg noted in June that there was a huge spike of women registering to vote after the Supreme Court in June 2022 overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision recognizing the constitutional right to abortion, and that Democratic turnout has exceeded expectations ever since.—

    Notes:https://www.nps.gov/articles/declaration-of-sentiments-the-first-women-s-rights-convention.htm

    Week beginning 23 August 2023

    The book reviewed this week is a study of Agatha Christie’s novels, referred to as looking at the science of her work. I initially saw this as considering the use of poison in her novels. I have not looked at this as an issue in the Agatha Christie work that appears at Further Commentary and Articles about Authors and Books*. However, I think it is a topic really worth some analysis. Net Galley provided me with the uncorrected proof of a book that seeks to analyse the ‘science’ of Christie’s work in a wider sense, The Science of Agatha Christie by Meg Hafdahl and Kelly Florence.

    Meg Hafdahl; Kelly Florence The Science of Agatha Christie The Truth Behind Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple, and More Iconic Characters from the Queen of Crime Skyhorse Publishing September 2023.

    Thank you, NetGalley, for providing me with this uncorrected proof for review.

    This book appears to have been written for a particular type of audience with strong connections to the form of the podcasts which the authors produce. It includes boxed sections of print which at times repeat the information in the text, but do not necessarily add to the ease with which it is read. Sometimes they are just intrusive, as are the homilies and mini lectures that also appear with minimal application to the main text. I found this quite unappealing. The subtitle, The Truth Behind Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple, And More Iconic Characters From the Queen of Crime, is only partially covered in this book, which moves beyond Christie and her work to interviews with and material that, while interesting, do not add a great deal to knowledge about Christie.  However, I also believe that the book deserves a review that provides readers, for whom these features would not be a negative, with some understanding of the novels covered, and some of the features this work illuminates.  See Books: Reviews

    After the Covid update: Community pantries in Canberra; Elizabeth Cummings, Exhibition; Screen Australia to support 47 projects with $1.2 million.

    Records are now not so frequently and clearly updated to match with the time at which this post is made public. However, an overall picture will emerge over the months.

    New Covid cases at 18 August number 175, with 9 people in hospital. One person is in ICU. Two lives have been lost.

    Community pantry

    Seen on the way to the O’Connor shops, making it an easy way to make a small contribution. It was gratifying to see that the package of bread had gone when we returned from the shops to leave a few items. Weekends are particularly busy so helping stock up in preparation for those busy times sounds like a good idea.

    The Community pantry is a street pantry started by the O’Connor Buy Nothing Group – bringing neighbours together. oconnorcommunitypantry@gmail.com

    Helping ACT’s weekly Street Pantries Restocking program:

    This week’s Street Pantry is #braddonstreetpantry.

    We just topped it up with some long life food and lots of fresh vegetable and fruit.

    Let us keep helping all in need.

    Mohammed Ali Manar Ahmad Sally Mijica Canberra, Australian Capital Territory ABC Canberra #canberraweekly #helpingact

    Elisabeth Cummings exhibition celebrates distinct voice of renowned Australian artist

    ABC Radio Sydney  / By Rosemary Bolger posted Wednesday 16 August 2023.

    A woman wearing a puffer jacket stands surrounded by bush.
    Elisabeth Cummings, 89, in the bush surrounding her studio at Wedderburn. (Supplied: Peter Morgan)

    Elisabeth Cummings calls herself a “slow developer”.

    Since she was a child growing up in Brisbane she has always painted, but she says it took time to find a voice of her own on the canvas.

    There was no particular turning point, she says, in the evolution of her renowned landscapes and interiors.

    “I just kept on painting, I suppose,” Cummings says in typically low-key fashion.

    “That’s all I can say. And slowly, slowly, there were changes.”

    A painting of a messy space with pinks and reds and white.
    The exhibition includes more than 40 paintings from the past 30 years.(Supplied: Elisabeth Cummings)

    The now 89-year-old’s distinct visual language will be celebrated in a major show at the National Art School opening on Friday.

    National Art School director Steven Alderton says Cummings is an inspiration to students today.

    “She has determinedly and daringly painted her way to the stature of one of Australia’s most eminent artists.”

    Preferring the freedom of memories, Cummings never paints from photos.

    “The photos have already pinned down a subject in its own photographic way. I wanted to create my own image, how I want to interpret that subject,” she says.

    A woman stands in front of art on a wall and paintbrushes on a desk.
    “There’s always something to paint,” Cummings says. (Supplied: National Art School)
    ‘Mostly it’s a struggle’

    Over time, Cummings’s paintings have become less traditional, less representational, as she strives to inject them with energy above all else.

    “I hope to make them alive, that’s the aim anyway, to create that life in the painting,” she says.

    “I love the process of doing a painting in spite of all the frustrations, it’s not easy. Sometimes it’s easier than others and it just flows.

    “Mostly it’s a struggle, but it’s worth it.”

    A painting featuring clouds with whites, blues and purples.
    Early morning Osborn Bay, Kimberley by Cummings. (Supplied: Elisabeth Cummings)

    The exhibition will add to her “wonderful” memories as one of a handful of students to complete the course there in the 1950s when it was the East Sydney Technical School.

    Her talent was recognised early, but not all approved of a woman pursuing an artistic career.

    A black and white photo of a woman staring into the distance.
    Cummings, pictured in 1974, at Wedderburn.(Supplied: National Art School)

    When Cummings was awarded the NSW Travelling Art Scholarship the head of the Julian Ashton art school, Henry Gibbons, wrote to the newspaper complaining that it was a waste to give it to a woman.

    “I’d forgotten that … but yes, that was the attitude back then of some people. My own head of the art school, Douglas Dundas, wrote a reply to that, backing me up which was nice,” Cummings says.

    She went to Florence in Italy and stayed in Europe for 10 years.

    “You could live on very little, and travel a bit,” she says.

    “You could do a lot in the 60s very reasonably, it was an exciting time.”

    ‘Always something to paint’

    Cummings was surprised that she missed the Australian bush.

    “I used to find the bush very boring, we used to drive through it or play in it, but it’s what I missed when I was away,” she says.

    “There’s something about this landscape that gets into you.”

    Cummings’s studio at her Wedderburn mud-brick home in south-west Sydney, which was originally part of an artist’s commune, also provides plenty of inspiration.

    A woman with a wide brim hat sits in a camp chair holding a paint brush surrounded by bush.
    Cummings continues to travel to paint, recently going to Ross River, east of Alice Springs. (Supplied: Ann Cape)

    Artists like her, she says, paint whatever’s around them, referring to a quote from the Dutch-American abstract expressionist Willem de Kooning.

    “He said I could be locked away in a prison cell with a few objects and I could endlessly paint them,” Cummings says.

    She has just returned from Ross River, east of Alice Springs, and when she gets back in the studio plans to work on ideas sparked on the trip.

    “There’s always something to paint.”

    Radiance: the art of Elisabeth Cummings opens Friday, August 18 and runs until October 21 at the National Art School in Darlinghurst.

    ABC Sydney in your inbox

    Screen Australia to support 47 projects with $1.2 million

    Staff Writer· BusinessFilmFundingNewsTV & Streaming ·August 16, 2023

    Corrie Chen, Kacie Anning and Melanie Tait.

    Nearly 50 projects will benefit from $1.2 million through Screen Australia’s Premium and Generate Funds, including new work from Class of 07 creator Kacie Anning and multi-hyphenate Leah Purcell.

    A total of 29 feature films, 13 television dramas, and four online projects will be supported as part of the story development funding, with 28 coming under Generate and 19 backed by Premium.

    Among the titles receiving funding are six projects that came through Screen Australia and Australians in Film’s 2022 Untapped initiative. The announcement also includes the remainder of projects funded in the 2022/23 financial year, during which Screen Australia supplied over $3.1 million of story development funding to 97 projects.

    Screen Australia’s development head Bobby Romia said the latest cohort represented a vast selection of dynamic and diverse voices, which showcased the strength and capability of the talent in our screen industry.

    “It is an exciting time for filmmakers and storytellers in Australia and we are thrilled to be supporting so many exciting projects at the beginning of their journey,” he said.

    Leah Purcell and Bain Stewart.

    Features

    Premium

    Koa Kid
    Oombarra Productions PTY Ltd
    Genre: Action-adventure, Family
    Writer/Director: Leah Purcell
    Producers: Bain Stewart, Leah Purcell
    Synopsis: Set a task of ‘dinosauric’ proportions by ancient forces, our two pre-teen heroes, Gidgee and Tim, realise they are capable of anything they put their minds and hearts to.

    45 and 47 Stella Street
    Tough Crowd Pictures
    Genre: Comedy, Family
    Writers: Vidya Rajan, Alistair Baldwin
    Producer: Bron Belcher
    Executive Producers: Charlotte Nicdao, Lital Spitzer
    Synopsis: When the horrible Mr and Mrs Phoney move into Number 45 and start ruining everything, the adventurous kids of Stella Street must band together to defend their community and discover exactly what their wealthy new neighbours are up to. Based on the bestselling novel by Elizabeth Honey.

    Swept
    Dreaming Tree Productions
    Genre: Drama, Horror, Thriller, War
    Writer: Yolanda Ramke
    Synopsis: In a desperate bid to spare her childhood friend from certain death on the Western Front, a young woman strikes a dark bargain with The Sidhe, a race of otherworldly beings who dwell beneath her Irish village. Though her wish is granted, it comes with a perverse twist: Bronagh awakens in a trench, trapped inside Oran’s body instead of her own. In turn, Oran is returned to the home front in possession of Bronagh’s body, and must carry their unborn child.

    The Good People
    Aquarius Films Pty Ltd
    Genre: Dark Fairytale
    Writer: Hannah Kent
    Producers: Angie Fielder, Polly Staniford, Martina Niland
    Synopsis: 19th century Ireland: as the Catholic church wages war against pagan beliefs, three women conspire to banish a changeling.

    The Golden Age
    The Golden Age Rights Holding Pty Ltd
    Genre: Drama
    Director: Elissa Down
    Writers: Sue Smith, Cathryn Strickland
    Producers: Tristram Miall, Renee Kennedy
    Executive Producer: Geoffrey London
    Synopsis: In an act of defiance, two thirteen-year-olds in a polio rehab ward determine they won’t let their dreams and lives be defined by their condition, and poignantly fall in love.

    The Golden Galah
    Monsoon Pictures Australia PTY LTD
    Genre: Comedy, Family, Heist
    Writer: Adam Dolman
    Producer: Adam Dolman
    Synopsis: An alienated boy and his twin sister, desperate to keep their ex-con dad out of prison, assemble a motley crew of kids in an attempt to return the valuable statue their dad stole to its near-impenetrable museum exhibit in a daring reverse-heist.

    Jiling
    Darlene Johnson
    Genre: Drama, Coming of Age
    Writer/Director: Darlene Johnson
    Producers: Darlene Johnson, Tania Chambers
    Synopsis: Jiling, an angry young woman trapped in a life of self-destruction and violence, meets a tough mentor who could change everything. A timeless story of courage, self-discovery and survival.

    Ascent
    Truant Pictures & Southern Light Films
    Genre: Survival Thriller
    Director: Jennifer Peedom
    Writer: Becca Johnstone
    Producers: Zareh Nalbandian, Toby Nalbandian, Gregory Schmidt, Timothy White
    Synopsis: On a remote mountain wall, a fearless free solo climber out on her most ambitious climb must help a stranded amateur ascend to safety without ropes or equipment, all the while the natural elements and their own personal demons conspire to keep them from reaching the top.

    Canary Highway
    Lumila Films
    Genre: Comedy, Drama
    Writer/Director: Allanah Zitserman
    Co-Writer: Felicity Price
    Producers: Allanah Zitserman, Alexandra Taussig
    Executive Producers: Bruno Charlesworth, Michael Helfand
    Synopsis: In 1976, a young Sydney mother fed up with her confined existence breaks out of the suburbs for one liberating night on the town with her girlfriends.

    Nest
    Mushroom Studios Pty Ltd
    Genre: Horror, Thriller
    Writer/Director: Guy Edmonds
    Producers: Bethany Jones, Marie Maroun
    Executive Producer: Joe Weatherstone
    Synopsis: Isolated in a new suburban house with his newborn daughter, a reluctant stay-at-home dad unearths an equally protective parent – a massive, predatory spider. It’s kill or be killed as this father must do whatever it takes to protect his family and their home.

    Tinglewood
    Lonely Astronaut Pty Ltd
    Genre: Action-adventure, Horror, Thriller
    Writer/Director: Antony Webb
    Producer: Jaclyn Hewer
    Executive Producer: Tim White
    Synopsis: When a PhD student with a traumatic past investigates the healing properties of the ancient Tinglewood forest, she finds herself embroiled in a horrific world that will test her moral fibres, forcing her to overcome her past or die trying.

    The Last Days of Lee McQueen
    Harvey House Productions Australia Pty Ltd
    Genre: Drama, Thriller
    Writer/Directors: Spencer Harvey, Lloyd Harvey
    Synopsis: A chronicling of the tumultuous final days of celebrated fashion designer Alexander McQueen, as he tries to complete his last runway show.

    Generate

    Three Moon Hunt
    Photoplay Films
    Genre: Comedy, Supernatural, Crime, Mystery
    Director: Tony Rogers
    Co-Director: Maurial Spearim
    Writers: Anthony Vercoe, Nicole Dade, Gillian Moody
    Executive Producer: Oliver Lawrance
    Producers: Linda Micsko, Karen Radzyner, Gillian Moody
    Synopsis: Two female detectives hunt their escaped murder suspect, discovering the Outback town of Ruby’s End holds a monstrous secret – and they are at its heart. Some legends are born. Others bite!

    Alice
    Cookie-wise Pty Ltd
    Genre: Drama
    Writer: Matthew Cormack
    Synopsis: While holidaying in a small rural town surrounded by vast farmland and wilderness, Sally and Henry, an older unmarried and childless couple of twenty years, lose their dog Alice. Over the next few months they tirelessly search for Alice, walking a thousand kilometres through a struggling rural community, quitting their jobs, spending their small savings, as the quiet crisis of their relationship and future is laid bare by the sacrifices they make and the encountered community’s capacity to help.

    Eurovisionary
    Sestra Films Pty Ltd
    Genre: Comedy, Drama, Coming of age
    Writer/Director: Jeneffa Soldatić
    Producers: Jeneffa Soldatić, Petra Lovrenčić
    Synopsis: Sydney, 1983: 10-year-old Croatian-Australian Julie is ostracized by her schoolmates, who accuse her of being connected to the notorious “Croatian Six” terrorist scandal. When Julie travels to Yugoslavia for a family holiday and her namesake song “Džuli” is performed at Eurovision, the village kids welcome her unconditionally. Returning to Australia, she’s determined to introduce Eurovision to her school. Will Eurovision have the same power to unite her school, so that she can belong again?

    Brilliant Monkey
    Confidante Pictures
    Genre: Comedy, Drama, Road Movie
    Director: Warwick Young
    Writers: Warwick Young, Alan Dukes
    Producer: Belinda Dean
    Executive Producers: Timothy White, Josh Pomeranz
    Synopsis: On the death of their mother, two estranged brothers; an ageing punk rocker and a brain injured soldier, begrudgingly hit the road together to meet the deadline for her funeral and lay claim to their share of the estate.

    Panos, Pannos and George
    Damien Strouthos
    Genre: Comedy, Drama, Crime
    Director: Peter Andrikidis
    Writer: Damien Strouthos
    Producer: Indiana Kwong
    Creative Developer: Danielle Stamoulos
    Script Editor: Kris Wyld
    Synopsis: Max’s road-trip to Melbourne and reconciliation with his estranged father is hijacked by three peculiar Athenians who are secretly on the run from the law.

    Counting Cards With My Father
    Lydia Rui Huang
    Genre: Drama, Crime
    Writer/Director: Lydia Rui
    Synopsis: Introverted Lisa (16, she/they) has just moved into residential care and befriends Morgan (21, she/they), aspiring DJ and nightclub hostess. However, Lisa knows they’re not staying long: they’re going to find their poker playing, Chinese cowboy of a father, Sammy (59, he/him), and get the hell out of there. But life is a gamble, and you’re not always going to like the hand you’re dealt — especially if you lose yourself in the process.

    Umuzimu (Spirit)
    Arenamedia Pty ltd
    Genre: Drama, Comedy, Magic Realism
    Writer/Director: Santilla Chingaipe
    Producer: Robert Connolly
    Synopsis: A grieving mother learns to parent her daughter in the afterlife.

    Deluge
    The Luscri-Surgenor Film Company
    Genre: Drama, Psychological
    Director: Melissa Anastasi
    Writers: Melissa Anastasi, Ayeshah Zakiya Rose
    Producers: Chris Luscri, Hayley Surgenor
    Synopsis: A Muslim contemporary dancer, on the cusp of a career breakthrough, is struck down by mysterious seizures that force her to face her past.

    The Child
    Brooke Goldfinch
    Genre: Drama, Thriller, Mystery, Science fiction, Coming of Age
    Writer/Director: Brooke Goldfinch
    Synopsis: Shy teen, Rhea Reid, develops an intense relationship with a charismatic young mother who claims to be her daughter from the future.

    Three Cows
    Sara Kern
    Genre Drama, Horror, Mystery
    Writer/Director: Sara Kern
    Script Editor: Angeli Macfarlane
    Synopsis: A 13-year-old with an uncanny resemblance to her immigrant grandmother becomes a conduit for the severed past.

    Revelations
    Dark Before Dawn Productions
    Genre: Horror, Psychological
    Writer: Travis Akbar
    Producer: Travis Akbar
    Executive Producer: Silvio Salom
    Synopsis: After a brutal storm forces them to take shelter in a church, parents-to-be Matthew and Elizabeth must face the church’s archaic Priest, who believes Elizabeth’s soon-to-be born child is the anti-Christ and will stop at nothing to destroy it.

    Unravel
    Michael Hudson (Third Impact Films)
    Genre: Horror, Thriller, Psychological
    Writer/Director: Michael Hudson
    Producer: Michael Hudson
    Synopsis: The lives of an Aboriginal family slowly start to unravel after a single father is involved in a serious accident. In the days following, his only child will learn that guilt isn’t the only thing Dad has brought home.

    Baby Face
    AP Pobjoy
    Genre: Romantic comedy
    Writer/Director: AP Pobjoy
    Synopsis: After their estranged sister dies, Bly, a millennial mid gender transition, is suddenly responsible for their troubled fourteen-year-old nephew, Michael. But on the cusp of going through puberty for the second time, Bly must now become the most adult thing in the world: a parent.

    Playtime
    Causeway Films
    Genre: Psychological Drama
    Writer/Director: Alex Wu
    Producers: Kristina Ceyton, Samantha Jennings
    Synopsis: Returning to China, a psychologist starts working at a treatment facility for internet-addicted teenagers. Her desire to help one young man sparks an unexpected yearning for connection inside them both.

    Calm
    Golden Moss Films
    Genre: Psychological Thriller
    Writer/Directors: Michael Leonard, Jamie Helmer
    Producers: Michael Leonard, Justin Pechberty, Susan Schmidt
    Synopsis: Forced to move her family to the dilapidated farmhouse of her childhood, Helen is unsettled by a strange presence in the house, while her son grows dangerously out of control.

    Television Series

    Premium

    Thirteen Days
    3 x 60 mins
    Curio Pictures Pty Ltd
    Genre: Drama, Thriller, Historical
    Writer: Andrew Bovell
    Executive Producers: Jo Porter, Rachel Gardner, Marian Macgowan, Andrew Bovell
    Synopsis: The revisionist history of a forgotten woman at the forefront of our political landscape.

    The Housemate
    6 x 60 mins
    Lingo Pictures Pty Ltd
    Genre: Thriller, Crime, Mystery
    Writer: Liz Doran
    Executive Producers: Helen Bowden, Jason Stephens
    Synopsis: Three Melbourne housemates. One dead, one missing and one accused of murder. It’s a mystery that has baffled Australians, including investigative reporter Oli Groves, for nearly a decade… Until the missing housemate returns. Together with millennial podcaster Cooper Ng, Oli uncovers a dangerous web of secrets that threatens to engulf her personal life too. How far will she go before she loses herself – or endangers the ones she loves?

    Immersion
    8 x 60 mins
    I Am That Pty Limited
    Genre: Crime, Science fiction
    Director: Garth Davis
    Writer: Matt Vesely
    Producer: Samantha Lang
    Executive Producers: Garth Davis, Emile Sherman
    Synopsis: When an investigation into his daughter’s illness leads to signs of a shadowy government Agency experimenting with the subconscious, a police detective becomes trapped in an immersive reality.

    Forget Me Not
    8 x 30 mins
    Kacie Anning
    Genre: Comedy
    Writer/Director: Kacie Anning
    Producer: Kacie Anning
    Synopsis: Famous as a child for her parents’ notorious prank-filled online channel, Sally (27) is still reckoning with her unwanted fame when an unforgivable stunt by her parents sets Sally on a crusade to wipe her own existence from the internet. Together with two other internet-famous-kids and a documentarian hoping to expose ‘sharenting’ culture, Sally will take on internet giants, trolls and hackers, but most importantly, her parents, in a bid to have her Right to Be Forgotten granted.

    House of Kwa
    8 x 60 mins
    Wooden Horse Pty Ltd
    Genre: Drama
    Creator: Corrie Chen
    Writer/Director: Corrie Chen
    Writers’ Room Collaborators: Penelope Chai, Niki Aken, Liselle Mei, Kim Ho
    Producers: Jude Troy, Richard Finlayson
    Executive Producers: Jude Troy, Richard Finlayson, Elizabeth Bradley, Corrie Chen
    Synopsis: When high-profile journalist Mimi Kwa’s father sues her over his beloved sister’s will, she faces a battle with the ghosts and misdeeds of her family’s dynastic past.

    Unsettled
    8 x 60 mins
    Tilt Media & Entertainment Pty Ltd
    Genre: Family Drama, Mystery, Indigenous Realism
    Creators: Nicole Sullivan, Melissa Lucashenko
    Writers: Melissa Lucashenko, Stuart Page
    Producer: Diane Robertson
    Co-producer: Nicole Sullivan
    Executive Producers: Chris Hilton, Rhoda Roberts, Simonne Overend
    Synopsis: In an Australian seaside town newly arrived French teenager, Sasha, discovers the body of an Indigenous child which has been mysteriously preserved for 150 years forcing two prominent families to face unsettling secrets and triggers a battle over coveted ancestral land.

    Undercurrent
    6 x 60 mins
    Sweet Shop Green Pty Ltd
    Genre: Drama, Thriller, Crime, Mystery
    Creators: Rebecca Ingram, Stuart Page
    Writers: Stuart Page, Rebecca Ingram, Jock Serong
    Producer: Gal Greenspan
    Executive Producers: Ayelet Waldman, Sharlene George
    SSG Head of Scripted: Rachael Turk
    Synopsis: When a mainland police officer is murdered on idyllic Norfolk Island, an islander finds herself caught between the fiercely independent community she loves, the much-maligned Island Administrator tasked with investigating the crime, and her own desperate need for a smoke.

    Generate

    A Lonely Girl is a Dangerous Thing
    6 x 60 mins
    Thumper Pictures Pty Ltd
    Genre: Drama
    Writer: Jessie Tu
    Script Editor: John Collee
    Producer: Morgan Hind
    Synopsis: Jena is a Taiwanese-Australian woman and former child prodigy who is re-entering the white, male-dominated and privileged world of classical musicianship after a lengthy period out of the spotlight; in doing so she must grapple with her own understanding of her identity and power, which has been tied to this world and those that put her in it for as long as she can remember.

    Unqualified
    6 x 30 mins
    Catherine Moore
    Genre: Comedy
    Director: Matthew Moore
    Writers: Catherine Moore, Genevieve Hegney
    Producers: Catherine Moore, Genevieve Hegney
    Synopsis: The story of two women who are not just living a lie but lying for a living. Uptight, ambitious, Joanne Truebody and eternally optimistic, Felicity Bacon are over 45 and virtually skill-less. This odd couple team up to open a Temporary Employment Agency — but they’ll do ALL the jobs themselves. Jobs for which they are well and truly unqualified. Unqualified is for everyone who’s ever felt like an imposter in the workplace and anyone who actually is one.

    Good Eggs
    6 x 30 mins
    3rd Gen Productions Pty Ltd
    Genre: Comedy, Drama
    Writer: Melanie Tait
    Producer; Cecilia Ritchie
    Synopsis: Nicola is 39 and wants a family, Sarah is 40 and she’s losing her family, Zoya is 39 and she hasn’t got any family left. They haven’t seen the nuclear family work for anyone. Can a baby or two help these three friends make a family together?

    My Sister Ellie
    Jessie Mangum
    6 x 60 mins
    Genre: Mystery Thriller
    Director: Laura Scrivano
    Writers: Samantha Collins, Laura Scrivano
    Producer: Jessie Mangum
    Synopsis: Jen and her husband Paul land in wintery London determined to find Jen’s sister Ellie, the surrogate carrying their child, who has fled Australia and vanished. Desperate, they discover Ellie has lied about her former life in London, fuelling their fears and triggering Jen’s memories of the childhood death of Ellie’s twin Marianne. As their search continues Jen discovers how deep the lies run – are those closest to her hiding a terrible secret?

    Honeymoon
    8 x 30 mins
    Gina Song
    Genre: Comedy, Drama, Romance
    Writers: Gina Song, Liên Ta
    Synopsis: In a near future with increasing global warming and decreasing fertility rates, a romantic optimist, Thea Lim, joins ‘The Honeymoon’ – a program designed to pair young people with their potential life partners. Her happily-ever-after is complicated when she begins to fall in love with her matched partner’s cynical sister, Haru.

    Custodians
    8 x 30 mins
    Natasha Henry
    Genre: Comedy
    Writer: Natasha Henry
    Synopsis: A Pasifika creative lucks her way into a high stakes public relations role at a public art museum, just as the state government threatens to close it down. To keep her job and the museum open, she must singlehandedly transform their eccentric director into a woke media darling and push her moral and cultural compass to its limits.

    Online

    Adventuries of the Century
    42 x 1 mins
    Molly Daniels
    Genre: Comedy
    Director: Molly Daniels
    Writers/Producers: Molly Daniels, Dylan Murphy
    Synopsis: Dylan and Molly are two cousins who are regularly thrust into high-stakes escapades by their Grandma Catherine. In Adventuries of the Century, her demands will see the duo get to the bottom of an adoption scandal, rob City Hall, go on trial for their crimes, break out of prison, salvage a doomed wedding, and save Christmas!

    I’d Rather Eat Cake
    6 x 8 mins
    Blackwood River Films Pty Ltd
    Genre: Comedy, Drama
    Director: Mimi Helm
    Writer: Tahlia Norrish
    Producer: Sophia Armstrong
    Synopsis: Twenty-three-year-old Cobie assumed her sexual awakening would eventually arrive. But upon discovering she’s potentially asexual, Cobie takes matters into her own hands… I’d Rather Eat Cake is a comedy/drama based on truth that chronicles a young female’s journey towards radical self-acceptance.

    Let’s Break Up
    6 x 5 mins
    Kiosk Film
    Genre: Comedy, Drama
    Creator: Anisa Nandaula
    Writers: Anisa Nandaula, Gemma Bird-Matheson
    Producers: Tilly Towler, Sara Taghaode
    Synopsis: When Anisa, a seemingly conservative young Muslim woman, is rushed to hospital with a mystery illness, she must make a decision – will she come clean about her secret life of dating and stand-up comedy, knowing that her confession will radically change her closest relationships? Time is running out and her honesty seems to be the only way to figure out what is going on with her body.

    Scrunt Hunt
    15 x 5 mins
    Jordan Raskopoulos
    Genre: Comedy, Mystery, Fantasy
    Writer/Director: Jordan Raskopoulos
    Producer: Jordan Raskopoulos
    Synopsis: It’s Blues Clues meets Twin Peaks as Jordan and her son Scrunt; a yellow lizard boy powered by A.I. character technology, embark on adventures and solve mysteries in their animated neighbourhood.

    The Place I Carry Within
    1 x 20 mins
    Enoet Râz Pty Ltd
    Genre: Action adventure, Family, Fantasy, Game
    Writer/Directors: Enoet Râz, Ahnat Râz
    Producer: Enoet Râz
    Synopsis: Mina has requested to see you; she needs your help. With the passage of time, her most cherished childhood memories have faded away, destined to vanish forever. There is only one way to stop this from happening; you must go back in time, to the land she had to flee as a child, and relive her memories all over again. Will you agree to embark on this journey?

    Week beginning 16 August 2023

    This week I review two novels by Kerry Fisher. They are both set in Rome, tempting me to add this city to my 2024 travels as features that I have not read about previously are brought to light in these detailed works. One, Secrets at the Rome Apartment, was sent to me by NetGalley as an uncorrected copy for review. I was able to buy the first in what might well become a very readable series, on book Bub for 99p – a good find indeed.

    Kerry Fisher begins this delightful series with The Rome Apartment, in which the continuing characters, Ronnie and her daughter Nadia, and Marina are introduced. Their personalities are well observed in this first novel although it centres on Beth and the possible breakdown of her marriage. Ronnie’s and Nadia’s fraught relationship is sketched in around the possibility of the latter and her husband taking up residence in one of Ronnie’s Roman apartments, on a sabbatical from Britain. Ronnie and Marina’s relationship is described through their interaction with Beth, visiting in response to their advertisement of the apartment as a place for a woman in crisis to recuperate. Beth becomes the resident of the apartment Nadia would like to use. Although there are two other apartments they are in a state of disrepair. Their refurbishment and the manner in which is accomplished cleverly adds to the Marina’s characterisation. See Books: Reviews for the complete review.

    Kerry Fisher, Secrets at the Rome Apartment (The Italian Escape Book 2), Bookouture July 2023

    Secrets at the Rome Apartment continues the story of Ronnie, Nadia and Marina. A prologue establishes that one of the characters has been involved in a devastating accident. In the first chapter, Ronnie six years after his death, has obeyed her daughter, Nadia’s demand that she put flowers on her husband, Matteo’s grave. While there she meets Gianna, his mistress of twenty years and a reason for Ronnie’s reluctance.  This chapter establishes that Ronnie’s secrets have impacted on her marriage and relationship with Nadia. Chapter 2 is a return to the past, June 1971, and Ronnie’s secrets begin to be revealed. See Books: Reviews for the complete review.

    After the Covid update: Cindy Lou; Annabelle Crabb and Kitchen Cabinet; Heather Cox Richardson re the Republican Party; Guardian Live advertised talk – In conversation with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie; Hillary Clinton interviewed by Rachel Maddow; Georgia Indictments.

    Covid update by Australian state on Friday 11 August, 2023

    Australian Capital Territory : 191 new cases; 9 in hospital; none in ICU or ventilated; no deaths recorded.

    New South Wales: 1,993 new cases; 664 in hospital with 13 in intensive care; 36 new deaths recorded.

    Northern Territory: Five average cases in the week to August 8, with one in hospital and none in ICU. No deaths were recorded. NB the Northern Territory records data fortnightly so the next record will be Friday August 18.

    Queensland: Records on a seven-day rolling system (as per the federal government’s national reporting site). There were 183 daily average cases (a decrease from the previous week); 119 people in hospital and one in ICU.

    South Australia: there were 503 new cases (a decrease from 536 last week); 37 people are in hospital and three in ICU. There were no deaths recorded.

    Tasmania: there were 217 new cases with 7 people in hospital and 1 in ICU.

    Victoria: no independent recording of statistics. However, the federal statics show that there were 63 average daily cases, another decrease. There were 85 people in hospital and 5 in ICU. There was one death recoded.

    Western Australia: There were 677 new cases with 59 people in hospital, with 3 in intensive care. There were 10 deaths recorded.

    Cindy Lou at Divine, Jamieson

    A pleasant lunch at Divine Cafe and Bar meant that I did not have to venture into a cold Canberra night for a meal out for a change from home cooking. I chose from the lunch menu and my friend chose from the breakfast menu that is available until 2.30. My prawns were some of the nicest I have had – large and nicely cooked, no chilli, just luscious prawns. The accompaniment of rice noodles, egg, tofu, shallot and crisp bean sprouts made a delicious meal.

    The spice beans shakshuka breakfast menu dish was generous and also, from the look of the dish at the end, delicious.

    Two tropical juices accompanying the meals were excellent.

    ABC BACKSTORY

    Annabel Crabb on what happens behind the scenes of Kitchen Cabinet and the importance of a travel-hardy dessert *

    By Backstory editor Natasha Johnson Posted  Yesterday [Saturday] at 12:21pm

    Two women holding bowls of food standing against a wall with family photos on it, smiling at the camera.
    Nationals Senator Bridget McKenzie opened up about what it’s like being at the centre of a political scandal over a meal of smoked trout pasta.(ABC)

    Picture this… Annabel Crabb checking in at an airport, popping her signature wicker basket through security screening and boarding a plane, hoping the precious contents of her basket survive the flight and the change in weather conditions between the place of departure and the destination – the home of a politician she’s filming for her show, Kitchen Cabinet.

    A hand holding a basket with a cake wrapped in a teatowel.
    Dessert in transit and the basket that’s clocked up quite a few frequent flyer points.

    Returning after seven years, the new series profiles former Home Affairs minister Karen Andrews, Minister for Indigenous Australians Linda Burney, Opposition Leader Peter Dutton, Western Sydney Independent Dai Le, Nationals Senator Bridget McKenzie, Greens Senator Jordon Steele-John, Independent Senator Lidia Thorpe and Labor Minister Anika Wells.

    Camera crew filming a man and a woman standing in a forest in the distance.
    Filming with Peter Dutton on his Queensland farm.(ABC)

    Crabb has travelled to the Gold Coast, Perth, Melbourne, Brisbane, Wodonga and Sydney and her logistical challenge – aside from the interview itself, of course — is always how to make sure the dessert she’s carefully crafted is delivered in the best shape possible.

    “My friend Wendy Sharpe, with whom I’ve written a couple of cookbooks, is an imaginative cook and she helps me with the recipes, so we’ll go through who is this person, what’s their background, I might ask them what sort of dessert do you like?”

    Woman in a kitchen using a grater with a camera filming.
    Crabb spends a lot of time coming up with a special dessert for each guest and practices the recipe several times before filming.(ABC)

    “For example, Peter Dutton said he loves custard, and I thought okay that figures, so I made him a custard slice, but I put in some tweaks that I thought might appeal to a Queensland cop… like rum and coffee,” she explains. “So, we come up with a dessert that’s appropriate, looks nice on television and that will cope with a couple of hours in a plane [if we’re travelling interstate]. “Then, I make the dessert in my own kitchen, I’ll do a few trial runs first and once I’m confident I can make it, I devise a way of transporting it.”

    Woman in kitchen putting berries on a dessert with a basket next to her.
    After perfecting the recipe, the next challenge is working out how to ensure the dessert actually makes it to the dinner table.(ABC)

    “At airports I carry the dessert in my basket, which fits into the plane’s overhead compartment, and people tend to recognise me and know what I am doing but travelling to Perth with food can be tricky, because they’re VERY conscious of what you take into the West. “I’ve been pulled up at Perth airport with cake forks several times, so I’ve also learned that cutlery can be an issue!”

    There have — over the previous six seasons, which aired between 2012 and 2016 — been occasions when the dessert didn’t last the distance.

    Annabel Crabb basket used in filming of Kitchen Cabinet on a beach
    The well-travelled basket does its job but occasionally containers and cake forks have caused some headaches.(ABC)

    “Probably my biggest disaster was the brandy snap baskets I made for Craig Emerson in 2012, which were supposed to be filled with passion fruit curd and berries,” she recalls. “They were a MASSIVE pain in the arse to make and then I made the mistake of transporting them in a vintage tin whose beauty sadly outshone its actual airtightness. “Combined with the Brisbane humidity, my crisp little baskets became flat, flabby discs. “You’ll notice in that episode that the camera doesn’t linger on the dessert! “Also, in the last Kitchen Cabinet that went to air – two days before the 2016 election – I took Bill Shorten a picnic.”

    Woman and man sitting at picnic table in a park eating sandwiches and laughing.
    Bill Shorten politely ignored the fact that the sandwiches were a bit worse for wear when a picnic didn’t quite go to plan.(ABC: Kitchen Cabinet)

    “Foolishly, I once again relied on a vintage item – a fabulous old picnic case. “The Thermos leaked all over the sandwiches. “Shorten very politely ate soggy sandwiches without complaint.”

    Of course, the show is not really about food, either Crabb’s creation or her interviewees.

    Annabel Crabb holding a sourdough loaf with parliament house drawn on it

    Rather, what politicians reveal about their personal and political lives during a relaxed conversation in the comfort of their kitchen, freed from the straitjacket of scripted ‘talking points’, evasions and snappy sound grabs that usually pepper daily political discourse.

    “The food is essentially a device,” she says. “It gives people something to do with their hands and it’s something that they can concentrate on or switch to talking about if they feel uncomfortable. “If I’m going too far with something personal they go ‘oh, I think the beans are boiling’! “It’s a bit like how you have the best conversations with teenagers when driving in a car to footy training or somewhere and you’re not looking at each other. “Somehow, you get more out of that conversation. “This is the same thing; my main aim is to make them forget that they’re doing a televised interview so they will tell me more stuff.”

    Rice pudding dessert with rhubarb and blackberries on a kitchen bench.
    Rice pudding with rhubarb and blackberries which Crabb made for the episode with Indigenous Affairs Minister Linda Burney.(ABC)

    Crabb came up with the idea for the show after years working as a political journalist in the Canberra press gallery and says Kitchen Cabinet aims to give the audience a new insight into their elected representatives.

    This season showcases the diversity of the current parliament, with the eight politicians featured having very different life stories and paths into politics.

    “I always thought it was interesting that when you met politicians when it wasn’t in a formal interview situation you often learned a lot more about them and it was always useful in predicting how they were going to jump on certain issues because politicians are humans with huge subjectivity,” she says. “The thing that they will pursue and pursue and pursue or the thing that they will expend some political capital on is something that’s important to them because of something that happened to them in their life. “I don’t think Kitchen Cabinet is a substitute for political coverage — people critique the show and say oh, you’re giving them a soft ride. “Well, I interview people who get a hard time on the ABC all the time but I’m trying to find out stuff that you wouldn’t be able to find out if you had your boots on their throat in an interview. “It’s a delicate balance too — sometimes, if I’m asking about something very, very personal I will canvass it with a politician in advance. “Every single politician we elect has a back-story that dictates the way they behave in politics and whether you love or loathe them, it’s always worth knowing that story.”

    Camera crew filming food on a kitchen bench with a large light in the background.
    The production team sets up four cameras in a politician’s kitchen and it takes about half a day to record an episode.(ABC)

    To avoid interrupting the flow of conversation, four cameras are set up in the politician’s home and film pretty much non-stop for about four and a half hours.

    “The point of having so many cameras is that you can set up, light the place and then I can just step in and have a conversation where we’re not stopping and starting and saying ‘will you please say that again down camera two’ or whatever,” Crabb explains. “I’ve also got a very handy crew who’ve been with this show for a long time — director Stamatia Maroupas, director of photography Josh Flavell, sound recordist Gavin Marsh, camera operator Ben Lindberg, makeup artist Belinda Weber — somehow they manage to make a high-quality half hour of TV in one day, which is almost unheard-of. “And executive producer Madeleine Hawcroft has been there since the very beginning when she spent every shoot wearing my newborn baby in a sling, walking around the location outside with an earbud in her ear listening as I did the interview inside. “That’s how committed this brilliant crew is.

    “We only have our guests for one day. “It’s hard enough to get one day out of the working politician’s schedule let alone an opposition leader or minister, so we’ve got to get it all done fast. “I prepare a list of questions, but I don’t really ever have them in front of me.

    “I don’t walk in with a notebook. “From the first second the cameras roll, I try to engage them in conversation in such an absorbing way that they forget that there are cameras there, and, weirdly enough, even though it’s an incredibly awkward set up it’s amazing how quickly they do relax.”

    Two women sitting across a dinner table with one pretending to serve up food to the other, both smiling at the camera.
    Dining with Aged Care and Sport Minister Anika Wells who talks about juggling career, three kids and chronic illness.(ABC)

    What helps is the politician’s choice of cuisine. They’re advised to choose something they feel comfortable cooking and has some meaning to them.

    “You don’t want somebody to undertake to make a souffle and then have a meltdown on camera because it’s flopped,” Crabb says. “You want them to feel like they’re going to pull this off. “We don’t expect people to be brilliant cooks in fact, sometimes it’s hilarious when they aren’t.

    “Joe Hockey was highly under qualified to be in the kitchen but that was quite amusing. “Mind you, I think the world has a different view of men who can’t cook from women who can’t cook. “Often the women politicians I talk to are much more anxious about whether the meal works because they know they’ll be judged for not being able to cook much more than men will be. “But that’s a conversation for another time!”

    When the dinner and filming is finished, Crabb and the crew help do the dishes and pack up. As she tidies up production of this series, Crabb contemplates what could make a delicious dream episode – all eight guests breaking bread together around her dinner table.

    “I think this series is the most interesting one we’ve made, there are so many revelations,” she says. “There are two of my guests, who have never had a conversation with each other which I find absolutely stunning — two very high-profile people, I can’t tell you who because it’s a hilarious moment in the series. “But this is something that is weird about parliament. “Sometimes people who disagree with each other, and even people who agree with each other on some things, do not have conversations with each other. “And I think that’s madness.

    “I would have anybody on this series over to my house and preferably all of them at once because it would be a great night.”

    Kitchen Cabinet begins Tuesday, August 15, at 8pm on ABC TV and ABC iview

    • edited – the quotes have been run together in the same paragraph in some cases for space purposes. An unnecessary apostrophe was removed (!)

    Heather Cox Richardson American Letter

    As I try to cover the news tonight, I am struck by how completely the Republican Party, which began in the 1850s as a noble endeavor to keep the United States government intact and to rebuild it to work for ordinary people, has devolved into a group of chaos agents feeding voters a fantasy world. 

    The big news today was the hearing in Washington, D.C., where Department of Justice prosecutors argued for a protective order to stop former president Trump from intimidating witnesses and tainting the jury pool in the case against him for trying to stop the counting of electoral votes that would decide the 2020 presidential election. 

    Trump appears to have given up on winning the cases against him on the legal merits and is instead trying to win by whipping up a political base to reelect him, or even to fight for him. He has filled his Truth Social account with unhinged rants attacking the justice system and the president, and on Sunday his lawyer, John Lauro, echoed Trump as he made a tour of the Sunday talk shows, misleadingly suggesting that Trump had been indicted for free speech. In fact, the indictment says up front that even Trump’s lies are protected by the First Amendment, but what isn’t protected is a conspiracy that stops an official proceeding and deprives the rest of us of our right to vote and to have our votes counted. 

    A grand jury indicted Trump on August 1; when he was arraigned on August 3, the magistrate judge warned him that it is a crime to “influence a juror or try to threaten or bribe a witness or retaliate against anyone” connected to the case. Trump said he understood. 

    The next day, he posted on Truth Social: “IF YOU GO AFTER ME, I’M COMING AFTER YOU!” 

    Justice Department lawyers promptly sought a protective order to limit what information Trump and his lawyers can release. Trump has a longstanding pattern of releasing misleading information to bolster his position among his base, and lawyers are concerned that he will continue to intimidate witnesses and try to taint the jury pool in hopes of getting the trial venue moved.

    Days later, Trump told an audience in New Hampshire that he would not stop talking about the case, and called Special Counsel Jack Smith a “thug” and “deranged.” He has continued to post such messages on social media.

    U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan reinforced that Trump’s focus on politics had no relevance in her court of law. Justice reporter for NBC News Ryan Reilly noted: “The word of the Trump hearing today: yield. Came up six times, as in: ‘the fact that he’s running a political campaign currently has to yield to the orderly administration of justice.’”

    Chutkan agreed to the protective order but agreed with Trump’s team that it would not include any material already in the public domain. She also prohibited Trump from reviewing materials with “any device capable of photocopying, recording, or otherwise replicating the Sensitive Materials, including a smart cellular device.”

    Finally, she warned Trump’s lawyers: “I caution you and your client to take special care in your public statements in this case…. I will take whatever measures are necessary to protect the integrity of these proceedings.” If Trump repeats “inflammatory” statements, she said, she will have to speed up his trial to protect witnesses and keep the jury pool untainted.

    Just what that might mean was illustrated today when a judge revoked the bail of former FTX cryptocurrency chief executive officer Sam Bankman-Fried for witness tampering and sent him to jail. Prosecutors say Bankman-Fried was leaking the private diary entries of his former girlfriend to the New York Times to discredit her testimony against him.

    In Ohio, where voters on Tuesday overwhelmingly rejected the attempt of the Republicans in the legislature to stop a November vote on an amendment to the state constitution protecting abortion rights, Republicans tried to stop the inclusion of that amendment by challenging its form. Today the Ohio Supreme Court unanimously rejected that lawsuit. The proposed amendment will be on the ballot in November. 

    After demanding that David Weiss, the U.S. attorney in charge of investigating and charging Hunter Biden, be named a special counsel and then charging that Weiss had asked for and been denied that status—both he and Attorney General Merrick Garland denied that allegation—Republicans are now angry that Garland today gave Weiss that status. 

    Weiss requested that status for the first time earlier this week, and Garland granted it, although both Weiss and Garland had previously said Weiss had all the authority that status carries. Now House Republicans say appointing Weiss a special counsel is an attempt to obstruct Congress from investigating the Bidens. For all that Republicans are in front of the cameras every day insisting President Biden is corrupt, there is no evidence that President Biden has been party to any wrongdoing.

    One of the things such behavior accomplishes is to distract from the party’s own troubles, including the inability of House Republicans to agree to measures to fund the government after September. Far-right extremists are still angry at the spending levels to which House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) agreed in a deal to raise the debt ceiling last June, and are threatening to refuse to agree to any funding measures until they get cuts that the Senate will never accept. 

    The House left for its August break after passing only one of the twelve bills it needs to pass, and when it gets back, it will have only twelve work days before the September 30 deadline. This chaos takes a toll: when the Fitch rating system downgraded the U.S. long-term rating last week, the first reason it cited was “a steady deterioration in standards of governance.” It explained: “The repeated debt-limit political standoffs and last-minute resolutions have eroded confidence in fiscal management.” 

    Another thing this chaos does is convince individuals that the entire government is corrupt. On Wednesday, as Biden was to visit Utah, FBI agents shot and killed an armed man there who made threats against him, Vice President Kamala Harris, and other officials who have been associated with Trump’s legal troubles: Attorney General Garland, Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg, and New York attorney general Letitia James. Craig Deleeuw Robertson described himself as a “MAGA Trumper.”

    It seems we are reaping the fruits of the political system planted in 1968, when the staff of Republican presidential candidate Richard Nixon reworked American politics to package their leader for the election. “Voters are basically lazy,” one of Nixon’s media advisors wrote. “Reason requires a high degree of discipline, of concentration; impression is easier. Reason pushes the viewer back, it assaults him, it demands that he agree or disagree; impression can envelop him, invite him in, without making an intellectual demand…. When we argue with him, we…seek to engage his intellect…. The emotions are more easily roused, closer to the surface, more malleable.”

    The confusion also takes up so much oxygen it’s hard for the Democrats, who are actually trying to govern in the usual ways, to get any attention. Today was the one-year anniversary of the PACT Act, officially known as the Sergeant First Class Heath Robinson Honoring our Promise to Address Comprehensive Toxics Act of 2022. The law improves access to healthcare and funding for veterans who were exposed to burn pits, the military’s waste disposal method for everything from tires to chemicals and jet fuel from the 1990s into the new century. 

    According to Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL), the PACT Act has already enabled more than 4 million veterans to be screened for toxic exposure, more than 744,000 PACT Act claims have been filed, and hundreds of thousands of veterans have been approved for expanded benefits.

    Biden spoke in Utah about the government’s protections for veterans and why they’re important. In addition to the PACT Act, he talked about his recent executive order moving the authority for addressing claims of sexual assault, domestic violence, child abuse, and murder outside the chain of command to a specialized independent military unit—a move long championed by survivors and members of Congress.  

    Today the White House released a detailed explanation of “Bidenomics” along with resources explaining why the administration has focused on certain areas for public investment and how the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act have supported that investment. That collection explains why the administration is overturning forty years of political economy to return to the system on which the U.S. relied from 1933 to 1981, and yet it got far less traction than the fight over the protective order designed to keep Trump from attacking witnesses.

    —

    Notes:

    Click to access gov.uscourts.dcd.258149.28.0_5.pdf

    Click to access 2023-ohio-2786.pdf

    https://www.npr.org/2023/08/03/1191901829/trump-indictment-arraignment-news

    https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/doj-seeks-protective-order-after-trump-publishes-post-appearing-to-promise-revenge

    https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-indictment-campaign-election-interference-11cc4d1015c36e6ba078c00805d99838 ; https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/judge-largely-sides-with-trump-defense-on-protective-order-in-2020-election-case; https://www.npr.org/2023/08/11/1191362886/ftx-sam-bankman-fried-sbf-crypto-fraud;https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/trump-lawyer-john-lauro-indictment-defense-rcna98509;https://www.politico.com/interactives/2023/trump-criminal-investigations-cases-tracker-list/#jan- six; https://www.fitchratings.com/research/sovereigns/fitch-downgrades-united-states-long-term-ratings-to-aa-from-aaa-outlook-stable-01-08-2023; https://www.politico.com/minutes/congress/08-11-2023/gop-funding-meeting/https://apnews.com/article/utah-biden-fbi-assassination-threat-f9b31d6cd8e432870e4f8949cdb45b92; https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2023/08/10/remarks-by-president-biden-on-the-one-year-anniversary-of-the-pact-act-salt-lake-city-ut/; https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/28/politics/biden-executive-order-sexual-assault-military/index.ht; https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/more-details-on-guy-who-threatened-to-assassinate-biden; https://www.politico.com/news/2023/08/11/judge-warns-trump-speed-trial-00110870; Joe McGinnis, The Selling of the President, 1968 (London: Andre Deutsch, 1970), pp. 36, 41–45; https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/blog/2023/08/11/iia-resources/; https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/08/09/comer-biden-analysis/Twitter (X):

    From The Guardian Live

    In conversation with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
     
    The award-winning Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie will join us for a special livestreamed event to talk about her new children’s book, Mama’s Sleeping Scarf.

    A warm celebration of mother-daughter relationships and family life, the book is a joyous journey through an ordinary day in Lagos. Accompanied by beautiful illustrations by Joelle Avelino, Adichie shares the story of Chino, who plays with her mama’s scarf.

    She previously opened up conversations about mothers and daughters and what it means to be a woman today in the bestselling Dear Ijeawele: A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions, which explored how mothers can empower their daughters to become strong and independent.

    Join her with the Guardian’s Lisa Allardice for a wide-ranging conversation about her first book for children, her writing about her family and how we can be feminist role models for our children. She will also be answering your questions in this livestreamed event.
    Wednesday 6 September, 8pm–9pm
    Book tickets  

    Hillary Clinton on MSNBC

    Hillary Clinton appeared on MSNBC on Tuesday afternoon (Australian time) interviewed by Rachel Maddow. This was an excellent interview and worth following up. In the meantime, some of the coverage:

    Posted By Ian Schwartz Real Clear Politics On Date August 14, 2023

    Hillary Clinton: When You Look At The People That Support Trump’s Attitudes, It Is So “Anti-American” In Every Way

    Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and MSNBC host Rachel Maddow discuss former President Donald Trump trashing the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team.

    “When you really look at the whole network of people organizations and money that supports the kind of attitudes that Trump and those like him express, it is so anti-American in every way. And that is what shocks me, because people walk around with flags on talking about how they support him or one of his wannabe followers,” Clinton said.

    The Independent – David Taintor

    Hillary Clinton reveals one ‘satisfaction’ she gets from Trump’s indictment.

    ‘This is a terrible moment for our country, to have a former president accused of these terribly important crimes,’ Hillary Clinton says.

    Hillary Clinton responded in real-time to the news of Donald Trump’s likely fourth indictment in Georgia, revealing the one “satisfaction” she feels.

    “I don’t know that anybody should be satisfied,” Ms Clinton told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow late Monday. “This is a terrible moment for our country, to have a former president accused of these terribly important crimes. The only satisfaction may be that the system is working. Justice is being pursued.”

    Deadline

    Hillary Clinton’s Reaction To Trump 2020 Election Case Indictments On ‘The Rachel Maddow Show’ Goes Viral*

    By Armando Tinoco Night & Weekend Editor@armietinoco

    …’Clinton had been set to appear on Maddow’s show to talk about an opinion piece she wrote for The Atlantic in which she talks about the politicization of social issues. The former First Lady of the United States and Secretary of State wound up giving her take on the latest indictments surrounding Trump.

    “I don’t know that anybody should be satisfied. This is a terrible moment for our country to have a former president accused of these terribly important crimes,” Clinton said. “The only satisfaction is that the system is working. That all of the efforts by Trump and his allies and enablers to try and silence the truth and undermine democracy have been brought into the light. And justice is being pursued.”

    Trump was Clinton’s opponent in the 2016 presidential race which she ultimately lost. During his campaign, Trump incited his crowd of followers to chant “Lock her up,” in reference to Clinton using a personal e-mail system to handle classified information.

    “I hope that we won’t have accountability just for Donald Trump and if there are others named in these indictments along with him for their behavior but we will also have accountability for a political party that has just thrown in with all the lies and the divisiveness and the lack of any conscience about what has been done to the country,” Clinton also said tonight.

    *edited.

    Week beginning 9 August 2023

    The book sent to me as an uncorrected copy from NetGalley for review is by Hanna Flint. What Movies Teach Us Strong Female Character begins with a criticism of the form in which Barbie appears without the trappings of her many manifestations as a career woman, adventurer, glamour icon etc. For Hanna Flint the search for a doll that reflected her appearance was an important start to her concern with the way in which women’s appearance controls their lives.

    Barbie, the film, has raised awareness of this phenomena in the very person of Flint’s concern. Barbie also featured in the novel by Alice McDermott, Absolution, reviewed in the week beginning July 5th 2023. I have yet to see the film but look forward to doing so.

    Hanna Flint  Strong Female Character Footnote Press, February 2023.

    Hanna Flint has compiled a compelling autobiography with a mixture of events from her life and their connections to a host of films – those that she admires, and those which she disparages. More than this, her story has links to other women, people from diverse backgrounds, the film industry, and social change. It is a book that cannot be read without being challenged. Sometimes that challenge is directed to the language Flint uses, which at times seems blatantly provocative. However, more importantly, her analysis of ideas that permeate society and are perpetuated by film create debates well worth having. In using examples from the films she has viewed, the autobiography projects a broader world than usual when people write their story.

    Flint begins her discussion of her childhood with her search for a doll that reflects her physique – none is available, and the impact on this young girl is that there is a female ideal, and she is not it. This is not a new idea, it has been debated along with other targets impacting on childhood understandings of what is perfect, what is needed to measure up and the failings associated with not doing so. Nevertheless, this makes an excellent beginning to an autobiography that is different. It will be interesting to read any analysis Flint might make of the recently released Barbie.

    After the Covid update: Leanne Michelle writes about her response to Barbie; A.J. Pearce -Finding Good Advice in World War II-Era Women’s Magazines; Cindy Lou has coffees and pastries on the South coast; signs for Yes are prominent in businesses and gardens.

    Covid in Canberra

    The ACT recorded 188 new cases of Covid to the 4th of August 2023. There are 11 people with Covid in hospital, none of whom are in ICU or ventilated. Two people lost their lives to Covid in this period, bringing the total number of lives lost to Covid in the ACT to 266.

    Barbie the film: comments by Leanne Michelle

    My thoughts on the Barbie movie:

    I wasn’t really sure what to expect of this movie. I didn’t go into it expecting anything that was going to make me think – movies don’t always have to be cerebral, they can just be good old fashioned fun. And this movie is a truck ton of fun. Greta Gerwig has done an amazing job of bringing the world’s most famous doll to life. Barbieland looks visually stunning. The set designers really outdid themselves recreating all of the Dreamhouses and various Barbie vehicles. There is so much pink in this movie that I’m probably going to become allergic to it.

    Margot Robbie as Barbie is absolute perfection. She brings so much heart to this movie, and you feel her pain and sadness as well as her joy and excitement as she discovers more about the real world – and herself – than she ever anticipated. A brilliant bit of casting and I really can’t see anybody else in this role.

    Ryan Gosling as Ken is the absolute embodiment of the himbo accessory who suffers an existential crisis if Barbie fails to notice him. His comic timing is impeccable, and you can feel his frustration, confusion and hurt as he attempts to discover who he is without her. Also, the Kens musical number alone is worth the price of admission.

    America Ferrera’s pivotal speech is one that every woman in the cinema felt in her core. We all relate to it. We’ve all lived it. It infuriated us, but ultimately it inspired us. All of the man babies crying about how this movie is anti-men really don’t understand its message. This movie is not anti-men. It is anti-patriarchy, which is a very different thing. The patriarchy hurts everyone, not just women. I don’t think that the movie intentionally set out to deliver that message, but that’s the vehicle it has become.

    I honestly did not expect a movie about a doll to run me through such a gamut of emotions. It was hysterically funny, profoundly sad and ultimately hopeful. It is the kind of movie that I really needed at this point in time – something fun, a bit thought provoking, and thoroughly enjoyable. I will definitely go and see this movie again.

    4.5 hot pink stilettos out of 5. 

    Finding Good Advice in World War II-Era Women’s Magazines

    “The advice isn’t always consistent, it’s not always pleasant, but it is always fascinating.”

    By AJ Pearce , August 28 2023

    I first came across a copy of a 1939 British women’s magazine during an enthusiastic bout of procrastinating on eBay. Expecting nothing more than a mildly interesting read for my £4.95, a few days later, I found myself beginning what became a collection of hundreds of vintage magazines, a Sunday Times bestselling debut novel, and a new career as a novelist. As you can imagine, I’m still a keen supporter of timewasting online.

    That’s a pretty exciting series of events instigated by a magazine featuring a cheery woman wearing a sun hat on the cover, with the headline Knit This Beach Suit! But perhaps that’s the whole point. What on face value looked like a fun read became (as did countless other magazines in this genre) a source of some of the most interesting, significant, and inspiring material I’ve used in my research.

    That copy of Woman’s Own was an accessible, relatable glimpse into the lives of women in 1939. The pages were filled with fashion, beauty, fiction and films, a recipe for salmon in a sauce and a set of stomach exercises, adverts for Band-aids, Tampax, and McDougall’s self-raising flour. It was a magazine for me—if I had been getting on with life over eighty years ago.

    1939 is the year Britain went to war with Germany. The magazine I was holding would have been read just weeks before war was declared. It gave me an entirely new doorway into that world and, for the first time, made me think about writing historical fiction.

    If you’re wondering if salmon in a sauce is a little bit shallow as a gateway for a novelist, stick with me. Two columns in particular stood out. The first was called What Women Are Doing and Saying which featured news of a group of female boat builders—the eldest only eighteen—who had been taught by their father “because boy apprentices found work too tough (and) would not stay.” Then it told readers about Dr. Gisa Kaminer, the Austrian scientist assisting Professor Ernst Freund as he set up his London cancer research lab, having been exiled by the Nazis. The women had serious stories to tell.

    https://a889d421b5e77a4987c2ac5cf7e489da.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-40/html/container.htmlThe columnists are supporting their readers, championing them, informing, warning and in some instances, judging.

    The final feature, and the one that became the basis of my series The Emmy Lake Chronicles, was the advice column at the back. I was surprised at how many of the readers’ problems still had resonance. From the mother concerned that her daughter wasn’t working hard enough at school, to the twenty-year-old whose parents said she shouldn’t get married, to the woman whose husband was seeing way too much of a young married woman, they didn’t feel like history. They felt as if they could have been written today.

    My £4.95 had bought me a time machine.

    In the ten or so years since then, I’ve built a magazine collection that ranges from the 1960s back to a volume of The Lady’s Magazine: Or Polite Companion For The Fair Sex from 1761, including, for fans of Bridgerton’s Queen Charlotte, a report on her wedding to King George (it was not a small do). The majority of my collection, however, is from World War II, when the almost unimaginable challenges of war added layers of stories to the previously relatable advice. Nothing beats first-hand accounts of course, but in terms of understanding what mass numbers of women were concerned with and reading about in their everyday lives—these publications have been invaluable.

    While the bulk of the magazines tells me what women ate and drank and wore, or the brands they bought or the radio programs they listened to, it’s the advice columns that reveal the issues that really mattered to them: those concerns that kept them awake at night to the extent they were would write to a complete stranger and ask for help.

    This is gold to a writer.

    Equally, it is the responses of the advice columnists which give serious insight into the views, morals, and judgements of the period. In general, I have found them to be highly supportive of their readers, but I would be remiss not to say that the attitudes are very much of their time. Supportive on some issues, while on others revealing horrible bigotry. It’s not always comfortable reading, but it’s an insight I use in my work. In my debut novel, Dear Mrs. Bird, a young reader writes that she is in love with a Polish airman, much to the disapproval of her parents. The elderly advice columnist in the novel makes it clear that while the young man’s service in the war is much respected, marrying someone “from overseas” is not. It gave me the conflict I needed for the book’s young, far more modern protagonist Emmy Lake. In my most recent novel Mrs. Porter Calling, Emmy is now an advice columnist herself, and fights for her readers on every page.

    I was especially fascinated by the role of advice columnists in the war effort. Women’s magazines played a key part in the British Government’s communications. The Ministry of Information worked with the women’s press to reach millions of readers needed to join the war effort: recruiting to the services and factories, and crucially, maintaining the home lives and families that everyone was fighting for. If the cookery pages moved into making rations last and promoting carrots when the Ministry of Food predicted a glut, it was the advice columnists who had to deal with the emotional as well as practical impact of years of conflict. The readers’ problems in my novels are almost all based on letters published in original magazines. In just one issue, a wartime advice columnist might tackle loneliness, loss, grief, unplanned pregnancies or sexually transmitted diseases as well as the “usual” problems of mothers or daughters or work or money.

    The columnists are supporting their readers, championing them, informing, warning and in some instances, judging. Depending on the magazine, the advice isn’t always consistent, it’s not always pleasant, but it is always fascinating.

    It’s also increasingly hard to find. If you spot a stack of old magazines in your attic, please don’t throw them away. Even better, let me know about them. They hold so many stories I still want to tell.

    __________________________________

    Mrs. Porter Calling by AJ Pearce is available from Scribner, an imprint of Simon and Schuster.

    AJ Pearce

    AJ Pearce grew up in Hampshire, England. She studied at the University of Sussex and Northwestern University. Her collection of over 800 vintage women’s and news magazines is the inspiration for her series The Emmy Lake Chronicles, which includes Dear Mrs. Bird, Yours Cheerfully, and Mrs. Porter Calling. She lives in the south of England.

    AJ Pearce

    Edited (slightly) : Article from Women and Literature, Literature Hub.

    I find this google alert provides me with a wealth of interesting material about women’s writing, and books about women.

    Cindy Lou’s morning teas at the South Coast

    Massey on Pacific at Mossy Point was a great find. The seating is surrounded by gum trees, dogs are welcome, and the food and coffee were just what we wanted. We had a lime and coconut cake (delicious) and banana bread. The latter was warmed and served with a generous portion of butter. There was a good variety available. The empty case for hot items may mean that they had been devoured! However, it is as likely that the case was to be filled for the lunch time trade. Generous cooked breakfasts were available and were being taken to customers by smiling efficient staff. On the latter, the service was very prompt indeed. There were light blankets on some chairs, reminiscent of outdoor seating in Istanbul. The morning was warm, but it is easy to imagine customers being grateful for covering after an early morning jog in light clothing.

    Crumb Cafe is in the main thoroughfare at Batehaven and could be a little noisy. However, this did not deter the customers who filled all the seats inside and out on the first occasion we tried to eat there.

    When we were successful, we were pleased with the smiling service, good coffees and pastries – a Danish with pear and an apple crumble muffin complete with custard.

    The Batehaven Bakehouse is in a side street – not so much noise, but no lovely vista. This was the pick of the coffee places I visited. Perhaps this was partly because of the cream bun on the menu- reminiscent of student days spent at Rottnest Island after exams were over.

    No holiday was complete without such a bun, and, fortunately for our health, long bicycle rides around the island. Coffee at the Batehaven Bakehouse was served with a delicious light macaroon – even the takeaways that we ordered were accompanied by such a delicious morsel! The apple and cinnamon crumble muffin was excellent. No bike riding, merely a stroll – oh dear!

    Seen in a Bungendore shop window.

    I was pleased to see that the hairdresser I go to also has a Yes poster in the window. Great hairdressing and good values.

    Week beginning 3 August 2023

    Two books are reviewed this week – one that I read some time ago and somehow neglected to publish on the blog (the third in Kerry Wilkinson’s Whitecliff Bay series) and Keith Urban by Jeff Apter. Both were provided to me by NetGalley as uncorrected proofs for review.

    Jeff Apter Keith Urban Kensington Books Citadel, September 2023.

    Jeff Apter has adopted an incisive and detailed, but accessible, style which suits his topic – an Australian boy from Caboolture who wanted to succeed in Nashville. In particular, Apter has given the reader so much information about why the various people, as well as Keith Urban, might have acted as they have, but does not pass judgement. This is a style that enhances the biography in which Urban’s attempts at rehabilitation, his behaviour toward managers, bands, other performers, his marriage and attitudes towards expressing himself, are covered. There are plenty of clues to dwell upon as to why an attitude, behaviour or event might have occurred – but there is no overt or covert opinion expressed by this most delicate of biographers. I enjoyed the Australianness of the early chapters, they give Urban a background that cannot be eradicated by his life in America, and this resonates as a reality. At the same time, Nashville becomes an experience for those who know little about it, along with the development of a style of music that has changed over the period. So, too, do we learn about Urban as a songwriter, a man struggling towards success, and then eventual success in his personal and public life and someone as at home in each of the various spheres he now works and lives in. See Books: Reviews for the complete review.

    Kerry Wilkinson The Ones Who Are Buried (A Whitecliff Bay Mystery Book 3) Bookouture 17 April 2023.

    The Ones Who Are Buried continues the partnership between Millie Westlake and Guy Rushden and begins a new investigation into the disappearance of two school age boys. The investigation begins with Kevin Ashworth, former teacher and football coach found guilty of their abduction, leading the way over cold and wet moorlands to recover a small wooden box. It is too small to house the remains of the missing boys on whom the expedition has focussed but will become an important part of the story of their disappearance. Millie is intrigued by the demand for Guy’s presence, and the background to his and Ashworth’s story is partially revealed. Moving well away from cold and wet expeditions is Millie’s interest in unravelling a mystery associated with a film star, and their visit to her opulent but decaying house.

    At the same time as Millie and Guy investigate, their domestic circumstances are further revealed. Millie’s ongoing battle to remain calm in the face of her ex-husband’s and his new partner’s provocation; her relationship with her son who is in his father’s custody; her friendships; and then, a new introduction to the series, more about Guy’s domestic life. See Books: Reviews for the complete review.

    After the Covid update: Ian McMullan – Voice Paradox; Heather Cox Richardson – The most recent Trump Indictment; Cindy Lou breakfasts at Kopiku; excerpt from Secret London.

    Covid in Canberra the week ending 28 July 2023

    There were 176 new cases with 20 people in hospital with Covid. One person is in ICU and 1 ventilated. There was one life lost this week.

    Ther are no longer any restirctions in place. however, the encouragement to follow smart behaviours can be observed in the social distancing that takes place, and some wearing of masks.

    Another approach to The Voice to Parliament

    Voice Paradox

    Ian McMullan

    Opponents of the Voice referendum risk achieving the opposite of their stated wishes.

    Most of the credible opponents of the Referendum , including Peter Dutton and Sussan Ley, say that they are in favour of the first proposition to formally recognise indigenous Australians in the Constitution. I am sure that most Australians  also agree.

    Their objection to the  second proposition that a Voice to Parliament be enshrined in the Constitution has led then to oppose the entire question.

    Even if the Referendum succeeds the Voice will need legislation before any advisory body can be created.

    That is when the detail that many are clamouring for will be debated in Parliament.

    If the Referendum fails it is still open to legislate to establish a Voice. That  is the likely outcome..

    Many prominent Liberals are arguing that localised advisory bodies be created by legislation to provide advice to Government. I have heard Senator Price and Sussan Ley advocate for this outcome

    So the effect of a No vote is likely to be that recognition which is supported by many No advocates will fail and that The Voice which they oppose will happen.

    Surely some politically savvy Liberals will recognise the paradox they have created.

    First published in The West Australian, July 2023.

    Heather Cox Richardson – Letter From America, August 1, 2023.

    Today a grand jury in Washington, D.C, indicted former president Donald J. Trump for conspiring to defraud the United States, conspiring to disenfranchise voters, and conspiring and attempting to obstruct an official proceeding. The charges stemmed from Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election. A grand jury is made up of 23 ordinary citizens who weigh evidence of criminal activity and produce an indictment if 12 or more of them vote in favor. 

    The grand jury indicted Trump for “conspiracy to defraud the United States by using dishonesty, fraud, and deceit to impair, obstruct, and defeat the lawful federal government function by which the results of the presidential election are collected, counted and certified by the government; “conspiracy to corruptly obstruct and impede the January 6 congressional proceeding at which the collected results of the presidential election are counted and certified”; and “conspiracy against the right to vote and to have one’s vote counted.” 

    “Each of these conspiracies,” the indictment reads, “targeted a bedrock function of the United States federal government: the nation’s process of collecting, counting, and certifying the results of the presidential election.” “This federal government function…is foundational to the United States’ democratic process, and until 2021, had operated in a peaceful and orderly manner for more than 130 years.” 

    As Rachel Weiner pointed out in the Washington Post, “conspiracies don’t need to be successful to be criminal, and perpetrators can be held responsible if they join the conspiracy at any stage.”

    The indictment referred to six co-conspirators without identifying them by name, but the details included about them suggest that Co-Conspirator 1 is Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani; Co-Conspirator 2 is lawyer John Eastman, who came up with the plan for then–vice president Mike Pence to use his ceremonial role of counting the electoral votes to throw the election to Trump; Co-Conspirator 3 is Trump lawyer Sidney Powell; Co-Conspirator 4 is Jeffrey Clark, a Justice Department lawyer whom Trump tried to push into the role of attorney general so he could lie that there had been election fraud; Co-Conspirator 5 appears to be Kenneth Chesebro, a Trump attorney behind the idea of the false electors. 

    The identity of Co-Conspirator 6, a political consultant, is unclear.

    On The Reid Out tonight, law professor Neal Katyal suggested that the six were not indicted because the Justice Department “doesn’t want the trial of the other six to be bundled up with this and slow this down.” Los Angeles Times senior legal affairs columnist Harry Litman concluded that the absence of Trump’s White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, from the indictment indicates he’s cooperating with the Department of Justice. Meadows had a ringside seat to the last days of the Trump administration.

    The indictment is what’s known as a “speaking indictment,” one that explains the alleged crimes to the public. It undercuts Trump loyalists’ insistence that the Department of Justice is trying to criminalize Trump’s free speech by laying out that Trump did indeed have a right to challenge the election—which he did, and lost. He also had a first-amendment right to lie about the election.  

    What he did not have was a right to use “unlawful means of discounting legitimate votes and subverting the election results.”  

    The indictment begins by settling out that Trump “lost the 2020 presidential election” but that “despite having lost, [Trump] was determined to remain in power.” So he lied that he had actually won. “These claims were false, and [Trump] knew they were false.” More than 15 pages of the 45-page indictment establish that Trump knew the allegations he was making about election fraud were lies. 

    In one memorable December exchange, a senior campaign advisor wrote in an email, “When our research and campaign legal team can’t back up any of the claims made by our Elite Strike Force Legal Team, you can see why we’re 0–32 on our cases. I’ll obviously hustle to help on all fronts, but it’s tough to own any of this when it’s all just conspiracy sh*t beamed down from the mothership.”

    The Trump team used lies about the election to justify organizing fraudulent slates of electors in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Allegedly with the help of Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel, they attempted to have the legitimate electors that accurately reflected the voters’ choice of Biden replaced with fraudulent ones that claimed Trump had won in their states, first by convincing state legislators they had the power to make the switch, and then by convincing Vice President Mike Pence he could choose the Trump electors. 

    When Pence would not fraudulently alter the election results, Trump whipped up the crowd he had gathered in Washington, D.C., against Pence and then, according to the indictment, “attempted to exploit the violence and chaos at the Capitol” to overturn the election results. “As violence ensued,” the indictment reads, Trump and his co-conspirators “explained the disruption by redoubling efforts to levy false claims of election fraud and convince Members of Congress to further delay the certification based on those claims.” On the evening of January 6, 2021, the indictment alleges, Trump and Co-Conspirator 1 called seven senators and one representative and asked them to delay the certification of Biden’s election. 

    While they were doing so, White House counsel Pat Cipollone called Trump “to ask him to withdraw any objections and allow the certification. The Defendant refused.” Just before midnight, Co-Conspirator 2 emailed Pence’s lawyer, once again begging the vice president to “violate the law and seek further delay of the certification.” 

    While Trump loyalists are trying to spin the indictment as the weaponization of the Department of Justice against Trump, legal analyst George Conway noted on CNN tonight: “All the evidence comes from Republicans. If you go through this indictment and you annotate the paragraphs to figure out who are the witnesses the [special counsel] would use to prove particular points, they’re all Republicans. Those are the people who were having the discussions, telling [Trump], ‘You lost.’” 

    Trump will be arraigned at 4:00 p.m. Eastern time on August 3. The case of the United States of America v. Donald J. Trump has been randomly assigned to Judge Tanya S. Chutkan, appointed by President Obama in 2014 and confirmed 95–0 in the Senate. Chutkan has presided over dozens of cases concerning the defendants who participated in the events of January 6, 2021, and has been vocal during sentencing about the stakes of that event. In December 2021 she said: “It has to be made clear that trying to stop the peaceful transition of power, assaulting law enforcement, is going to be met with certain punishment.”

    “The attack on our nation’s capital on January 6, 2021, was an unprecedented assault on the seat of American democracy,” Special Counsel Jack Smith said in his statement about the indictment.

    “The men and women of law enforcement who defended the U.S. Capitol on January 6 are heroes. They’re patriots, and they are the very best of us. They did not just defend a building or the people sheltering in it. They put their lives on the line to defend who we are as a country and as a people. They defended the very institutions and principles that define the United States.”

    The prosecution of former president Trump for trying to destroy those institutions and principles, including our right to consent to the government under which we live—a right the Founders articulated in the Declaration of Independence—should deter others from trying to do the same. Moreover, it will defend the rights of the victims—those who gave their lives as well as all of us whose votes were attacked—by establishing the truth in place of lies. That realistic view should enable us to recommit to the principles on which we want our nation to rest.

    Such a prosecution will reaffirm the institutions of democracy. Donald Trump tried to destroy “the free exercise and enjoyment of a right and privilege secured…by the Constitution and laws of the United States—that is, the right to vote, and to have one’s vote counted.” Such an effort must be addressed, and doing it within the parameters of our legal system should reestablish the very institutions Trump loyalists are trying to undermine.

    As former House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said this evening: “Like every criminal defendant, the former President is innocent until proven guilty…. The charges…must play out through the legal process, peacefully and without any outside interference…. As this case proceeds through the courts, justice must be done according to the facts and the law.”

    —

    Notes:

    Click to access gov.uscourts.dcd.258149.1.0_1.pdf

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/08/01/trump-indicted-jan-6-overturn-2020-election-results/

    https://www.congress.gov/nomination/113th-congress/1227

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/08/01/trump-indictment-jan-6-2020-election/

    https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/01/politics/co-conspirators-trump-indictment/index.html

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/08/01/trump-indicted-jan-6-overturn-2020-election-results/

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2023/08/01/trump-charges-2020-election-probe/

    Cindy Lou breakfasts at Kopiku, O’Connor

    Kopiku has been a stalwart of breakfasts and coffees from its time as 39 Steps. During one period of ownership the cafe failed to meet the friendliness and efficiency of its past ownership, and current owners. This was a pity, but customers returned in a stream once the present owners took over. Once again there were smiles, efficient service, and a dog bowl. Despite their opening Kopiku as the Covid regulations were introduced, they have been immensely successful. On weekends it is sometimes difficult to find seating at their delightful rustic round tables outside. However, on a weekday morning I found everything to my liking – seating outside, a good menu, the regular smiling efficiency and excellent food.

    From Secret London (edited)

    A Giant Food Hall With Over 15 Food Vendors Has Opened Up In Battersea Power Station • Arcade Battersea

    Hitting the recently-revamped grade II-listed building, the latest London food hall is set to rival heavyweights such as Eataly.

     JACK SADDLER • 26 JULY, 2023

    a pre-vis image of a bar running along the back wall of the arcade battersea food hall
    Credit: Arcade

    Giant food halls have been a roaring success in London as of late. Just look at Eataly, the indoor Italian market in a 42,000 square foot space in Liverpool Street, serving up heaps of tongue-tingling pasta and delicate glasses of wine.

    Something else that’s been having a bit of a moment recently is Battersea. So, it makes sense that the newest kid on the food hall block has opened inside the recently transformed Battersea Power Station. We got a chance to go and have a look before it opened up fully and we were pretty impressed.

    The Arcade Battersea food hall follows on from the success of the brand’s unique food hall concept at its Arcade Centre Point location in Oxford Street. The new food hall boasts 500 seats, two bars, three stand-alone restaurants and a private dining room. It’s quite the dining destination!

    the interior of the battersea arcade
    Credit: Edmund Dabney

    Said Cokey Sulkin, COO of Arcade: “I’m thrilled to be leading the teams at Arcade Centre Point and Arcade Battersea. We aim to create a drinking and dining destination to attract Londoners and international guests alike via global cuisines and seamless technology in the historic Power Station”.

    Food & drink at Arcade Battersea

    Oh, and by the way, those restaurants and bars are in addition to the food hall’s own vendors! Guests can experience a truly unique dining experience in the food hall, with 13 different cuisines to take their taste buds all around the world. We’re talking Cantonese comfort food from Sui Sui, tasty Thai food from Phed Power, Indian fast food from Hero, and Nepali street food from Tipan Tapan (just to name a few). There’s even a new flatbread concept from TikTok butter-boy (and hugely successful restaurateur) Thomas Straker.

    two flatbreads from thomas straker's offerings at Arcade Battersea
    Credit: Tim Atkins

    Two bars are on hand to keep your thirst sated: Tap Room and ABC Bar. The former features a wall of 32 taps and a huge selection of beer from local and international breweries. ABC Bar, meanwhile, is full to the brim with all of your favourite cocktails.

    some powder being dusted over the top of a bright orange coloured drink in a glass
    Credit: Tim Atkins

    The best part of the food hall is the order-to-table system that made their original site so popular. What does that mean for you? All you have to do is take a seat, and you can then order widely from around the food hall, all without having to leave your seat. Grab a burger from one place, dumplings from another, a flat bread, and a round of drinks, all without ever having to queue!

    The stand-alone restaurants

    As if all of that wasn’t enough, there are also three restaurants at Arcade Battersea for you to stuff your face in. Manna is a US-style smash burger and fried chicken joint that has created a selection of dishes specifically for Battersea Power Station (now doesn’t that make us feel special?). Then there’s Solis, a grilled chicken and steak brand, and completing the trilogy of restos is cult Taiwanese favourite, BAO. They’re masters of (well, you guessed it) bao, and they’ve brought a new noodle shop concept to town.

    A word to the wise: go with an empty stomach or you’ll regret it…

    Read more: London’s Biggest Asian Food Hall Might Just Rival Chinatown.Event details

    Week beginning 26 July 2023

    This week I review another Louise Doughty novel which can now is available for pre-order and will be published on 31 August 2023.

    Louise Doughty A Bird in Winter Faber and Faber August 2023

    When I finished A Bird in Winter I wondered why I had not followed up my recognition upon reading Apple Tree Yard that Louise Doughty was a writer I wanted to read, and read, and read. I am so pleased that I followed my instincts, although belatedly, and requested this novel from NetGalley. I am grateful that NetGalley gave me the opportunity to reread Apple Tree Yard and then this latest novel. A Bird in Winter is gripping, devastating and engaging, demanding to be read in one sitting. Heather, Bird of her father’s affection, Fevver of her friend’s small daughter and Sophie of her enemies’ doing, is a flawed character. But she is also so absorbing that she becomes a woman whom we want to triumph. Bird is in her fifties, physically strong and on the run.

    Loss is a pervading feeling throughout the novel, from Heather’s leaving a meeting in the room named Alaska, through her flight from everything she knows with a hold all full of clothing for various iterations of herself, to the ending where she is still travelling. Her past, present and future are bound up in her father’s profession, her mother’s acceptance of his secrecy and frequent unexplained absences and her eventual peaceful widowed life, free of the intricacy of being married to a secret agent. Heather has no such future, and her present is largely unpeopled by close friends or family. She has protected herself and friends by rejecting involvement, perhaps because of her mother’s experience, perhaps because of her own inability to create lasting relationships. Heather’s loneliness is apparent throughout the novel, weaving the coldness of such a life with the physical environment in which she journeys. Books: Reviews

    After the covid update: Bob McMullan – Are the Greens losing the renters’ vote?; Cindy Lou; Yes signs in Canberra.

    Covid Canberra

    There were 180 new cases of Covid 19 this week (to 21 July 2023) with 12 people in hospital with Covid. No cases are in ICU or ventilated. however, ther have been 2 lives lost to Covid this week.

    Pearl and Irritations

    Are the Greens losing the renters’ vote?

    By Bob McMullan

    Jul 26, 2023

    House rental, real estate, detached house.

    One of the emerging political challenges of the 2020’s in Australia is the contest for the votes of renters.

    This contest has changed the political complexion of previously safe conservative seats and led to a major policy confrontation between the Greens and the Labor Party.

    Some interesting research has emerged which suggests, contrary to the prevailing orthodoxy, that the Greens may be losing votes as a result of their cooperation with the Liberals, Nationals and One Nation to block increased government funding for affordable housing.

    Long-time political analyst, and former Senator, John Black, has made an assessment of the lessons to be drawn from the Fadden by-election results. What distinguishes Black’s analysis is his focus on polling booth level statistics and associated demographic data.

    It is difficult to do this at a by-election because it is impossible to get data about those who did not vote. The turn-out in Fadden was only 72% compared to 86% at the general election.

    Nevertheless, Black draws some interesting insights from the data.

    Some of his conclusions are obvious. For example, he asserts that the Prime Minister’s honeymoon is over. I think even Anthony Albanese would agree with that. He is now facing all the benefits and risks of incumbency. The polling is still very strong for the PM but he is no longer exempt from the voters’ assessments merely because he is not Scott Morrison.

    What is most interesting to me, because I have seen nothing comparable in more general analyses of the current political situation, is Black’s assessment that the Greens are losing the votes of renters.

    Black puts it colourfully, but if his statistics are correct the underlying analysis seems valid.

    As reported in the Financial Review, Black asserts the Greens have been led into a “demographic cul de sac” by their housing spokesperson, Max Chandler-Mather.

    His data shows that “The green strategy of voting with the coalition against Labor’s housing reforms almost halved their primary vote in Fadden…” and “ The supposed beneficiaries of the strategy renters swung to the coalition candidate…”

    It is almost impossible to assess the national significance of these trends as by-elections are by their very nature different from general elections.

    However, in the normal course of events by-elections tend to be good for independent and minor party candidates as vehicles for relatively safe protest.

    Therefore, if Black’s analysis is correct, it may be even worse for the Greens than it seems.

    John Black is an experienced analyst and his assessments should be taken seriously. If I were responsible for the Greens party strategy I would certainly be considering whether their research validates the Black analysis, and if not why not.

    The national polling does not show any significant trend in support for the Greens. At the 2022 election they received 12.25% of the national vote . They did even better in Queensland with 12.94%. This makes support for the Greens dropping to 6.18% a cause for concern for them.

    It is important to remember that voting at a ballot box tends to be more meaningful than merely responding to a question from a pollster.

    What we can reasonably conclude from the polling and by-election data is that the Greens are not making any gains overall from their blocking strategy and may even be losing the votes they are targeting.

    Time will tell but it makes for some interesting dynamics in the parliament and in the public debate about housing policy over the next few months.

    Great to see on our afternoon walk

    And a chance to correct my spelling of Mittagong, and feel even better about the motel we chose…

    Cindy Lou eats at Jamieson Shopping Centre

    Back to Canberra, away from the marvellous fish and chips on the coast, and a meal after shopping. Coffee Guru serves quiches, sausage/ricotta and spinach rolls, sandwiches, coffee, tea and fancy cold beverages. On this occasion I enjoyed the water with my meal. The salad served with the ricotta and spinach roll was generous, fresh and delicious. However, the pastry on the roll needed to be crisper around what was a pleasant and generous mixture of ricotta and spinach.

    Week beginning 19 July 2023

    The book reviewed this week is Apple Tree Yard which has been offered on NetGalley together with Lousie Doughty’s latest novel, A Bird in Winter. I ended the earlier review, published in one of my first blogs, with the comment that I would look for more of Doughty’s work. I have been remiss in not doing so – and have missed such opportunities to read some engaging and thoughtful novels. I am pleased to have now read A Bird in Winter, and am looking forward to reading all the work before and in between these excellent novels.

    Louise Doughty Apple Tree Yard Faber & Faber 2017.

    Is this the story of an affair or a marriage? Ostensibly, the main protagonists are Yvonne Carmichael, eminent scientist and X, a spook. The novel begins with them in the dock, we are not sure why, but we do know that we feel afraid for them. The reader is then drawn into the first meeting and their relationship. Illicit sex is driving force for both, and this relationship becomes pivotal in the novel, with Yvonne’s nighttime letters to X, her meetings with him, some sexual and later, some caring. Throughout the novel other characters seemingly provide a backdrop, Guy, the husband and Carrie and Adam, Yvonne’s adult children. However, by the end of the novel, the resolution of the trial and affair, it is Yvonne’s marriage, troubled though it may be, that provides the focus of her thoughts. Books: Reviews

    Covid in Canberra

    There have been 244,173 cases since March 2020. This week (ending 14 July, 2023) there have been 204 new cases. Eleven people are in hospital with Covid with 2 in ICU and 1 ventilated. Three lives have been lost.

    Cindy Lou eats at the coast

    Berny’s Fish and Chips was a delightful find at Batehaven. The friendliness was only surpassed by the quality of the meal. The chips were crips and succulent and the fish with its light batter so much better than anything I have had since the Benito fish meals in New York and LA. There is outside seating and parking close by. The hamburger (complete with beetroot) was bought for the non- fish eater at the next-door cafe. They also provided the coffees pictured below.

    The variety of pastries at Three 666 Espresso Bar is amazing. We had a splendid breakfast there with good coffees before beginning our travel homewards. This cafe has a large menu offering cooked meals, and a large range of sandwiches and rolls. A huge breakfast here is a must for each visit to Lilli Pilli (although we did not indulge on this occasion because we needed to be on our way, two might be needed on our next visit). The outdoor wood fire was a lovely touch.

    Station Coffee House Mittergong

    Arriving late in Mittergong we found that many eating places were closed. Fortunately, Station Coffee House remains open until 4.00 on Sunday, with its kitchen operating until 3.00. The beef salad and chicken salad were excellent – full of flavour, the meat beautifully cooked and the salad generous. The cakes we bought to have with the very good coffees had to be parceled up and taken back to the motel for supper.

    The Mittergong Motel makes provision for dogs to stay. We were happy to take advantage of this opportunity to take Leah to the coast, through Wollongong to take a friend to the station for her train to Sydney, and to walk and sleep in Mittergong. What we did not expect was such a friendly and pleasant place to stay. The motel provides typical Australian country town accommodation. However, the room was particularly nice with a fantastic shower, comfortable bed and good air conditioning. Breakfast was complimentary and provided buffet style to be taken back to the room for cooking and eating -yoghurt, cereals, fresh fruit, fresh milk, white and wholemeal bread and orange juice. Coffee, tea and biscuits were provided in the room. There were pleasant walks in the vicinity, enjoyed by the three of us.

    Australian National Museum

    I was fortunate to have a reason to visit the museum recently, to introduce an American visor to its lovely location on Lake Burley Griffin and, of course, the exhibitions. There is such an improvement in the latter! Although I have visited on many occasions, this time I was most impressed, and happy to consider returning to enjoy more of what is now on show at the museum.

    The museum is located in beautiful bushland.

    There was a special exhibition which needed to wait for another visit. This exhibition from the British Museum explores how goddesses, demons, witches, spirits and saints have shaped our understanding of the world. Discover Feminine Power through the Ages. Until 27 August 2023, costs apply.

    Some of the exhibits we did see are pictured below. The Indigenous Gallery is a joy to wander through, and there will be more photos from the portion I saw next week.

    Week beginning 12 July 2023

    This week’s review is of another Pen & Sword publication, this time reviewing Beverley Adams’ The Forgotten Tudor Royal Margaret Douglas, Grandmother to King James VI & I. I have reviewed two of her books, The Rebel Suffragette (December 1, 2021) and Ada Lovelace The World’s First Computer Programmer ( March 29, 2023). The Pen & Sword series is known for its accessible writing, and stories of people and events that are less well known. Yes, Margaret Douglas is yet another Tudor – but one of whom we have heard little.

    Beverley Adams The Forgotten Tudor Royal Margaret Douglas, Grandmother to King James VI & I Pen & Sword, Pen & Sword History, 2023.

    Thank you, NetGalley, for providing me with this uncorrected proof for review. I was impressed with Beverley Adams’ ability to assemble a plausible story and character development from a small amount of material in The Rebel Suffragette The Life of Edith Rigby (Pen & Sword History 2021) and Ada Lovelace The World’s First Computer Programmer, (Pen & Sword History 2023).

    Unfortunately, The Forgotten Tudor Royal Margaret Douglas does not meet the standard of Adams’ previous work. There is repetition, some awkward phrasing and, more importantly, Margaret Douglas does not shine from the pages as do Edith Rigby, in particular, and Ada Lovelace. Nevertheless, for those interested in Tudor history, this book makes a solid contribution to evoking the period, the ramifications of religious, geographic and personal interests that permeated the finery and theatre of the royal courts of Henry V11, Henry V111, Mary 1, Elizabeth 1 and Mary Queen of Scots. From her birth in 1515 to her death at sixty-two, Margaret Douglas had an important role in the Tudor hierarchy as she matured, grasping opportunities for herself and her children. She achieved her aim, her grandson, James became James V1 of Scotland and James 1 of England.  See Books: Reviews for the complete review.

    Covid-19 cases at Friday 7 July – there are 233 new cases, with 14 people with covid in hospital, and 1 in ICU.

    British elections

    Bob McMullan

    It is as certain as any future event can be that the British Labour Party will win the next UK election, which is likely to be held in the latter part of 2024.

    It is technically possible that the election could be delayed until January 2025 but it is hard to imagine the government choosing to campaign over Christmas.

     The combination of factors which make this result all but inevitable go beyond a simple reading of the polling data.

    The polling data as shown in the Politico poll-of- polls shows the Labour Party in an extraordinarily strong position The support has been strong for more than twelve months. Of course, the support for Labour shot up as a consequence of Liz Truss’s extremely short but disastrous tenure as PM. While it has improved a little for the Tories since then the support for the British Labour Party remains very strong.

    The latest Politico poll- of-polls suggests the Labour Party has a 46% to 27% lead over the Conservative Party. This represents a 14% improvement over the Labour Party’s miserable 2019 result.

    In addition, the corruption controversy around the SNP in Scotland suggests that Labour will win back a significant number of seats in Scotland.

    The most recent polling I have seen of national election voting intentions in Scotland suggests Labour and the SNP are tied on 34% each. This would mean a 15% improvement for Labour on their 2019 performance.

    The “Red Wall” of previously safe Labour Party seats in the North of England which were lost so disastrously in 2019 appear to be reverting to pre-Boris/ Brexit levels as the Tories fail to deliver the promised support to the North, Boris disappears into the wilderness, Brexit fades as an issue and the Labour Party presents a more acceptable face to many traditional Labour voters.

    The combined effect of all these factors, when taken with an apparently tired and divided government, makes it clear that unless they score an astoundingly bad own goal the Labour Party must win.

    The steady leadership style of Keir Starmer, like that of Anthony Albanese before the last Australian election, should be enough for a clear win for the Labour Party.

    The current Prime Minister, Rushi Sunak, appears competent but does not seem to have the ability to establish a rapport with the “Red Wall” voters or to recover lost ground in other areas. He is also continually being undermined by Boris Johnson’s supporters and faces several difficult by-elections.

    Reports from the UK, particularly with regard to Prime Minister’s questions, suggest Starmer and his deputy, Angela Rayner, have the measure of Sunak and his deputy.

    It all points to a strong result for Labour, and the recent Local Government elections reinforce that view.

    In fact, the Election Predictor model suggests a sweeping landslide.

    The most recent prediction, based on polling essentially the same as that from Politico, indicated that if the current numbers were reflected at a General election the result would be Labour 475 seats (an increase of 273), Conservatives 100 (a loss of 265), SNP 28 ( a loss of 20) and Liberal Democrats 23 ( a gain of 12).

    It is hard to believe that the final result could be as extreme as the Predictor suggests, but it is equally hard to imagine a scenario under which Keir Starmer does not become Prime Minister with a solid majority by the end of next year.

    First published in Pearls and Irritations

    Here is the truth about Aboriginal ‘elites’: all they have achieved had to be fought for – Marcia Langton

    Story by Lorena Allam • 10h ago

    The Guardian

    That some Aboriginal people today such as Prof Marcia Langton hold a PhD or own a house or drive flash cars, it is an achievement against the odds.’ Photograph: Lukas Coch/AAP

    The need to produce ID was one reality of the draconian protection era that she, her brothers and sisters grew up in. Every aspect of their young lives was controlled by the government: where they could travel, live and work. Their wages were paid as “pocket money” or withheld by the “board”. They had to seek permission to buy a dress, book a train ticket, attend a funeral. If your “papers” weren’t in order, you’d be picked up by police. My grandmother never stopped having hers ready.

    Related: New Australia v old Australia: a yes vote on the voice is a vote for the future | Megan Davis

    As a child on the mission, she was given a year’s worth of schooling, delivered at the end of a cane by the stern Anglican manager’s wife. Still a child, she was sent away at 14 to work as a “domestic”. As the cook in a shearer’s camp, she met my grandfather and fled the terrors of that servitude as quickly as she could. They, and later their children, moved constantly to keep ahead of the New South Wales protection board, which could have taken their children, including their youngest, my father. He was a talented footballer and a bright student with a love of numbers, but he had to leave school at 15 to help support his family.

    They are both gone now. My father died at 60, far too young. It’s not uncommon for Aboriginal men: the average life expectancy at birth is now 71 years, but that’s the optimistic end of the scale for earlier generations. So many of our cousins, fathers, uncles, brothers don’t make it.

    I finished high school and went to university. My cousins and I were the first to pass through the foreign land of tertiary education. We have good jobs and can pay our bills. We have used that education to improve our lives and those of our children. We advocate for the rights of First Nations people because we can, and we do it to honour the sacrifices of those who went before us.

    The no campaign says the voice to parliament will create a ‘two-tier society’, but that is already where we live

    At a forum in inner-west Sydney this week, Warren Mundine told the audience he was concerned the voice to parliament amounted to “a power grab by academics in the Indigenous elite, people and that [sic] who are concerned about losing their power”.

    Our elders didn’t work for personal enrichment or to accumulate an investment portfolio. They didn’t collect antiques or buy holiday homes. They didn’t leave us generational wealth. They shielded us as best they could against intergenerational trauma. It got to us anyway. They worked to keep us safe in a racialised system that shortened their lives, limited their opportunities and pushed them to the fringes of a hostile society in their own land.

    The no campaign says the voice to parliament will create “permanent race-based privilege” and a “two-tier society”, but that is already where we live. Generations have fought for everything we now enjoy. Land rights, native title, education, jobs: any progress has come from Aboriginal struggle, not from some benevolent external force, or from the exercise of some undefined power.

    “I’m really sick of people questioning our honesty and integrity,” Prof Marcia Langton said recently, rubbishing allegations she was part of some secret cabal of Indigenous academic power elite.

    A Noongar Elder is urging Australians to learn more about the proposed Indigenous Voice to Parliament.

    “I’m on the public record for over 30 years on the empowerment of Indigenous people. And yes, I work at a university. But I grew up in a native camp and in housing commission, and tents, in Queensland. And I know the track record of the members of the referendum working group. Every one of them is an outstanding and honourable person.”

    They are not elites, she said. They are survivors of a system that did its best to ensure they did not succeed. And they are a reflection of the black excellence in our communities, where so many brilliant, creative people have had their potential cut short by the preventable diseases of poverty and the violence of the carceral system, entrenched over more than a century of racially discriminatory laws and policies.

      That some Aboriginal people today hold a PhD, or own a house, or drive flash cars – whatever the shifting set of criteria the right uses to determine this “elite” status – it is an achievement against the odds.

      The right tell us we must pull ourselves up by the bootstraps and make a contribution to society. But when First Nations people appear to prosper in the system, they are called “elites”. Perhaps it’s the contribution they disagree with.

      At a voice forum in Sydney in May, the Gumbayngirr-Dhungutti man Phil Dotti caused a stir when he took to the stage. After listening to non-Indigenous people talk about the voice for an hour and 40 minutes, he decided it was time to speak up.

      Dotti, the first Aboriginal person to play for the Cronulla Sharks, told me later he went on the stage to speak his mind because “people needed to see someone with strength and character”, qualities his mother and grandfather instilled in him when growing up “very poor” in a tin shack on the Burnt Bridge mission in Kempsey, NSW.

      His unexpected speech was cut short; some people got up and left.

      “I know they’re scared because I might be an educated blackfella, and there’s nothing more scary than that,” he said.

      In a speech to the National Press Club this week, the Indigenous Australians minister, Linda Burney, spoke of a beloved friend who died far too young.

      Michael Riley was a photographer and film-maker, one of the cofounders of the Boomalli Aboriginal artists’ cooperative. His luminous, lyrical works work hang in galleries around the nation.

      “Michael grew up in poverty in Dubbo during the 1960s and spent time on the Talbragar Aboriginal reserve, an overcrowded place where basic hygiene was all but impossible and medical care was almost nonexistent,” Burney said.

      “Like so many others who were forced to live in those poor conditions, Michael suffered from chronic infections and got rheumatic fever, a condition from which his immune system never recovered.”

      Riley died at the peak of his career, of renal failure, at the age of 44.

      “I was very close to him. I visited him every day in hospital. I watched him go blind in one eye,” Burney said. “His Aboriginality condemned him to an early death, a preventable death.”

      Burney said the injustice of his passing motivated her every day “to put one foot in front of the other, to do better by Indigenous Australians”.

      Regardless of where on the spectrum of yes to no Aboriginal people sit in their views on the voice, we all know losses like this. We miss good people who unjustly left us way too soon. We mourn the opportunities they should have had, and wonder what more they could have achieved. We carry them with us.

      Crikey journalist, Bernard Keane, sees the elite as being associated with the No Campaign. See his story: How elite is the No campaign? Let’s count the ways in Crikey.

      Noticed white labels stuck to random objects in Civic? They’re part of the ‘Festival of Everyday Art’ 5 July 2023 | James Coleman

      Labels on ‘artwork’ for the Festival of Everyday Art. Photo: People Lab.

      A metal plate with the initials ‘FH’ on them. A drain. Leftover paint on a brick wall.

      All examples of regular ‘city things’ you probably walk past on your morning commute. Chances are, you’ve certainly never stopped to study them, let alone regard them as examples of contemporary art.

      Claire Granata’s ‘People Lab’ project is here to change that.

      Since 2018, Claire and fellow artist Pablo Latona have worked on a “public art experiment” with grant funding from the City Renewal Authority (CRA). It started simply enough with a greyhound-patting experience in an empty shop front in Civic’s Sydney Building.

      “We tested all these things that were really basic but could hype people up and make them appreciate everyday things,” she says.

      “The whole idea was to get people really engaging with their city and community.”

      It now takes the form of the ‘Festival of Everyday Art’.

      The festival starts each month with a workshop (this month on Saturday, 8 July), where members of the public spend up to two hours scouting the city and photographing literally anything that catches the eye. Think of it like a photo scavenger hunt.

      “You’re finding things that are exciting, bizarre, unnoticed or funny,” Claire says.

      “You’re curating the art, essentially.”

      It’s then up to Claire’s team to come up with printed labels for each of the photos ahead of the next part on 15 July – the ‘Treasure Hunt’.

      “We set up a marquee near the Street Theatre, off Childers Street, and people drop in anytime between 11 am and 3 pm, and we give them a map of the city and a bunch of labels. Their job is to go out and find where those labels belong and stick them in place.”

      The result is a “huge outdoor public art gallery” involving more than 100 little white labels tacked onto an eclectic mix of objects. And some laughs.

      “Sometimes people really enjoy it but don’t actually get the memo, and they’ll go and stick the label somewhere completely wrong, which can be quite funny.”

      The team with the best photos “of a label in place” receive a particularly nice leaf in return.

      “At the end of the day, when people have photographed their labels in place and come back, they get to choose from a suitcase full of leaves.”

      The stakes are higher the following day for the ‘Treasure Trail’ when vouchers to local businesses (including Good Games) are up for grabs.

      “Again, we set up our marquee over at the ANU, and it’s people’s job to find as many labels as they can and photograph them.”

      It might sound simple enough, but Claire says it’s striking a chord with locals and tourists alike.

      Claire Granata and Pablo Latona.

      Photos: People Lab.

      “We got an email after the last event series in June from a lady who is in Canberra but has lived in Melbourne for 12 years, saying how much she enjoyed seeing Canberra in a different light.

      “We also had a 15-year-old girl who had travelled in with her family from Bungendore specifically for the Treasure Hunt to celebrate her birthday.”

      Several national institutions here in Canberra have also shown interest in the festival, and Claire and Pablo are preparing to head to Sydney soon to introduce it to the Inner West Council. News is even spreading overseas.

      “We might take it to Canada in a couple of years’ time,” Claire says.

      “We’ve got a local creative who joined our team and is moving over there, so we’ll try to get some funding and take it overseas.”

      As for whether Canberra will continue to host the public art gallery in the future, Claire’s response is unequivocal.

      “Absolutely.”

      Visit People Lab on Facebook for more information.

      Week beginning 5 July 2023

      Alison McDermott’s Absolution is reviewed this week.

      Alice McDermott Absolution Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023.

      Absolution is the first of Alice McDermott’s novels I have read. It certainly will not be the last. Absolution is an enticingly written book, with its subtle  descriptions of complex relationships and superbly drawn  characters that draw the reader into American life and its impact in Vietnam in, as it was at the time, Saigon. The introduction of the role of Barbie dolls as definers of a relationships between Charlene and her daughter, Rainey; Charlene and Patricia; obsession with charitable fundraising at the expense of a Vietnamese servant; as an element in an almost disastrous mission, and then – a powerful and emotional  link with the past when two characters meet again, in England years after they have left Vietnam, is a wonderful comment on the complexity of American involvement in that country.

      The story is written in the first person by Patricia and Rainey. Patricia is  a new arrival in Vietnam in 1963. She is newly married to Peter. Although she sensitive to the imperfections of Charlene, she is  not immune to the strength of her  personality which overcomes any resistance to her unspoken but nevertheless mesmerising  claims to be righteous. Rainey is the recipient of the first letter, written by Patricia. Rainey reciprocates, then the narrative returns to Patricia, ending with Rainey’s observations.  The letters say so much more than their surface observations. Those about society at the time, and in particular women’s role, Patricia’s past, Rainey’s life after the family leave Vietnam and  Charlene’s behaviour and character are joined by subtle clues about the links between her and Patricia that remain previously unknown to Patricia and have to be winnowed out of the interchanges. See Books: Reviews for the complete review.

      At 30 June the new Covid cases numbered 263, with 20 people with Covid hospitalised. No-one is in ICU or ventilated. Three lives were lost in this period.

      The Voice Rally in Canberra

      ‘Happy Little Vegemite’ reimagined with a new generation

      Vegemite has remade its famous advertisement, featuring one of the original stars, in the lead-up to celebrating 100 years.

      Everyone knows the “Happy Little Vegemite” jingle, which came about in the 1950s.

      To mark 100 years of the beloved spread, Vegemite decided to reimagine the ad. See Television and Film: Comments for story.

      A New Novel Offers Literary Mothers a Feminist Alternative

      Molly Lynch’s debut reimagines outdated tropes and dismisses conventional stories told about women
      Photo by Geran de Klerk on Unsplash
      JUNE 27, 2023 IRENE KATZ CONNELLY

      My mother has read hundreds of books aloud to me. The titles changed over the course of my childhood—as my brother and I graduated from picture books to doorstopper paperbacks, fantasy to historical fiction, middle grade to angsty young adult novels—but we could always count on our mom to do one thing: cry if a fictional mother went missing. If she began to suspect that a mother was going to die, disappear, or otherwise become separated from her children, she would choke up, stop reading, and flip to the back of the book to see if the characters would be reunited in the end. 

      The crying drove me and my brother absolutely nuts. “It’s just a story,” we would inform our mother impatiently. We made faces and covered our eyes and sometimes rolled on the ground to indicate the scorn we felt for behavior this corny. If the insult cheugy had existed in the early 2000s, we would have leveled it at her. 

      This scene played out in my bedroom many, many times because many, many books for young readers rely on a mother’s disappearance to kickstart the plot. Grimms’ Fairy Tales, whose conventions inform so much of modern literature, often contrast an absent, kind mother with a present, evil stepmother. In Harry Potter, the Chosen One’s mother (and, in all fairness, his father) die within paragraphs of the series’ beginning. The Dear America novels, a beloved series of fictional journals “authored” by teenage girls from different historical eras, sentence mothers to occasionally cartoonish fates: In Seeds of Hope, a rogue wave literally drags the protagonist’s mother off the deck of a ship while mysteriously sparing the rest of the family. Even “feminist” alternatives to traditional fairy tales, like Ella Enchanted, frequently dispatch mothers so that child protagonists can get on with their adventures unimpeded. 

      Mothers, these stories tell us, are not particularly important. In fact, they say, it’s much easier for a plucky young heroine to achieve independence, embark on a journey of self-discovery, and meet the inevitable prince without a mother nagging them to wear a jacket or get home for dinner. For girls especially, these stories suggest that their value as protagonists has a time limit. If Cinderella’s rags-to-riches tale is made possible by her mother’s death, what will happen to her once she has her own children? 

      The literary obsession with missing mothers made little sense in the context of my own life: I was so fully secure in my mother’s presence that I could blithely make fun of her for taking fictional tragedies seriously, and yet somehow, I was still growing up, taking charge of my life, navigating my own modest adventures. But no matter how much I insisted that these stories were “just” fiction, I was absorbing their lessons. In my first fumbling short stories, the protagonists were, as a matter of course, motherless. 

      I thought back to these children’s books while reading Molly Lynch’s debut novel, The Forbidden Territory of a Terrifying Woman. The novel follows Ada, a young mother existentially preoccupied with the climate crisis and the dangers it poses to her son’s future. One night, Ada goes missing without a trace; her family soon learns that mothers around the world, many with the same concerns as Ada, have vanished from their homes. Part of a small vanguard of novels interrogating the missing mother trope, Forbidden Territory treats its missing mother not as an accessory to another person’s story, but as a literary symptom of the broader problem of parenting during a period of social and ecological decay. By chronicling Ada’s disappearance and return, Lynch invites readers to imagine the stories we could tell if we weren’t so bound to the missing mother. 

      Lynch invites readers to imagine the stories we could tell if we weren’t so bound to the missing mother.

      The missing mother trope predates the literature of my childhood, and the era of the Brothers Grimm, by a long shot. The Chinese folktale “Ye Xian,” which dates back to the ninth century, tells a “Cinderella”-like story in which a young heroine has to make her way in the world without her mother. In the Western tradition, novels like The History of Tom Jones, Jane Eyre, and Oliver Twist rely on dead or absent mothers. Missing mothers are common in other mediums, as well: In The Atlantic, Sarah Boxer cataloged animated movies that kill off their protagonists’ mothers in order to make way for father-child adventure stories. (Spoiler: It’s basically all of them.)

      Enjoy strange, diverting work from The Commuter on Mondays, absorbing fiction from Recommended Reading on Wednesdays, and a roundup of our best work of the week on Fridays. Personalize your subscription preferences here.

      There are many possible reasons for the missing mother’s enduring power. Folklore scholar Marina Warner suggests that for much of history, the trope was at least partly grounded in reality, given that high maternal mortality rates meant that many children grew up without mothers. Others have offered more Freudian justifications. In his book The Uses of Enchantment, psychologist Bruno Bettelheim argues that the fairy tale convention of juxtaposing a “good” mother and “wicked” stepmother both preserves the idea of an “all-good mother when the real mother is not all-good,” and “permits anger at this bad ‘stepmother’ without endangering the goodwill of the true mother.” If a mother is absent, in other words, her inevitable flaws can’t jeopardize our myths about ideal motherhood. 

      That said, if we are first encountering these myths in children’s literature, writers are increasingly subverting them in the territory of adult fiction. The past decade has seen a proliferation of novels about about “bad” mothers. Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch, Szilvia Molnar’s The Nursery, Yüko Tsushima’s Woman Running in the Mountains, and pretty much every sentence Elena Ferrante has ever written focus on the pressures of parenting in societies that fetishize motherhood without guaranteeing actual mothers dignity or support. Yet fewer novels confront the missing mother trope head on, among them Alexis Schaitkin’s Elsewhere and Lydia Sandgren’s Collected Works, and in imagining what would happen if mothers went missing en masse, Forbidden Territory feels entirely fresh. 

      Ada, the novel’s protagonist, lives in Ann Arbor with her history professor husband Danny, and six-year-old son Gilles. A writer and teacher, Ada holds a deep reverence for the natural world, collecting “special rocks” and stitching owl feathers into her son’s clothes as protective talismans. By most metrics, she lives a comfortable life: She has a loving family, a safe home, and a steady job in academia.

      The past decade has seen a proliferation of novels about about ‘bad’ mothers.

      Still, Ada spends her days in a fog of anxiety. A compulsive newshound, she gravitates toward ominous stories about deteriorating civil society, far-right extremism, and, especially, climate change. News of “garbage islands” and polluted air make it impossible for her to envision a safe future for Gilles: In her worst moments, she imagines him struggling to survive in an apocalyptic landscape of “burning forests” and “filthy” seas. As she puts her son to bed, she wonders if her instinct to comfort him is misguided and thinks to herself, “Shouldn’t she say, The water is poisoned. The forests are on fire. Genocide and torture are normal. When you grow up you might need to wear an oxygen mask.” When she’s unable to process the onslaught of drastic stories, she comforts herself with a visit to the only patch of unviolated nature available to her, a small strip of forest behind Gilles’ school. 

      Then, on the radio, Ada starts to hear stories about local mothers disappearing, walking out of their lives without leaving a trace of their whereabouts. Just as she begins to suspect that the disappearances are connected, she vanishes as well, leaving Gilles searching the house and Danny calling friends in a futile attempt to track her down.  

      If Forbidden Territory adhered to the conventions of the novels I grew up reading, Ada’s disappearance might have cleared the way for Danny and Gilles to set off on their own adventure or execute a daring rescue mission. Instead, family life grinds to a halt in Ada’s absence: Danny can barely eat or mark the passing days, and Gilles asks the same questions about his mother’s whereabouts over and over again. Combing through Ada’s computer search history and contacting the families of other missing mothers, Danny attempts to aid the police with his own sleuthing. But neither he nor the cops make any useful discoveries. 

      Moreover, Ada’s disappearance is not an isolated incident but rather part of a larger trend. By the time Ada goes missing, enough mothers have met the same fate that the FBI is investigating the “crisis” in motherhood. And while Danny is unable to do much for his wife, he does notice that many of the disappearing women shared Ada’s deep anxiety about the future. The husband of a mother who went missing shortly before Ada, for example, tells Danny that his wife could not stop talking about “the cruelties of the world.”

      While Lynch never reveals where the mothers go or how they get there, she hints at the cause of the disappearances by way of the public response to the crisis. Through the historians who quickly posit connections between the missing mothers and mass disappearances during other periods of extreme social transformation, like the Industrial Revolution, she suggests that, like Ada, the other mothers have walked out of the known world because they cannot imagine how their children will inhabit it. Meanwhile, predictably misogynist backlash ensues. A senator calls on the public to fight “the ideologies that he said were causing women to betray their children.” In some countries, groups of vigilante men begin to accost women walking alone, intimidating them in the name of keeping them in their rightful places at home. Given that missing mothers in literature are so ubiquitous as to be unremarkable, the rancor that so quickly develops over these “real” disappearances reads like an authorial nudge. Perhaps these men, who have presumably enjoyed their fair share of fairytales and movies about bootstrapping orphans, are angry because the women in their own lives seem to be disappearing not in service of someone else’s story but for their own inscrutable reasons. How Could a Mother Leave Her Child?Sophia Shalmiyev’s “Mother Winter” couldn’t answer the defining question of my life, but at least we were asking it togetherFEB 15 – CHELSEA BIEKERBOOKS

      Eventually, Lynch unveils another—the biggest—difference between Ada and the missing literary mothers who precede her. When Ada returns home of her own accord, she has no idea where she’s been. The only thing she can recall from her weeks-long absence is a mysterious and unexpectedly pleasant sensation of merging with the trees, as if she’d become one with the forest that so beguiled her. Ada’s belief that she enjoyed herself while her family went frantic with worry feels so socially unacceptable that she can barely express it to Danny. And that confused happiness is what makes Forbidden Territory so subversive: By understanding her disappearance as a kind of necessary retreat, rather than a banishment, Ada escapes not only her frightening world but the conventions of the stories long told about women like her. The question this novel asks is not how children can get along without their mothers, but what mothers can do when the project of parenting seems impossible. The answer Lynch provides? They can walk away—at least for a little while. 

      Now that I am a grown woman who cries during especially moving chewing gum commercials, I have more sympathy than I once did for my mother’s reading preferences. And I can also see that she was teaching me something by crying over all those literary mothers. Just as Ada cannot harden herself to the news around her, my mother was surprised each time a woman in one of my chapter books was separated from her children. Though she is nothing like Ada (and would consider the collecting of owl feathers an excellent way to contract avian flu), she refused to become inured to what others might dismiss as an unimportant but unalterable literary convention. I couldn’t have put that lesson into words at the time—partly because I was a child unacquainted with feminist literary criticism, and partly because we need new texts to imagine alternatives to the stories we take for granted—but all the same, it was an important one. If Forbidden Territory carries the fear of a world changing beyond repair, it also teaches us to question what came before. 

      In the novel’s final pages, Ada is driving home from a meeting with the FBI agent assigned to her case. She still doesn’t know what happened to her, but she has recovered enough to start talking about it. Speeding through the outskirts of Detroit, she encounters a twenty-first-century Valley of Ashes: a smoking, stinking landfill overflowing with rubbish. The dump is a literal manifestation of Ada’s fears about the future, and for a moment, she feels overwhelmed by the “layers of waste, plastics and greases, chemicals and particles of diapers” she imagines churning within the pit. 

      “For a brief moment she inhabited that heart,” Lynch writes, “and then she returned to her body, driving.” Ada ends the book laughing. One could read these last paragraphs cynically, as evidence that Ada has simply given up worrying about a future she can do little to change. But I like to think that her disappearance has taught her to confront her fears without letting them destroy her, to move through her days in this world without hardening herself to its flaws. I don’t know what that feels like. Perhaps I’d have to walk away from my life to find out.

      https://bookshop.org/widgets/list/a-new-novel-offers-literary-mothers-a-feminist-alternative

      Cindy Lou eats at an Italian restaurant in Brunswick

      Brunswick, Sydney Road, is an excellent place to find a reasonably priced meal at a casual restaurant. On this occasion I tried the Italian restaurant just off Sydney Road, in Union Street, close to the railway station. This makes Caio Mamma! a pleasant place to eat on the way home from work, or a day in the city. It opens at 5.30pm and the tables filled quickly on the nights I ate there. However, a place was found for two of us, and then on the next evening, for three. Service is prompt so it is easy to make a short stop to eat a generous and flavoursome meal. Al dente and non al dente pasta is offered, and there is a variety of sauces, including a special on both nights we were there.

      An ice-cream shop between Ciao Mamma! and home was a welcome sight. The honeycomb ice-cream was too tempting, but at least I had only one scoop.

      Bendigo Art Gallery

      The remainder of the art in the Australiana Designing a Nation Exhibition depicted everyday life. Icons such as the beach and swimming were portrayed, alongside youth culture.

      Furniture, sculptures and china from the exhibition

      Observations on display

      Minister for Indigenous Australians Speech at the National Press Club The Guardian July 5,2023, Josh Butler

      Voting yes in voice to parliament referendum an ‘act of patriotism’, Linda Burney says

      Minister to tell National Press Club Indigenous people ‘more likely to have experienced homelessness than to hold an undergraduate degree’

      Linda Burney
      Minister for Indigenous Australians Linda Burney will make a deeply personal speech on the voice to parliament referendum on Wednesday. Photograph: Mick Tsikas/AAP

      Indigenous voice to parliament

      Voting yes in the voice to parliament referendum is an “act of patriotism”, with the advisory body to be asked to focus on “new perspectives to old challenges” in health, education, jobs and housing, the Indigenous Australians minister says.

      Linda Burney will make a deeply personal speech about the referendum on Wednesday, recounting the death of her friend aged just 44 from serious health problems and saying: “His Aboriginality condemned him to an early death.”

      “We have to do things better,” Burney will tell the National Press Club. “I honestly believe the voice can help.

      “Voting yes at the referendum will be a vote to unify and strengthen Australia. Voting yes will be an act of patriotism.”

      Burney’s speech will set a stronger framework around the work and focus of the voice, after questioning from the Coalition about whether the body would weigh in on defence acquisitions or Reserve Bank decisions.

      “From day one, the voice will have a full in-tray,” Burney will say, according to an advance copy of her speech. “I will ask the voice to consider four main priority areas: health, education, jobs and housing.”

      The government is expected to emphasise the impact of the voice on developing policies in those core areas in coming weeks, with the education minister, Jason Clare, and the health minister, Mark Butler, to play more prominent roles.

      The government says the exact details of the voice, including the members, will be decided in a post-referendum consultation with Indigenous communities.

      In her speech, Burney will stress that the voice will be an independent representative body, made up of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, and chosen by local communities.

      In her first meeting with the members of the voice, she will ask them to advise on reducing suicides, increasing school attendance and supporting Indigenous families.

      “It’s not going to be a passive advisory body. I want it to be active and engaged. We need new perspectives to old challenges.”

      Her speech suggests community members would raise issues with their voice representative, who would then relay those concerns and make representations to government and parliament.

      “It’s about linking up that local decision making and local knowledge with policymakers in government,” Burney will say.

      The voice would help close the gap faster, she will say, listing a range of outcomes differing greatly between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians.

      “Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children are 55 times more likely to die from rheumatic heart disease than non-Indigenous people. These deaths are completely preventable with access to medical care, proper housing and running water.

      “Indigenous young people are 24 times more likely to be locked up than their non-Indigenous neighbours

      “Our people are more likely to have experienced homelessness than to hold an undergraduate degree. In 2020 the number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people locked up in a prison cell was four times as many as those who celebrated graduating uni that year.

      “This is systemic and structural disadvantage.”

      Director of Yes23 campaign Dean Parkin

      Burney’s speech will touch on a deeply personal matter, the death of her friend, the photographer Michael Riley. She will recount his life of poverty on the Talbragar Aboriginal reserve in Dubbo, “where basic hygiene was all but impossible and medical care was almost nonexistent”.

      “Like so many others who were forced to live in those poor conditions, Michael suffered from chronic infections and got rheumatic fever, a condition from which his immune system never recovered,” Burney will say.

      “At the peak of his career at the age of 44, he died of end-stage renal failure.

      “I visited him every day in hospital. I watched him go blind in one eye. His Aboriginality condemned him to an early death. A preventable death.

      “I remember being at his bedside with his cousin Lynette when he passed. I remember the injustice of it. And it’s what still motivates me to this day.”

      Responding to questions about why the voice should be enshrined in the constitution, rather than set up via legislation, Burney will say that the government is following the request set out in the Uluru statement from the heart.

      “The starting point for reconciliation has to be listening to the wishes of Indigenous people,” she will say. “The starting point cannot be a political fix made in Canberra. That’s not real reconciliation.”

      From The New York Times, June 29 2023.

      Justice Sotomayor argued that the majority’s vision of race neutrality “will entrench racial segregation in higher education because racial inequality will persist so long as it is ignored.”

      But despite her scathing language, Justice Sotomayor ended on a defiant note, writing that despite the court’s actions, “society’s progress toward equality cannot be permanently halted.”

      “The pursuit of racial diversity will go on,” she wrote. “Although the court has stripped out almost all uses of race in college admissions, universities can and should continue to use all available tools to meet society’s needs for diversity in education.”

      Another of the liberal justices, Ketanji Brown Jackson, wrote in her dissent that “it would be deeply unfortunate if the equal protection clause actually demanded this perverse, ahistorical, and counterproductive outcome.”

      “To impose this result in that clause’s name when it requires no such thing, and to thereby obstruct our collective progress toward the full realization of the clause’s promise, is truly a tragedy for us all,” she wrote.

      Both Justice Sotomayor and Justice Jackson criticized the majority for making an exception for military academies. Justice Jackson wrote that the majority concluded that “racial diversity in higher education is only worth potentially preserving insofar as it might be needed to prepare Black Americans and other underrepresented minorities for success in the bunker, not the boardroom.”