Week beginning 24 September 2025

Laura Lippman Murder Takes a Vacation A Mrs Blossom Mystery, Faber and Faber Ltd, August 2025.

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

Mrs Blossom holds the fears of many whose route to the back of a plane is accompanied by the overwhelming feeling that they will not be welcome in the tiny space to be shared with other passengers. On this occasion, arriving early at check in as usual, she is rewarded with an upgrade. Her unfamiliar feeling of wellbeing on a plane is enhanced by her meeting with handsome and caring fellow passenger. However, this will be the last time she is afforded such a comfortable state of mind. The flight lands in Heathrow too late for her to make her connection to a Paris where she is to join her friend to cruise through France.

Muriel Blossom is a wonderful character with her amalgam of fears about her appearance and age, her robust willingness to put her detection skills to use and her interactions with the people she meets. At times she inclined to think the worst of them; at others she is keen to befriend a fellow traveller. At the same time as she is interacting with new acquaintances, her friendship with the multiple marrying Elinor is joyful, accepting and warm, painting this relationship as ideal, depicting everything a woman’s friendship should be.

There is enough ‘bite’ in this novel to avoid it being a ‘cozy’ mystery. Laura Lippman has brought Mrs Blossom, female friendships, humour, detection and intrigue together to make an extremely satisfying read. As in Dream Girl (2021) Lipmann’s Tess Monaghan takes second place to a new character and story line. Murder Takes a Vacation poses a successful interaction with Lippman’s famous character and a secondary character from Another Thing to Fall (2008). Lippmann’s ability to deliver a plot that, while providing only glimpses of Tess Monaghan, is again triumphant.

Jane Corry The Stranger in Room Six Penguin General UK -Fig Tree, Hamish Hamilton, Viking Penguin Life, Penguin Business, Penguin, June 2025.

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

This novel is difficult to put down, so much so, that I read it over a day with only enforced pauses. It begins with an intriguing prologue, and the pace after the gunshot at its conclusion only becomes faster. The stranger in room six begins the story telling. However, the main thrust of the narrative belongs to Belinda and Mabel. Belinda is a carer at Sunnyside Home for the Young at Heart; Mabel is an elderly resident. Belinda’s story begins fifteen years previously as she dispassionately observes her husband. Mabel begins her story during World War 2 with a tragedy that brings her as a fifteen-year-old to The Rectory, now Sunnyside. Both women have secrets, and both tell their stories with a mixture of satisfaction, relief, and trepidation. Their companiable story telling becomes dangerous when the stranger begins to impose her will on the information that is being gathered. See Books: Reviews for the complete review.

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

I thoroughly enjoyed reading the publishers’ accounts of their commitment to The Strand, and Alexander McCall’s Foreword. All demonstrated the enthusiasm and exactitude with which the short stories were chosen and the significance of the publication. I have mixed feelings about the short stories, some of which I found extremely clever as well as readable; others I did not warm to; and I missed being able to read an example of a modern Agatha Christie with its signatory clues that fox the most insightful reader. See Books: Reviews for the complete review.

Australian Politics

The Saturday Paper logo

September 20 – 26, 2025  |  No. 568

John Hewson The unravelling of the Liberal Party

Clearly, not everyone saw delusion in Jacinta Nampijinpa Price’s run for, and subsequent attacks on, the Liberal leadership.

Her actions have been embraced by the Murdoch mob, in particular the excitable team at Sky News. She is backed as ever by right-wing advocacy group Advance, and think tanks such as the Institute of Public Affairs and the Centre for Independent Studies.

The rush of blood to the conservative media’s head was triggered by Price’s recent statements about Indian migrants and her refusal to properly apologise, and then her failure to publicly support Sussan Ley as the Coalition leader, which led to her justifiable ouster from the shadow ministry.

Many, both within and beyond Canberra’s political sphere, see the senator for what she has been since entering politics – a negative, divisive and disloyal force, and particularly so since she ditched the Nationals and joined the Liberal Party. Her political ambitions really took flight with the prominent role she played – employed to full effect by former opposition leader Peter Dutton – in opposing the Indigenous Voice to Parliament referendum. Dutton then endorsed her aspirations with a role in his election campaign. It quickly soured, given her lack of political substance and her ill-considered utterances about MAGA and other Trumpist lines.

It was hard to explain her appointment to the shadow ministry in the first place – especially taking into account her controversial time on the Alice Springs Town Council. Price is not a team player – it’s always her career first, then the party. Moreover, she has no particular policy expertise or experience, certainly none to justify the defence industries portfolio she was given. I suppose Ley felt she had to give Price something, given the brouhaha with which she arrived, and the leader probably felt the new recruit would work better with Angus Taylor, given their declared leadership alliance and friendship. It was surely a strategic miscalculation, as it’s possible Taylor knows even less about the defence portfolio – having never contributed significantly on the most relevant issues.

Ley has at least now been able to correct the poor initial decision to appoint Price to the front bench.

With her comment on “mass migration”, Price was obviously seeking to capitalise on the anti-immigration sentiment of the recent marches and protests taking place both here and overseas. She did however, once again, show very poor judgement and a lack of compassion towards Indian migrants, whose support the Liberals will need in both city and country seats at future elections.

It was insensitive and demeaning to assume that Indians vote as a coordinated, homogeneous block. Perhaps the strong skew polling firm RedBridge Group noted among the community towards Labor at the last election owed to Dutton’s racism and generally poor campaign? These communities deserve respect, not cheap political shots.I imagine the other aspiring leaders – Hastie, Taylor or Tim Wilson spring to mind – are happy to let Price go on destabilising from the back bench. They are just sitting back like spiders in a web, waiting for their moment to strike.

Price’s attack on Indian migrants rekindled memories of the party’s mishandling of Chinese–Australian voters that cost it dearly in the past couple of elections. The electorate can infer from these incidents that there is a deep-seated racism in the Coalition. This point was made forcibly by the Gillard government’s trade minister Craig Emerson recently, as he suggested that these conservative parties “offer cover for bigots”. I fear this is closer to the mark than we’d care to believe. It’s worth noting that Price was speaking outside her portfolio, to which she had given completely inadequate attention – with all that’s going on, she could have issued a press release on defence every day, cheered on by her friends in the media.

This has been a destabilising episode for Ley, stirring talk of a challenge by the end of this year. I believe it is most unfortunate that Ley hasn’t been afforded a clear opportunity to do the job. I accept she hasn’t been inspirational or strategic but, like countless before her, she deserves a genuine chance. That said, if she wants to survive politically, she will need to do better than the anti-government, anti-welfare and amorphous speech she delivered at the think tank CEDA this week.

The current Coalition needs to learn the importance of discipline and teamwork rather than engaging in this persistent navel gazing.

The party’s sluggishness in conducting its policy reviews, and in announcing any new strategic direction or clear positions on so many pressing national issues, has created the image of a rudderless group more absorbed by internal squabbles than good policy. There has been a complete shambles over issues such as immigration, climate change and net zero, the latter ignoring the substance of the recently released climate risk assessment. The contribution of Andrew Hastie this week, in suggesting he would leave the front bench if the party sticks with its climate target, could not have been more ill-considered or ill-timed.

This Coalition is sadly and obviously not in any condition to govern – a fact clearly reflected in its devastating polls. Anthony Albanese would win again if an election were held now, and probably even more definitively. The primary vote for the Coalition in the most recent Newspoll collapsed to 27 per cent – the worst result in the poll’s history since 1985. The Labor primary vote was steady at 36 per cent, giving the government a commanding 58-42 two-party preferred lead, which is Albanese’s biggest margin since taking office.

This latest Price saga was likely an important contributor to the slide in the polls. Ley was seen to be slow in responding, especially given the clear breach of cabinet responsibilities. Ley waited surprisingly long to call on Price to apologise to the Indian diaspora, which in the end she had to do herself. Price became a particularly shambolic element of an unfolding Liberal mess, despite her protection team, led by former prime minister Tony Abbott – who last week described Price in this paper as “one of the few Liberal MPs with a proven ability to provide national leadership” – and his former chief of staff, Peta Credlin. One Liberal MP told The Sydney Morning Herald that Credlin’s soft interviews on Sky News are Price’s “safe space”.

The constraints on Ley and therefore her performance need to be recognised. She beat Taylor by only a small margin of four votes – depending in part on the support of senators whose parliamentary time has now ended. She also allowed the unsuccessful candidate for Bradfield to vote. Unfortunately, Ley’s staff are seemingly quite inexperienced, and closely associated with Alex Hawke, who apparently runs her office. This is a clear disadvantage given his history of factionalism in the New South Wales party, and broader ambitions. Price alleged that Hawke berated her staff, generating a heated argument, rather than Ley calling directly.

Ley is also disadvantaged by Abbott running amok across factions in the NSW party. He was instrumental in Price’s transfer from the Nationals. He is also clearly behind her ambitions, which to Abbott would mean building a hard-right conservative force in our politics, channelling the likes of Britain’s Nigel Farage, talked up by the cheer squad of Andrew Bolt, Rowan Dean and Paul Murray.

Ley’s reshuffle again emphasises an important weakness of the current Liberal Party, namely the absence of genuine talent with significant professional standing. Those days seem long gone as the party is simply not attracting such people – a sharp contrast with the candidates drawn to the independents movement. As a result, the shadow cabinet is appointed mostly on political and geographic considerations, meaning that inexperienced members have to learn on the job, forced to perform without particular compassion and commitment. For example, Price’s complex role combining defence industry and personnel with cybersecurity and science has been split between Melissa Price of Western Australia and Claire Chandler of Tasmania. It was also bordering on ridiculous to add Senator James Paterson to the leadership team. As the party’s campaign spokesman in the election, he showed an inability to expand on or explain the statements by the leaders.

I am sure, nevertheless, that Ley will expect, and hopefully get, more loyalty and discipline from her new team than she was getting before.

Even if the current leader were to be spilt, I don’t believe, given Jacinta Price’s total sellout of Indigenous Australia, that she could or should win, or indeed ever be given any meaningful portfolio in the future. Changing the jockey won’t make a winner if the horse is crook.

Three leadership challenges remain, for whoever is in the role. First, achieving genuine unity within the party and the Coalition. Second, policy credibility. Third, deep organisational reform. All three require consistent, coordinated and focused hard work with all back- and frontbenchers making their essential contributions. Sadly, as things stand, these efforts are not yet being made.

I imagine the other aspiring leaders – Hastie, Taylor or Tim Wilson spring to mind – are happy to let Price go on destabilising from the back bench. They are just sitting back like spiders in a web, waiting for their moment to strike. 

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on September 20, 2025 as “Price checked”.

The Guardian

Australia could be a ‘dumping ground’ for goods made for us with forced labour, anti-slavery tsar warns

Exclusive: Chris Evans says ‘blind spots’ in modern slavery laws means few prosecutions occur and some companies are ‘taking the mickey’ in their approach to reporting

Ben Doherty Mon 1 Sep 2025 12.25 AEST

Australia’s modern slavery laws are among the weakest in the developed world and the country risks becoming a “dumping ground” for goods made with forced labour, Australia’s first anti-slavery commissioner has said.

In a wide-ranging interview with Guardian Australia, the commissioner, Chris Evans – a former Labor senator and minister – said there were “blind spots” in Australia’s efforts that risked the country becoming a global laggard.

“Not only are we not keeping up to the standard of acceptable corporate responsibility,” he said of Australia’s Modern Slavery Act, “but we’re also now running the risk of being a dumping ground because of the fact that we have the lowest level of prevention of goods made with forced labour coming into our country.”

His comments come as a report by the UN special rapporteur on contemporary forms of slavery argued that migrants and vulnerable minorities “slip through the cracks” to be exploited in Australia.

The attorney general, Michelle Rowland, described modern slavery as “abhorrent” and said the government was committed to combating it.

Evans said jurisdictions comparable to Australia, including the US, Canada, or – soon – the EU had introduced import bans on goods made with, or strongly suspected of being made with, forced labour. No such ban exists in Australia.

Australia has one of the “weakest regimes in dealing with forced labour”, Evans said, arguing that companies making goods with forced labour on warning lists, and excluded from markets such as US, Canada or Europe, would seek to export to countries without import bans.

“We’re [Australia] at risk of becoming a dumping ground for goods that are designed for … wealthy western countries, but which may have serious issues with forced labour in their supply chains.”

Australia’s other most pressing “blind spot” was in low rates of identification and prosecution of offences occurring inside Australia, he said.

“Some people like to comfort themselves by thinking, well, that means we don’t have much of a problem here, but … that’s nonsense: what it means is we haven’t been very good at … identifying those people who are being exploited and secondly … there are real issues about prosecutions in Australia and the amount of time it takes to get a case to court.”

Walk Free’s Global Slavery Index estimates that there are about 41,000 people held in modern slavery in Australia.

The Guardian requested statistics from the commonwealth director of public prosecutions on modern slavery prosecutions. Data provided to the UN office of drugs and crime shows that in 2023 – the latest figures available – 352 people were “brought into formal contact with the police and/or criminal justice system because they have been suspected of, arrested for, or cautioned for trafficking in persons”.

Five people were prosecuted. Zero were convicted.

Evans said Australia’s Modern Slavery Act, introduced in 2018, was “light-touch” legislation and Australia had failed to progress from that “first tentative step”.

The act mandates only that companies turning over more than $100m a year issue modern slavery reports: it imposes no obligations to address risks.

There are no penalties for failing to report and no penalties for substandard reporting. It’s estimated that between 400 and 1,000 companies who are obliged to report on modern slavery in their practices or supply chains are refusing to do so.

Some companies are reporting comprehensively, Evans said: “Others quite frankly are taking the mickey, by putting in two pages of ‘we oppose modern slavery’ and that’s been regarded as sufficient to pass muster.”s

He argued that Australia’s modern slavery laws needed to move from a reporting mandate to a “due diligence” model, where companies were required to act to prevent modern slavery in their supply chains or business practices.

Evans said the introduction of penalties was similarly overdue.

In 2023 the former ombudsman Prof John McMillan led a review of Australia’s Modern Slavery Act. He found “no hard evidence that the Modern Slavery Act … has yet caused meaningful change for people living in conditions of modern slavery”.

Among his 30 recommendations was that the act be updated to include: an obligation that companies must address modern slavery risks in their supply chains; penalties for companies that fail to comply; and high-risk declarations for regions, factories or suppliers.

The government did not respond until December 2024 – accepting in full, part or principle 25 of the 30 recommendations – but many have not been implemented. The government released a consultation paper in July.

Rowland said Australia had “strong laws and a comprehensive response to combat modern slavery practices, such as human trafficking, slavery, and slavery-like practices”.

“The Albanese government is committed to continuing our efforts to strengthen our response,” she said.

This month the UN special rapporteur Prof Tomoya Obokata said he was “seriously concerned by the treatments of temporary migrant workers in Australia”, reporting “disturbing, sometimes very serious, patterns of exploitative practices by employers, labour hire companies and migration agents”.

Obokata highlighted the exploitation of asylum seekers and refugees; people with disabilities; temporary migrant workers such as those on the Pacific Australia labour mobility scheme (particularly those who had “disengaged” from it and were outside its protections); domestic workers in diplomatic households; and students visa-holders.

He said vulnerable and marginalised people were let down by Australia’s “patchwork” laws.

The government will respond to Obokata’s report at the human rights council in September.

I know Canberrans are passionate about protecting our climate by reducing emissions and transitioning our energy grid to renewables as quickly as possible.

That’s why I am excited to share with you that today, the Albanese Labor Government has taken another strong step forward on climate action by announcing an ambitious and achievable 2035 emissions reduction target of 62 – 70%.

This target range is based on expert advice including from the Climate Change Authority and puts Australia firmly on the path to net zero while protecting households and businesses from the burden of higher costs.

Today’s announcement isn’t just a target, it also includes a detailed Net Zero Plan which outlines exactly how we plan to achieve our target while also providing businesses and renewables investors the certainty that they need so they can play their key role in decarbonising our economy past 2030.

The Plan demonstrates how Australia can transition while:

  • growing the economy
  • reducing cost pressures on households and businesses
  • creating new jobs.

The Plan also identifies five priorities to guide our transition to net zero:

  • Clean electricity across the economy.
  • Lowering emissions by electrification and efficiency.
  • Expanding clean fuel use.
  • Accelerating new technologies.
  • Net carbon removals scaled up.

If you’re interested, you can read the Net Zero Plan or check out the finer detail in the sector emissions reductions plans we have released today here.

In our first three years in government, we’ve increased wind and solar capacity by 45%, enough to power over 6 million households, but we aren’t done yet. Now we’ll build on that success and pick up the pace.

We know that renewables are the cheapest form of new energy and today we’ve made another down payment to supercharge their rollout. We’ve announced $2 billion to deliver even more renewables and we are also setting up a new $5 billion Net Zero Fund to help industry do the heavy lifting in moving to clean energy.

Our responsibility as a government for all Australians is to balance ambition with practical delivery to cut emissions, create jobs and keep downward pressure on household bills. That’s exactly what this target does.

The target is affordable and achievable but most importantly, its ambitious. We are up for doing the hard work that comes on the other side of announcing this target because our future generations deserve that from us.

Only Labor leads from the front on climate action and renewable energy investment right across Australia, and today’s plan builds on our commitment to deliver climate action in a meaningful and responsible way.

Thanks for taking the time to read about this significant announcement and I look forward to engaging with Canberrans about this target and our broader plans to deliver net zero by 2050.

Political Cartoons Australia’s post

David Pope

Carrick Ryan posted on Facebook, referring back to his previous commentary on PM Anthony Albanese and the failure to meet with President Donald Trump…

Since I wrote this, Republican Congressmen and Women have threatened Australia with “consequences” for its recognition of Palestine, Department of Defence officials leaked private correspondence to the media in an effort to disrupt Albanese’s meeting with Xi, and Trump has threatened an Australian reporter… so no, I don’t think Australians have any interest in our Prime Minister being humiliated in the Oval Office any time soon…

Carrick Ryan 

13 July Facebook·

Albanese has tried to speak to Trump, and Trump has so far made no accommodation for him.

Personally, I don’t think the Australian people really want this meeting to happen.

I think they’ve seen Trump humiliate his allies in the Oval Office, they’ve seen him demonstrate his ignorance and disrespect towards every nationality he’s ever spoken about other than his own.

We don’t want to cringe as we watch our Prime Minister feature in one of the mad king’s moments of lunacy, or be used as a prop for some ulterior political motive.

We don’t want to have to see our representatives grovel at Nero’s court, and pretend that we can see the emperor’s clothes too. We don’t want to dignify this circus.

Because even if we did all that, what would it achieve?

Do we expect Trump to be swayed by reason? Are we appealing to his conscience? Even if he suddenly changed his mind, could we ever trust his capricious mood swings and unpredictable policy on the go? Would anything he say mean anything later?

Trump placed tariffs on our nation despite the fact the US has a trade surplus with us. Defying the entire justification he has provided for this stupefying global trade war.

He could have easily utilised our example to demonstrate his fairness to the world, and absolved us as one of the few who buy more from America than they sell… but he chose not to. He chose to punish the nation that has followed the US into every one of their wars since WWII.

So no… we don’t want to send someone to Washington to go and kiss the ring…

…instead, we shall speak to Beijing.

We’re not looking for new friends, but we’re still trying to figure out who our enemies are.

British Politics

The Conversation:

This week the UK news cycle has been dominated by the state visit of the US president, Donald Trump. Many of us will have held our breath. Not so much for the duration of Trump’s stay at Windsor Castle. But the summit with the prime minister and the press conference which followed were pregnant with the possibility for gaffes or discord. Trump seemed so dreamily charmed by his time with the Royals that he appeared to be benevolence itself. Sighs of relief all round at Chequers this weekend, one can only assume.

The Conversation

How I tracked the biggest hidden sources of forever chemical pollution in UK rivers – new study

Published here under Creative Commons licence.

Published: September 19, 2025 7.17pm AEST

Patrick Byrne

Disclosure statement

Patrick Byrne receives funding from the Natural Environment Research Council.

The amount of toxic “forever chemicals” flowing into the River Mersey in north-west England has reached some of the highest levels recorded anywhere in the world.

My team’s research links much of this contamination to old landfills, waste facilities and past industrial activity. Even if these chemicals were banned tomorrow, they would continue polluting our rivers for decades, possibly centuries.

But there is a path forward. We’ve developed a new method to track and prioritise the largest sources for clean-up, giving regulators a clearer picture of where to act first.

Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), more commonly known as “forever chemicals”, are a large family of human-made chemicals found in everyday products like food packaging, water-repellent clothes and fire-fighting foams. They are valued for their ability to resist very high temperatures and to repel water and oil, but these same properties make them extremely persistent.

Once released, some PFAS could take thousands of years to break down. They accumulate in the environment, build up – with different compounds accumulating at different rates – inside the bodies of wildlife and people, and have been associated with harms to health. The most studied types have been linked to cancers, hormone disruption and immune system problems.

Last year, my research team discovered that the amount of two potentially cancer-causing PFAS chemicals washing off the land and into the Mersey was among the highest in the world. In our follow-on research, we travelled upstream to try and locate where these PFAS are coming from. But with hundreds of potential PFAS sources, how do we isolate the largest ones?

The secret is measuring something called the PFAS load – the total amount of PFAS flowing through the river at a given point, rather than just the concentration in the water.

Here’s why that matters: a small stream can have high concentrations but carry only a small total amount, while a large river with lower concentrations can be transporting far more PFAS overall. If we only look at concentration, we risk missing the really heavy polluters.

By measuring PFAS loads at multiple points along the Mersey system, we could see exactly where the largest increases occurred. That told us both the location and the scale of PFAS inputs.

We detected PFAS chemicals at 97% of our sample sites, even in supposedly pristine streams draining from the Peak District national park. But the big breakthroughs came when we matched the largest PFAS load increases to specific areas.

PFBS (a type of PFAS) was coming in huge amounts from land draining old landfills in the Glaze Brook watershed near Leigh, west of Manchester. PFOA, a globally banned and cancer-causing PFAS, appeared to originate from a waste management facility on the River Roch, north of Manchester. PFOS, another banned PFAS, was entering the River Bollin, with strong evidence pointing to historic firefighting foam use at Manchester Airport.

What’s most striking to me is that all these sources are rooted in the past – old landfills, waste sites or historic industrial use. These chemicals are no longer in production, but they are still escaping into the environment, decades later.

This is where PFAS load measurements make a real difference. Instead of chasing the highest concentrations – which might lead to cleaning up small streams that contribute little overall – we can target the sites releasing the largest total amounts of PFAS into our rivers.

It’s a simple idea with major implications. In a world where environmental regulators face tight budgets and limited monitoring capacity, knowing exactly which sites are the biggest sources is vital.

The Mersey is just one example. Around the world, PFAS contamination follows a similar pattern: numerous potential sources scattered across the landscape, many of them historical. The chemicals’ extreme persistence means they will continue cycling through rivers, soils and wildlife for generations unless active steps are taken to remove or contain them.

Our latest study shows that measuring PFAS load can help solve one of the toughest challenges in managing chemical pollution: working out where to start. By identifying and prioritising the biggest sources, regulators have a realistic chance of reducing the flow of forever chemicals into our rivers – and perhaps one day, making that nickname a little less true.

Liverpool John Moores University provides funding as a member of The Conversation UK.

American Politics

Paper Clip Protest Sep 20 

On Thursday, E. Jean Carroll started it: Paper Clip Protest.

“Comely Reader! I suggest we all start wearing the paper clip. Subtler than a red hat, more powerful as a CONNECTION,” she wrote, explaining they were also worn during World War II as a sign of resistance against the Nazis.

Norwegian teachers and students wore paper clips to signal their opposition to Nazi occupation. They attached them to their lapels and wore them as jewelry, a symbol of solidarity binding them together as paper clips did with papers. It was a quiet act of defiance, expressing that Norwegians remained united against Nazi rule.

Friday, when I signed on to tape the #SistersInLaw Podcast, Jill Wine Banks had a clip delicately attached to the collar of her shirt. It made me smile. In that moment, I knew E. Jean was onto something. Our defiance can and must be loud and public at this point. But the quiet symbol of solidarity on someone’s collar when you walk into a crowded room? Genius. And much better than a red hat.

You probably have a paper clip in your desk or junk drawer that you can put on straight away. You can be a subtle signal of support for people who need that right now. You can be a conservation starter. Jill tells me she’s having special paper clips made for the occasion—very fitting for a woman known for wearing pins—and has promised to send me one.

Small efforts can bear fruit when we’re all in on them. I’m going to find a paper clip before I head out to the farmers’ market.

We’re in this together,

Joyce

Pablo Picasso Portrait of a Woman 1940, also known as Portrait of Dora Marr Royan, France – oil on paper on canvas

Cindy Lou enjoys her return to 86

I t seems so long since I ate at 86 – far too long, and I shall certainly not leave so much time before my next visit. I forgot to photograph the delicious, charred corn with togarashi cream and parmesan, but managed to photograph the remainder of the meal before it was devoured. It was a favourite menu – fragrant crispy eggplant with sichuan chilli caramel, pumpkin tortellini with burnt butter and sage sauce, and broccolini with hazel nuts. And, the delightful orange blossom cocktail was back.

Cindy Lou likes Ginger and Spice for its lunch menu – something familiar and something new

Eggplant, potato and capsicum

Sweet and sour chicken

Kebaba is a casual Turkish outdoor cafe in Civic. Today we had zucchini fritters and a kebab.

Tonight, I was at Llewellyn Hall and wanted to add the story below before posting.

John Galloway PAINTER AM

Mozart’s Requiem performed by the Canberra Symphony Orchestra was dedicated to John Painter AM. A moving speech was made before the performance. I was fortunate in knowing John as a lovely, gentle neighbour as well as the man of the accolades he so deservedly received in the speech.

Obituary from the Sydney Morning Herald

John Galloway Painter AM, one of Australia’s most esteemed musical figures, died peacefully surrounded by close family on September 13 at the age of 92. John retained his easy sense of humour and gentlemanly nature throughout the short illness leading to his death.

John’s express wishes were for a direct committal with no funeral service.

A tribute concert will be held at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music on Sunday October 12 at 3pm. Tickets will be available from Wednesday September 24 through the Conservatorium’s online box office.

Published by The Sydney Morning Herald on Sep. 20, 2025.

Week beginning 17 September 2025

Helene Harrison The Many Faces of Anne Boleyn Interpreting Image and Perception Pen & Sword | Pen & Sword History, July 2025.

Thank you, NetGalley and Pen & Sword for providing me with this uncorrected proof for review.

Helene Harrison’s forensic approach to discovering Anne Boleyn is a remarkable enterprise, and one that provides a welcome addition to the myriads of interpretations that have already been written. Harrison’s perceptiveness is an asset in considering the immense range of sources she investigates. These are primary and secondary sources, all of which she appraises with almost a gimlet eye. Her understanding of other writers’ and film/television makers’ interpretations is acute, critical at times, but recognising the importance of others’ contribution to creating an understanding of this elusive woman. That Anne Boleyn is elusive can, of course, be questioned. After all, she has been the subject of so many books, films, and television series. However, where so much has been partisan, it is useful to try to stand back, look at the material and, as Harrison has done, investigate. See Books: Reviews for the complete review.

Suzann Fortin The Codebreaker’s Daughter Embla Books, July 2025.

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

The Codebreaker’s Daughter is not just another book in which women’s impact on the work at Bletchley Park is central to the plot. Hana is a Japanese speaker and an expert at solving puzzles that involve language skills. These she perfects with her father over cross word puzzles, and it is this relationship and her linguistic skills that bring her into Bletchley Park, a world of secrets and danger. See Books: Reviews for the complete review.

As I review so many books published by Pen and Sword, and find them valuable sources of topics that often highlight feminist themes, I thought it worthwhile publishing the following information about the publisher, although it refers only briefly to the social history themes that I find so gratifying. It is interesting that the publisher is renowned for its military historical titles, an imprint taken over from Leo Cooper, husband of Jilly Cooper.

Pen and Sword Publications

The origin of Pen and Sword Books is closely linked with its sister company, the Barnsley Chronicle; one of the UK’s oldest provincial newspapers – established in 1858 – and one of the few weeklies still in private ownership.

The first books published by the company were in response to public demand following of a series of articles published in the newspaper:- Dark Peak Aircraft Wrecks told the story of crash sites in the Dark Peak area of the Peak District National Park, and a further weekly feature on the history of two Kitchener battalions, known as the Barnsley Pals, aroused a thirst for more information. Over the years these books have been reprinted a number of times and have collectively sold around 20,000 copies.

Following on from the success of Dark Peak Wrecks and Barnsley Pals books, a number of local history paperbacks were produced along with a series of battlefield guide books. Battleground Europe proved immediately successful and as more and more titles were produced the company made the decision to launch a book publishing arm of the group.

The company acquired the Leo Cooper military history imprint and “Pen and Sword” was born. Leo Cooper, the husband of the famous novelist Jilly, had established a strong reputation for publishing military history titles and had some famous books in his list. With the Leo Cooper imprint and its backlist, Pen and Sword became established as one of the UK’s leading military history publishers.

Over recent years Pen and Sword has continued to grow and has added new imprints to its core area of military history, as well as publishing the majority of its catalogue digitally in eBook format. Pen and Sword specializes in all areas of military history, naval and maritime, aviation, local history, genealogy, social history, transport, discovery and exploration, archaeology, nostalgia and true crime. In 2017, a new lifestyle imprint named White Owl was launched, which publishes books on areas such as health and diet, hobbies and sport, gardening and wildlife and space.

With over 350 books published every year, Pen and Sword has established itself as a specialist book publisher.

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Tracey Emin’s Largest-Ever Exhibition Is Landing In London Next Year – And It Will Display ‘My Bed’ As Well As Never-Before-Seen Pieces

‘A Second Life’ is Tracey Emin’s largest exhibition, and you’ll be able to catch it when it lands at London’s Tate Modern in February.

 Jack Saddler – Senior Staff Writer • 8 September, 2025

Tracey Emin’s career has spanned over 40 years, and her work makes her one of the recognisable names in contemporary British art. And her achievements are to be recognised with her largest-ever exhibition, which lands at London’s Tate Modern next year.

Titled Tracey Emin: A Second Life, the giant exhibition opens at the Tate at the start of next year, with a mix of her most well-known pieces as well as works that have never been shown to the public before.

Tracey Emin: A Second Life at the Tate Modern

Running at the Tate Modern between February 26 – August 31, 2026, Tracey Emin’s landmark A Second Life exhibition shows more than 90 works, with many you’ll likely recognise, including the two pieces that are at the heart of the exhibition, Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made 1996 and the Turner Prize-nominated My Bed 1998, which documents the artist’s ‘recovery from an alcohol-fuelled breakdown’. Elsewhere in the exhibition, you’ll see works from Emin from the 2020s, including her I Followed You Until The End 2023 statue stood outside the Tate.

At the beginning of the exhibition, visitors will see pieces from her first solo exhibition, My Major Retrospective, featuring tiny photographs of her paintings she completed at art school, as well as her six-minute video storytelling piece, Why I Never Became A Dancer 1995, which recounts her time growing up in Margate.

The title of the exhibition references Emin addressing her own ‘second life’, with the artist addressing her experience of cancer, surgery, and disability in the exhibition, with her sculpture Ascension 2024 exploring her relationship with her body following surgeries for bladder cancer, which is also adressed with stills from a new documentary that will premiere at the Tate that shows the stoma and urostomy bag Emin now lives with.

Speaking on the exhibition, Dame Tracey Emin said: “I’m very excited about having a show at Tate Modern. For me, it’s one of the greatest international contemporary art museums in the world and it’s here in London. I feel this show, titled ‘A second Life’, will be a bench mark for me. A moment in my life when I look back and go forward. A true celebration of living.”

‘Tracey Emin: A Second Life’ is landing at the Tate Modern on February 26, 2026 and will run until August 31, 2026. Find out more about it here.

Steve Shirley countered sexism by founding her own company

The refugee, entrepreneur and philanthropist died on August 9th, aged 91

She learned the ropes pretty fast at Computer Developments Ltd. In 1959, she had to. Not so much the coding, with paper and pencil at her desk, until it could be punched up and sent to the computer; to anyone as fond of maths as she was, that was just fun. No, she also learned to stand against the wall in case a male colleague tried to pinch her bottom. And if she wanted to make a sensible point at a meeting, and was bluntly told it was nothing to do with her, she had to silently accept it. The day after that particular slight, however, she handed in her notice and decided to create a company herself. One just for women.

Stephanie Shirley knew exactly what she wanted. A company employing university-educated women, who were otherwise laid off when they got married or became pregnant. A job, coding and inputting data, which they could do from home, with flexible hours and on piecework, to allow for looking after children or elderly parents. A company without the top-down “Do this, jump here” attitude of male bosses, but instead working in teams, eventually with shared ownership. She called it “Freelance Programmers”, and it would sell software.

That in itself caused male sniggering. No one would buy software in 1962; it was given away free with hardware. And of course no one would buy it from a woman. Try again, dear. (You could always recognise ambitious women, she said, because their heads were flat from being patted patronisingly.) Nonetheless, she started her company from her dining table with a mere £6 in capital. By the 1990s, when it was floated, it employed 8,500 people; by 2000 it was valued at $3bn. Its management-control protocols had been adopted by NATO, and it had programmed the black-box flight recorder for Concorde. As for the woman with her back against the wall, by 2017 she was a dame and a Companion of Honour, both for services to IT and for giving away the fortune she had made.

Much of that success lay in cunning. Because married female graduates were ignored by male employers, she had her pick of the best, all mustard-keen to work, and needing only a telephone to get started. Of 300 employees initially recruited, 297 were women. She disguised the scattered, domestic character of her workforce by offering fixed prices. When male clients called, she played a tape recording of efficient typing down the line to suggest a busy office, not her kitchen. Wiliest of all, she began to sign off letters to potential clients not as “Stephanie” but as “Steve”. That was her family nickname, one she liked much better, and responses shot up when she began to use it. So did her delight when, having arranged a meeting, she would walk into a room full of men who were expecting a he, not a she. When they had recovered from assuming she had come to make their tea, they increasingly agreed to do business with her.

This was not the first time she had changed her name. Before she married Derek Shirley in 1959, she was Stephanie Brook. But before that she was Vera Buchthal, who had arrived at Liverpool Street station in 1939, five years old and crying for her lost favourite doll, as one of 10,000 mostly Jewish children brought to England from Germany and Austria under the Kindertransport programme. That start in life marked her ever afterwards. Because kind people had saved her, she was going to make very sure that hers was a life worth saving. She would fritter none of it away.

That was why she snubbed the chance of university, though she was so brilliant at mathematics that she had to go to a boys’ school to study it properly. Instead she took a degree in it after six years of evening classes, while she worked at Dollis Hill Research Centre. (Another personal ambition was never to be poor again.) At Dollis Hill she helped devise electronic telephone exchanges and worked on Ernie, the computer that randomly chose the winning holders of Premium Bonds. At CDL she found even more rewarding work, developing software for the ICT 1301, one of the first mass-produced transistor computers. She created and moulded “Flossie” almost as if it were a child.

Coping with a real child, though, could be much more problematic. She seemed to have perfected the brand-new idea of work-life balance (helped, in her case, by a wonderfully encouraging husband). But it rapidly became impossible. Her only child Giles, at first a contented baby, suddenly at two and a half stopped talking and became unmanageable. He was diagnosed as severely autistic. At puberty he developed epilepsy, and became so violent that more than once she considered family suicide. For years she struggled with depression, even as her company boomed.

The tragedy of Giles convinced her that money was no use if it simply sat there. It had to be spread about. Before she retired in 1993 she therefore gave most of her stake in the company to her staff, ultimately making 70 millionaires. With much of the rest she gradually set up centres where autistic young people like Giles could be cared for, understood, even prepared for work, in an atmosphere as loving as she had tried to give him. The first, a supported living centre called Autism at Kingwood, opened in 1994 with Giles as the first resident. He died only four years later of an epileptic seizure, but he was happy there.

Most of her money went to autism causes, including Autistica and the National Autistic Society. But she did not forget her first love, computing. In 2001 she became a founding donor of the Oxford Internet Institute, which was set up to consider its social and ethical implications. Too many people, she believed, were afraid of new tech. She embraced it wholeheartedly, AI and all; so should they. The only thing to fear was wasting time, for who knew what opportunities might open up tomorrow? One day she had been playing in Vienna, the next on a train, the next on a ship to a new land; one day the butt of a roomful of men, the next her own master, undaunted, and climbing to the top of the tree. ■

The article above appeared in the Obituary section of the print edition under the headline “Steve Shirley” From the September 6th, 2025, edition.

Recollect – Bill and Bev Wood Exhibition

Bob McMullan launched this splendid exhibition. The art collection was exciting in its variety and connections to Canberra artists, and Bill and Beverly’s wide range of activities throughout Bill’s time in the ACT House of Assembly. Somehow, whatever these responsibilities beyond Bill’s commitment to the arts may have encompassed, art and adding to their collection found a place. As well as the art, a timeline of photographs and a collection of political badges, made a collection well worth visiting.

Thank you, Beverly Wood, for providing me with the photo of Rocking Rooster by Catherine Nix.

American Politics

Heather Cox Richardson from Letters from an American <heathercoxrichardson@substack.com> September 14, 2025

 President Donald J. Trump has been trying to remove Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook from the board of governors, alleging she lied on a mortgage application by claiming two homes as primary residences, which could garner a lower interest rate. Yesterday Chris Prentice and Marisa Taylor of Reuters reported that documents show that, in fact, Cook told the lender who provided a mortgage that a property in Georgia for which she was obtaining a loan would be a “vacation home.”

It appears the documents that director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency Bill Pulte used to accuse her of mortgage fraud were standardized forms that her personal application specifying the house was a second home overrode. It also appears that Cook never applied for a primary residence tax exemption for the Georgia home and that she referred to the home on official documents as a “2nd home.”

In contrast, Reuters reported last week that unlike Cook, Pulte’s own father and stepmother claimed primary residence tax exemptions for two homes in different states. When that news broke, one of the towns in which they reside removed their primary residence exemption and charged them for back taxes.

Trump hoped to use the allegations against Cook to advance his control of the Federal Reserve. Now the revelation that those allegations appear to be false highlights the degree to which this administration is attempting to achieve control of the country by pushing a false narrative and getting what its officers want before reality catches up. Senator Joe McCarthy (R-WI) pioneered this technique in the 1950s when he would grab media attention with outrageous statements and outright lies that destroyed lives, then flit to the next target, leaving fact checkers panting in his wake. By the time they proved he was lying, the news cycle had leaped far ahead, and the corrections got nowhere near the attention the lies had.While McCarthy eventually went down in disgrace, the right wing adopted his techniques of controlling politics by creating a narrative. Spin turned into a narrative that denigrated opponents as anti-American, and then into the attempt to construct a fictional world that they could make real so long as they could convince voters to believe in it. In 2004, a senior advisor to President George W. Bush told journalist Ron Suskind that people like him—Suskind—lived in “the reality-based community”: they believed people could find solutions based on their observations and careful study of discernable reality. But, the aide continued, such a worldview was obsolete.“

That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” the aide said. “We are an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

But once you have untethered the political narrative from reality, you are at the mercy of anyone who can commandeer that narrative.

In the wake of the murder of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk in Utah on Wednesday, the radical right is working to distort the country’s understanding of what happened. Long before any information emerged about who the shooter was, the president and prominent right-wing figures claimed that “the Left,” or Democrats, or just “THEY,” had assassinated Kirk.

White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller posted an attack on his political opponents on social media: “There is an ideology that has steadily been growing in this country which hates everything that is good, righteous and beautiful and celebrates everything that is warped, twisted and depraved. It is an ideology at war with family and nature. It is envious, malicious, and soulless. It is an ideology that looks upon the perfect family with bitter rage while embracing the serial criminal with tender warmth. Its adherents organize constantly to tear down and destroy every mark of grace and beauty while lifting up everything monstrous and foul. It is an ideology that leads, always, inevitably and willfully, to violence—violence against those [who] uphold order, who uphold faith, who uphold family, who uphold all that is noble and virtuous in this world. It is an ideology whose one unifying thread is the insatiable thirst for destruction.”

But in fact, the alleged shooter was not someone on the left. The alleged killer, Tyler Robinson, is a young white man from a Republican, gun enthusiast family, who appears to have embraced the far right, disliking Kirk for being insufficiently radical.

Rather than grappling with reality, right-wing figures are using Kirk’s murder to prop up their fictional world. Briefly, they claimed Robinson had been “radicalized” in college. Then, when it turned out he had spent only a single semester at a liberal arts college before going to trade school, MAGA pivoted to attack those who allegedly had celebrated Kirk’s death on social media.This morning, Miller posted: “In recent days we have learned just how many Americans in positions of authority—child services, law clerks, hospital nurses, teachers, gov[ernmen]t workers, even [Department of Defense] employees—have been deeply and violently radicalized. The consequence of a vast, organized ecosystem of indoctrination.”

Today, billionaire Elon Musk, who just months ago was a key figure in the White House, reposted a spreadsheet of “people who’ve said vile things” about Kirk’s murder. Over the list, he wrote: “They are the ones poisoning the minds of our children.” “So far, teachers and professors are by far the most represented,” the author of the list wrote.

Across the country, educators have been suspended or fired for posting opinions on social media that commented on Kirk’s death in ways officials deemed inappropriate. Legal analyst Asha Rangappa noted that “Americans are being conditioned to be snitches on their fellow citizens who don’t toe a party line on what is ‘allowed’ to be expressed. And employers are going along. It’s the new secret police.”

The deliberate attempt to create a narrative centering around “us” and “them” and to mobilize violence against that other was on display today when Musk told a giant anti-immigrant rally in the United Kingdom: “You’re in a fundamental situation here…where whether you choose violence or not, violence is coming to you. You either fight back or you die. You either fight back or you die. And that’s the truth.”

Of course, that is not the truth. It is a classic case of dividing the world into friends and enemies—a tactic suggested by Nazi political theorist Carl Schmitt—and inciting violence against newly identified enemies by claiming it is imperative to preempt them from using violence against your friends. Miller has vowed to use the power of the government not against the far right, where the violence that killed Kirk appears to have originated, but against MAGA’s political enemies. Flipping victims and offenders, he called his political opponents “domestic terrorists” and warned: “[T]he power of law enforcement under President Trump’s leadership will be used to find you, will be used to take away your money, take away your power, and, if you’ve broken the law, to take away your freedom.”

Where that kind of rhetoric takes a society showed on the Fox News Channel’s Fox & Friends Friday, when host Brian Kilmeade suggested the way to address homelessness was through “involuntary lethal injection. Or something. Just kill them.” When asked “why did we have to get to this point,” he answered: “we’re not voting for the right people.”

And that’s the heart of it. The radical right is frustrated because a majority continues to oppose them. According to Elliott Morris of Strength in Numbers, Trump’s job approval rating is just 42.3% with 53.6% disapproving, and more people disapprove of all of his policies than approve of them. Unable to control the country through the machinery of democracy when it operates fairly and afraid voters will turn them out in 2026, Republicans are working to make the system even more rigged than it already is: just yesterday, Missouri lawmakers approved a mid-decade gerrymander to turn one of the state’s two Democratic seats into a Republican one.

Right now, Trump and his loyalists control all three branches of government, but Trump is not delivering what his supporters believe his fictional vision of his presidency promised. Trump telegraphed great strength and vowed he could end Russia’s war against Ukraine with a single phone call, for example. When he failed to get any buy-in at all from Russia’s president Vladimir Putin for his proposals, Trump threatened to impose strong new sanctions against Russia. This afternoon he backed away from that altogether, saying he would issue sanctions on Russia only after all NATO nations stopped buying oil from Russia and placed 50% to 100% tariffs on China. “This is not TRUMP’S WAR (it would never have started if I was President!), it is Biden’s and Zelenskyy’s WAR,” he posted.This latest retreat from his threats against Russia after all his previous empty threats makes Trump’s claims of strength ring hollow. Russia is increasing its attacks on Ukraine, and today NATO member Romania scrambled jets when a Russian drone breached its airspace. Polish and NATO aircraft were deployed today to protect Polish airspace as well.

As Trump’s narrative falters on this and so many other fronts, MAGA is moving to the violence of the far right to achieve what he cannot. In that, they are fueled by the right-wing disinformation machine that is whitewashing Kirk’s racism, sexism, and attacks on those he disagreed with and instead portraying Kirk simply as a Christian motivational speaker attacked by a rabid left wing. Trump’s vow to award Kirk the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, posthumously reinforces that image.

The refusal of Republican lawmakers to challenge MAGA’s creation of its own reality has opened the way for believers to try to put that world into place through violence. Their victory would end the rule of law on which the United States was founded and base the government on the whims of an authoritarian cabal.

It would make the United States a country in which people who stand in the way of the regime—people like Lisa Cook—would be at the mercy of hostile officials who allege they are committing crimes in order to get rid of them.—

Notes:https://www.reuters.com/world/us/fed-governor-cook-declared-her-atlanta-property-vacation-home-documents-show-2025-09-12/https://www.reuters.com/world/us/bill-pulte-accused-fed-governor-lisa-cook-fraud-his-relatives-filed-housing-2025-09-05/https://kyivindependent.com/romania-scrambles-jets-poland-closes-airport-over-russian-drone-alerts/https://www.wsj.com/world/these-charts-show-how-putin-is-defying-trump-by-escalating-airstrikes-on-ukraine-f7eee47b?mod=hp_lead_pos5https://www.politico.com/news/2025/08/26/clearly-a-low-moment-u-s-india-relationship-sours-as-new-tariffs-kick-in-00527196https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/09/stephen-miller-charlie-kirk-tyler-robinson-extreme-rhetoric-id/https://www.gelliottmorris.com/p/datahttps://www.npr.org/2025/09/12/nx-s1-5537977/redistricting-midterms-trump-missourihttps://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-says-will-posthumously-award-charlie-kirk-presidential-medal-fre-rcna230581Bluesky:atrupar.com/post/3lypzw476j723wartranslated.bsky.social/post/3lypphezqak2spaleofuture.bsky.social/post/3lyqfcyxgjk2ajsweetli.bsky.social/post/3lyqs7kehqc22asharangappa.bsky.social/post/3lyre7fpuzc2hthe-ronin.bsky.social/post/3lypnusdo5s2hclairewillett.bsky.social/post/3lyqpmvctj225

Playwright and dramaturg Tom Wright – whose adaptation TROY is on at Malthouse Theatre – loves the ephemeral nature of his chosen art form. By Anna Snoekstra.

Playwright Tom Wright on the purpose of creativity

“I was swimming alone at Whale Beach and I got caught in a rip and died,” playwright Tom Wright tells me. He didn’t really die on that beach 25 years ago – after all, he is zooming with me from a tiny back room at Malthouse Theatre, where he is in rehearsals with director Ian Michael for the production of TROY.

“In my personal mythology, I died,” he explains. “I somehow managed not to panic and floated my way into safer waters. I got back to the beach and my legs were like jelly and I crawled, literally crawled, back to my towel. I wasn’t pompous enough to think that I’d been returned for a purpose or any of that Hollywood stuff.”

Wright’s near-death experience reinforced his decision to live “an irresponsible life”. He is highly aware that he comes from security and privilege and decided that to live without assets or property was the ultimate privilege.  

“I’ve lived as a grasshopper and not enough as an ant,” he says. “That came from a sense of this precariousness of what it is to be alive and what it is to share and make. It made me feel like, oh yes, it’s all right. Everything now is just a bonus.”

TROY is Wright’s seventh retelling of a classical text – others include The Odyssey, The Women of Troy, Oresteia and The Lost Echo – and it’s easy to see how mythic narratives frame his experience of the world.

Wright is artistic associate at Belvoir St Theatre in Sydney but considers himself a “Melburnian in exile”. His family has been in Victoria since the 1840s, and he was brought up in Russell Street in the CBD in the late 1960s. “My father had grown up on an apple orchard in regional Victoria and as the result of an accident, could no longer run the property,” he says. “Something like Dick Whittington, he had to come to the city to make his living. My mother came from an old Melbourne family full of socialists and radical theorists. Their curiosity and their citizenship were instinctive and tribal. You know, I’ve been away from Melbourne for nearly a quarter of a century, but the bluestone runs deeply in my veins.”

Comparing Melbourne with Sydney, Wright quotes late Australian playwright Jack Hibberd, who observed the differences between Australia’s largest cities. “Sydney was founded by the English in the cultural sense; even its penal convict relationship is an English thing,” Wright says. “It’s also more English in the sense that it’s mercantile, obsessed with trade, obsessed with value, obsessed with your role in the marketplace.

“Because of the gold rush and a whole range of different things, Melbourne is a Scots–Irish city. It comes from the Celtic diaspora more than the Anglo diaspora.” Wright believes Melbourne to be a hard nut to crack if you weren’t born here, and says it can be highly unwelcoming to outsiders.

In Sydney, he says, no one cares what school you went to or who your grandfather was. “They just want your value in terms of your ability to make money. And it’s great when you’re exciting and on the way up the mountain, but it’s deeply lonely when you’re on the other side. Whereas Melbourne, your tribe and the group of friends that you make in your vital decades remain your soulmates for the rest of your life. It’s a deeply safe space, at its best. I’m always happy when I come home. The sky feels familiar.”

Wright’s family valued curiosity above creativity. This is a value he still carries with him. He prizes articulacy, believing it to be the most generous trait you can have. While we speak, Wright works hard to decentralise himself from the narrative. He talks at length about director Ian Michael, about the nature of theatre in Australia, about war, privilege and cultural memory. He quotes famous plays, directors and poets many times. But getting him talking about his childhood, or journey as a writer, is difficult.

I can tell that the dodging and weaving is intentional on his part. His interests lie in the work he’s creating and the voices he is attempting to put centrestage through his retellings. I ask him about his growth as a creative – he thinks the word “creative” is overused. He quotes King Lear – “nothing will come of nothing” – and says that he doesn’t create, he reimagines.

He tells me he didn’t set out to be a playwright. He fell into theatre, first acting and then dramaturgy, because his girlfriend was studying it. “It’s the classic manifestation of privilege,” he says. “I cannot emphasise enough the privilege of being a multigenerational, white, English-speaking Australian and the safety that it gives you. Although I was the first person in my family to go to university, I never felt unworthy.” “People think that the purpose of being creative is to live forever, but you’ll end up just a forgotten statue battered by the desert winds.”

Although his family was uninterested in his burgeoning career on the stage, Wright’s deep sense of security never faltered. His career unfolded naturally, beginning with one-man shows monologuing death row cases and evolving with a long-term collaborative relationship with Barrie Kosky that culminated in an eight-hour production of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. He is now one of the country’s most acclaimed playwrights: his work tours the globe and has earnt him multiple Helpmann and Green Room awards as well as the Nick Enright Prize for Playwriting.

“When I was a young man, I callously thought that I was ‘lucky’, to use that great Australian word,” he says. “Now I realise I wasn’t lucky, I was privileged. But it took me a long time to see that. Sometimes I wonder about over-articulate white men in our society and their endless obsession with how smart they are. It feels to me like pages of the newspaper and the internet, or any social forum, are just full of men who have been conditioned by thousands of years to be listened to, still insisting on their right to be right. I’d like my right to be wrong.”

Listening is one thing, hearing is another, he says. “I feel like I’m getting better at hearing when I do listen.”

This connects to a broader shift in contemporary Australian theatre. “At the moment, it strikes me that we’re going through a phase where the director fulfils a facilitator role more than a visionary role,” he says. Wright sees a shift away from the idea of the auteurist visionary director, largely because of mistrust around the ego and power imbalances that often come with it.

In its place, a collaborative model of theatre is thriving, allowing rooms to be safer, more communicative and diverse. Wright is all for this model, finding the shift “exciting”. However, he is also aware that something can be lost, because there are fewer opportunities for people who genuinely want to go out on a limb. “So we’re making better, general quality work, but I would suggest that we’re possibly making fewer productions that are genuinely extraordinary,” he says. “Sometimes you pay for your cultural safety with cultural timidity. And at the moment, I feel like we’re going through a consolidation of what it is to be a nation, what it is to write plays, what it is to make theatre.”

In Wright’s view, Ian Michael, the director of TROY, possesses that genuinely extraordinary visionary quality. Michael originally worked in the box office at Malthouse, selling tickets to previous plays of Wright’s. After a swift career rise, he directed a revival of Wright’s adaptation of Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock at Sydney Theatre Company, and Wright is thrilled to be working with him again.

“As a Noongar man and as an emerging leader in the Noongar and Indigenous communities across the country, Ian’s work cannot escape the prism of a postcolonial discourse,” Wright says. “TROY is a piece about Ukraine and it’s a piece about Gaza, but it never mentions them. It’s about war. It’s thinking philosophically about what war is and how war works for us, inside our stories and inside our mythologies.”

Wright believes there is great power in the act of retelling myths. He sees it as a way for Australians to learn about themselves as a nation: their strengths, weaknesses and prejudices. But he says that as an immature postcolonial society, Australia struggles with its retellings.

“We either get cultural cringe and try to be like the northern hemisphere model of what it is to make art and literature, and we imitate that,” he says. “It feels like we’re still trapped in that cycle and will be until our reconciliation project moves further on. Or we get adolescent in our insistence on our own novelty. And neither of these options feel particularly satisfactory to me. So, I like the mythic and I like the historical and I like the act of retelling, as opposed to telling.”

Wright respects the art of theatre as an act of resistance against capitalism. He loves its ephemeral nature. “It strikes me that we live in an age where everything is commodified. Our lives and our memories and our intellectual property and the data of our phones is now something that’s passed around in a marketplace,” he says. “But there are occasionally some moments where genuine community can still take place, where a group of people in the city can sit in a darkened room and hear again a story from thousands of years ago, and no one can really commodify that moment.

“The fact that it’s very hard to make money out of theatre is its curse and its blessing. It resists being continually colonised by neo-capitalism. Yes, obviously there are people making money out of commercial theatre, but I’m talking about these kinds of moments. And again, this is the Melburnian in me coming out, is that I value the way in which, in this day and age, frankly, going to a show on a Wednesday night in St Kilda and in the rain is active resistance. You pay your money, but the money barely covers the cost of what it is. No one’s going to come along and say, I love this, I’m going to purchase it. I’m going to package it up and sell 46,000 editions a day. Theatre is very hard to make a mass art form, and that’s one of its great things.”

Wright often thinks about “Ozymandias”, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s famous poem in which a traveller describes a ruined statue in a huge, empty desert. The traveller can see in the half-buried form that the sculptor had skill, and notices on the pedestal the inscription: My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; / look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! “People think that the purpose of being creative is to live forever,” Wright says, “but you’ll end up just a forgotten statue battered by the desert winds.”

He tells me about speaking to students at the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA) about his work. He mentions his and Kosky’s The Lost Echo, of which he is still immensely proud, as well as other work from the period that he considers deep failures. “One thing these shows have in common now is that not only have the students never seen them, but they also weren’t even born then,” he says. “Theatre is just ice blocks on a frying pan.” 

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on September 13, 2025 as “Wright to be wrong”.

Cindy Lou snacks at Hello in Campbell

Hello is a delightful cafe for breakfast, lunch, or coffees. With the friendly service, birdlife (even some plovers – the first I’ve seen at a coffee shop), pleasant coffees and good menu, with indoor and outdoor seating this is a real find. The menu includes breakfast dishes, specials such as a delicious soup, pastas and a lamb pie, and regulars as fancy as a Lebanese lamb burger with Tzatziki.

Spring – the Manchurian pears look magnificent whether the sky is blue or gloomy. One lone daffodil! And the grape hyacinths are now appearing.

Brilliant & Bold

Brilliant & Bold, a zoom meeting held monthly by Dr Jocelynne Scutt was, this month, addressed by Benju Oli.

Benju is a registered nurse and women’s health advocate from Nepal and now resides in Australia. She has worked in Nepal and Dubai coordinating and advising families in line with her philosophy: “Empowering hearts, inspiring leaders, nurturing change.” 

Benju has experienced firsthand women’s distinct struggles as well as their strength, resilience, and leadership. She has organised and been a key participant in international webinars about women’s leadership and empowerment. Ever proud of her roots, Benju adores her nation, Nepal, and is determined to motivate women to take up leadership roles.

Benju Oli used her broad experience to talk about the new leadership in Nepal. Discussion ranged very freely across countries, cultures and influences.

The information below provided the core to discussion.

Brilliant & Bold! Global Discussion Sunday 14 September:

What constitutes leadership? Should women emulate ‘male’ leadership or what is stereotypically considered masculine – assertive, linear-orientated, exercising power without any or little consultation with subordinates? Or is there a different way of approaching leadership – more consultative, taking into account the views of others, operating as a team – even ‘first among equals’. Do women run the risk of being seen as ‘weak’ or ‘not leadership material’ if they do not follow the ‘top down’ approach? What about negotiations with other leaders. Say one is leader of a country or nation-state negotiating with the leader of another country or nation-state: does the known character of the latter impact on how a leader should go about her (or his) job? 

Following Benju Oli’s address, I found the following article:

Published by – Washington Post WorldView

By Praveen Kumar Yadav, Karishma Mehrotra and Supriya Kumar with Sammy Westfall

Young Nepalis brought down the government. Now they need a plan.

KATHMANDU, Nepal — A week before massive protests forced the resignation of Nepal’s prime minister, Tanuja Pande was hunched over her phone in Kathmandu, furiously typing in the comments section of a TikTok video.

The clip showed Nepal’s political elites flaunting their wealth — “flexing,” as she put it — contrasted with images of ordinary Nepalis departing for the Gulf, where most eke out a meager living as manual laborers.

For Pande, a 24-year-old lawyer, the video hit close to home. In her hometown of Damak, in eastern Nepal, most people in her parents’ generation went abroad to work. Back at home, she said, there aren’t enough schools and hospitals are underfunded.

Her thoughts returned to the video on Sept. 4, when the government abruptly banned dozens of social media apps, including WhatsApp, Signal and Instagram. To Pande and other young Nepalis, it was seen as a direct assault on their civic space, and a way of cutting off their connection to the country’s 2 million-strong diaspora.“We were sitting on gunpowder — and the social media shutdown ignited it,” said Devesh Jha, a Nepalese political analyst.

In a little over a week, grassroots protests over corruption would spiral into deadly violence, thrusting this small Himalayan nation into a new period of instability.

The groundswell was led by activists like Pande, who launched Gen.ZNepal, a scrappy Instagram collective that quickly grew to 30,000 followers and racked up almost 13 million views. Members used VPNs to get around the government ban and began organizing.

“This is not outrage against a particular party or leader,” Pande said in an interview on local television. “This is against the entire system.”

On Sunday, the day before their planned rally, Pande and 25 other young Nepalis met at the protest venue to discuss logistics: permissions, water supplies, fliers. “It was nothing much bigger than that,” she said.

They were on the cusp of a generational revolt, even if they didn’t know it yet. At 9 a.m. on Monday, nearly 4,000 people converged at the Maitighar Mandala monument in the heart of Kathmandu. They danced to patriotic songs and held up homemade signs: “our memes, our rules” and “this generation won’t tolerate what our parents tolerated.”

“It was really peaceful,” she said. “It was beautiful.” Thirty-six hours later, the government was gone and the capital was in flames.

The uprising was just the latest in a series of youth-led movements across South Asia that have risen up to challenge the status quo, taking down governments from Dhaka to Colombo. “What happened in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and most recently in Indonesia inspired us to raise our voices for Nepal,” said Amrit Kumar Mishra, a 28-year-old lawyer and protester who filed a Supreme Court petition against the social media ban.

Monday’s unrest quickly spread beyond the capital. “These same politicians were in power when I was a child, and now, at 22, they are still there — unchanged, unaccountable, and corrupt,” said Ranjana Kami, who protested in the western city of Dang. In her area, she said, local fixers with political connections demand bribes for basic tasks, such as giving out citizenship certificates.

Asal Kumar Dahal, 19, who joined the protests after seeing posts on social media, said he was sick of pervasive corruption. His well-connected friend obtained a driver’s license in a week, he said, while he has been mired in bureaucracy.

Nepal is one of the most corrupt countries in the world, according to Transparency International, ranking 107 out of 180 nations. “Corruption was endemic, and so was the impunity against leaders,” said Amish Raj Mulmi, a Nepali author.

By midday Monday, the crowd in Kathmandu began to shift, according to Pande and other young protesters, and the celebratory atmosphere turned darker. Pande noticed strangers, often older men, pushing into the crowd. “I was scared of the new faces,” she said. She fired off an Instagram warning — leave immediately — and went straight home.

“Then it just spiraled,” said Pranaya Rana, a journalist who was covering the protests for Kalam Weekly, an online publication. When protesters forced their way into a restricted area, witnesses said, security forces opened fire on them with live ammunition, rubber bullets and tear gas.

“When I close my eyes, I can still see the people running scared, screaming,” said Dahal.

On Tuesday, in an effort to restore calm, the government lifted the social media ban and Prime Minister K.P. Sharma Oli resigned. Pande and other Gen Z leaders called off plans for more protests. But the chaos had taken on a life of its own. Mobs roamed the streets armed with iron rods and knives, looting businesses and attacking police officers.

By dusk, the violence reached the heart of the state. Shirtless men clambered atop the gates of Singha Durbar, an administrative palace, waving the national flag. Chanting protesters surged into parliament. Smoke choked the sky.

Nepal’s parliament, the Supreme Court, political offices, hotels and media houses were torched that day as army tanks rumbled past. A former prime minister’s wife was critically injured when rioters set fire to her home. At least 51 people were killed over two days, police said, and hundreds more wounded, according to hospital officials.

“Buildings can be rebuilt,” said Mulmi. “But the idea of the Nepali state itself has been put into doubt.”

“Gen Z has achieved their goals, but at a very, very large cost to the country,” said Rana, the journalist.

Pande bristled at suggestions that her movement was responsible for the bloodshed. “What happened on September 9 was not by us,” she said Wednesday, after taking part in negotiations with the army. “They are trying to dirty our movement.”

Kathmandu is a city in shock. Banks and police stations were shuttered on Wednesday. In some neighborhoods, volunteers swept rubble from the streets. Across Nepal, people are reckoning with how the country arrived at this moment — and what comes next.

Nepal emerged from civil war in 2006 after a brutal, years-long Maoist insurgency. Political progress was halting; governments came and went. A popular movement that began in 2006 led to abolition of the monarchy in 2008. It took seven years and two constituent assemblies to adopt a constitution, which enshrined federalism and secularism. When Oli first rose to power in 2015, a new generation was “promised a new Nepal,” Rana said.

But “we never experienced those changes in practice,” said Mishra, the lawyer.

One in 5 Nepalis live below the poverty line and nearly half survive on less than $6.85 a day, according to the World Bank. Almost a quarter of young people are unemployed, and remittances account for nearly a third of GDP. As migration separated families and drained Nepal of skilled labor, the children of government ministers showed off their lavish lifestyles online.

“The anti-corruption mood came because the wealth gap is widening,” said Mulmi.

In March, thousands rallied in Kathmandu for the restoration of the monarchy under former king Gyanendra. Now, Gen Z protesters fear they are trying to co-opt the uprising.

When the Nepali Army Chief allowed a pro-monarchy figure into talks on Wednesday, the protesters left the table immediately, they said. Army spokesperson Raja Ram Basnet declined to comment. “We are currently focused on maintaining law and order,” he told The Washington Post.

On Friday, one of protesters’ key demands was met when former chief justice Sushila Karki was sworn in as caretaker leader, making her the country’s first female prime minister. After taking the oath of office, she called for new elections in six months.

Many protesters support Balendra Shah, Kathmandu’s rapper turned mayor, whose songs about inequality and government ineptitude helped propel him to power. But for those on the front lines of the country’s sudden political transition, the future looms large and uncertain.

“I don’t think the Gen Z really has a plan,” said Jha. Even Pande admitted: “We are confused right now.”

The Tyranny of Structurelessness

During the discussion on leadership, the following article, ‘The Tyranny of Structurelessness’ was raised, and well worth (re-)reading.

ORIGINAL INTRODUCTION


“During the years in which the women’s liberation movement has been taking shape, a great emphasis has been placed on what are called leaderless,
structureless groups as the main form of the movement. The source of this idea was a natural reaction against the overstructured society in which most of us found ourselves, the inevitable control this gave others over our lives, and the continual elitism of the Left and similar groups among those who were supposedly fighting this over-structuredness.

The idea of ‘structurelessness’, however, has moved from a healthy counter to
these tendencies to becoming a goddess in its own right. The idea is as little examined as the term is much used, but it has become an intrinsic and unquestioned part of women’s liberation ideology. For the early development of the movement this did not much matter. It early defined its main method as conscious ness-raising, and the ‘structureless rap group’ was an excellent means to this end. Its looseness and informality encouraged participation in discussion and the often supportive atmosphere elicited personal insight. If nothing more concrete than personal insight ever resulted from these groups, that did not much matter, because their purpose did not really extend beyond this.

The basic problems didn’t appear until individual rap groups exhausted the virtues of consciousness-raising and decided they wanted to do some- thing more specific. At this point they usually floundered because most groups were unwilling to change their structure when they changed their task. Women had thoroughly accepted the idea of ‘structurelessness’ without realising the limitations of its uses. People would try to use the ‘structureless’ group and the informal conference for purposes for which they were unsuitable out of a blind belief that no other means could possibly be anything but oppressive.

If the movement is to move beyond these elementary stages of development, it will have to disabuse itself of some of its prejudices about organisation and structure. There is nothing inherently bad about either of these. They can be and often are misused, but to reject them out of hand because they are misused is to deny ourselves the necessary tools to further development. We need to understand why ‘structurelessness’ does not work…”

International Anarchist Pl‘ The Tyranny of Structurelessness’, by Jo Freeman, was first printed by the women’s liberation movement, USA, in 1970. It was reprinted in Berkeley Journal of Sociology in 1970 and later issued as a pamphlet by Agitprop in 1972. It was again issued as a pamphlet by the Leeds wom en’s group of the Organisation of Revolutionary Anarchists (ORA) and then re- printed by the Kingston group of the Anarchist Workers’ Association (AWA). It was later Published jointly by Dark Star Press and Rebel Press in 1984 in a pamphlet called ‘Untying the Knot – Feminism, Anarchism & Organisation’, with the printing done by Aldgate Press [84b Whitechapel High St, London E1]. Around 1996 this text was placed on the web at http://www.tigerden.com/~berios/tos.txt . This edition is based on a that text with US spellings switched to British ones. See Further Commentary and Articles arising from Books* and continued longer articles as noted in the blog. for the complete article.

‘Just doing his job’: Albanese government backs ABC reporter blasted by Trump

Story by Adam Vidler

The Albanese government has thrown its support behind an Australian journalist who was subjected to a spray and threat from US President Donald Trump.

ABC journalist John Lyons, on assignment for the program Four Corners, quizzed Trump on his business dealings while in office, asking if it was “appropriate” for a sitting president to be engaged in so much personal commerce.

“My kids are running the business,” Trump said, before asking where Lyons was from.

“The Australians. You’re hurting Australia, right? In my opinion, you are hurting Australia very much right now,” Trump said.

“And they want to get along with me. You know, your leader is coming over to see me very soon. I’m going to tell them about you. You set a very bad tone.”

The Trump administration continued the criticism online after posting a video of the exchange on an official White House account with the caption: ”POTUS smacks down a rude foreign Fake News loser (many such cases).”

The Trump family has been involved in numerous business undertakings arguably bolstered by the patriarch’s presidential status, including golf course deals and cryptocurrency launches, since the start of Trump’s second term.

Speaking on camera for the ABC later this morning, Lyons addressed the clash.

“If our job as journalists is to hold truth to power, then surely asking legitimate questions politely to the president of the United States should be acceptable, but in this day and age now, it’s not,” he said.Expand article logo  

He referenced Donald Trump’s US$15 billion ($22.4 billion) lawsuit announced against the New York Times yesterday, saying it was all part of his “war on the media”.

Lyons defended his questions as fair, research-based, and politely conveyed.

Asked whether he had been banned from White House grounds, he said it would be a “very dark day” if that was the case.

“I don’t think we’ve yet reached that point though,” he said.

It’s a controversy that has been raised since Trump was first elected president and refused to divest himself of his business interests while in office.

When asked about the exchange at a press conference this afternoon, Treasurer Jim Chalmers said Lyons was “just doing his job”. 

“I respect the ABC and I respect its independence, and that extends to not second-guessing the questions asked legitimately by journalists at press conferences,” he said.

“Journalists have a job to do, and as far as I can tell, that journalist was just doing his job in Washington DC.

Week beginning 10 September 2025

Jane Caro Lyrebird Allen & Unwin, April 2025.*

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

A lyrebird’s cry in a lonely bush site echoes a desperate woman’s cry for help. It is overheard by a student, who aware of its possible significance, takes her recording to the police. With no body, and no respect for Jessica Weston’s theory, the case remains unresolved. Twenty years later a body is found at the site and Jessica, now Associate Professor, and retired Megan Blaxland brought back for the new inquiry, together are determined to solve the case.

Caro makes superb use of features of the Australian bush – the loneliness, silence, foliage and undergrowth, and its beauty which hides a heinous crime. Her commitment to caring for the environment is made through engaging characters, the exposition becoming an integral part of the social commentary which provides a thoughtful background to solving the crime.

Characterisation is a strong feature of this novel, Megan Blaxland becoming a figure who would make excellent returning character. However, she is not alone in being a well-developed personality. Caro achieves complexity in her characters by weaving their flaws together with positive characteristics. At the same time, a sense of chill surrounds even the friendliest of interactions. This is a crime that, despite the possibility of wider ramifications has a small town, claustrophobic feel about it, the bush and the lyre bird’s lonely song playing a sinister part in achieving this.

This is the first of Jane Caro’s novels that I have read, although I follow her shorter contributions in the media. I found Caro’s combination of good story telling, social commentary, and a complex crime to be solved very inviting and look forward to reading her past and future work.

*I have posted this review in its entirety here, and it also appears at Books: Reviews .

Amy Blumenfeld Such Good People Spark Press, July 2025.

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

April and Rudy become childhood friends, and their families replicate this closeness. April and Rudy’s lives take different paths as young adults, but they and their families remain close. When April invites Rudy to join her at a college event the result is disastrous. Rudy prevents her being assaulted by another guest who later dies. Rudy is arrested and gaoled. April moves on, marrying and having a family. One focus of the novel celebrates the closeness that the families maintain despite these changes. Another is Rudy’s release from prison and the impact it has on April, her husband and children, and less immediately, the journalist who was also present at the college event.

Although I finished this book, there were times that the language really grated, and I was tempted to stop reading. For example, ‘tresses’ for hair, ‘atop’ on occasions when a simple ‘on’ would do, and ‘pertain’ instead of ‘about.’ At times April’s responses were also jarring. She is introduced as the wife of an aspiring politician, but when a journalist phones, rather than query the reason, she provides a host of information about herself, her husband, family, and their activities. This seems more in keeping with the young student about whose past the journalist is calling rather than a mature woman in a political world. April continues to make unrealistic choices, demonstrating her care and concern for her childhood friend Rudy, but at times overlooking her current responsibilities. On the positive side, telling the story from April’s, Rudy’s and Jillian’s perspectives helps with characterisation, develops a story line that demonstrates the importance and depth of the childhood friendship, and its continuation into young adulthood, as well offering reasons for as Jillian’s complicated reactions to events. The complete review appears at Books: Reviews

American Politics

Joyce Vance from Civil Discourse <joycevance@substack.com>

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Forgetting the Survivors Joyce Vance Sep 1 

Everyone but the survivors—the people who deserve it the most—seems to be the focus of the renewed interest in Jeffrey Epstein. Politics, prurience, and curiosity about which political and pop culture figures might be mentioned in the files have dominated media coverage while people on both sides of the aisle clamor for the release of information gathered by the government as it prepared to prosecute Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.

This week, some of the survivors will meet privately with members of the House Oversight Committee, and there may be some public testimony. The survivors have been critical of the administration’s handling of the situation, but no one seems to be listening to them. Imagine having been victimized by these people and then having to listen to the shameful “interview” by Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, who let Maxwell whitewash her conduct. Blanche, who was not on the prosecution team that tried the case, failed to challenge Maxwell, who was convicted by a jury of sex trafficking, when she claimed she never saw “underage women” (many of us would call them “girls”) being abused. Blanche even fed her lines when she faltered.

No one should be surprised that a convicted criminal, sentenced to 20 years in prison, would claim she never did anything wrong—especially when her conviction is still on appeal and the government is holding out the prospect of transfer to a much more hospitable prison setting than the one she was in. What’s appalling is that no one at the Justice Department or in the administration seems to have considered the survivors when they released the video and the transcript, or, for that matter, when they gave Maxwell favorable treatment, moving her from a federal prison in Florida to a minimum-security prison camp in Texas just days after the interview with Blanche. The Justice Department, which the Bureau of Prisons is a component of, offered no explanation for the unprecedented transfer of a convicted sex offender, but it seemed to come in exchange for saying Donald Trump hadn’t done anything criminal.

“Trump was always very cordial and very kind to me. And I just want to say that I find — I — I admire his extraordinary achievement in becoming the President now. And I like him, and I’ve always liked him. So that is the sum and substance of my entire relationship with him,” Maxwell said in the interview. Trump couldn’t have asked for anything better. Maxwell seems to have understood the importance of playing to the audience of one when you want something.

The Trump Justice Department has not spoken with any of the survivors as part of its review of the prosecutions. Maxwell’s trial took place during the Biden administration. The lead trial lawyer, coincidentally, was former FBI Director Jim Comey’s daughter, Maurene. She was fired by the Trump administration in July, with no reason given.

On Wednesday, there will be a nonpartisan rally on The Hill in Washington, D.C., participated in by groups that work to end human trafficking and to support survivors.

Rachel Foster, a cofounder of World Without Exploitation, an advocacy group for survivors of trafficking, explained why the rally on Wednesday is so important, why the focus should be on survivors, and what this repeated victimization is doing to them: “That is the focus of our coming together on Wednesday — to listen to those who were exploited by Epstein and Maxwell and have suffered decades long harm. These women have been omitted and silenced for too long. They are gathering to speak out about what justice means to them, and it’s not leniency or a pardon for the one perpetrator who has been held accountable for the egregious and predatory crimes she committed.”

Former federal prosecutor and Westchester County DA Mimi Rocah put it like this, “the real victims—over 1,000 by this DOJ’s own statement—have been further traumatized by allowing Maxwell this platform to spew her falsehoods. And, just as important, some of the most important cases that federal prosecutors bring–sex trafficking and child sexual enticement and abuse cases—will no doubt be jeopardized. Because who would trust a DOJ that orchestrates such a travesty of justice.”

When survivors of crimes are ignored, we should ask the question: Why is this happening? Here, the answer seems simple; the Trump administration is playing politics, not doing justice. They offered to release the Epstein files, a promise they haven’t delivered on, without talking with the survivors first and hearing their views. Epstein didn’t care about the people he exploited. Maxwell still doesn’t. And this administration and its Justice Department, the people charged with that duty under law, don’t either.

This week, a number of Epstein and Maxwell survivors will be coming out in public for the first time, and many who have never done so before will speak out. This is the power of being in community and finding courage and solidarity. When the survivors speak, we should all listen.

We’re in this together,

Joyce

Haley Robson answers reporters’ questions during a news conference with other alleged victims of disgraced financier and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, outside the US Capitol on September 3, 2025. 
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Heathercoxrichardson@substack.com> 

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September 5, 2025Heather Cox RichardsonSep 6  

Today President Donald J. Trump signed an executive order to rename the Department of Defense as the Department of War, although the 1947 abandonment of the Department of War name was not simply a matter of substituting a new name for the original one. In 1947, to bring order and efficiency to U.S. military forces, Congress renamed the Department of War as the Department of the Army, then brought it, together with the Department of the Navy and a new Department of the Air Force, into a newly established “National Military Establishment” overseen by the secretary of defense.

In 1949, Congress replaced the National Military Establishment name, whose initials sounded unfortunately like “enemy,” with Department of Defense. The new name emphasized that the Allied Powers of World War II would join together to focus on deterring wars by standing against offensive wars launched by big countries against their smaller neighbors. Although Trump told West Point graduates this year that “[t]he military’s job is to dominate any foe and annihilate any threat to America, anywhere, anytime, and any place,” in fact, the stated mission of the Department of Defense is “to provide the military forces needed to deter war and ensure our nation’s security.”As Amanda Castro and Hannah Parry of Newsweek note, in August, Trump said he wanted the change because “Defense is too defensive…we want to be offensive too if we have to be.” By law, Congress must approve the change, which Politico estimates will cost billions of dollars, although Trump said: “I’m sure Congress will go along if we need that. I don’t think we even need that.” By this evening, nameplates and signage bearing the new name had gone up in government offices and the URL for the Defense Department website had been changed to war [dot] gov.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has pushed the change because he sees it as part of his campaign to spread a “warrior ethos” at the Pentagon. Today he said the name change was part of “restoring intentionality to the use of force…. We’re going to go on offense, not just on defense. Maximum lethality, not tepid legality, violent effect, not politically correct. We’re going to raise up warriors, not just defenders. So this War Department, Mr. President, just like America, is back.”In 1947, when the country dropped the “War Department” name, the chief of staff of the U.S. Army—the highest-ranking officer on active duty—was five-star general Dwight D. Eisenhower. It is unusual for anyone to suggest that Eisenhower, who led the Allied troops in World War II, was insufficiently committed to military strength. Indeed, the men who changed the name to “Defense Department” and tried to create a rules-based international order did so precisely because war was not a game to them. Having seen the carnage of war not just on the battlefield but among civilians who faced firebombing, death camps, homelessness, starvation, and the obscenity of atomic weapons, they hoped to find a way to make sure insecure, power-hungry men could not start another war easily.

The Movement Conservatives who took over the Republican Party in the 1980s leaned heavily on a mythologized image of the American cowboy as a strong, independent individual who wanted nothing from the government but to be left alone. That image supported decades of attacks on the modern government as “socialism,” and it has now metastasized in the MAGA movement to suggest that the men in charge of the government should be able to do whatever they want.

Just what that looks like was made clear on Wednesday when the Trump administration launched a strike on a boat carrying 11 civilians it claimed were smuggling drugs. Covering the story, the New York Times reported that “Pentagon officials were still working Wednesday on what legal authority they would tell the public was used to back up the extraordinary strike in international waters.”

Today, David Philipps and Matthew Cole reported another military strike approved by Trump in his first term that was previously undisclosed. In the New York Times, they reported that in early 2019, Trump okayed a Navy SEAL mission to plant an electronic device in North Korea. The plan went awry when their activity near the shore attracted a civilian fishing boat with two or three men diving for shellfish. The SEALs killed the men on the boat, punctured their lungs with knives so the bodies would sink, abandoned the mission, and returned to base.

The administration never notified the Gang of Eight, the eight leaders of Congress who must be briefed on intelligence activities unless the president thinks it is essential to limit access to information about a covert operation. The Gang of Eight is made up of the leaders of both parties in each chamber of Congress, as well as the chairs and ranking minority members of the intelligence committee of each chamber.

Military officials appear concerned that Trump might continue to send personnel into precarious missions. Those who were involved in or knew about the North Korea mission said they were speaking up now because they are worried that such failures are often hidden and that if the public only hears about successful operations, “they may underestimate the extreme risks American forces undertake.”

Trump’s promise that his demonstrations of strength would make the U.S. a leader on the international stage is also falling apart. Barak Ravid and Dave Lawler of Axios reported that in a conversation yesterday with European Union leaders, Trump backed away from his promises to increase pressure on Russia to stop its war against Ukraine and instead told the leaders they must do it themselves.Also yesterday, the Financial Times reported that the administration will no longer help to fund military training and infrastructure in Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia, Baltic nations vulnerable to Russian incursions. National security scholar Tom Nichols commented: “I am adamant about people not falling prey to conspiracy theories about Trump and the Russians, but this is a classic moment where it’s understandable to ask: If the Russians owned him, how would his actions be any different?”

The administration has not briefed Congress on the change.

Earlier this week, on September 3, leaders Xi Jinping of China, Vladimir Putin of Russia, Kim Jong Un of North Korea, and Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus met in Beijing to celebrate the anniversary of the formal surrender of Japan and the end of World War II. The day before, Putin described Xi as a dear friend and said the ties between the two leaders are at an “unprecedented level.”

Trump did not appear to take the meeting well. He posted at Xi, reminding him of “the massive amount of support and ‘blood’ that the United States of America gave to China in order to help it to secure its FREEDOM from a very unfriendly foreign invader” and adding: “Please give my warmest regards to Vladimir Putin, and Kim Jong Un, as you conspire against the United States of America. PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP”

India’s president, Narendra Modi, also met with Xi this week as Beijing continued to push the idea that it is now the head of a new world order. Trump responded: “Looks like we’ve lost India and Russia to deepest, darkest, China. May they have a long and prosperous future together!”Reality is also intruding on the Republicans’ insistence that only they know how to run the economy.

Although Trump inherited a booming economy, he insisted that it was actually in terrible shape and that his tariffs would bring back manufacturing and make life better for those left behind by 40 years of economic policy that concentrated wealth at the top of society.

In fact, data released Tuesday show that U.S. manufacturing has contracted for six straight months. Economic journalist Catherine Rampell noted that the U.S. has fewer manufacturing jobs today than it had before the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020. The country has lost 78,000 manufacturing jobs this year. Seventy-two percent of Texas manufacturers say the tariffs are hurting their businesses. Only 3.7% think the tariffs are helping them.

Yesterday’s immigration raid on a Hyundai Motor battery plant in Georgia is unlikely to send a reassuring message to manufacturers. U.S. agents arrested 475 individuals, more than 300 of whom were South Korean nationals. Included in the sweep were business travelers. In August, Hyundai said it would invest $26 billion in the U.S. through 2028.Today’s new jobs report, the first since Trump fired the previous director of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) after accusing her of rigging the numbers for political reasons, was poor. It showed that the U.S. added just 22,000 jobs in August, far below the expected 75,000, while the jobs numbers for June and July were revised downward by 21,000 jobs. The numbers show that the economy is faltering.Just before the report was due to be released, the BLS website went down, an unfortunate reminder that the bureau is in turmoil. Today Em Steck and Andrew Kaczynski of CNN confirmed and expanded an August story by David Gilbert of Wired revealing what appears to be an old Twitter account belonging to E.J. Antoni, Trump’s pick to run the BLS. The account posted conspiracy theories and sexist, racist, and homophobic attacks, and parrotted Trump’s talking points.

Last night, when asked if he would trust today’s job numbers, Trump answered: “Well, we’re going to have to see what the numbers, I don’t know, they come out tomorrow. But the real numbers that I’m talking about are going to be whatever it is. But, uh, will be in a year from now when these monstrous huge beautiful places they’re palaces of genius and when they start opening up. You’re seeing, I think you’ll see job numbers that are absolutely incredible. Right now it’s a lot of construction numbers, but you’re going to see job numbers like our country has never seen before.”—

Notes:https://www.newsweek.com/trump-department-war-hegseth-defense-order-live-updates-2125101https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/03/us/politics/hegseth-venezuela-drug-strike.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/05/us/navy-seal-north-korea-trump-2019.htmlhttps://www.axios.com/2025/09/04/trump-zelensky-call-ukraine-russia-peace-talkshttps://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/09/04/trump-europe-security-russia-ukraine/https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/02/world/video/china-military-parade-xi-putin-kim-digvidhttps://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c78z2p6gg1zohttps://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cr4e4ngvvnrohttps://www.reuters.com/world/china/modi-says-russia-india-stand-together-even-difficult-times-2025-09-01/https://www.reuters.com/world/china/trump-says-india-russia-appear-lost-deepest-darkest-china-2025-09-05/https://finance.yahoo.com/news/us-manufacturing-activity-contracts-for-sixth-straight-month-in-august-its-survival-151934968.htmlhttps://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/trump-tariffs-economy-manufacturing-ism-rcna228790https://www.wsj.com/us-news/u-s-arrests-hundreds-in-raid-at-hyundai-plant-construction-site-in-georgia-4e150febhttps://abcnews.go.com/Business/bls-set-release-1st-jobs-report-trump-fired/story?id=125249122https://www.politico.com/news/2025/09/04/white-house-pentagon-department-of-war-00545673https://www.axios.com/2025/09/05/trump-jobs-report-august-bls-website-outagehttps://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5486849-live-updates-trump-jobs-report-white-house/https://www.wired.com/story/twitter-ej-antoni-trump-bls-conspiracy-theories-epstein-covid-election-denial/https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/05/politics/kfile-ej-antoni-bureau-of-labor-statistics-twitter-account-vishttps://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-west-point-address-dei-immigration-b2757275.htmlhttps://www.war.gov/About/​​Bluesky:justinwolfers.bsky.social/post/3ly3pb4lxf227crampell.bsky.social/post/3ly3pzg6rf22xliveadivinelife.bsky.social/post/3lxwiq6kw6y2rgtconway.bsky.social/post/3ly3kpkqvls2qyouranonjd.bsky.social/post/3lxx2y5ml6c27thebulwark.com/post/3ly2ebqsk5c22atrupar.com/post/3ly4ignwtyd2bnbcnews.com/post/3ly4secg6cb2h

A Mighty Girl – Facebook site

Happy 71st birthday to Ruby Bridges! Ruby was only six when she walked through a vicious mob toward William Frantz Elementary School on November 14, 1960. As Ruby became one of the first Black children to desegregate an all-White elementary school in the South, four U.S. Marshals surrounded her to protect the small girl as protesters hurled objects and racial slurs at her.

One woman held up a Black doll in a coffin, shaking it as Ruby passed. Another threatened to poison her. Federal Marshal Charles Burks, who escorted her that day, would never forget what he witnessed: “For a little girl six years old going into a strange school with four strange deputy marshals, a place she had never been before, she showed a lot of courage. She never cried. She didn’t whimper. She just marched along like a little soldier. We were all very proud of her.”

Inside William Frantz, an apocalyptic silence replaced the chaos. White parents had withdrawn their children overnight rather than have them attend school with a Black first-grader. The hallways stood empty, classroom after classroom abandoned. That first day, the chaos was so intense that Ruby and her mother Lucille spent the entire day in the principal’s office, unable to even reach a classroom. On the second day, Ruby finally made it to Room 112, where she met the only teacher who had volunteered to teach her after her colleagues refused: Barbara Henry, a 28-year-old from Boston.

The next day, the wall of White resistance showed its first crack. Methodist minister Lloyd Anderson Foreman walked his five-year-old daughter Pam into the school through a gauntlet of curses and threats from the angry mob, declaring, “I simply want the privilege of taking my child to school.” Within days, a handful of other White parents followed his lead. Though the protests began to subside, these children were kept in separate classrooms. Ruby could hear voices in the hallway again — proof the school was slowly returning to life.

For the entire year, however, Ruby remained alone with Mrs. Henry, who taught her as if addressing a full class, maintaining the fiction of normalcy while federal marshals guarded an empty playground during recess. When someone called threatening to poison Ruby’s lunch, the six-year-old began eating only food brought from home, sealed and checked by her mother. When she came back for second grade, the mob was gone. Other Black students had enrolled. White children filled the classrooms again.

The Bridges family paid a devastating price for their courage. Ruby’s father Abon lost his job at the gas station the day after she entered William Frantz. Her sharecropping grandparents were evicted from Mississippi land they’d worked for decades. Local grocery stores turned the family away. Federal marshals had to guard their home against nighttime threats. Through it all, Ruby kept walking through that mob each morning. Years later, she would recall what her mother Lucille had told her: “You’re going to school today, and you’re going for all of us.”

Today, on her 71st birthday, Ruby Bridges reflects on that year with remarkable grace. “I now know that experience comes to us for a purpose, and if we follow the guidance of the spirit within us, we will probably find that the purpose is a good one.” She founded the Ruby Bridges Foundation to promote tolerance through education, transforming her trauma into purpose.

“Racism is a grown-up disease,” she says, “and we must stop using our children to spread it.” In 2011, she stood in the White House as President Obama unveiled Norman Rockwell’s painting “The Problem We All Live With” — the image of a little girl in a white dress who showed a nation what courage looks like.

If you’d like to share Ruby Bridge’s inspiring story with children, we highly recommend the picture book “The Story Of Ruby Bridges” for ages 4 to 8 (https://www.amightygirl.com/the-story-of-ruby-bridges), the early chapter book “Ruby Bridges Goes to School” for ages 5 to 8 (https://www.amightygirl.com/ruby-bridges-goes-to-school), and the memoir that Ruby Bridges wrote for ages 8 to 12 entitled “Through My Eyes” (https://www.amightygirl.com/through-my-eyes).

Ruby Bridges is the author of the picture book “I Am Ruby Bridges” for ages 4 to 8 (https://www.amightygirl.com/i-am-ruby-bridges) and a book connecting today’s activism with her own childhood experiences for ages 10 and up “This Is Your Time” for ages 10 and up (https://www.amightygirl.com/this-is-your-time)

There is also an inspiring film about her story called “Ruby Bridges” for viewers 7 and up at https://www.amightygirl.com/ruby-bridges

For books for all ages about more courageous girls and women of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement for children and teens, check out our blog post on “50 Inspiring Books on Girls & Women of the Civil Rights Movement” at https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=11177

For our favorite t-shirt celebrating fierce Mighty Girls like Ruby Bridges, check out the “Though She Be But Little She Is Fierce” t-shirt — available in a variety of styles and colors for all ages at https://www.amightygirl.com/fierce-t-shirt

British Politics

Tom Watson’s Newsletter

Tom Watson <tomwatsonofficial@substack.com> Unsubscribe

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Angela Rayner’s second act

Why the country still needs her voice and why Labour no longer needs a deputy leader. Sep 6 

Angela Rayner has resigned. She should be Labour’s last ever deputy leader.

I am heartbroken for her. Angela’s life tells a bigger story about Britain. A childhood on a Stockport council estate, a mum at sixteen, night shifts in care, a union rep who learned how to organise and to speak for those who are not heard, an MP who fought her constituents’ corner, a minister who became Deputy Prime Minister. This is the long route to public service, earned the hard way, and it commands respect.

In government she brought a voice rooted in experience. She spoke as people speak. Long before office she said that ideology never put food on her table; it is the kind of sentence that cuts through because it comes from a life lived close to the edge. Many of her former colleagues are able administrators who keep the machine moving; Angela added something rarer, a felt understanding of the dignity of work and the worth of every person.

The events are painful and the weather is still rough. She has taken responsibility and stepped down. Politics moves at speed; the human rhythm is slower. The diary loses its weight, friends call, colleagues carry on, the work feels far away. I have known enough of public life to recognise that moment and I want her to know that reach does not vanish with office. It can be redirected and it can do good.

What comes next must be hers to decide, not mine to dictate. Yet if she chooses to put her energy where her life gives her authority, she can move the country: better pay and standards for paid carers, a serious advance for young carers who shoulder adult burdens too soon, adult literacy for families who were left behind, skills and second chances that open real paths and community power in places that feel forgotten. She belongs in front of a camera when it serves the cause. The public already trusts her to speak plainly and to listen well.

Now the institutional point. The role of deputy leader invites theatre without remit. It duplicates authority and muddies accountability. It tempts every faction to see a second power base where there should be clear lines of responsibility. At a time when the economy demands focus and steadiness, we should retire the title. Change our rules for who fronts the party when the leader is unavailable, empower a party chair with published objectives. Less parade, more purpose.

Those who remain in cabinet will go on with the hard graft of governing and many will do it well. None of that diminishes what set Angela apart: the ease with which she can walk into any room, listen hard and draw out the truth of people’s lives. That is a kind of leadership the country still needs.

I have a hunch the best is yet to come from Angie Rayner. And she is about to learn that you resign as a deputy leader but you can never resign as an ex-deputy leader.

Tom Watson’s Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Australian Politics

The Saturday Paper

Dennis Glover

The seven lessons of Nazi history

Occasionally something happens that turns our collective minds to history. That happened this week when Nazis dominated Australian headlines for possibly the first time since the end of World War II.

Australia’s Nazis are rattling the cage, trying to transform themselves from a secretive, mask-wearing sect into a political movement that influences our political ideas and controls the streets through violence. Their leader – bald-headed, dark-shirted, with a statement-making moustache – is staring at us defiantly from our newsfeeds and front pages.

Some might say they’re just a micro-cult of idiots; ignore them and they will go away. Thirty years ago, perhaps, but not now.

To understand why this has changed, we only need to look at the state of the world. Nazi-inspired agitators may be few in number, but they are casting a giant shadow through their explosive ideas and aggressive tactics, which are rapidly being copied by more mainstream politicians who should know better. This is how Nazis have always operated and likely always will. Like all ultra-radical movements that don’t have to deal with messy political realities or worry about the truth, their words and actions have a clarity that is easily understood and has strong appeal to the frustrated, impatient, unheard and unhinged. In Germany, France and Italy, parties inspired by Nazis – or with actual historical roots in Nazism and fascism – are either in power or threatening to achieve it. In the United States, Nazi-like groups were prominently involved in the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Let’s not call them neo-Nazis because there’s nothing new about them. Look at how they dress, their violent street tactics, the way they openly admire Adolf Hitler, call themselves his followers, talk of racial purity (white Australians are “thoroughbreds”) and deny the Holocaust. They are Nazis, and proud of it.

To combat them we should look to history and especially to the mistakes our grandparents and great-grandparents made in combatting the original Nazis.

What can history tell us?

Lesson 1. We must not be complacent, kidding ourselves that these Nazis will disappear if we ignore them. From little things, big things grow. These people are always potentially dangerous – and we are at the moment of maximum danger as they look to build a movement that can influence the mainstream. There were only about 40 of them at the Melbourne rally, but look how easily they took control of a directionless crowd. We may think they can’t get bigger; history says otherwise.

Lesson 2. Beware unexpected catastrophes. Nazis – much like other authoritarians such as Russian President Vladimir Putin – are waiting for catastrophic events to favour them.

In the 1928 elections at the Reichstag, the Weimar-era German parliament, Hitler’s Nazi Party won just 2.6 per cent of the vote. They were an irrelevancy, or so most thought. Then in 1929 came the Great Depression. As Germany descended into political gloom, the Nazis were able to pose as national saviours, offering a simple and appealing message of national redemption. They provided a voice for the voiceless, a conspiracy theory to explain the catastrophe, and enemies to blame. How familiar does this sound, as our own Nazis rail about imaginary violations of their freedom of speech, denounce immigration as the cause of every problem and vent against recent migrants and Indigenous Australians? They may not gain the same level of influence as Hitler’s Nazis, but they can spread hatred and wreak havoc.

In 1930, the Nazi vote increased sevenfold to 18.3 per cent. In July 1932, it roughly doubled again to 37.3 per cent. Six months later, the party was in power.

Lesson 3. Don’t underestimate them. Much of the analysis and rhetoric about today’s Nazis seems wrong. They look like bumptious fools, and their leader comes across as an aggressive, breathless try-hard, screeching idiotic statements free of facts. But Hitler and his Brownshirts were laughed at, too. We must stop calling them “cowards”. This is comforting but delusional. Male courage, political violence and endless struggle is one of the strongest defining characteristics of Nazism – then and now. They are tough and nasty and unafraid, and it’s better to acknowledge this and accept they are dangerous.

In 1930, the Nazi vote increased sevenfold to 18.3 per cent. In July 1932, it roughly doubled again to 37.3 per cent. Six months later, the party was in power.

Lesson 4. Never acknowledge that they may have a point. I’ve lost count of the number of callers to talkback radio this week who have said things like: “I hold no truck for Nazis and fascists, but you’ve got to admit they have a point about immigration and the direction of the country.” While politicians may think it clever to try to wean people away from extremists by acknowledging their discontent, this only provides legitimacy for dangerous ideas. The mainstream conservative establishment in Germany was complicit in this by waving through the persecution of Jews.

Lesson 5. Nazis can’t be co-opted or controlled. Many believe Hitler came to power through the popular vote, but that’s not the case. He never received much more than a third of the vote. He was put in power by establishment politicians, businessmen and media moguls, who believed they could make him chancellor, pack his cabinet withmoderating influences and steal his voters. A year later, some of these geniuses were dead.

Any politician who thinks it’s a smart tactic to share platforms with Nazis, or go soft on criticising them or their supporters, is a fool. Hitler’s aim was always to supplant the mainstream conservative parties, not assist their re-election campaigns. His tactics caused chaos in the conservative parties – something the Victorian Liberals might profitably ponder, given that much of their current internal misery can be traced back to the appearance of Hitler-saluting Nazis at a Liberal MP-organised rally on the steps of Victoria’s Parliament House in 2023. Today’s Nazis likely don’t give a damn about the Coalition; they want to destroy it. Maybe they already have.

Lesson 6. Don’t give them an even break. In 1923, Hitler attempted a coup in Munich, aiming to take over the government of Bavaria and march on Berlin to seize power, just as fascist leader Benito Mussolini had succeeded in doing in Italy the previous year. It failed and Hitler was arrested and tried for insurrection. Instead of being given the death penalty he was given a comfortable prison cell where he wrote Mein Kampf  before he was released early and his party re-legalised. Had he simply been made to serve out his full term of imprisonment, he wouldn’t have been around to take political advantage of the Great Depression, and World War II might not have happened. The failure to prosecute and jail Donald Trump after his assault on the Capitol should be sufficient proof that history repeats.Like all ultra-radical movements that don’t have to deal withLike all ultra-radical movements that don’t have to deal with messy political realities or worry about the truth, their words and actions have a clarity that is easily understood and has strong appeal to the frustrated, impatient, unheard and unhinged.

The temptation is to say we shouldn’t jail these homebred Nazis or their leader because it’s what they want, or because while we may disagree with them, they deserve their freedom of speech, or because they are expressing popular beliefs. This is nonsense. These Nazis, like the original Nazis, would regard this as weakness – certainly a courtesy they would never extend were the jackboot on the other foot. Common sense tells us that when Nazis brazenly commit crime, they should be penalised to the full extent of the law, because anything less will only embolden and enable them to come back for more.

We got a glimpse of this in Melbourne this week. After the completion of the rally, the Nazis were free to leave, seemingly unwatched. And what did they do? They staged their pogrom at Camp Sovereignty, where they allegedly battered First Nations women. Two days later, their leader interrupted a press conference by Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan, and was finally handcuffed and arrested outside the Melbourne Magistrates’ Court along with two associates in relation to the Camp Sovereignty incident. The Nazis mean our community nothing but harm, and believing the promises they may make to moderate their behaviour is naive. After 1923, Hitler claimed to be a changed man – until he got into power.

Lesson 7. Nazis and similar extremists can succeed in influencing politics here in Australia. If it can happen in Europe, America and Britain, where Nazi-inspired rioters last year attempted to burn down a refugee hostel – it can happen here. All it needs is a spark and it can spread. The Great Depression may not happen again, but in this era of pandemics, trade wars and major military conflict, it’s not too difficult to imagine a scenario that might propel these Nazis, or their evil ideas, to greater prominence.

Historians have called Australia’s democracy a laboratory. The current moment is a laboratory-like opportunity to learn from the mistakes of the long-ago past and stop these Nazis before their movement grows and ideas spread. Europe and the United States failed to do this; we mustn’t. Let’s be part of the solution to the global spread of Nazis and their ideas.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on September 6, 2025 as “The seven lessons of Nazi history”.

Kath Mazzella OAM – Red Knickers Day

MP Dave Kelly MP placed 60 pairs of red knickers for Gynaecological health awareness day today on politicians’ chairs. This was placed on the Premier Roger Cook’s chair today. Hope he liked the surprise. X Kath Mazzella OAM

❤️

Barbara Pym

A favourite Barbara Pym – well-worn copies, full of notes in the margins, yellow stickers as reminders…

The article, “Paradise Regained: the reopening of Simpsons “, appeared in my inbox, and I immediately thought of Barbara Pym’s A Glass of Blessings where Wilmet’s visions of meat in domed trollies feature against the very prosaic meals that are her regular fare on outings Piers. Wilmet, and A Glass of Blessings, was a wonderful recall. The chess players have been mainly edited out below, but the idea of Simpson’s -in-the-Strand opening again resonates warmly. As the idea did for Wilmet, who is observing a rather more substantial admirer than Piers:

I leaned back in my chair, well satisfied, both with my drink in such pleasant surroundings and with his devotion…I began to imagine future luncheons in town, the great joints of meat being wheeled up to the table in an unending procession, the chef standing deferentially with carving implements poised…(A Glass of Blessings, first published 1958)

Paradise regained: the reopening of Simpson’s

by Raymond Keene| @raykeene| @GM_RayKeene

Simpson’s-in-the-Strand is due to reopen this autumn after being closed for five years, ever since the Covid pandemic. For nearly two centuries, Simpson’s Grand Cigar Divan (as it was originally known) has been a landmark for chess players. The excitement is not least present with the new proprietor, the celebrated restaurateur Jeremy King. Here are his thoughts on the reopening:

“I was kept enthusiastic by the sheer pleasure of the number of inquiries I receive daily in the restaurants: ‘When is Simpson’s opening?’ – ‘Will you keep the Trolleys?’ etc – which taught us just how immense the anticipation is and kept us determined. Although after a period of thinking that we would never get the project over the line, there was a very telling moment when I returned to the site one day… I was showing around my friend, hotelier & restaurateur David and as we toured the building, he kept rather quiet, just gently nodding and hardly saying a word. To the extent that when we had finished the tour, he continued to be taciturn and I had assumed he didn’t like it or think a good idea, until he turned to me and said very firmly: ‘Jeremy, this is ***** FANTASTIC!’ And as is so often the case, seeing it through the eyes of others makes the case all the more compelling – rather like seeing our home City through new eyes does too.”…In spite of such history, the dining room that has seen more grandmasters than any other is Simpson’s. In the nineteenth century it was the world’s leading chess club. Its roast beef and lamb, carved from silver trolleys, were as famous as the games played upstairs. The chessboard at the top of the main staircase still commemorates the likes of Staunton, Anderssen, Morphy, Steinitz and Lasker. I played there myself on my fiftieth birthday and had my name added to the plaque.

Simpson’s was the scene of the Immortal Game in 1851, won by Anderssen. The game was so striking that messengers were sent down the Strand to telegraph the moves to chess fans in Paris. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle regularly visited Simpson’s: he may have modelled the appearance of his Professor Challenger on the world champion Wilhelm Steinitz, who played there often…

Simpson’s will soon open its doors again. The roast beef will return. And perhaps, upstairs, so will the chess…

Secret London

The Oldest Surviving Bridge In London Is Around 850 Years Old – And It Doesn’t Even Technically Cross The River Thames

This picturesque bridge dates all the way back to the 12th century, making it the oldest surviving bridge in the whole city.

 Katie Forge – Staff Writer • 8 September, 2025

London isn’t particularly thin on the ground in the bridge department. There are a plethora of picture-perfect pathways linking the separate sides of our city, ranging from tiny and twee to enormous and elaborate. And we Londoners can be pretty darn passionate about which of them we think is the best.

But whilst the subject of popularity may be up for debate; something that is undisputable is which of London’s abundance of bridges is the oldest. And that, my friends, would be Clattern Bridge.

Clattern Bridge

Now, I know it’s highly likely that you’ve never even heard of Clattern Bridge. But, fear not, folks – I’m here to tell you all about it. Picturesquely perched over in Kingston, this historic hidden gem is actually one of the oldest surviving bridges in the whole country. And – unlike most London bridges – it doesn’t technically cross the River Thames; it crosses the River Hogsmill (a tributary of the Thames, just before it flows into the main river).

The ancient Clattern Bridge in Kingston
Credit: Colin Smith via Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 2.0

The ancient artefact dates all the way back to 1175, and features some rather impressive medieval masonry. The lower part of the bridge consists of three arches, made of local stone – and the structure was declared an ancient monument in 1938. Clattern Bridge now proudly boasts both a shiny, blue plaque, and Grade I listed status. Not bad going, hey?

Clattern Bridge has been widened a couple of times over the years, but not a great deal has changed about it in the last 850 years. Well, aside from the way in which people most commonly venture across it. The bridge was named after the sound made by the horses hooves that frequently trotted across it. Nowadays, I can’t imagine it receives quite as much hoof-fall.

Week beginning September 3 2025

Janet Few A History of Women’s Work The Evolution of Women’s Working Lives Pen & Sword | Pen & Sword History, May 12025.

Thank you, NetGalley and Pen & Sword publishing for providing me with this uncorrected proof for review.

This is a dense, detailed, and absorbing history of women’s work. It is a valuable contribution to understanding women’s work, the impact on their health, their family, their old age, and their society. In a history such as this, familiar stories, such as the Bryant and May match factory women’s rebellion and demands for safer working conditions have their place. So too, do the stories about which little if any information has previously been published. One of the satisfactions in reading this book lies in this mix. Not only is there the evolution of the title, but the book demonstrates the evolution of access to information about women’s work, and interest in the gamut of tasks that occupied women’s lives from childhood to old age. Largely, the writing relies on the detail for its energy, rather than a style that is as easily accessible as some Pen & Sword publications. However, the inclusion of engaging stories is appealing, and where the information is delivered without these, Few’s ability to develop a strong understanding of women’s working lives is considerable.

So many of women’s professions, working environments, tasks and responsibilities are covered it is worth listing a few to provide a flavour of the material. There are chapters on working with textiles (clothing the family, factory work, glove making, buttons and lacemaking) munitions workers, straw plaiting, the fishing industry, prostitution, medical matters such as herbal knowledge, midwifery and childbirth, dairy work, and shop working. Women’s work during wartime and the fight for women’s suffrage provide broader aspects of women’s work and their social as well as economic aspirations. Some chapters are dedicated to women’s stories, and these are an excellent read. Others include anecdotal evidence about individual women and their responses to their environment – work, domestic and the wider life in a village or city. Legislation and trade union activity is discussed. The material on teaching and learning covers so much – the discriminatory practices and beliefs that hampered women, their domestic responsibilities and the lack of facilities and recognition when they completed educational hurdles.

There are some wonderful graphics, for example a poster inciting retribution for poor treatment of suffragists – ‘Down with Asquith Death to Tyrants – as well as informative pictures of various working conditions, machinery, many of the items referred to in the text and some of the women who feature in the book.   These are richly described. There are notes to each chapter and an index. Janet Few has provided a wonderful source of information about women’s work, and even more engagingly, insight into the women themselves.*

*The complete review appears here as this book is relevant to some of the following material.

Kerry Fisher Whose Side Are You On? Bookouture, August 2025.

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

Kerry Fisher is so adept at combining humour, drama, heartbreak and, for the reader, conflicting loyalties. For, as for the characters in the novel, whose side should we be on? Phillipa, Andrew, Jackie and Ian are long term friends who holiday together, celebrate together, and look on joyfully as their daughters, Scarlett, and Abigail also bond. Like Jackie and Phillipa, whose friendship is of over fifty years duration, it is expected that the two will continue this history.

However, Phillipa is tired of Andrew and secretly contemplating divorce. Thirty-year-old Scarlett has had numerous failed liaisons and is ready for a loving supportive relationship. Abigail is planning her wedding, complete with her father walking her down the aisle in a white concoction, and Scarlett as her bridesmaid. Jackie is to make the wedding cake and support Phillipa through the planning and celebration. Andrew and Ian are, as usual in Phillipa and Jackie’s relationship, the source of frustration, loving criticism and humorous asides. However, hovering over the interactions between the friends is Phillipa’s determination to change the foursome’s future. Dogging Jackie is her own thirty-year-old secret, partly known only to Ian and wholly known to Phillipa. See Books: Reviews for the complete review.

American Politics – Labor Day

August 31, 2025

Heather Cox Richardson from Letters from an American <heathercoxrichardson@substack.com> Unsubscribe

August 31, 2025Heather Cox RichardsonSep 1 

Almost one hundred and forty-three years ago, on September 5, 1882, workers in New York City celebrated the first Labor Day holiday with a parade. The parade almost didn’t happen: there was no band, and no one wanted to start marching without music. Once the Jewelers Union of Newark Two showed up with musicians, the rest of the marchers, eventually numbering between 10,000 and 20,000 men and women, fell in behind them to parade through lower Manhattan. At noon, when they reached the end of the route, the march broke up and the participants listened to speeches, drank beer, and had picnics. Other workers joined them.

Their goal was to emphasize the importance of workers in the industrializing economy and to warn politicians that they could not be ignored. Less than 20 years before, northern men had fought a war to defend a society based on free labor and had, they thought, put in place a government that would support the ability of all hardworking men to rise to prosperity.

By 1882, though, factories and the fortunes they created had swung the government toward men of capital, and workingmen worried they would lose their rights if they didn’t work together. A decade before, the Republican Party, which had formed to protect free labor, had thrown its weight behind Wall Street. By the 1880s, even the staunchly Republican Chicago Tribune complained about the links between business and government: “Behind every one of half of the portly and well-dressed members of the Senate can be seen the outlines of some corporation interested in getting or preventing legislation,” it wrote. The Senate, Harper’s Weekly noted, was “a club of rich men.”

The workers marching in New York City carried banners saying: “Labor Built This Republic and Labor Shall Rule It,” “Labor Creates All Wealth,” “No Land Monopoly,” “No Money Monopoly,” “Labor Pays All Taxes,” “The Laborer Must Receive and Enjoy the Full Fruit of His Labor,” ‘Eight Hours for a Legal Day’s Work,” and “The True Remedy Is Organization and the Ballot.”

The New York Times denied that workers were any special class in the United States, saying that “[e]very one who works with his brain, who applies accumulated capital to industry, who directs or facilitates the operations of industry and the exchange of its products, is just as truly a laboring man as he who toils with his hands…and each contributes to the creation of wealth and the payment of taxes and is entitled to a share in the fruits of labor in proportion to the value of his service in the production of net results.”

In other words, the growing inequality in the country was a function of the greater value of bosses than their workers, and the government could not possibly adjust that equation. The New York Daily Tribune scolded the workers for holding a political—even a “demagogical”—event. “It is one thing to organize a large force of…workingmen…when they are led to believe that the demonstration is purely non-partisan; but quite another thing to lead them into a political organization….”Two years later, workers helped to elect Democrat Grover Cleveland to the White House. A number of Republicans crossed over to support the reformer, afraid that, as he said, “The gulf between employers and the employed is constantly widening, and classes are rapidly forming, one comprising the very rich and powerful, while in another are found the toiling poor…. Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people’s masters.”

In 1888, Cleveland won the popular vote by about 100,000 votes, but his Republican opponent, Benjamin Harrison, won in the Electoral College. Harrison promised that his would be “A BUSINESS MAN’S ADMINISTRATION” and said that “before the close of the present Administration business men will be thoroughly well content with it….”Businessmen mostly were, but the rest of the country wasn’t. In November 1892 a Democratic landslide put Cleveland back in office, along with the first Democratic Congress since before the Civil War. As soon as the results of the election became apparent, the Republicans declared that the economy would collapse. Harrison’s administration had been “beyond question the best business administration the country has ever seen,” one businessmen’s club insisted, so losing it could only be a calamity. “The Republicans will be passive spectators,” the Chicago Tribune noted. “It will not be their funeral.” People would be thrown out of work, but “[p]erhaps the working classes of the country need such a lesson….”

As investors rushed to take their money out of the U.S. stock market, the economy collapsed a few days before Cleveland took office in early March 1893. Trying to stabilize the economy by enacting the proposals capitalists wanted, Cleveland and the Democratic Congress had to abandon many of the pro-worker policies they had promised, and the Supreme Court struck down the rest (including the income tax).

They could, however, support Labor Day and its indication of workers’ political power. On June 28, 1894, Cleveland signed Congress’s bill making Labor Day a legal holiday.

In Chicago the chair of the House Labor Committee, Lawrence McGann (D-IL), told the crowd gathered for the first official observance: “Let us each Labor day, hold a congress and formulate propositions for the amelioration of the people. Send them to your Representatives with your earnest, intelligent indorsement [sic], and the laws will be changed.”—

”—Notes:https://www.dol.gov/general/laborday/history-dazeNew York Times, September 6, 1882, p. 8.New York Times, September 6, 1882, p. 4.New York Daily Tribune, September 7, 1882, p. 4.https://blogs.loc.gov/law/files/2011/09/S-730.pdfhttps://history.house.gov/Historical-Highlights/1851-1900/The-first-Labor-Day/Share

Australian Politics – women’s work, Labor Day

Katy Gallagher: To mark the final parliamentary sitting week of the year, I’m excited to share with you this special edition newsletter to tell you about  some of the important bills that have passed the parliament this year.

We’ve passed over 280 bills in the Senate alone, so this certainly isn’t an exhaustive list, but here are some of the highlights-

*2. As the Minister for Women, I was thrilled to be part of the team that helped get our bill over the line to pay superannuation on Commonwealth paid parental leave. This is a change that we know will help close the gap in retirement incomes that currently exists between men and women.

3. On that note, we also passed a bill to expand paid parental leave to a full six months. This legislation delivers on recommendations from our Jobs and Skills Summit and the Employment White Paper, ensuring that working women and families have the security and support necessary to adjust to life with a newborn or adopted child.

4. At the beginning of the year, we passed the landmark Same Job, Same Pay and Closing the Loopholes bills. This legislation addresses critical gaps in employment laws that have long disadvantaged feminised industries, ensuring big businesses can no longer undercut the pay and workplace rights of working Australians. These new laws strengthen job security for workers and prevent the use of unethical tactics to undermine negotiated wages and conditions.

5. We didn’t just reform employment laws — we’ve also taken action to address the historic undervaluing of critical, women-dominated sectors, acknowledging the essential contributions these workers make to our community. Aged care workers have received a pay increase of up to 13.5%, while early childhood educators and carers have seen wages rise by 3.75%, and will begin receiving pay increases under supported bargaining of 10% in the first year and 15% in the second year from December.

Let your friends and family know they can get my updates too by signing up here. 
And don’t forget to follow me on social media:**

*Included are the bills that resonate with the women’s work theme in the first book I reviewed.

**The symbols did not copy, but Katy can be followed on – X, Facebook. Linked In and Instagram.

Labour Day in Australia

Labour Day is celebrated on various dates in the Australian states. Labour Day is also often referred to as May Day around the world. Internationally it is celebrated on 1 May and is known as International Workers’ Day in more than 80 countries. International Workers’ Day traces its international routes back to the 1886 Haymarket affair in Chicago, USA. The universal significance is that, across the world, the eight-hour day is considered the fairest working hours in a day for people in any industry.

Today, Labour Day in Australia is known as Eight-Hour Day in Tasmania and May Day in the Northern Territory. It is always on a Monday, creating a long weekend. Marches or parades only usually occur in Queensland now, and not always there depending on the state government at the time.

In the early 19th century, most labourers worked 10- or 12-hour days for six days each week. The 1850s brought a strong push for better conditions. A significant part of the push began in 1855 in Sydney. On 21 April 1856, in Melbourne, the stonemasons workers staged a well-organised protest. They downed tools and walked to Parliament House with other members of the building trade. Their fight was for an eight-hour day, effectively a 48-hour week to replace the 60-hour week. The government agreed to an eight-hour day for workers employed on public works, with no loss of pay.

The win was a world first but did not end all labour problems. Many working conditions were harsh and demanding, and women were paid a lot less than men. But the victory for the eight-hour day was significant and several hundred building workers marched in a parade in May 1856 to celebrate their win.

Tinsmiths, bootmakers, tailors, metal workers and stonemasons were amongst many of workers’ groups that protested and fought for better working conditions across the country. Over the next two decades, one by one, the states brought in the eight-hour-day although the working week was still officially six days until 1948 when it was changed to five days.

Industrial workers of the world lay down the law.

Wage Rage for Equal Pay

Chapter 16, Alarums and Excursions: Fictions, Fallacies and Fancies, covers just the type of material I love. Beginning with quotes from Ruth Parks’ Missus and Dorothy Hewitt’s Bobin Up, this chapter is a delightful read – as well as almost a horror story. After all, when Park writes:

Knowing she had no means of support and was desperate for work, the manager offered her less than the single girls, who were receiving only half the male rate anyway. The pittance was enough for food, but not for lodging. Jossie set her teeth and accepted it.

And as if this were not enough, Hewitt’s stark comment:

There’s a name for men who live off women.

Mary Parker’s ‘oh, such commonplace story’ (p.366) such a graphic and heartrending recall of women’s parlous position as depicted in Come in Spinner introduces yet another of the challenges to women receiving equal pay. Come in Spinner provides much more material, interspersed with non-fiction events such as the National Wage Case 1988, Maternity Leave Cases and Family and Parental and Leave Cases, Equal Opportunity Cases, the Nurses Comparable Worth Case 1985 -1986, Equal Pay Cases 1969 and 1972, the Minimum Wage Case 1974, National Wages Cases 1983 and 1988,  books such as The Dialectic of Sex and Exiles at Home and newspaper articles. But, back to the fiction: Ride on Stranger, The Fortunes of Richard Mahoney, My Brilliant Career Goes Bung, Fugitive Anne: A Romance of the Unexplored Bush, Up the Murray, A Marked Man, The Three Miss Kings, Sisters, The Bond of Wedlock, The White Topee, My Brilliant Career  – all have their place in Jocelynne Scutt’s Wage Rage for Equal Pay.

This is not an easy read, but this ingenious weaving together of fact and fiction makes an exceptional chapter.

Equal Pay Day 2025

1 July 2025

August 19 is the national Equal Pay Day 2025. The day marks the end of the 50 additional days into the new financial year that women in Australia need to work to earn the same pay, on average, as men. 

This year’s theme is “How does your employer measure up? When’s your Equal Pay Day?” 

This year, you can work out the individual Equal Pay Day for your workplace. 

That is, how many extra days women must work from the end of the financial to earn the same, on average, as men. And if you work in one of the 8% of workplaces that has a gender pay gap in favour of women, you can see how many extra days men need to work, to earn the same amount, on average as women.  

How is the national Equal Pay Day calculated?

WGEA uses the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) average weekly earnings trend data to calculate the number of days after the end of financial year that women have to work to be paid the same as the average man. This is our national Equal Pay Day. 

In February, the ABS reported its average weekly earnings for men and women from November 2024. 

Men working full time earned $2072.70, while women earned $1,826.40 per week on average. That’s a difference $246.30 every week and $12,807.60 every year.  

At the average rate of pay for women, this is the equivalent of over seven weeks additional work (50 days). 

The Equal Pay Day campaign will run for 50 days, until Equal Pay Day on 19th August. 

It’s important to note the ABS figures are base salary and full-time employees only. They do not include bonuses, superannuation or overtime – which men are more likely to earn – or the salaries of Australians working part-time. 

WGEA recommends using your workplace’s average total remuneration gender pay gap in the Equal Pay Day Calculator to calculate individual workplace Equal Pay Days. Your employer total remuneration gender pay gap includes base salary and additional payments, and so is the best way to calculate your workplace’s equal pay day.

WGEA research has identified three main contributors to Australia’s gender pay gap:  gender discrimination; care, family responsibilities and workforce participation; and gender segregation by job type and industry. 

What is your employer doing to address the issues that drive your workplace’s gender pay gap?

Early union activity union activity by Australian Labor Party women: Excerpts from Labor Women: Political Housekeepers or Politicians? Robin Joyce

Leaders’ roles and activities are usually, although not always, easy to follow. Jean Beadle was one woman whose career in the labour movement was well known. However, other women involved in the Western Australian labour movement, comprising the Australian Labor Party and unions, appear only in minutes, newspaper stories, lists of meetings attended and positions held in these organisations…

Women were also active in the trade unions, mostly coming to prominence in the 1920s, with Cecilia Shelley standing out in her capacity as long term secretary and organiser in the Hotel and Restaurant Employees Union. She was also involved with the ALP and Labor Women’s Organisations. However, other women also filled important positions in union executives but have been largely ignored. By 1928 sixty-two trustee positions had been held by women, twenty-one vice-president positions and twelve positions as president or chair. Women had been treasurers twenty-five times. In the 1920s two women were active in the Cleaners, Caretakers and Lift Attendants Union as secretary, one, Sylvia Donaldson later becoming an Inspector of factories in 1923. Ivy Pirani followed her husband as secretary of the Hospital and Asylum Employees union in 1923 and retained the position until the 1930s. May grace and Helen McEntrye were secretary of the Goldfields Hotel and Restaurant Employees Union in the late 1920s. Annie Warren became  secretary of the South West Clothing Trade Union  after a stint as treasurer.

Many other women are likely to have remained invisible but not inactive. There is little reason to suppose that they were of an inferior capacity to those given a voice through Labor Women’s souvenir journals, minutes and their papers submitted to the Battye Library. The main difference between those closely associated with the Labor Women’s Organisations and those who remained linked only to mainstream politics or union activity is that Labor women’s activities exposed them to feminist ideology through contact with interstate and overseas feminists and their publications. Women in the labour movement in the 1900s in Western Australia were indeed political activists in the labour movement, party and unions.   Although some were housekeepers, it is clear that many had no time to bake a scone or lift a teapot.  The myth that so many women did the latter, and none were accepting scones and tea after an arduous day campaigning, needs to be unremittingly challenged. It is a myth that not only deprives those early women of justice, but establishes the idea that the labour movement women activists have no or short term history or one that is peopled by only a small number of individuals. Setting the record straight is hard because of the paucity of material, but not impossible.

Labor Women: Political Housekeepers or Politicians? was originally published in Australian Women and the Political System, Marian Simms, Cheshire Longman, Melbourne, 1984.

Quote from Labor Women: Political Housekeepers or Politicians?

We are enthroned in the hearts of men; that is why men use us and pay us half the wages, but we don’t want to be enthroned in men’s hearts under these conditions.

Jean Beadle, Western Australian Labor activist speaking in 1909.

Kath Mazzella OAM

Gynaecological health awareness champion

Facing a radical gynaecological cancer diagnosis at the age of 39, Kathleen Mazzella was convinced she was alone. In her search to find someone else facing the same experience, Kath placed an ad in Woman’s Day, receiving 38 responses from women all over Australia who felt the same sense of isolation and embarrassment. Determined to connect and empower other women, and to reduce the stigma and squeamishness around women’s health, Kath established the Perth-based Gynaecological Awareness Information Network. Since then, Kath has become a voice for the millions of Australian women managing polycystic ovaries, endometriosis, fibroids, menopause, sexually transmitted infections, hysterectomies and more. At the core of her work is a straight-talking message: embarrassment around gynaecological issues risks lives. Kath breaks down the social stigma by sharing her journey and challenges, and promoting a positive preventative message. Twenty-two years after her initial diagnosis, Kath has not only survived, but thrived and dedicated her life to ensuring no other woman and families suffers in silence through her International Gynaecological Awareness Day campaign. In 2018 she was awarded WA Senior Australian of the Year.

Blossoms and birds – spring in Canberra

Week beginning 27 August 2025

JB Miller, Duch  Riverdale Avenue Books February 2025.

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

What fun, I thought, as I saw the premise for this book – Diana is living in Paris, having lost her memory but recognised as Diana by a school friend. But JB Miller has given so much more to attract a much broader audience than those who miss Diana, might like to see the British royal family exposed, or want a partisan view of the William and Kate versus Harry and Meghan stories that clutter the media.

The essential Diana is no longer her appearance, although that remains attractive at times; her fashionable dress, although the white pyjamas she wears have their place on the catwalk under her spell; or her ability to speak and be heard, although that too, is sometimes successful. It is the hugging that she bestows that has a mystical quality. Somewhere Diana’s magic is intact – and possibly in this woman in her sixties who is saved from the Seine, her first words being that she is Diana.

JB Miller has woven an elegant story line with understanding of the hearts of those who miss her, those who feared or resented the public’s fascination with her while she was alive, and those for whom she became an icon after her death. Her followers, her detractors, and the royal family to which she belonged and then left behind, as well as the media, feature. All are treated with humour and sensitivity, as well as being metaphorically prodded with wonderfully sharp observations. See Books: Reviews for the complete review.

See also, below, a new publication about Diana’s and her sons’ roles in her legacy. Duch is yet another interpretation of the way in which Diana has been seen, and both publications could fit together well.

Martina Devlin Charlotte Independent Publishers Group | The Lilliput Press, August 2025.

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

The Charlotte Bronte of Martina Devlin’s imagination is no pure rendition of the author of the well-known Jane Eyre, Shirley and Villette and the less famous juvenilia, posthumously published, The Professor and incomplete works. She is a woman who inspires love and affection, is a sexual being, a writer of adoring letters to a married man, a censor of her sisters’ work, and while enthralled in part by her marriage, is prepared to set aside any inclination to obey when it does not suit her plans. Her Irish background is less refined than the world she knows, which is apparent when on her honeymoon she rejects her husband’s demand (based on Patrick Bronte’s wish) that she should ignore her Irish relatives. This Charlotte is seen through the eyes of Mary Bell, who after Charlotte’s death marries her widower, Arthur Bell Nicholls, and lives, not only under the shadow of the first marriage, but the continual presence through that marriage of a woman that she longed to know closely.

See Books: Reviews for the complete review. See also, below, information about Elizabeth Gaskell’s biography of Charlotte Bronte.

The Life of Charlotte Brontë

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Title page of the first edition, 1857
AuthorElizabeth Gaskell
LanguageEnglish
GenreBiography
PublisherSmith, Elder & Co.
Publication date1857
Publication placeUnited Kingdom

The Life of Charlotte Brontë is the posthumous biography of Charlotte Brontë by English author Elizabeth Gaskell. The first edition was published in 1857 by Smith, Elder & Co. A major source was the hundreds of letters sent by Brontë to her lifelong friend Ellen Nussey.

Gaskell had to deal with rather sensitive issues, toning down some of her material: in the case of her description of the Clergy Daughters’ School, attended by Charlotte and her sisters, this was to avoid legal action from the Rev. William Carus Wilson, the founder of the school. The published text does not go so far as to blame him for the deaths of two Brontë sisters, but even so the Carus Wilson family published a rebuttal with the title “A refutation of the statements in ‘The life of Charlotte Bronte,’ regarding the Casterton Clergy Daughters’ School, when at Cowan Bridge”.

Although quite frank in many places, Gaskell suppressed details of Charlotte’s love for Constantin Héger, a married man, on the grounds that it would be too great an affront to contemporary morals and a possible source of distress to Charlotte’s living friends, father Patrick Brontë and husband.[1] She also suppressed any reference to Charlotte’s romance with George Smith, her publisher, who was also publishing the biography. In 2017, The Guardian named The Life of Charlotte Brontë one of the 100 best nonfiction books of all time.[2]

Notes: Lane 1953, pp. 178–183; McCrum, Robert (17 April 2017). “The 100 best nonfiction books: No 63 – The Life of Charlotte Brontë by Elizabeth Gaskell (1857)”. The Guardian. Guardian News and Media Limited. Retrieved 1 January 2018.

Marie Bostwick The Book Club for Troublesome Women HarperCollins Focus | Harper Muse, April 2025.

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

Marie Bostwick’s book begins with her revelation about her inspiration for it – a conversation with her ninety-one-year-old mother in which Bostwick learnt that Betty Freidan’s The Feminine Mystique had, in her mother’s words, changed her life. She then describes the research she undertook, often arousing feelings of anger, but also admiration of the women facing egregious discrimination. She recognises what Freidan, and those moved by her, did for women – an excellent start to a work of fiction that introduces courageous characters who respond to the discrimination they faced. The women’s coming together, through a book club based on reading extensively and eventually sisterhood, is an engaging topic and Bostwick’s book is a fine vehicle.

My immediately positive response was to Bostwick’s use of the term ‘troublesome women.’ This is a phrase used by feminist writers, Judith Butler, Naomi Wolf, and Laurel Thatcher Ulrich to describe women who refuse to bow to the traditional concept of behaviour that would designate them ‘good’ women. There is also the phrase, ‘Well behaved women rarely make history’ on my favourite, always worn, bracelet. Clearly, Bostwick was going to write about the sorts of women I wanted to read about!

Margaret, Bitsy, Charlotte, and Viv all live in a middle-class suburb, in houses with British names, these names providing information about the size and grandeur of the house. Margaret organises a book club and is encouraged by Charlotte to introduce it with Betty Freidan’s The Feminine Mystique. Each woman responds differently to the book, or the small sections they manage to read. However, the discussion about their reactions provides the nucleus for further revelations. At the same time as the women look for inspiration to change the lives they have adopted since leaving school or college, they are 1960s women with their attention to dress, the food they will provide at their meetings and suffering with curlers in their hair so as ‘to look their best’. The juxtaposition of women and their concerns who will be so familiar to baby boomers, and their aspirations, is heartwarming.

The women’s lives change. Their developing friendships, dealing with what they more strongly identify as discrimination at work, home and in the neighbourhood, and, in turn, realising that discrimination against women stultifies all human relationships and aspirations make for a story that weaves together a group of women worth knowing, ideas that are worth thinking about, and new pathways that are tempting.

The Book Club for Troublesome Women is an enlightening read at the same time as it is a touching story. There are highs and lows that are realistically portrayed, and the ending is particularly satisfying.

The new battle of brothers: Prince William and Prince Harry and ‘upholding Diana’s true legacy’

Story by Natalie Oliveri

The long-running feud between Prince William and Prince Harry has largely been talked about in terms of their disagreements over Meghan and the fallout from the Sussexes’ royal exit.

Going hand-in-hand with their sibling rivalry growing up (which Harry documented at length in his memoir, Spare) there has been another battle playing out between the two brothers in their adult years: that is, which brother best represents their late mother, Diana.

“It’s like there’s a church schism going on, both of them seem to think that they are upholding Diana’s true legacy,” author Edward White told 9honey from his home in Kent.

The brothers are carefully choosing their royal work to align with things that are “truly important about her”, he said.

“The point of my book is that people – from different communities and backgrounds – are seeing in Diana what they want to see and the same seems to be true even of her children,” White said.

White’s book Dianaworld: An Obsession is not your traditional royal biography, instead exploring the way the royal was viewed by various groups and the mania that was created by her mere existence.

The book is an exploration of the world Diana lived in, looking at her reputation from differing perspectives and the legacy that has been created nearly 30 years on from her death.

In White’s words, the books is “a vehicle for everybody else’s neurosis and obsessions and their own sense of identities”.

“The book isn’t about Diana, it’s just about everybody else. [It’s] a book about her reputation rather than her life.”

Dianaworld: An Obsession is out now.

See the remainder of this article in Further Commentary and Articles arising from Books* and continued longer articles as noted in the blog.

9 Books About Female Friendship in Every Decade of Life

Romance has nothing on the impact of a lifelong best friend
Photo by A. C. via Unsplash+
Aug 12, 2025
Michelle Herman

As a child in Brooklyn, my spirits rose and fell on the tides of a girl named Susan’s moods and disposition. We met in 1958, when both of us were three, our mothers both pregnant with unwanted (by us) younger siblings. We were inseparable—soulmates, I would have said, if I’d known the word—for years. Eight years, to be exact. And then my family moved a half-mile away, into a different school district. 

Susan was only the first of a lifelong parade of best and near-best, second-, third-, and close-but-not-best friends (I often maintained a deep bench). I think about them all, whether we’re still close (Hula) or not (Ronnie). Whether we are still in touch or not—whether they are still alive or not. I think about them all—Maria, Amy, Vicki, Debra, Marly, Kathy, et al.—far more often, and with far more feeling (sadness, gladness, longing, love, regret, nostalgia—and, in one case, hurt and grief) than I think about any of my ex-boyfriends. 

The truth is that even in my youth—my boy-crazy teens, my heat-missile-seeking 20s/early 30s—my friendships have always been more crucial to me than the romances that came and went. These were the relationships I knew I could count on (until, once in a while, I couldn’t—and then it was more shattering, and harder to get over, than a failed romance). It’s no surprise that I have gravitated all my life to good stories that center friendship. Or that I’ve been writing about friendship since before I published my first story in 1979. My latest book, the essay collection If You Say So, is dedicated to the friends who’ve come into my life in the last decade. It is also populated by them—a whole community that I lucked into in my 60s, a time when it’s supposed to be practically impossible to make new friends. The title essay is about one of them. Others sweep (and spin and leap) throughout. (This is not a metaphor. We take dance classes and perform together, and much of the book takes place in the dance studio.) And since stories about women’s and girls’ friendships—unlike those about romantic love—are not a dime a dozen, here’s a list of books in which it’s friendship that matters most, in every decade of a woman’s life. See Further Commentary and Articles arising from Books* and continued longer articles as noted in the blog. for the remainder of this article. It is a terrific read about the way in which women’s friendships have been an important topic in women’s writing. One book, suitable for a particular age group, is chosen for further reflection. Of the books mentioned, I really admired Absolution by Alice McDermott, and reviewed in in my blog of July 5, 2023.

About the Author

Michelle Herman is the author of the novels Missing, Dog, Devotion, and Close-Up and the collection of novellas A New and Glorious Life, as well as four essay collections—The Middle of Everything, Stories We Tell Ourselves, Like A Song, and If You Say So—and a book for children, A Girl’s Guide to Life. She writes a popular family and relationship advice column for Slate, and for many years she taught creative writing at Ohio State, in the MFA program she was a founder of in the early nineties. More about the author .

American Politics


August 20, 2025

Heather Cox Richardson from Letters from an American <heathercoxrichardson@substack.com> 

President Donald J. Trump created a firestorm yesterday when he said that the Smithsonian Institution, the world’s largest museum, education, and research complex, located mostly in Washington, D.C., focuses too much on “how bad slavery was.” But his objection to recognizing the horrors of human enslavement is not simply white supremacy. It is the logical outcome of the political ideology that created MAGA. It is the same ideology that leads him and his loyalists to try to rig the nation’s voting system to create a one-party state.

That ideology took shape in the years immediately after the Civil War, when Black men and poor white men in the South voted for leaders who promised to rebuild their shattered region, provide schools and hospitals (as well as desperately needed prosthetics for veterans), and develop the economy with railroads to provide an equal opportunity for all men to work hard and rise.

Former Confederates, committed to the idea of both their racial superiority and their right to control the government, loathed the idea of Black men voting. But their opposition to Black voting on racial grounds ran headlong into the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which, after it was ratified in 1870, gave the U.S. government the power to make sure that no state denied any man the right to vote “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” When white former Confederates nonetheless tried to force their Black neighbors from the polls, Congress in 1870 created the Department of Justice, which began to prosecute the Ku Klux Klan members who had been terrorizing the South.

With racial discrimination now a federal offense, elite white southerners changed their approach. They insisted that they objected to Black voting not on racial grounds, but because Black men were voting for programs that redistributed wealth from hardworking white people to Black people, since hospitals and roads would cost tax dollars and white people were the only ones with taxable property in the Reconstruction South. Poor Black voters were instituting, one popular magazine wrote, “Socialism in South Carolina.”In contrast to what they insisted was the federal government’s turn toward socialism, former Confederates celebrated the American cowboys who were moving cattle from Texas to railheads first in Missouri and then northward across the plains, mythologizing them as true Americans. Although the American West depended on the federal government more than any other region of the country, southern Democrats claimed the cowboy wanted nothing but for the government to leave him alone so he could earn prosperity through his own hard work with other men in a land where they dominated Indigenous Americans, Mexicans, and women.

That image faded during the Great Depression and World War II as southerners turned with relief to federal aid and investment. Like them, the vast majority of Americans—Democrats, Independents, and Republicans—turned to the federal government to regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, promote infrastructure, and support a rules-based international order. This way of thinking became known as the “liberal consensus.”

But some businessmen, furious at the idea of regulation and taxes, set out to destroy the liberal consensus that they believed stopped them from accumulating as much money as they deserved. They made little headway until the Supreme Court in 1954 unanimously decided that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. Three years later, Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard and mobilized the 101st Airborne Division to protect the Black students at Little Rock Central High School. The use of tax dollars to protect Black rights gave those determined to destroy the liberal consensus an opening to reach back and rally supporters with the racism of Reconstruction.

Federal protection of equal rights was a form of socialism, they insisted, and just as their predecessors had done in the 1870s, they turned to the image of the cowboy as the true American. When Arizona senator Barry Goldwater, who boasted of his western roots and wore a white cowboy hat, won the Republican nomination for president in 1964, convention organizers chose to make sure that it was the delegation from South Carolina—the heart of the Confederacy—that put his candidacy over the top.

The 1965 Voting Rights Act protected Black and Brown voting, giving the political parties the choice of courting either those voters or their reactionary opponents. President Richard Nixon cast the die for the Republicans when he chose to court the same southern white supremacists that backed Goldwater to give him the win in 1968.As his popularity slid because of U.S. involvement in Vietnam and Cambodia and the May 1970 Kent State shooting, Nixon began to demonize “women’s libbers” as well as Black Americans and people of color. With his determination to roll back the New Deal, Ronald Reagan doubled down on the idea that racial minorities and women were turning the U.S. into a socialist country: his “welfare queen” was a Black woman who lived large by scamming government services.After 1980, women and racial minorities voted for Democrats over Republicans, and as they did so, talk radio and, later, personalities on the Fox News Channel hammered on the idea that these voters were ushering socialism into the United States. After the Democrats passed the 1993 National Voter Registration Act, often called the “Motor Voter Act,” to make registering to vote in federal elections easier, Republicans began to insist that Democrats could win elections only through voter fraud.

Increasingly, Republicans treated Democratic victories as illegitimate and worked to prevent them. In 2000, Republican operatives rioted to shut down a recount in Florida that might have given Democrat Al Gore the presidency. Then, when voters elected Democratic president Barack Obama in 2008, Republican operatives launched Operation REDMAP—Republican Redistricting Majority Project—to take control of statehouses before the 2010 census and gerrymander states to keep control of the House of Representatives and prevent the Democrats from passing legislation.

In that same year, the Republican-dominated Supreme Court reversed a century of campaign finance restrictions to permit corporations and other groups from outside the electoral region to spend unlimited money on elections. Three years after the Citizens United decision, the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act that protected minority voting.

Despite the Republican thumb on the scale of American elections by the time he ran in 2016, Trump made his political career on the idea that Democrats were trying to cheat him of victory. Before the 2016 election, Trump’s associate Roger Stone launched a “Stop the Steal” website asking for donations of $10,000 because, he said, “If this election is close, THEY WILL STEAL IT.” “Donald Trump thinks Hillary Clinton and the Democrats are going to steal the next election,” the website said. A federal judge had to bar Stone and his Stop the Steal colleagues from intimidating voters at the polls in what they claimed was their search for election fraud.

In 2020, of course, Trump turned that rhetoric into a weapon designed to overturn the results of a presidential election. Just today, newly unredacted filings in the lawsuit Smartmatic brought against Fox News included text messages showing that Fox News Channel personalities knew the election wasn’t stolen. But Jesse Watters mused to Greg Gutfield, “Think about how incredible our ratings would be if Fox went ALL in on STOP THE STEAL.” Jeanine Pirro, now the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, boasted of how hard she was working for Trump and the Republicans.

In forty years, Republicans went from opposing Democrats’ policies, to insisting that Democrats were socialists who had no right to govern, to the idea that Republicans have a right to rig the system to keep voters from being able to elect Democrats to office. Now they appear to have gone to the next logical step: that democracy itself must be destroyed to create permanent Republican rule in order to make sure the government cannot be used for the government programs Americans want.

Trump is working to erase women and minorities from the public sphere while openly calling for a system that makes it impossible for voters to elect his opponents. The new Texas maps show how these two plans work together: people of color make up 60% of the population of Texas, but the new maps would put white voters in charge of at least 26 of the state’s 38 districts. According to Texas state representative Vince Perez, it will take about 445,000 white residents to secure a member of Congress, but about 1.4 million Latino residents or 2 million Black residents to elect one.In order to put those maps in place, the Republican Texas House speaker has assigned state troopers to police the Democratic members to make sure they show up and give the Republicans enough lawmakers present to conduct business. Today that police custody translated to Texas representative Nicole Collier being threatened with felony charges for talking on the phone, from a bathroom, to Democratic National Committee chair Ken Martin, Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ), and Democratic California governor Gavin Newsom.

Republicans have taken away the liberty, and now the voice, of a Black woman elected by voters to represent them in the government. This is a crisis far bigger than Texas.

When Trump says that our history focuses too much on how bad slavery was, he is not simply downplaying the realities of human enslavement: he is advocating a world in which Black people, people of color, poor people, and women should let elite white men lead, and be grateful for that paternalism. It is the same argument elite enslavers made before the Civil War to defend their destruction of the idea of democracy to create an oligarchy. When Trump urges Republicans to slash voting rights to stop socialism and keep him in power, he makes the same argument former Confederates made after the war to keep those who would use the government for the public good from voting.Led by Donald Trump, MAGA Republicans are trying to take the country back to the past, rewriting history by imposing the ideology of the Confederacy on the United States of America.

But that effort depends on Republicans buying into the idea that only women and minorities want government programs. That narrative is falling apart as cuts to the government slash programs on which all Americans depend and older white Americans take to the streets. Today, with the chants of those protesting Trump’s takeover of Washington, D.C., echoing in the background, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller told reporters: “We’re not going to let the communists destroy a great American city…. [T]hese stupid white hippies…all need to go home and take a nap because they’re all over 90 years old, and we’re gonna get back to the business of protecting the American people and the citizens of Washington, D.C.”—

Notes:https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/19/us/politics/trump-smithsonian-slavery.htmlhttps://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/citizens-united-explainedhttps://www.cnn.com/2020/11/13/business/stop-the-steal-disinformation-campaign-invs“Socialism in South Carolina,” The Nation, April 16, 1874, pp. 247–248.https://www.newsweek.com/fox-news-hosts-private-texts-revealed-lawsuit-bombshells-2116299https://time.com/7310875/texass-map-racial-division/https://www.politico.com/story/2016/11/ohio-injunction-trump-roger-stone-polls-230754Bluesky:thejenniwren.teamlh.social/post/3lwuaavezhc2uatrupar.com/post/3lwtvjaw3vq2a

Alternet *

*This site is a source of optimistic insight into the Democratic Party’s responses to President Trump, so much so, that I usually do not use it here – just enjoy the maybe misplaced optimism. However, there is some valuable material for reflection in this article.

MAGA is panicking as Trump finally meets his match | Opinion

Opinion by Thom Hartmann

The effect is unmistakable: the California governor is shifting the cultural battlefield, showing that Democrats can seize the same terrain of humor and symbolism Republicans have dominated since Richard Nixon’s “law and order” days. Newsom has left conservative pundits — particularly on Fox “News” — sputtering.

It’s the kind of cultural jujitsu that Antonio Gramsci imagined — flipping power by seizing the symbols and frames of your opponent — and it’s the kind of thing Democrats have needed to do for years but haven’t successfully pulled off since the days of FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society.

To truly rule with the broad consent of a nation’s citizens, he realized, you have to shape the culture. You have to convince people that your worldview is “common sense,” that your version of reality is the only normal, natural way to see the world.

He called this “cultural hegemony.” The churches, the schools, the newspapers, the songs people sang, the plays they watched and the stories they told all carried values. And those values shaped politics far more than any speech in parliament.

If you win the cultural battle, he argued, you will inevitably win the political one.

Their solution was simple: steal Gramsci’s insight and use it to push back. Andrew Breitbart put the slogan on bumper stickers: “Politics is downstream from culture.” Steve Bannon made it into a strategy for the Trump White House.

Change the story the nation tells itself, control the cultural conversation, and politics will follow.

Republicans have taken that playbook and used it ruthlessly. Following Frank Luntz and other experts’ advice, they reduce every issue to a frame that touches the gut, not the head, and then repeat it until it becomes the background noise of American life.

Nixon gave us one of the earliest, ugliest examples. His “law and order” campaign wasn’t about crime in general; it was code for crushing the civil rights movement and suppressing Black political power.

His “war on drugs” wasn’t a moral crusade against addiction; as his aide John Ehrlichman later admitted, it was a way to criminalize Black people and anti-war activists. They couldn’t outlaw being Black or protesting the Vietnam War, but they could associate both with drugs and then use police and prisons to break movements and communities.

That was cultural framing at its most cynical and vicious. Nixon didn’t have to talk about race. He just had to say “law and order” and “drugs,” and racist white voters understood the code.

The pattern has repeated itself ever since.

When Republicans attack reproductive rights, they don’t say they want to outlaw abortion or strip women of autonomy; they say they’re defending “life.” That single word is a cultural sledgehammer. Democrats, for years, answered with “choice,” which at least carried some emotional punch, but over time they got pulled into defending Planned Parenthood against smears and explaining the economic dimensions of reproductive healthcare as a women’s “economic issue.” Important arguments, yes, but they don’t resonate at the same visceral level as “life.”

On healthcare, Republicans took the word “choice” and made it their own. “Choose your own doctor” became the mantra of those defending corporate-controlled healthcare and insurance. Democrats talked about “single payer” or “public options,” language that could have come out of an actuary’s report. “Choice” sounds American, even when it means choosing between bad insurance plans or facing bankruptcy.

When Republicans use Reagan’s favorite phrase “small government,” people picture a plucky individual freed from bureaucrats and taxes, a man out west on horseback making a life for himself and his family out of the wilderness. What they mean, though, is making government too weak to tax billionaires, regulate corporate pollution, or protect people from discrimination.

But Democrats never met this frame with one of their own. Instead of talking about “government that works for all,” as FDR and LBJ once did, Democrats let the conversation drift into debates over the Affordable Care Act’s exchanges or the technical structure of regulatory agencies.

FDR understood that people don’t want less government or more government; they want a government that works for them. That is a cultural message, not a policy paper, and Democrats have abandoned it ever since Jimmy Carter’s well-intentioned but wonk-driven presidency.

Republicans say “tax relief,” and suddenly taxes are a disease from which you need to be liberated. Democrats counter with discussions about marginal rates and progressive brackets instead of using FDR’s old line that, “Taxes are what we pay for civilized society. Too many individuals, however, want civilization at a discount.”

Republicans say “red tape,” and instantly every rule protecting you from being poisoned, cheated, or injured is recast as a useless nuisance. Democrats instead talk about the importance of “regulation,” something all of us would like less of in our lives.

Republicans say “freedom,” and people see flags and hear the national anthem. Instead Democrats, too often, talk about “programs” or “safety nets.”

The same dynamic plays out on guns. Republicans wrap the issue in the word “freedom” and the power to “fight tyranny.” Democrats come back with talk about universal background checks and assault weapons bans. Important, necessary measures, but they don’t touch the same cultural nerve.

Democrats could have framed gun control differently: freedom from being shot at school, freedom from being afraid in a grocery store, freedom from the constant terror that your child might not come home. That’s freedom that resonates with ordinary people. But by ceding the cultural word “freedom” to the GOP, Democrats let Republicans define what freedom means in America.

On immigration, Republicans talk about “secure borders” and “sovereignty.” Democrats talk about “pathways to citizenship.” Republicans make it about the survival of the nation, Democrats make it about paperwork. The Democratic Party is the party of the Statue of Liberty (that was installed during Democrat Grover Cleveland’s presidency), yet Republicans have stolen the cultural image of America and turned it into one of a fortress under siege.

Education has become another cultural battlefield. Republicans push “parents’ rights” and book bans “to protect our children.” Democrats respond with statistics about test scores and defenses of teachers’ unions. But the cultural high ground belongs to the idea that every child has the right to learn the truth, and every parent has the right to send their kid to school without censorship or fear. Republicans frame themselves as liberators of children, even as they chain them to ignorance. Democrats need to call that out for what it is, in cultural terms that are impossible to ignore.

The lesson is the same in every case. Republicans don’t win by having better policies: their policies are almost uniformly cruel, corrupt, and designed to serve the morbidly rich at the expense of everyone else. They win because they fight at the cultural level. They win because they tell a story, over and over, that makes people feel. Democrats, for decades, have responded with charts that only tickle the intellect.

It wasn’t always this way. During the New Deal and the Great Society, Democrats owned the culture wars. FDR didn’t talk about the Securities and Exchange Commission; he talked about “saving capitalism from itself,” about “restoring faith in America,” about “freedom from want and fear.”

Lyndon Johnson didn’t just present Medicare as a program; he said it was part of building a Great Society where people could live with dignity. He sold the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts with similar rhetoric. Those were cultural narratives, not policy briefs. They tied the Democratic party to the most powerful emotions and aspirations of the American people.

If Democrats want to win again, they have to stop ceding the cultural battlefield. Instead, they need to seize today’s opportunities to fully engage in the culture wars, from policy prescriptions to Gavin Newsom ridiculing Trump to JB Pritzker calling out the GOP’s embrace of fascism.

That means reframing every major issue not just in terms of policy mechanics, but in terms of the classic and compelling American values of freedom, fairness, safety, dignity, and opportunity.

Taxes aren’t a burden; they are the way we all pay for the freedom and opportunity America makes possible.

Regulations aren’t red tape; they are the rules that keep the game fair.

Healthcare isn’t about exchanges; it’s about whether you have the right to live without fear of medical bankruptcy.

Guns aren’t about background checks; they’re about whether your child comes home from school alive.

Immigration isn’t about paperwork; it’s about whether America still stands for the promise on the Statue of Liberty.

Republicans learned from Gramsci and weaponized culture. They turned it into dog whistles, slogans, and memes that bypass reason and lodge themselves in the national gut. Democrats can learn from the same source without resorting to the GOP’s lying, cruelty, and thinly coded racism.

The closest Democrats have come in recent years was Barack Obama’s “Hope and Change” campaign in 2008, revisited in 2012. But those terms, while culturally potent, lost their impact as the Democratic Party continued to bow to the demands of the banks (not a single bankster went to prison for the 2008 crash they caused) and health insurance (Obamacare was written by the Heritage Foundation and gifted the industry with trillions after Obama dropped the public option) industries.

We can tell the story of freedom that is big enough to include everyone. We can tell the story of America not as a fortress for billionaires but as a community where everyone has a fair shot and nobody is left behind.

Like FDR and LBJ, Democrats can again talk about America realizing its potential as a “we society” instead of the selfish Ayn Rand “me society” that Republicans idolize with their “I got mine, screw the middle class” policies and memes.

The alternative is to keep losing ground to a Republican Party that has mastered the art of cultural hegemony in the worst sense of the term. Nixon showed how destructive that could be with his law and order rhetoric. Reagan perfected it with his “welfare queen” lies. Trump and Bannon have pushed it into the realm of authoritarian spectacle, where politics becomes theater and culture becomes a weapon to bludgeon democracy itself.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

The Democrats of the New Deal and Great Society eras knew how to speak to the heart as well as the head. They knew that politics is not just about what laws are passed but about what stories a nation tells itself about who it is. They knew that culture is not an afterthought; it is the riverbed through which politics flows.

Republicans now know it too, and they’ve been poisoning that river for half a century. If Democrats want to save democracy, they must reclaim the story of America, the cultural high ground, and the word freedom itself.


The joy of the quiet time of year 🌳

Dervla McTiernan

View this email in your browser  👉 Was this email forwarded to you? Am I in your inbox for the first time? I’d love it if you sign up to my newsletter here. Friday, 22 August 2025 [slightly edited].


Hello Robin,
I’m happy to tell you that I’m in that quiet period of the year. The thing about traditional publishing is that it works on a cycle. For the two months before and the two months after your book comes out you are generally caught up in the whirl of promotional work. There are writers, I think, who do less promotion, and certainly there are many writers who do more, but these days it would be difficult to find a writer who doesn’t do any. 

The reality is that we live in a very noisy, busy world, and it’s so easy for a book even by your favourite writer to pass you by (case in point — I completely missed the existence of a Sophie Hannah book that I just came across on Audible and I LOVE her work!).

So promotion is now very much part of my life, and I like it, really. It’s fun to do something so completely different, and a joy to go out on the road and to meet so many people and talk books. Also … sometimes it is all so totally worth it. I was in Dymocks the other day and spotted The Unquiet Grave still in the top ten, and it’s been out for months and months! So thank you to everyone who is reading. I’m eternally grateful. 

After the main hubbub of launch is over, writers go into the quiet time of year. This year, I focused first on getting my structural edit done, and as that’s now off my desk I’m mainly spending my time on family bits and pieces, and working my way slowly through the list of jobs I put off during busier times. One particular job is turning out to be something exciting. I’m having my website redesigned and it’s one of those rare situations where you ask someone to do something and you have very high hopes and then they just deliver and deliver and deliver! The whole design is so rich and gorgeous and it feels like being on the website is like being in the world of the books. (

QUESTION??A question for you! I’m putting lots of new material on the website. In terms of downloadable content, is there anything in particular you’d like to have? The only thing I can really think of that you might like to have off the website is questions and notes for book clubs. If anything else occurs to me, please do email me and let me know. 
I sent my new book off to my editors a few weeks ago so it is very close to being finished now. I’ll get notes back from my editors at the end of the month, and then I’ll have just over three weeks to turn it around and get it back to them. And you know what? At that stage I’ll already have had a planning meeting with my publisher for the launch of that book next year! I’m not sure I’m ready for that … 

The main project I’m working on right now is my new new book (not the one that will be out next year, but the one after that). I’m starting a new series (don’t tell anyone, that’s a secret). I’ve been planning this for ages, which is such a good thing, because before I’ve even gotten into the writing of it, the world has become so rich and exciting to me. The story and the characters already feel real, and the longer I’ve been held back from writing it by other projects, the more I want to write it, which is such a good sign. 

By the time I email you next I should have almost finished my copy edit and I’ll be well into the new book. Wish me luck!

I went to Byron Writers Festival this month and had a grand old time, which I feel pretty guilty about, because most of the festival had to be cancelled because the rain was so intense. I was just lucky that my workshop and panel event were right at the beginning, because by the time I was leaving on Friday we were well and truly flooded, and more rain was on the way.

My panel event was with Michael Robotham and Chris Hammer and our moderator was Marele Day. We had such a lovely warm welcoming audience, and Michael and Chris were both hilarious, which made for a memorable event! (iykyk!)

I also taught a workshop on writing, which is something I do very rarely, and I’m not sure I’m in a rush to do again. It was a very fun morning, and a privilege to meet the lovely writers who attended, and I really do love talking all things writing, but with time so tight these days, I want to give all the time I have to writing, as opposed to preparing for or attending events and workshops. The thing about being a writer is that there’s always another distraction waiting around the corner and you can always convince yourself that it’s work but at the end of the day it all draws you away from the real thing!

Thanks so much to everyone who emailed me about The Correspondent. A lot of people seem to have read it and all of the comments were very positive. I thoroughly enjoyed it. It was a very compelling story, and it was so rewarding to spend time with a writer who so deeply understands the topic they’re writing about, who can give real information and nuanced point of view about something so complex. Another reminder of the joy of books and a relief to get away from the constant outrage bait and hot takes on social media!

For this month, I’m going to read one of my favourite writers. If you’ve ever attended one of my events, you’ll have heard me talk about Tana French. She’s an Irish writer and her books are generally described as literary crime. I want to go right back to her debut novel, In The Woods, to see if it has the same effect on me today that it did when it came out. I remember it being completely compelling, that I just had to turn the pages. I remember the shock of the twist, and how real the characters felt to me. So! If you’d like to join me, you can order the book online or from all good bookshops. If you do read it, please do let me know what you think!
All my best,
 
Dervla.
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Women and Literature

Barbara Pym, The Sweet Dove Died

Barbara Pym’s social comedies are pure post-war delights. The English writer close read middle-class village life in her tightly constructed novels of manners, and reclaimed “spinsterhood” for glorious loners everywhere.

Her arguable masterpiece follows the vain Leonora Eyre over and around a fraught love quadrangle with a widowed antiques dealer, his nephew, and some other motley souls. The NYRB Classics crew has selected this book for its October club on the strength of what The Guardian once called “faultless” prose.

The Reality behind Barbara Pym’s Excellent Women: The Troublesome Woman Revealed (excerpt)

Spinsterhood is an important theme in Barbara Pym novels and short stories, one that I was keen to develop in my book.:

The surfeit of unmarried women who people Pym’s fiction provides a wealth of variety in what a spinster might be, or how she might act. Many are given central roles in Pym’s novels. Their depiction, as described throughout the texts, is dealt with in detail in Chapter 2. They highlight qualities that undermine, rather than reinforce, the traditional, non-feminist view of a spinster. Under Pym’s guidance, the term spinster becomes the personification of a strong, individualistic woman, a feminist interpretation of what a spinster can be, when given a central role. However, Pym also gives spinsters secondary, or fleeting roles, in her fiction. However fleeting or modest the role, the stereotype is usually toppled, or if portrayed as what has been designated a typical spinster, is developed with accoutrements, jarring qualities that enforce a reassessment of how a spinster should behave. Pym develops these inconsistencies with a sharpness that shows her enthusiasm for undermining the spinster stereotype.

Central spinsters are Jessie Morrow who, amongst her several appearances, features with Miss Doggett and Barbara Bird in Crampton Hodnet, Catherine Oliphant, Esther Clovis and Deidre Swan in Less Than Angels, Mary Beamish in A Glass of Blessings, Dulcie Mainwaring and Viola Dace in No Fond Return of Love, Ianthe Broome in An Unsuitable Attachment, Leonora Eyre in The Sweet Dove Died, Marcia Ivory and Letty Crowe in Quartet in Autumn and Emma Howick in A Few Green Leaves. They are a vital part of the community in these works and are represented in a variety of relationships and with a range of behaviours and lifestyles.

Where depictions of spinsters are brief, they nonetheless demonstrate Pym’s continuing and sustained interest in portraying single women as individuals rather than members of a stereotypical group. Spinsters appear briefly in Crampton Hodnet, Less Than Angels, A Glass of Blessings, No Fond Return of Love and The Sweet Dove Died, and in greater depth in A Few Green Leaves. Crampton Hodnet includes young spinsters, one about to go to Oxford, and involved in flirtations which are momentarily disappointing; a young woman who contributes to that disappointment; a potential first-class honours student about to embark on an affair with her tutor, and her university friends; a young woman who ‘had an unpleasant experience in Paris’ (CH, 151) and a potential fiancé. Another companion is mentioned and there are additional single working women, such as maids, a nun, three Oxford college tutors and a college Principal. There are two ‘dim North Oxford spinsters’ (CH, 29) in new hats, one of whom elicits possible censure with her newly waved hair; ‘groups of North Oxford spinsters at tea after shopping’ (CH, 52) and spinsters amongst a church congregation.

Spinsters who feature in Jane and Prudence continue Pym’s pattern of providing single women with a variety of characteristics and lifestyles. Flora, Jane’s daughter will be studying at Oxford, but in the meantime displays the domesticity that her mother spurns, yearns after various men briefly and is practical in the face of her mother’s fanciful imaginings and behaviour. Miss Jellink, the Principal and Miss Birkenshaw, head of English at Oxford, are unmarried professionals. Miss Clothier and Miss Trapnell are office workers of indeterminate age and occupation. Their concern about working only the requisite hours is contrasted with the young typists who display no interest in time keeping and talk casually of their elders (JP, 109-110). Miss Bird, a friend of Jane Cleveland’s, makes a brief appearance as a writer who seizes a plate of sandwiches to eat by herself at a literary function (JP, 131-132).

Less Than Angels includes spinster anthropologists, one of Bolshevist views and the other a flirt, who compete for funding to go into the field; ‘an expert in African languages’ (LTA, 8-9); an aunt who combines a vivid imagination, observance of ritual and resentment against a clergyman; a spinster aunt deemed, by her unmarried state, inferior to her married sister (LTA, 29); two fiancés and a rejected lover who is also a breeder of golden retrievers; ‘a tweedy little woman of a mild, almost downtrodden aspect’ (LTA, 153) is Miss Jessop, who also features in Excellent Women; a tall debutante with a desperate mother; a mistaken identity which links stereotypical understandings about spinsters with one who is not a stereotype; and mention of young women who ‘Either said nothing “submitted to his embraces” […] or pushed him away indignantly’ (LTA, 26) or as members of the local club ‘might also be considered amongst its amenities […but] often led [men] captive in marriage’ (LTA, 37).

A Glass of Blessings includes typists and a young woman who works in a coffee shop. The warden of the Settlement is a spinster; other spinsters are a former governess on familiar terms with people of a higher status after her retirement; nuns; ‘two elderly spinsters [learning Portuguese] who plan to hitchhike around Portugal and write a book about it’(AGB, 64); two young attractive spinsters who are learning Portuguese for ‘personal and romantic reasons’ (AGB); and another whose reason for learning Portuguese is unclear; a spinster with a unique blood type who demands special treatment at the blood donor clinic; women in the civil service including one in a principal role in the ministry; ‘splendid Miss Hitchens’ (AGB, 132) and her friend Prudence Bates, a central character in Jane and Prudence; spinsters who are the source of conversation with feminist overtones (AGB); a worker with galley proofs; and unmarried mothers.

The third spinster who appears in No Fond Return of Love is ‘a fellow lecturer’ (NFRL, 9) to the key male character in the novel and the next is the ‘librarian of quite a well-known learned institution’ (NFRL, 13). Variety and commentary on women’s work are added by the introduction of a spinster who prefers housework ‘which nowadays did not seem to be regarded as in any way degrading’ (NFRL, 29); another working in a haberdashery department; the main character’s niece who arrives to work in London after leaving school; a science lecturer at London University; a helpful woman, Rhoda Wellcome, from Less Than Angels, at a jumble sale; an elderly aunt whose previous work in censorship is followed by parish and committee work, and at the end of the novel is said to be marrying a vicar; another woman about to marry, but who has been a headmistress; a young woman who expects that women will be in the workforce; and, more typically, a spinster who minds her elderly mother and is distressed about a handsome clergyman.

The Sweet Dove Died focuses on Leonora, a spinster in her fifties, and introduces few characters who do not belong explicitly to her world. Even in this limited sphere there are spinsters of varying personalities and occupations. Leonora’s spinster friend from their working days is infatuated with a young gay man; and her tenant is an elderly spinster. On the periphery of her life, but a threat to her friendship with a young man, is a spinster who is a sexually free writer; an uncompetitive, admiring middle-aged spinster who works with the young man at the antique shop; and the spinster, so recognised because her basket holds a dinner for one, for whom Pym provides alternative views of spinsterhood: a woman alone and pitiful, or a woman ‘going home to cosy solitude’ (TSDD,140-141).

In An Unsuitable Attachment, the additional spinsters featured are the vicar’s wife’s sister, a secretary to a London publisher; a retired hospital nurse; the vet’s sister who assists him in the surgery; a retiring library assistant; a dressmaker; nuns; and two seventy-year-old English spinsters holidaying in Rome, the Misses Bede from Some Tame Gazelle. The spinsters in An Academic Question are a Swedish au pair; a young lecturer who would prefer to eat than talk to her male companion; the owner of a second hand bookshop with ‘a preoccupation with animals and interest in the problems of loneliness, […and a] sardonic attitude towards academics’ (AAQ, 15); a university student; a nursing home matron; the unmarried sister of the central character; a former principal of a teachers’ college; an assistant editor on a sociology journal; and a lover of medical romances. The novel includes a reference to the well-known Pym spinster character from Less Than Angels, Miss Clovis, whose funeral is attended by the main character.

Quartet in Autumn, which gives two markedly different spinsters central roles, also features ‘a young black girl, provocative, cheeky and bursting with health,’ (QA, 8) who works in the same office as the main characters; a single landlady and two spinster tenants; and a retirement home resident warden.

As Pym moved into her new phase of writing, the number of spinsters peripheral to the main theme diminished. The work from the 1960s, with its stronger undertones and eventually openly feminist ideas needs fewer outwardly comforting characters. Although they are troublesome women and carried Pym’s feminist narrative, spinsters also provided an aspect of her village cover. As previously noted, in the later novels, that function was no longer necessary.

However, with her novel that sets aside the village image, almost going for the jugular of village cosiness, A Few Green Leaves, Pym returns to her practice of including multiple characters who feature more than fleetingly, while not necessarily being central. They include a range of spinsters. Some spinsters who appear briefly in A Few Green Leaves are ageing and might be expected to fall easily into stereotypical positions. The novel gives troublesome roles to the rector’s sister in her fifties and in love with Greece; ‘a long-established village resident’ (AFGL, 8); a spinster ‘of uncertain age’ (AFGL, 11) who has written a romantic historical novel; ‘a small, bent woman in an ancient smelly coat’ (AFGL, 18) who encourages hedgehogs into her house; a former governess; a librarian; young women in church or the local pub; a former headmistress; ‘Tom’s history ladies’ (AFGL, 100), a group that is likely to include spinsters; a worker in a museum; a student ‘recovering from an unsatisfactory love affair and writing a novel’ (AFGL, 210) and reference to Miss Clovis’ death as ‘the passing of a formidable female power in the anthropological world’ (AFGL, 133).

Secret London

This Tiny London Street Is Known As ‘Little Paris’ Filled With French Bakeries, Old Bookshops And Even A Vintage Cinema – And You Probably Don’t Know It

 Vaishnavi Pandey – Staff Writer • 16 August, 2025

Everything about this corner feels less like London and more like the 5th arrondissement: independent bakeries with baguettes stacked behind the glass.

London is full of secrets – hidden mews, tucked-away gardens, and short streets that feel like stepping through a doorway into another city. Yet, just a few minutes from South Kensington’s high street, there is a quiet lane where the air smells of fresh croissants, where conversations often switch effortlessly into French, and where old volumes of Camus, Balzac, and Colette spill from bookshop shelves.

Everything about this corner feels less like London and more like the 5th arrondissement: independent bakeries with baguettes stacked behind the glass, cafés where regulars greet each other with a warm bonjour, and cultural sanctuaries devoted to French literature and film.

Week beginning 20 August 2025

Aaron Poochigian Four Walks in Central Park A Poetic Guide to the Park Familius, September 2025.

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

I had mixed feelings about the writing style when I began reading Four Walks in Central Park. However, I became captivated by the way in which Aaron Poochigian brings Central Park to life, although I found his style idiosyncratic. Both the writing, and the material is distinctive, making this book more than a wander through the Park with attention to the familiar. Under Poochigian’s hand memorials, vegetation, sites, and cafes become interesting places to visit as well as a memorial to the Park’s architect, Frederick Olmsted. There are digressions into political and social commentary, and memorable observations about literary and other figures. The four walks include well known sites, and many (at least to me, unknown locations).

Each of the four walks is covered in one chapter, and the sites to visit are listed in the table of contents. The narratives woven around the sites can be read to enhance the walks – or, ignored if what you want is a photo opportunity or to enjoy the plant and animal life. However, I wish that this book had been available on the occasions on which I walked in Central Park. And to return to the animal life, look for the black swans with which any Australian is familiar. Although they become part of the poetry and visual effects in the Park, they are not native to America and their capture in the 1800s could have joined some of the other poignant stories with which the four walks abound. See Books: Reviews for the complete review.

The Shakespeare Garden’s Hidden Bench©Image Credit: Deposit Photos

Behind the well-known garden lies a secluded bench inscribed with lines from ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream.’ Local writers often claim this spot for peaceful afternoon work sessions. The bench faces west, offering perfect sunset views through the garden’s archway. Medieval herbs mentioned in Shakespeare’s plays grow nearby.

The Pool’s Hidden Grotto©Image Credit: DepositPhotos

A concealed path leads to this natural rock formation overlooking quiet water. Local photographers capture stunning morning mist rising from the pool. Winter reveals ice formations rarely seen elsewhere in the park.

 

Dr Janet Smith Helen Taylor and Her Fight for the People Education Reformer, Feminist and Pioneer of the Labour Movement Pen & Sword | Pen and Sword History, June 2025.

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

Janet Smith has amassed a spectacular amount of information. Not only does Helen Taylor, largely unknown, come to life but so much more is gleaned about her mother, Harriet Taylor (later, Stuart Mill) and her stepfather, John Stuart Mill. This is an immensely engaging book. The content is inspiring, in its volume, the range of topics and the enthusiasm with which Smith investigates long held beliefs about Helen Taylor, to show another side to this formidable and remarkable woman. Although the writing is less dynamic than my experience with Pen and Sword publications, its accessibility is intact – the content is such a driving force that this non-fiction book could be classed a ‘page turner.’

There are three parts, covering Helen Taylor’s early years as the daughter of Harriet Taylor, separated from her husband, and close friend of John Stuart Mill; her public life after the death of her mother, John Stuart Mill, and her good friend, Kate Amberly; and the years between 1886 and her death in 1907. See Books: Reviews for the complete review.

Stephanie Kline Raising the Tudors Motherhood in Sixteenth-Century England Pen & Sword | Pen & Sword History, June 2025.

Thank you, NetGalley and Pen & Sword, for providing me with this uncorrected proof for review.

Although there are detailed sightings as well as glimpses of the Tudors with whom we have become familiar, this book is about the many other mothers of varying ranks, wealth, and contributors to the economy and social structure in the Tudor period. Stephanie Kline provides an insightful narrative about these women; their male counterparts; and the medical system, its philosophies and implementation in a patriarchal world. Her acknowledgement, early in the book, of the material she has used is a bonus – no searching to find out if the information that vies with ‘common knowledge’ can be verified. We know that she has used primary sources. As we read, we can also see how she has used them to valuable effect. This is an instructive, engaging, and valuable read, providing information about the period Kline covers and importantly, raising questions and responses about mothering that extend beyond the Tudor world.

The first part of the book is a mine of information about the medical ideas and practices that informed doctors and midwives and their patients in the Tudor period. It is not particularly unusual to find that women were seen as secondary to men but is fascinating to learn about the detail. It is unusual to be told that in this period, pregnant women’s husbands were advised by the medical profession to be dutiful. An example of a husband not fulfilling his role in preparation for the birth is in a letter from the wife to her husband’s mother expressing concern. A later example shows a father conveying his distress that his daughter is not being adequately cared for. It is also remarkable to be shown that the numbers of women dying in childbirth was not the picture we have been led to believe (although the increase after the introduction of male physicians to replace midwives makes familiar reading). Kline has the research to challenge understood ideas about motherhood and medicine. At the same time, her work supports much of what has been understood of the period and the treatment of women. An important outcome of reading these chapters is recognising that significant opportunities for further understandings of the past exist, Kline’s research serving a doubly valuable purpose. See Books: Reviews for the complete review.

Canberra Writers Festival 

Global Stars at 2025 Canberra Writers Festival

We’re getting closer to releasing the full 2025 festival lineup, but for now, here is a sneak peak at international writers appearing at CWF2025!

Dream State: In Conversation with Eric Puchner
Tuesday 7 October | 6pm National Library of Australia

Join internationally acclaimed American novelist Eric Puchner as he visits Canberra for a special event centred around his latest novel, Dream State – an instant New York Times Bestseller and Oprah Book Club Pick!

In Dream State, Puchner has delivered a compelling love triangle set against the panoramic Montana skyline.  Written with tart humour and heart, this book follows friendship, marriage, and and the march of climate change, as events of an impulsive summer reverberate across fifty years and span generations. 

Puchner’s book launched earlier this year to much acclaim:
 “A gorgeous, gripping epic…being hailed by some as the next great American novel.” – BBC (“40 of The Most Exciting Books to Read in 2025”)

‘The kind of book you don’t want to put down’ Oprah Winfrey

‘Puchner’s writing is almost flawless… moving, funny and utterly engrossing’ The Times
Renowned for the sheer beauty of his sentences and immersive storytelling, Puchner has earned numerous prestigious accolades, including as a winner of a California Book Award, Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and as a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award.

Don’t miss this unique opportunity to hear Eric Puchner in conversation with Artistic Director of the Canberra Writers Festival, Andra Putnis.  

Girl on Girl: Modern Misogyny Gone Global

Fri 17 Oct 6:00 PM Louie | Verity Lane Markets General Admission 60 Mins

What have decades of reality TV, social media, porn and the beauty industry done to women and feminism around the world? Here from the UK, Pulitzer-nominated journalist and author Sophie Gilbert delves into the complex landscape of modern misogyny in her latest book Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves.   

Women are saturated in a beauty culture based on male desire and all-pervasive pornography. Through media and advertising, they’re warned not to be too edgy, too assertive, or too angry. Women are being pitted against themselves and each other in service of the male gaze. 
  
Sophie will be in conversation with much-loved Canberra journalist and author, Virginia Haussegger, who has just emerged from an extensive period of research with her explosive work Unfinished Revolution: The Feminist Fightback. Together they will take a birds-eye view of where women find themselves. 

Sophie Gilbert is a staff writer at the Atlantic, where she writes about television, books, and popular culture. She was a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Criticism and has previously written for the New York Times, Washington Post, the New Republic, and the Brooklyn Rail. She lives in London.

Grief and Glamour in Hollywood: In Conversation with Griffin Dunne
Saturday 25 October | 1.30pm Verity Lane Markets

Griffin Dunne grew up in the glamorous, fantastical world of 1980s Hollywood, surrounded by celebrities – with Joan Didion an aunt and Carrie Fisher as his best friend. He was once even saved from drowning by Sean Connery. He went on to build his own exciting career as a Hollywood actor, director and producer. 

But amongst the drugs, debauchery, and hilariously bad film business decisions, Griffin and his family experience horrific loss: his twenty-two-year-old sister, Dominique, a rising star, brutally strangled by her ex-boyfriend. This event led to one of the most infamous public trials of the decade. 

The Friday Afternoon Club is no mere celebrity memoir. It is a family story and searing portrait of life and loss in the made-up, but all-too-real world of Hollywood. Over from the U.S., Griffin’s conversation with Australia’s master of the stage and author of The Empress Murders, Toby Schmitz, will be jaw-dropping. 

GINSIGHTS: Kelly Rimmer Thursday 21 August | 6pm Big River, 1 Dairy Road Fyshwick

CWF Partners Big River Distilling Co, Paperchain Bookstore and MARION welcome guest author Kelly Rimmer.    ​

Kelly writes historical and contemporary fiction, including The Warsaw Orphan, The Things We Cannot Say, The Secret Daughter, and The Paris Agent and has sold more than 2 million books. Her books have been translated into dozens of languages and have appeared on bestseller lists around the world, including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today.  The central character, Fiona Winslow, is intent on restoring a dilapidated country mansion on her family’s estate. When a book, The Midnight Estate, catches her attention, Fiona is plunged into a tale that mirrors her own life – a story of love, loss and betrayal. She dismisses the similarities as coincidence, but as she’s drawn deeper into the story, the lines between fiction and reality blur, and Fiona must ask herself: how well does she know her family?​

Cindy Lou becomes a lady who lunches

Courgette

‘Ladies who lunch’ has always sounded rather derogatory, suggesting that those who do so have nothing better to do with their lives. My riposte is – how could anything have been better than the delightful lunch I had at Courgette with two women friends? Celebrating an 80th birthday was only one feature of the lunch. To the food later, but importantly it was clear that these three women had far more in their lives than lunching, but were very happy to add doing so to their vast repertoire of activities. Travelling, political activity and serious discussion and debate, singing in a choir, reading, writing, gardening, mothering and grand mothering, partying and dancing, walking dogs…so much, and time remaining in these busy women’s lives to enjoy Courgette’s food, friendly and efficient service, lovely ambience and some special treats as well as our chosen meals.

The ash butter and rolls is one of my favourites – and we given a serve of butter each. Then to entrees – the duck and quail, scallops, and tomato and burrata were delicious. With our main course – stuffed courgette blossoms and mushrooms for the three of us – we were served a complimentary pureed potato side. Forgoing dessert was easy, as the coffees arrived with a chocolate, and then came the birthday treat of berries, gelato and mousse.

China House at Erindale

The menu is extensive, featuring choices from ‘Old fashion’, ‘Gluten Free’, ‘Vegetarian’, ‘House Favourites’, and a wide range of dishes that are exciting and different. Why I didn’t take a photo of the fantastic aubergine, tofu and mushroom dish I do not understand. As delightful as it was, it certainly didn’t disappear before I could do so. However, the other dishes we shared appear below.

The service was friendly and efficient, the dishes hot and full of flavour, and the atmosphere lively.

Legendary movie critic David Stratton dies

SBS Australia and SBS On Demand 

David: “It’s rubbish from start to finish.”

Margaret: “It’s one of the best films of the year.”

Only The Movie Show could give us moments like this.

Vale David Stratton.

The New Daily Aug 14, 2025, updated Aug 14, 2025

Respected and loved Australian movie critic David Stratton, 85, has died, his family announced on Thursday afternoon.

Stratton reviewed thousands of films with co-presenter Margaret Pomeranz on The Movie Show on SBS and At the Movies for ABC TV as well as in print.

His family said he died peacefully in hospital near his home in the Blue Mountains.

“David’s passion for film, commitment to Australian cinema, and generous spirit touched countless lives,” said his family in a statement.

“He was adored as a husband, father, grand and great grand father and admired friend.

“David’s family would like to express their heartfelt gratitude for the overwhelming support from friends, colleagues, and the public recently and across his lifetime.”

Stratton, a Member of the Order of Australia, was considered a national treasure.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese led an outpouring of tributes.

“With dry humour and sharp insight, David Stratton shared his love of film with our country,” said Albanese.

“All of us who tuned in to At the Movies respected him for his deep knowledge and for the gentle and generous way he passed it on. May he rest in peace.”

ABC radio veteran and known atheist Phillip Adams posted on X: “Vale David Stratton. Old friend and colleague now reviewing movies for the Almighty.”

Stratton retired in 2023 because of ill health, after a celebrated career as a film critic, writer, educator and historian that spanned 57 years.

An English migrant who arrived in Australia as a “ten pound Pom” in 1963, Stratton worked for SBS from 1980 as their film consultant and introduced the SBS Cinema Classics on Sunday nights.

His best-known role was co-hosting the long-running SBS TV program The Movie Show with Margaret Pomeranz, from 1986 to 2004, when they moved to the ABC to co-host At the Movies with Margaret and David.

They retired from the show in 2014.

He wrote six books and lectured in film history at the University of Sydney’s Centre for Continuing Education until 2023.

He also served as a jury member at many prestigious international film festivals throughout his career.

Stratton’s life was the focus of the documentary A Cinematic Life, which opened in 2017.

English-born Stratton told The New Daily at the time of the documentary that his favourite movie was Singin’ in the Rain.

“It’s set in a period of Hollywood history that I find fascinating … And I grew up at a time when there was a new musical just about every week,” he said.

“All the popular songs that we were listening to – that’s where they came from. It was before the arrival of rock’n’roll and Elvis Presley and Bill Haley and all that sort of stuff.”

Stratton’s experience interviewing Gene Kelly, aka Singin’ in the Rain‘s Don Lockwood, also proved to be a defining moment in his career as a film critic.

“One of the most interesting days of my life was the one I spent with Gene Kelly at his home.

“He was so friendly and so kind and I was just this young and impoverished film critic doing an interview with this great entertainer … And he was lovely. We literally spent a whole day at his house and he made sandwiches and I just recorded him talking away.”

Stratton’s family issued a special request to moviegoers, asking that they celebrate his “remarkable life and legacy” by watching their favourite movie, or David’s favourite movie, Singin’ In the Rain.

Details of a public memorial service are expected to be announced soon.

-with AAP

Australian Politics

Bob McMullan

Labor vulnerable nowhere in particular, everywhere in general

The best attempt at a post-election pendulum was published recently by Dr Kevin Bonham, who also did a terrific job explaining developments during the preference count in the recent Tasmanian election.

Of course it shows the remarkable scale of the 2025 Labor victory and the consequent scale of the Liberal challenge in 2028.

But we all knew that, although it is useful to have it defined more specifically.

For example, Bonham’s pendulum shows that there would need to be a more than 6% swing against the government before it loses its majority. A 6.06% swing would see Labor lose 18 seats, but retain its majority as it would still have 76 seats.

The coalition would become the largest party (assuming it stays together) after a 7.2% swing and would require a massive 8.9% swing to gain a majority.

Behind the statistics is another story. The breadth of the Labor victory.

Except for the National Party heartland, the ALP won everywhere. The Liberals lost everywhere. A look behind the figures show the strength of the Labor vote in previously Liberal heartland. For example, Bonham and Ben Raue in his excellent website, The Tally Room, both estimate that on a two-party-preferred analysis Labor would have won Bradfield which has always been the safest of Liberal seats. It was in fact the bluest of blue-ribbon seats for the Liberals but not only have they lost the seat to an Independent, they would probably have lost it in a direct contest with Labor. This is an indication of the magnitude of the challenge the Liberals face in regaining the previously safe seats they have lost to Teal candidates. This problem is exacerbated by the National Party’s continuing love affair with climate denialism.

Looked at on a State-by -state basis, the result is equally remarkable.

There was a swing to the ALP in every state and territory except the Northern Territory. The swings ranged from -1.29 in the NT to 9.01 in Tasmania. More significantly, Labor won more than 55% of the two-party preferred vote in every state except Queensland, in which they won 49.42%, a swing of 3.47 in their historically weakest state. This suggests the Liberals need to have a strategy for the whole country rather than targeting any particular state or region, while the Labor Party needs to defend on a similarly broad basis.           

This is reinforced when the character of the seats in contest based on the pendulum are analysed.

Of the 18 seats it would take to reduce the ALP to a mere 76 seats, according to the AEC nomenclature, 3 are inner city, 10 are outer metropolitan 2 are provincial and 3 are rural.

In fact, although I understand the rationale for the AEC’s classifications I don’t always agree with their conclusions. The three Labor “marginals” which the AEC call rural are Gilmore, Leichardt and McEwen. I would consider each of them to be more realistically classified as regional or provincial. Leichardt is a very large electorate on Cape York peninsula, but its heart is the major regional city of Cairns. Gilmore is on the South Coast pf New South Wales and based around the major centre of Nowra. McEwen includes outer Melbourne suburbs as well as many small to medium towns. In voting pattern it tends to reflect outer-metropolitan rather than other rural divisions

In addition Labor would need to defend Melbourne, Wills and Brisbane from potential threats from the Greens.

The combined impact of this assessment is that Labor has to prioritise the defence of 6 inner metropolitan seats, 10 outer metropolitan seats and 6 regional or provincial seats. That means defending everywhere.

But it also means the Liberals have to seek seats everywhere, in Teal seats, and seats across the range of regions and demographics.

In fact, they will have to campaign everywhere but in the National Party seats which will have no possible impact on any federal election in the next decade.

For the Liberal Party this is a strategic challenge. Realistically they need to start with a two-election strategy while seeking opportunities to do better than that should the Labor government falter. However, it is never sustainable in a major party to concede that it will take two elections to win. Therefore, they will need some refined strategic and tactical thinking.

For the government, while this is a nice problem to have, it is a strategic challenge in terms of electoral priority setting.

There are also big decisions for the Greens, Teals and other House Independents, but it is unlikely that their decisions will affect the overall outcome of the next election, although they could have a significant impact in a number of seats.

In broad terms the two major parties face a similar strategic challenge. Needing to win everywhere    (or defend everywhere) creates a resource allocation and priority setting challenge.

However, having seats to defend everywhere is far preferable to having too few anywhere.

Of course, there are other very significant factors arising from the last election, such as the Liberals crisis in support amongst younger voters and women.

The low primary vote for both major parties is also a point of shared vulnerability.

Policy issues and international economic and geo-strategic events will play a big part in determining any election.

However, all these factors will play out in the lead up to 2028 against a backdrop of the strategic and tactical issues arising from the comprehensive nature of Labor’s 2025 victory.

First published in Pearls and Irritations.

Australian Labor Party Facebook Post 16 August 2025.

On this day 50 years ago, Gough Whitlam and Vincent Lingiari made history. In returning land to the Gurindji people, it marked the first time an Australian Prime Minister acknowledged Aboriginal land rights.


American Politics

What the 7 key swing states think of Trump after 200 days in office©Metro

Story by Steve Charnock

The latest data from Civiqs appears to reflect spreading voter disquiet in the states that decided the 2024 election (and will most likely to decide the next one too). The current approval ratings for the seven swing states are as follows…

Arizona • Approve: 45% • Disapprove: 52% • Neither approve nor disapprove: 3%
Georgia • Approve: 43% • Disapprove: 52% • Neither approve nor disapprove: 5%
Michigan • Approve: 43% • Disapprove: 53% • Neither approve nor disapprove: 4%
Nevada • Approve: 47% • Disapprove: 49% • Neither approve nor disapprove: 4%

North Carolina • Approve: 44% • Disapprove: 53% • Neither approve nor disapprove: 3%
Pennsylvania • Approve: 45% • Disapprove: 52% • Neither approve nor disapprove: 4%
Wisconsin • Approve: 46% • Disapprove: 51% • Neither approve nor disapprove: 3%

As we can see from the figures, there is no longer a single swing state that has a higher approval rate than disapproval rate for Trump. In six of the seven key states, over half of those people quizzed replied that they were not in favour of how President Trump has conducted his second presidency so far.

Even with approval lagging, some pro-Trump voters still cite specific wins – whether on border enforcement, regulatory rollbacks or foreign affairs. Yet frustration amongst Trump’s voter base is building too. Now, the numbers seem to suggest, that a fair few Trump supporters are changing their tone.

In terms of data, perhaps the best compare and contrast figures out there are how those in the seven swing states actually voted back in 2024. In this and the next slide we can see the US presidential election results from last year…

Arizona • Trump: 52% • Harris: 47%
Georgia • Trump: 51% • Harris: 49%
Michigan • Trump: 50% • Harris: 48%

Nevada • Trump: 51% • Harris: 47%
North Carolina • Trump: 51% • Harris: 48%
Pennsylvania • Trump: 50% • Harris: 49%
Wisconsin • Trump: 50% • Harris: 49%

As we can see, Trump narrowly won in all seven. Recent approval ratings, as we’ve just explored, aren’t as kind. With the mid-terms approaching, it’s bound to be cause for some concern in the White House.

Heather Cox Richardson from Letters from an American <heathercoxrichardson@substack.com> 

August 14, 2025

Today, flanked by California’s Democratic elected officials and union leaders, California governor Gavin Newsom responded to Trump’s attempt to strongarm the Texas legislature into redistricting the state to give Trump the five additional congressional representatives to which he feels “entitled.” Newsom announced that California will hold a special election on November 4 for voters to consider redistricting their state temporarily if Texas redistricts, so that California can neutralize Trump’s rigging of the state of Texas. The plan would only go into effect if Texas—or any of the other states pressured by Trump to redistrict to get more votes—launches its mid-decade redistricting that is transparently designed to help resurrect the Republicans’ prospects for 2026 and 2028. (My emphasis)

After years of criticism that Democrats have not fought hard enough against Republicans’ manipulation of the system to amass power, the California plan, along with Newsom’s announcement of it, flips the script. The plan leverages Democrats’ control of the most populous state in the Union to warn Republicans to back away from their attempt to rig the 2026 election.At the same time, the plan’s authors protected against claims that they were themselves trying to rig the game: the plan goes into effect only if Republicans push through their new maps, and it declares that the state still supports the use of fair, nonpartisan redistricting commissions nationwide, a system Republicans oppose.

Newsom’s announcement of the plan continued a shift in Democratic rhetoric from defense to offense. After years of Trump and Republicans attacking California, Newsom celebrated his state and the principles it reflects. “We are in Los Angeles, the most diverse city, in the most diverse county, in the most diverse state, in the world’s most diverse democracy,” he said. “And I’ve long believed that the world looks to us…to see…it’s possible to live together and advance together and prosper together across every conceivable and imaginable difference. What makes L.A. great, what makes California great, and what makes the United States of America great—is that…we don’t tolerate our diversity, we celebrate our diversity, and it’s a point of pride, because we’re all in this together,” he said.

California has the population of 21 smaller states combined, he pointed out, and the fourth largest economy in the world. Pushing back on the trope that says, “Don’t mess with Texas,” Newsom warned: “Don’t mess with the great Golden State.” In a reference to the 1846 California Republic, also known as the “Bear Flag Republic”—a history captured by the California grizzly bear on the state’s flag—Newsom echoed the words of Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA) when he added: “Donald Trump, you have poked the bear, and we will punch back.”Newsom emphasized that democracy is under siege by Trump and his MAGA loyalists, a point illustrated by the fact that officials had sent more than a dozen masked and armed Border Patrol agents to the Japanese American National Museum in the Little Tokyo neighborhood of Los Angeles, where Newsom was speaking. Some of the agents were carrying rifles. A Border Patrol chief, Gregory Bovino, made it clear the agents were there to intimidate state officials, saying: ““We’re here making Los Angeles a safer place, since we don’t have politicians who can do that. We do that ourselves.”

Trump “doesn’t play by a different set of rules,” Newsom said. “He doesn’t believe in the rules. And as a consequence, we need to disabuse ourselves of the way things have been done…. We have got to meet fire with fire…. So that’s what this is about. It’s not complicated. We’re doing this in reaction to a president of the United States that called a sitting governor of the state of Texas and said, find me five seats…. We can’t stand back and watch this democracy disappear, district by district all across this country…. We need to be firm in our resolve. We need to push back.” He called this moment “a break the glass moment for our democracy, for our nation.”

Newsom called for Americans to “[w]ake up to what Donald Trump is doing…. Wake up to the assault on institutions and knowledge and history. Wake up to his war on science, public health, his war against the American people. This is a guy who lays claim to want to get a Nobel Prize sitting there and bending his knee to Mr. Putin.”

“We do have agency,” Newsom reminded his audience. “We’re not bystanders in this world. We can shape the future.” Noting that “this time requires us to act anew, not just think anew,” Newsom nodded to President Abraham Lincoln’s famous call from 1862: “The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise—with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.”

Newsom’s team has been garnering attention lately by trolling Trump on social media, taunting the president with grandiose, jerky, all-caps posts that mimic Trump’s own. *Today, Newsom continued that taunting by pointing out that Trump wants to rig the district maps because he knows his party is going to lose the midterms. Newsom called Trump “a failed president” and pointed to Trump’s dispatch of the Border Patrol to intimidate the people in attendance at the event as proof Trump is “weak…broken, someone whose weakness is masquerading as his strength…. The most unpopular president in modern history.”On a day in which a new report this morning from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed flashing red lights over inflation caused by Trump’s tariffs, Newsom trolled Trump by echoing the president’s triumphant promise that April 2, when he announced those tariffs, was “Liberation Day. Newsom called today’s announcement “Liberation Day in the State of California.”

When a reporter asked Newsom whether his mimicry of Trump’s social media posts is a strategy, he replied: “I hope it’s a wake up call…. If you’ve got issues with what I’m putting out. You sure as hell should have concerns about what he’s putting out as president…. But I think the deeper question is, how have we allowed the normalization of his tweets through social posts over the course of the last many years to go without similar scrutiny and notice.”

In a press release about the event, Newsom’s office emphasized that Democratic leaders from across the country have been launching similar broadsides against Trump’s push for redistricting, quoting Arizona Senator Ruben Gallego, Michigan Senator Elissa Slotkin, New York governor Kathy Hochul, New Jersey governor Phil Murphy, and Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker.

After the events, Newsom’s press office posted on social media: “DONALD IS FINISHED—HE IS NO LONGER “HOT.” FIRST THE HANDS (SO TINY) AND NOW ME—GAVIN C. NEWSOM—HAVE TAKEN AWAY HIS “STEP.” MANY ARE SAYING HE CAN’T EVEN DO THE “BIG STAIRS” ON AIR FORCE ONE ANYMORE—USES THE LITTLE BABY STAIRS NOW. SAD! TOMORROW HE’S GOT HIS “MEETING” WITH PUTIN IN “RUSSIA.” NOBODY CARES. ALL THE TELEVISION CAMERAS ARE ON ME, AMERICA’S FAVORITE GOVERNOR. EVEN LOW-RATINGS LAURA INGRAM (EDITS THE TAPES!) CAN’T STOP TALKING ABOUT MY BEAUTIFUL MAPS. YOU’RE WELCOME FOR LIBERATION DAY, AMERICA! DONNIE J MISSED “THE DEADLINE” (WHOOPS!) AND NOW I RUN THE SHOW. THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER! —GCN”.*

The office followed that post up with one that recalled Trump’s February 2025 reference to himself as a king, a reference that likely referred to a decades-old puff piece that called Trump “the king of New York.” After a popular outcry at Trump’s apparent claim to a throne, the White House followed up with an AI-generated image of the cover of what appeared to be Time magazine showing Trump wearing a crown in front of the New York City skyline with the legend “Long live the king.”

Newsom’s version replaced Trump’s image with his own, symbolically taking over turf that at the height of his popularity Trump considered his own. It declared: “A SUCCESSFUL LIBERATION DAY! THANK YOU!”—

Notes:https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/newsom-make-announcement-redistricting-after-threatening-end-trumps/story?id=124651447https://www.gov.ca.gov/2025/08/14/governor-newsom-launches-statewide-response-to-trump-rigging-texas-elections/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/14/us/newsom-la-immigration-agents.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/19/us/politics/trump-king-image.htmlhttps://www.snopes.com/fact-check/white-house-post-trump-as-king/https://bellanyc.com/the-king-of-new-york-donald-trump/https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/second-annual-message-9YouTube:watch?v=9xshWDUr_fAX:GovPressOffice/status/1956179690449985876GovPressOffice/status/1956196831261851887

*


Heather Cox Richardson from Letters from an American <heathercoxrichardson@substack.com> August 17, 2025

On the heels of President Donald J. Trump’s Friday meeting with Russia’s president Vladimir Putin in Anchorage, Alaska, Trump will meet with Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky Monday afternoon at the White House. According to Barak Ravid of Axios, Trump called Zelensky from Air Force One on the way home from Alaska. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and White House special envoy Steve Witkoff were also on the hour-long call. The leaders of the European Commission, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and the United Kingdom then joined the call for another half hour.

In the call, Trump embraced Putin’s view of the conflict, telling Zelensky and European leaders that Putin does not want a ceasefire. Trump indicated that he is abandoning his own demand for a ceasefire and adopting Putin’s position that negotiations should take place without one. Zelensky insists on a ceasefire before negotiations. After the call, Trump posted on social media that “it was determined by all that the best way to end the horrific war between Russia and Ukraine is to go directly to a Peace Agreement, which would end the war, and not a mere Ceasefire Agreement, which often times do not hold up.” “All” is doing a lot of work in that sentence: it appears to mean Putin, with the possible agreement now of Trump.

Key unanswered questions from Friday’s summit were why it ended so abruptly, with the cancellation of a planned luncheon and more discussions, and why Trump immediately told Fox News Channel personality Sean Hannity, “Because of what happened today, I think I don’t have to think about [further sanctions on Russia] now. I may have to think about it in two weeks or three weeks or something, but we don’t have to think about that right now.”

The abrupt cancellation could mean that U.S. officials sent Putin packing without lunch because he would not agree to a ceasefire. But it seems worth keeping on the table that Trump has recently exhibited both an inability to focus on any topic, and a need to live in a carefully constructed world that ignores reality and assures him he is the best and the brightest. A high-stakes meeting with principals about a very real situation might have been too much for him to manage for a full day. (My emphasis)

At the press conference following the summit, NBC News White House correspondent Peter Alexander reported that what struck him was “the looks on the faces of a lot of the American delegation here. Karoline Leavitt…, Steve Witkoff, who came into the room, then left quickly, then came back in. Leavitt appeared to be a bit stressed out, anxious. Their eyes were wide, almost ashen at times.”

At 8:31 this morning, Trump posted one word, “bela,” on his social media account. California governor Gavin Newsom’s social media account, which has been trolling Trump by imitating his boastful, insulting, all-caps posts, wrote: “We broke Donald Trump.”

As of midday Sunday, there appeared to be no mention of the Alaska meeting on the State Department’s website, although it has been updated since Friday to acknowledge Indonesia Independence Day and the Gabonese Republic National Day.

What is clear from the summit, though, is that Trump and Putin badly miscalculated the nature of power in democracies.

It has seemed since 2016 that Putin believed that if he could drive a wedge between the U.S., NATO countries, and other allies, which together have defended a rules-based international order since 1949, he could break that order. Then, absent the system that worked to keep big countries from invading smaller ones, he could take over parts of Ukraine and possibly other countries around Russia. Together, Putin and Trump have gone a long way toward aligning the U.S. government with Putin and other authoritarians. In his first term, Trump talked of leaving NATO, but those in his administration who understood the nature of power prevented him. Now he is operating without those professionals and has shifted the U.S. to a foreign policy that is fraying our relationships with other countries.But U.S. strength in international relations has always been its relationships, and with the U.S. withdrawing from its traditional democratic alliances, others are strengthening their relationships without the U.S. Today, at a meeting with Zelensky in Brussels, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen stressed that international borders cannot be changed by force. She called for Ukraine to become “a steel porcupine, indigestible for potential invaders.” French president Emmanuel Macron said that Ukraine’s borders must be honored and that “if we show weakness today in front of Russia, we are laying the ground for future conflict.”

These allies are standing together against Putin and, if necessary, against Trump. Von der Leyen will accompany Zelensky to a meeting at the White House on Monday. So will French president Emmanuel Macron, Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni, German chancellor Friedrich Merz, NATO secretary general Mark Rutte, United Kingdom prime minister Keir Starmer, and Finnish president Alexander Stubb.

National security scholar Tom Nichols noted on social media that it “suggests something went very wrong in Alaska if this many European leaders are coming to Washington on short notice.”

Trump has misunderstood the nature of power in a democracy at home, too. Rather than building domestic coalitions to support the government, he is overseeing the takeover of the government by a radical minority that seems to think the way to build power is for the government to attack its own people.

The administration’s defunding of scientific research, medical care, environmental protection, food safety and security, and emergency management all threaten Americans’ health, safety, and security. Its attacks on history and education, as well as its firing of women and racial and gender minorities, seem designed to drive wedges among Americans. Its incarceration and disappearing of undocumented migrants both creates an “other” for Trump loyalists to hate and provides a warning of what could happen to the regime’s opponents.

Now, under the guise of fighting crime, the administration has quite literally turned guns on the American people.

On June 7, Trump deployed 700 Marines to Los Angeles and federalized 4,100 California National Guard personnel after scattered protests of immigration raids. Administration officials argue that the troops were not engaged in law enforcement but were simply protecting federal agents. California governor Gavin Newsom sued the administration to limit the use of the military in Los Angeles. In the trial, held last week, lawyers for the federal government said troops can protect federal agents wherever they go, effectively asserting that there are no limits to how a president can use troops domestically despite the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act saying the opposite.

That deployment was so deeply unpopular that, as Shawn Hubler of the New York Times reported in July, of the 72 soldiers whose enlistment was set to expire during the deployment, two had already left and 55 said they would not extend their service: a 21% retention rate when the normal retention rate is 60%. One told Hubler: “This is not what the military of our country was designed to do, at all.”

But if Trump’s deployments of troops in states can be challenged under the Posse Comitatus Act, that’s a harder call in Washington, D.C., which is overseen by Congress. There, the president controls the National Guard—in contrast to what Trump claimed in 2021—and so did not need additional authority. In addition, the 1973 Home Rule Act that established limited self-government in the city provided that the president could take control of the police department there. Trump is the first to do so.

On Monday, August 11, Trump announced he was placing the Washington, D.C., police department under federal control and deploying National Guard troops there. He asserted that violent crime in the city is “getting worse” and in an executive order claimed that “crime is out of control” in the city.

This is a transparently manufactured excuse to enable the administration to take over a Democratic city with troops they control. In fact, crime in Washington, D.C., has been trending downward for decades and violent crime is now, according to the Department of Justice’s own statistics, at a 30-year low. There is also the sticky little problem of the fact that Trump pardoned about 1,500 of those convicted of crimes for their participation in the riot of January 6, 2021, and that under his direction, the Department of Justice dismissed all pending cases against the remaining January 6 defendants. Many of those defendants attacked police officers.

More generally, the administration seems to be encouraging violence rather than shunning it. As Anna Merlan of Mother Jones reported on Friday, the White House, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the Department of Homeland Security joke on social media about cruelty and torture, suggesting it’s fun to hurt people. They are sanitizing and popularizing state violence. Trump’s pardoning of drug trafficker Ross Ulbricht, sentenced to life in prison, and his welcome to the U.S. of a man convicted of killing three people in Spain suggest the president’s support for “law and order” is coverage for his own political ends.

MAGA’s violent rhetoric is bearing fruit in the shooting of two prominent Minnesota state lawmakers and their spouses in early June, killing two. Then, on August 8, a Georgia man who blamed the covid-19 vaccine for making him depressed and suicidal fired more than 180 shots into the Atlanta headquarters of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, killing police officer David Rose, a 33-year-old former Marine.

Yesterday the Republican governors of West Virginia, South Carolina, and Ohio all said they would send National Guard troops to Washington, D.C., to support Trump’s takeover of the city. They will be funded by the federal government—that is, our tax dollars. Journalist Philip Bump illustrated that the true goal of the forces in the city has little to do with actual crime rates by running the numbers. He showed that 43 cities in the states sending troops to Washington, D.C., have higher rates of violent crime than the capital does.

The Trump administration is launching a classic authoritarian project, attempting to take over a country through division and fear. But they badly misunderstand the nature of power. If they succeed, they will control a badly diminished United States of America, one that has fallen to the level of a country like Russia, far from the powerhouse it was when we recognized that the extraordinary strength of our nation always came not from force, but from alliances.

There is one thing Trump’s military deployments against the American people have accomplished though: media mentions of the Epstein files have plummeted.—

Notes:https://www.axios.com/2025/08/16/trump-zelensky-meet-white-house-putin-summithttps://www.wsj.com/world/europe/trump-tells-europeans-he-is-open-to-u-s-security-guarantees-in-ukraine-347892f6https://www.state.gov/newsroom/https://kyivindependent.com/international-borders-cannot-be-changed-by-force-von-der-leyen-says-in-brussels-ahead-of-trump-meeting/https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/pr/violent-crime-dc-hits-30-year-lowhttps://www.pbump.net/o/more-people-in-ohio-need-protection-from-violent-crime-than-do-people-in-d-c/?s​​https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/granting-pardons-and-commutation-of-sentences-for-certain-offenses-relating-to-the-events-at-or-near-the-united-states-capitol-on-january-6-2021/https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/08/trump-administration-propaganda/https://www.cbsnews.com/news/national-guard-los-angeles-deployment-trial-day-3/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/16/us/trump-national-guard-california.htmlhttps://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/08/13/trump-dc-police-national-guard/85622174007/https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz7e0jve875ohttps://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/24/world/americas/trump-venezuela-convicted-murderer-swap.htmlhttps://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/after-two-day-manhunt-suspect-charged-shooting-two-minnesota-lawmakers-and-their-spouseshttps://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/in-cdc-attack-man-fired-180-shots-breaking-150-windowshttps://www.wrdw.com/2025/08/17/atlanta-officer-killed-cdc-shooting-be-laid-rest-friday-family-says/https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5457056-trump-bela-post-mystery/https://www.cnn.com/politics/live-news/trump-putin-meeting-news-08-15-25#cmedkl3jk00053b6uswo6bdj5https://abc7.com/post/russia-ukraine-war-trump-zelenskyy-meeting-happen-monday-putin-secured-no-peace-agreement/17555667/

Moving The Window

Joyce Vance from Civil Discourse <joycevance@substack.com> Unsubscribe

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Moving The WindowJoyce VanceAug 17 

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Tonight’s piece runs longer than I like to, especially on a Saturday night, but the issues are serious, and incumbent upon us all to stay caught up. Thanks for being here and for reading Civil Discourse. If it helps you understand these issues better, I hope you’ll share it with friends and consider subscribing if you don’t already.

The Overton Window is a model that describes the range of policies considered acceptable at a given time by the public and policymakers. It’s the spectrum of ideas that are legitimate, feasible choices, and anything that falls outside of the window is considered too extreme for serious consideration. For instance, the idea of deploying the National Guard, or even the military, on American streets to control the local population is something we would have considered far outside of the Window for decades.

Think of what Donald Trump is doing in the District of Columbia in these terms. He’s made up a crisis—a wave of crime that doesn’t exist. The law in the District is different from how it is elsewhere because of limited home rule and a law that was drafted, at least arguably, to give the president alone the ability to declare an emergency that would permit control of local law enforcement. Trump tried it in Los Angeles, but ran into issues, like the Governor’s objection and the Posse Comitatus Act, which prevents direct law enforcement by the Guard and the military. But in the District of Columbia, Trump has asserted the ability to seize control of the Metropolitan Police for at least thirty days and longstanding DOJ interpretation of the law says Posse Comitatus doesn’t apply in D.C.

Trump is using the quasi-federal status of the District to socialize the idea that he can: make up an emergency and no one can challenge his thinking seize control of local law enforcement use the National Guard for direct law enforcement purpose.

For the casual observer of American politics, he’s creating a new normal and shifting the Overton Window to include a presidential takeover of American cities.

Next stop, Los Angeles, Baltimore, Oakland, New York and Chicago, all cities Trump said were “bad, very bad,” without explanation. All cities where the law is less friendly to a Trump takeover than it is in the nation’s capital. But Trump has been more than willing to brazen it out in court and live to fight in the Supreme Court, where he hopes for, and has frequently been rewarded with, a decision that hands over more power to the unitary executive. To be able to last out the appeal, Trump needs to make sure that the public isn’t so outraged that he has to pull back. Hence, the need to move the Overton Window.

A potential pitfall for Trump is that outside D.C., he’ll need to convince courts, where his moves will certainly be challenged, that his determination of an emergency or other condition necessary to allow him to interfere with state and local control is not reviewable. Since his first day in office, when he declared an emergency at the border, Trump has been relying on that notion, that contrary to the checks and balances the Founding Fathers set up, any decision he makes that there is a national emergency can’t be challenged in the courts. Then, he declared an emergency that permitted him to make the (false) claim that the Venezuelan drug cartel Tren de Aragua was invading the United States, which set up his inhumane deportations of people to CECOT prison in El Salvador without due process. Most recently, it has been tariffs, predicated on the claim that “foreign trade and economic practices” have led to a “national emergency.” In each instance, Trump has faked an emergency, while pushing the courts to say that they cannot review his decisions. So far, the lower federal courts seem to be skeptical. At some point, that issue will make its way to the Supreme Court. If SCOTUS lets him get away with that, our position becomes that much more precarious.

Understood this way, what’s happening this weekend in the District of Columbia is a matter that should concern all of us. We cannot afford to let the Overton Window move. Our conversations with the people around us matter and it’s a moment where we need to make real the spectre of armed and masked troops marching through our streets—not just those in other people’s neighborhoods.

Last week, we discussed how small of a force the D.C. National Guard is. There are reports that early this week, National Guard troops from other states, Trump-friendly red states like West Virginia, Ohio, and South Carolina, will arrive to assist in whatever it is that Trump thinks he’s doing—surely not fighting crime, since these troops aren’t trained to do that. If Trump wanted to help reduce crime, he’d be funding data-driven best practices that are shown to work and that have, in fact, been bringing down crime in the District, as then-interim U.S. Attorney Ed Martin announced Trump had done during his first 100 days in office. Make sure you point out the incredible hypocrisy by Trump when he justifies his actions by claiming crime is out of control.The most important news is that Americans are not giving way to Trump. As the pictures sent to me by protestors show, people were out in the District of Columbia today, refusing to be intimidated by a president who wants to convince us that sending out masked law enforcement agents and armed troops on the streets of the nation’s capital, and any other city for that matter, is within his power. It is not. We will not tolerate his creeping totalitarianism. We are not obligated to accept his power play or make any of this easy for him, as he takes a well-worn page from every authoritarian’s playbook. We are not that country and he is not a king—nor a dictator.On Friday, Judge Ana Cecilia Reyes, born in Uruguay and appointed to the district court in D.C. by Joe Biden in 2023, wasted no time in scheduling a hearing after the District filed a lawsuit challenging Trump’s attempt to exceed the power granted by the home rule law in his attempt to take over the Metropolitan Police. The previous night, Attorney General Pam Bondi tried to replace the D.C. Chief with the head of the DEA.You have to like a judge who has this picture of herself with her pup on Wikipedia and reportedly brings her dog to work. Such a breath of fresh air during an administration where the president has no pets and the Secretary of DHS admitted that she shot hers.Judge Reyes began the hearing by clarifying that she was not holding an evidentiary hearing and would not get into issues that would require development of the facts, like whether there was actually an emergency or a legitimate federal purpose behind Trump’s takeover. For purposes of the hearing, she assumed that Trump was correct on those points, saying she would go into them this coming week if necessary, before delving into the legal issues surrounding Trump’s order.In the end, Attorney General Pam Bondi backed down, agreeing to let Metropolitan Police Department Chief Pamela Smith continue to run the Department’s day-to-day operations under Mayor Muriel Bowser’s orders. She wrenched a concession from the district, directing Bowser to order the police department to assist in federal immigration enforcement. There is likely another legal confrontation coming where that process may conflict with laws passed by the District, which is a sanctuary city.And as for Trump’s claim that he was worried about crime? Chief Smith wrote in an affidavit accompanying the District’s lawsuit that, “If effectuated, the Bondi Order would upend the command structure of MPD, endangering the safety of the public and law enforcement officers alike.” Imagine your local police department being run by the attorney general or his designee instead of the people who know your city and its needs the best. We’ve come full circle to where we started: Trump is making up the need for any of this. It’s about moving the Overton Window to give him the opportunity to seize more power, in more places, in a distinctly un-American fashion.We shouldn’t forget about what was on the front pages before Trump started all of this and his embarrassing knee-bending exercise with Putin in Alaska on Friday. Trump has something to hide. And, apparently, he’s willing to take some hits to try and knock it off the public’s radar screen. Let’s not let anyone forget about it: Trump could release the Epstein files tomorrow.

We’re in this together,

Joyce



Mslexia Writing Competitions

MSLEXIA NOVEL COMPETITION

Imagine the doors that could open for you if Bernardine Evaristo chose your manuscript as this year’s winner! Open to women who are not yet published as novelists, to novels of at least 50,000 words in any genre for adult or young adult readers. Just submit your first 5,000 words to be in with a chance of winning £5,000, manuscript feedback, pitch training and editor intros. It’s a life-changing prize – this could be your year.

Deadline: 22 Sep
Entry fee: £26
Enter here

MSLEXIA SHORT STORY COMPETITION

Size is never an issue for us! Our annual short story comp is super-duper flexible – we want your short fiction of up to 3,000 words on any theme you fancy. Judged by Eley Williams, the top prize is a nifty £3,000, with the top four entries appearing in Mslexia magazine, plus the top twelve entries will be published in our anthology Best Women’s Short Fiction 2025. That’s publication sorted for you! 

Deadline: 22 Sep
Entry fee: £12
Enter here MSLEXIA FLASH FICTION COMPETITION 

Last one, we promise. Our flash fic category is judged by Amanda Saint, with the winner landing £500 plus publication. The top four entrants will be published in Mslexia and Best Women’s Short Fiction 2025 – alongside all the other finalists! Just sharpen your finest micro fiction of up to 300 words to enter. 

Deadline: 22 Sep
Submission fee: £6
Enter here

Week beginning 13 August 2025

Lauren O’Neill-Butler The War of Art A History of Artists’ Protest In America Verso Books (US)|Verso, June 2025

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

This is a huge undertaking, with its dense rollcall of information, detailed discussions of various artists, their motivation, and the application of this to their work. The density, and the multitude of ideas and information made this a difficult read. Rather than what I expected, a lively interpretation of the causes embraced by the artists, their successes and failures, the impact of the political environment at the government and community level, and the type of art that artists used to achieve their aims, I felt overwhelmed. So many of these issues are canvassed, but the way in which various strands are muted by the over serious nature of the writing and extraneous detail (or so it seems) makes understanding them difficult.

Where O’Neill – Butler excels is in giving a voice to relatively unknown artists and their work. Again, the mountain of detail needs to be surmounted, but an avid interrogator of this will find valuable material. It just takes some work, and a determination to follow the trails.See Books: Reviews for the complete review.

Rhys Bowen Mrs. Endicott’s Splendid Adventure Lake Union Publishing, August 2025.

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

I was tempted into reading my first Rhys Bowen novel because of the title. It is reminiscent of the work by some British women novelists writing from the 1930s to the 1960s. There is a particular charm about some of this literature, with its weaving together main female characters who seemingly mildly demand their independence with a well-developed plot which includes gentle humour. Although Rhys Bowen is writing in 2025, her depiction of one such character, Mrs Endicott, in a plot that moves from divorce in an English village to a village in France, portraying the competing demands of old and new friends, war and the sinister arrival of German troops in what has appeared to be a haven, has the appeal of this earlier work. See Books: Reviews for the complete review.

Miranda Rijks You Can Trust Me Inkubator Books, July 2025.

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

Mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, friends – all are dancing around each other in this novel of twists and surprises, comic moments, and nefarious activities. Relationships are duplicitous, criminal activity is rife and lies are an integral part of the friendships and partnerships. None of the characters is sympathetic. However, at the same time, their various manipulations are intriguing enough to read to the end of the novel. See Books: Reviews for the remainder of this short review.

Canberra Art Exhibition

CÉZANNE TO GIACOMETTI Until 21 Sep | Ticketed, under 18s free

Only six weeks left to see Cézanne to Giacometti. Don’t miss the Gallery’s winter exhibition featuring artists who have influenced and changed the course of twentieth-century art, with over 80 works from the Museum Berggruen in Berlin alongside works from the national collection.
Cézanne to Giacometti is exclusive to Kamberri/Canberra.

Free entry for visitors under 18 thanks to our supporters, including Principal Patron Tim Fairfax AC, Exhibition Patrons and donors to the 2024 Annual Appeal.

Kids & families
Play and create in a dedicated interactive space by artist Sanné Mestrom.
Shop & read 
Visit the Art Store at the Gallery to browse the illustrated publication and an exclusive product range inspired by the exhibition. 

NEW COLLECTION HIGHLIGHTS

Visit the international art galleries to experience new acquisitions including Edvard Munch’s Man with horse and Balloon Venus Dolni Vestonice (Yellow), a gleaming 2.7m-high sculpture made of highly polished stainless steel, by American artist Jeff Koons.

Know My Name: Global presents works by women artists who have pushed the limits of artistic practice from the 1960s to the present day, including Judy Chicago, Tracey Emin and Jenny Holzer.

Special Events

Art Talks Fridays
Join artists, curators and experts in exploring the collection and exhibitions during free lunchtime talks each Friday. Listen to past talks online. 

ART TOGETHER WITH LAUREN BERKOWITZS 30 Aug
Join artist Lauren Berkowitz to reimagine materials left over from transporting and presenting works of art at the National Gallery.

LEARNING & OPPORTUNITIES
For First Nations Arts and Culture professionals, applications for the Dhiraamalang: First Nations Arts Leadership Program open 18 August for the 12-day residency of cultural and professional development this December.
For art students in Year 10 or equivalent, the National Summer Art Scholarship applications open this week. The Scholarship includes artist-led creative workshops and studio visits and behind-the-scenes experiences at the National Gallery. 
For teachers, artists and cultural practitioners, early bird tickets are now available for the National Visual Art Education Conference presented in conjunction with After the Rain, the 5th National Indigenous Art Triennial. Find more professional learning opportunities here. 

Australian Politics

Blocking social media to the kids will save us all

Yesterday, I announced our Government is going to create a new minimum age for access to social media. We will bring this legislation into Parliament before the end of the year. This is all about supporting parents and protecting children.  

I know there are many Mums and Dads who have been pushing for change in this area and this newspaper has run a strong campaign in support of them. The South Australian Government has been doing important work as well but at the end of the day, this in an issue that crosses state borders. It’s a national challenge that requires national leadership. That’s what our Government is stepping up to deliver.

As parents, we love our children and we worry about them. We do everything we can to keep our kids safe and to help them grow up happy, confident and comfortable with who they are.

Wherever I go in Australia, I know one of the biggest things worrying Mums and Dads is the impact social media is having on their children’s wellbeing.

There’s no going back to a world without technology and the internet has given all of us access to a world of knowledge and culture that can be such a force for good. Buttoo often, social media isn’t social at all. Instead, it’s used as a weapon for bullies, a platform for peer pressure, a driver of anxiety, a vehicle for scammers and, worst of all, a tool for online predators.

Like anything, as we get older most of us get better at spotting the fakes and the risks and we build up the resilience to ignore the nastiness. We get to know that our followers aren’t necessarily our friends and we learn not to measure ourselves against the unattainable standards of curated images.

All of this is tough for young adults and it’s much harder for children. What’s more, parents feel they are working without a map. No previous generation has grown up with smartphones and social media as part of their daily life. Parents are worried about where all this leads and they’re looking to us to help.

That’s why we’re working with the eSafety Commissioner to help parents talk to their children about being safe online and partnering with the Alannah and Madeleine Foundation to fund digital literacy programs in every school in Australia.

Of course, parents already have the option of banningphones or particular social media platforms for their children. But when they do they are up against the powerful force of peer pressure and no-one wants to make their child the odd one out.

Setting a new national minimum age for social media also sets a new community standard. It takes pressure off parents and teachers and backs them with theauthority of government and the law. Changing the dynamic in the schoolyard is crucial to making lasting change in behaviour.

We all know that technology moves fast. I’m sure there will be people who make it a priority to find or make ways around these new laws, some might succeed.None of that is an excuse for inaction. After all, there are plenty of young people who find ways to get alcohol before they turn 18 but no-one is saying we should lower the drinking age.

Government may not be able to protect every child from every threat on social media but we do have a responsibility to do everything we can, to help as many young Australians as we can.

I want young Australians to grow up playing outside with their friends, on the footy field, in the swimming pool, trying every sport that grabs their interest, discovering music and art, being confident and happy in the classroom and at home. Gaining and growing from real experiences, with real people.  

Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, until 30 Aug 
QUEENSLANDSkywhales Across Australia
Horizon Festival, Caloundra, 17 Aug

NEW SOUTH WALESOlive Cotton and her contemporaries Hawkesbury Regional Art Gallery, 22 Aug – 19 Oct 
Clarice Beckett: Paintings from the National Collection Wagga Wagga Regional Gallery, Until 7 Sep

We want children to have their childhood. We want parents to have peace of mind. That’s what a minimum age for safer social media will help achieve.

Our Government understands people are under pressure with the cost of living and we’re acting to help.

We know parents are worried about social media and we’re stepping up to help.  

That’s what our Government does. We listen, we act, we deliver change that makes a positive difference for all Australians

Tech giants fail to tackle heinous crimes against children

Savannah Meacham
Aug 06, 2025, updated Aug 06, 2025Share

There were a few positive improvements with Discord, Microsoft and WhatsApp

There were a few positive improvements with Discord, Microsoft and WhatsApp Photo: AAP

Tech giants have been slammed for failing to crack down on online child sexual abuse material after a safety watchdog raised the alarm about ongoing failures.

But one of those mega-companies has refuted the claim and that it is successfully removing child abuse content, saying the watchdog focused on metrics over performance.

An eSafety report has revealed Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Discord, WhatsApp, Snapchat and Skype are still not doing enough to stop online child sexual abuse even after three years of calls for action.

The watchdog reports Apple and Google’s YouTube were not tracking the number of user reports about child sexual abuse, nor could they say how long it took to respond to the allegations.

The companies also did not provide their number of trust and safety staff to the watchdog.

Child justice advocates slammed the tech giants for their lack of reporting that leaves the true rate of online sexual abuse in the dark.

“They’ve had all these years of warning to say this is unacceptable and continue to have the same safety gaps and shortcomings from past reports,” International Justice Mission Australia chief executive David Braga said.

“We’re talking about crimes here against children,” he added.

eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant said the tech companies’ failure to detail how many reports they received indicates a winding back of content moderation and safety policies.

“What worries me is when companies say, ‘We can’t tell you how many reports we’ve received’ … that’s bollocks, they’ve got the technology,” she told ABC Radio.

It comes as YouTube argues against being included in a social media ban for Australians under 16 years of age on the basis that it is not a social media platform, but rather is often used as an educational resource.

Google has claimed it has been leading the industry fight against child sexual abuse “since day one” to remove the content from its platforms.

“eSafety’s comments are rooted in reporting metrics, not online safety performance,” the spokesperson said.

“More than 99 per cent of all child sexual exploitation or abuse content on YouTube is proactively detected and removed by our robust automated systems before it is flagged or viewed,” they said.

“Our focus remains on outcomes and detecting and removing child sexual exploitation or abuse on YouTube.”

The commission’s latest findings come three years after it uncovered that the platforms were not proactively detecting stored abuse material or using measures to find live-streams of child harm.

The latest report also criticises some platforms for not deploying tools to detect live-streams of child sex abuse, and others for not using the comparison technique called hash matching to detect and remove previously identified illicit content.

Some platforms also fail to use language analysis to detect grooming or sexual extortion, it found.

Justice advocates want the federal government to legislate digital duty of care laws that would make platforms take reasonable steps to prevent foreseeable harms.

“Digital duty of care would put the onus back onto the technology companies to make sure that the products that they provide, the way they design their business model, don’t facilitate the online sexual exploitation of children,” Mr Braga said.

Another watchdog report is due in 2026 with updates from the tech giants.

1800 RESPECT 1800 737 732

National Sexual Abuse and Redress Support Service 1800 211 028

Lifeline 131 114

Kids Helpline 1800 55 1800 (for people aged 5 to 25)

-AAP

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August 08, 2025

Paul Bongiorno Calls for justice in Gaza and progress on Closing the Gap

Neither Anthony Albanese nor any of his ministers joined last Sunday’s “March for Humanity” across Sydney Harbour Bridge, which garnered international attention. Instead, the prime minister and a group of his senior cabinet colleagues attended Australia’s largest Indigenous cultural gathering in north-east Arnhem Land.

Both events, however, pose almost intractable challenges for the prime minister: the protesters’ demand to bring peace to the starving population in Gaza and Garma’s call for a closing of the persistent gap of disadvantage suffered by Australia’s First Peoples, particularly in remote areas.

Whether it was 90,000, as the police initially estimated, or closer to 300,000, as organisers claimed, last weekend’s march in pouring rain was one of the biggest anti-war protests seen since the Vietnam War five decades ago.

It left no doubt that the Gaza conflict is a real issue for Australians, who are demanding their government involve itself even more than it has.

Many called for increased sanctions on Israel, a call rejected by the prime minister, who says we already have imposed sanctions on militant settlers who have attacked Palestinians on the West Bank, as well as on two of the Netanyahu government’s “most extreme” ministers.

Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong announced on Monday that the government was committing a further $20 million from the emergency fund set aside in the budget to contribute to aid in Gaza. This brings Australia’s contribution to about $130 million for humanitarian relief to be delivered by agencies on the ground.

Wong says Australia has consistently been part of the international call for Israel “to allow a full and immediate resumption of aid to Gaza, in line with the binding orders of the International Court of Justice”.

The peace movement of the early 1970s was provoked in no small way by contemporaneous pictures of the conflict beamed nightly onto Australian television screens.

The scenes in Gaza, 50 years later, are having even more impact, with images flashed around the world in real time and in colour. The transmission of this horror began with Hamas terrorists on October 7, 2023, broadcasting their killing of Israelis, the destruction of their homes and the abduction of entire families.

The impact has only deepened in the intervening 22 months, with the mounting toll of death and the reporting of destruction and starvation. In light of this, Wong says she was not surprised by the size of the weekend protests.

On ABC Radio she said the marches in Sydney and Melbourne “do reflect the broad Australian community’s horror at what is going on in the Middle East and the desire for peace and a ceasefire, which is what the government is seeking”.

The news midweek that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was planning to extend military operations for a complete takeover of the Gaza Strip was, in Wong’s view, even more reason for Australia and the international community to use recognition of Palestinian statehood to create “a pathway to a two-state solution”.

“There is a risk there will be no Palestine left to recognise,” she says.

Wong says this pathway should be part of the peace process and there is no chance of freeing the remaining hostages unless the war ends. This is an increasing imperative in light of Hamas releasing a video of two of them clearly starving to death.

The foreign affairs minister says this call for an immediate, permanent ceasefire is the view of 600 former Israeli security officials who have written publicly to Netanyahu, and also to United States President Donald Trump, urging him to intervene.

These former officials include previous chiefs of Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency and the military, who believe Hamas no longer poses a strategic threat to Israel.

The Coalition has parted company with Wong and the dissenting Israeli assessment, insisting Hamas must surrender and the hostages be freed before discussions of Palestinian recognition can progress.

There is concern among Liberals that the leadership is getting the tone of its response wrong and that uncritical support of the Netanyahu government is unwarranted and out of sync with public opinion.

On Monday Opposition Leader Sussan Ley finally admitted “there is hunger and starvation in Gaza”.

Ley’s reluctance to appear too sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, according to a close ally, is a response to a “dirt sheet” put out by Angus Taylor’s camp in the lead-up to the leadership contest, accusing her of being “anti-Israel and pro-Palestine”.

Privately, ministers are pessimistic that Netanyahu is susceptible to any outside pressure, except for whatever President Trump can be persuaded to exert. They are hoping the building momentum for a significant vote at the United Nations in September will at the very least draw a line on Israel’s expansionist ambitions.Wong says she was not surprised by the size of the weekend protests … She said the marches in Sydney and Melbourne “do reflect the broad Australian community’s horror at what is going on in the Middle East and the desire for peace and a ceasefire, which is what the government is seeking”.

Albanese has been working tirelessly behind the scenes, his office revealing this week that the prime minister discussed the Gaza situation with United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres late last week.

On Tuesday the prime minister spoke with President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority, which had joined significant Arab states in calling for the disarming of Hamas and the release of the hostages.

This was followed by a call with French President Emmanuel Macron, who is leading the charge for unconditional Palestinian recognition. They discussed getting aid to civilians in Gaza and, according to the briefing note, “their longstanding support for a two-state solution”.

At time of writing, Albanese was still waiting for Netanyahu to take a call. Former minister for foreign affairs Bob Carr, who joined the Sydney Harbour Bridge march, said if Albanese wanted to tell his Israeli counterpart that Australia supports a two-state solution, “he is wasting his breath” because Netanyahu opposes it.

There is only so much Australia can do in responding to the Middle East conflict. There are greater expectations for the government to improve the lot of Indigenous citizens, a task that gains a greater focus at the annual Garma Festival in the Northern Territory.

On Saturday, a croaky Albanese announced what he called a new economic partnership with Indigenous communities and agencies across the country. This First Nations Economic Empowerment Alliance would play a crucial role in administering programs, advising governments and assisting native title-holders to advocate for their rights.

An innovative education initiative would take technical and further education classes to remote communities, training tradespeople in the skills needed for construction and maintenance of homes and business premises. There was $31 million for mobile TAFE and $70 million to “get First Nations clean energy projects up and running”.

Albanese noted more Indigenous health workers and educators were coming through, but he said the latest Productivity Commission report on Closing the Gap showed only four of the 19 targets were on track to be met.

Without naming Peter Dutton or Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, Albanese attacked those “who choose the cheap politics of division over the patient work of lasting change and who seek to turn the grace and generosity of a Welcome to Country … into a political weapon”.

Albanese said, “Culture wars are a dry gully – they offer us nothing, they lead us nowhere.”

Ley declined an invitation to the festival. The Coalition, she says, was represented by a senior member in shadow attorney-general Julian Leeser. Leeser showed moral courage in quitting Dutton’s front bench to support the “Yes” vote in the referendum.

Instead, Ley spent four days in the remote Kimberley region of Western Australia, visiting Indigenous communities with her shadow minister for Indigenous Australians, Kerrynne Liddle. Liddle took the role after Ley moved Price to the defence industry portfolio after the election.

The government is bemused by the “coincidental” timing of Ley’s trip, but it was also clearly designed to send a message that the Coalition is under new management. Ley distanced herself from the Western Australian Liberal division, which was pursuing the culture wars at their state conference, and said she was interested in practical outcomes.

After her WA visit, Ley said the Albanese government “is mismanaging Indigenous policy”. Aboriginal leaders at Garma had a different view, echoing the criticism of Senator Lidia Thorpe in blaming the NT’s Country Liberal Party government.

Thorpe wants the government to review its 80 per cent funding of the Territory budget, especially in light of its new tough-on-crime laws targeting Indigenous youth.

These punitive laws have led to a significant increase in the incarceration rates of Aboriginal people. Nearly 90 per cent of adult prisoners and almost 100 per cent of youth detainees in the Northern Territory identify as Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander.

Darwin-based Aboriginal leader Thomas Mayo says Chief Minister Lia Finocchiaro is “worse than Trump”, ignoring expert advice and implementing policies that exacerbate problems for Indigenous communities.

Finocchiaro says she has a mandate to deliver Territorians safe streets and that frontline workers deserve the protection of hitherto banned spit hoods.

Minister for Indigenous Australians Malarndirri McCarthy say she is listening to the complaints and has concerns about the direction of the NT government, which could undo years of youth justice reform efforts.

The minister is seeking a meeting with Finocchiaro. While the federal government has the power to override Territory legislation and could cut funding, this is a perilous political path. The history of federal intervention in the Territory is far from a happy or productive one.

It’s a precedent that cuts both ways. Canberra should respect the democratic will of the self-governing territory and the chief minister should take note of the Howard government’s failed, punitive intervention.

The calls everywhere this week were ones for justice. 

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on August 8, 2025 as “The march on the bridge”.

The Saturday PaperThe MonthlyAustralian Foreign Affairs

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John Hewson August 9 – 15, 2025 |  No. 562


Albanese’s long game is paying off

The consequences of the Trump tariff policies seem to finally be coming to a head. Economic figures from the United States suggest that not only has inflation begun to climb again, but that jobs growth has slumped, with steep downward revisions to recent months’ figures. Included in the July jobs report was confirmation that many industries, including manufacturing and construction, have essentially stopped hiring.

Donald Trump’s response, unsurprisingly perhaps, was to fire the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). In two of several related rants on his platform, Truth Social, Trump posted: “In my opinion, today’s Jobs Numbers were RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad” and “The Economy is BOOMING under ‘TRUMP’ ”.

This in turn sparked concerns among economists about the ongoing integrity of the data that the central bank relies on to set interest rates. It’s a concern that can now be added to the increasing likelihood that the US president will – if not directly, then through his constant criticism – force the Federal Reserve chair to step down. Alongside his attacks on the BLS chief Erika McEntarfer was yet another reference to the Fed’s failure to cut interest rates, declaring that “Jerome ‘Too Late’ Powell should also be put ‘out to pasture.’ ”

Meanwhile, Trump’s trade policy continues its erratic course. Much media coverage and commentary has been attempting to make sense of the various deals governments around the world have struck to secure Trump’s favour and some finalisation of their rates.

US trade representative Jamieson Greer now says the recently announced tariff levels are likely to stay in place. They are higher than expected for most countries: 39 per cent for Switzerland, 35 per cent on many goods from Canada, 50 per cent for Brazil, 25 per cent for India, 20 per cent for Taiwan and so on, all by executive order. The European Union’s recent agreement will apparently see its rate from April halved to 15 per cent, equalling the tariff on German cars, which will drop from 25 per cent, but the levies are still far more punitive than what existed before this administration. Meanwhile, Trump’s orders still face legal challenges as to whether the president actually has the power to so easily sideline congress on global trade policy.

It is important to give credit where genuine credit is due, by recognising the success of the Albanese government’s patient, professional and focused diplomacy, mostly conducted behind closed doors.

Many countries remain bewildered as to the logic behind Trump’s decisions. What a pointless exercise. It’s clear that logic has played no part. His misguided economic decisions seem merely the products of his prejudice and desire for revenge.

Trump himself has over time expressed three main objectives, as I see it: boosting government revenue, redressing trade imbalances and rejuvenating industries. Unfortunately, Trump doesn’t run on evidence or value any lessons learnt from the past, but rather seems intent on setting successive and meaningless deadlines and generally bullying governments to join his game and play by his rules. Many did, seeking meetings with Trump and/or his officials very publicly, achieving little if any improvement in their positions but enduring various degrees of humiliation in what has been little better than a global circus.It is important to give credit where genuine credit is due, by recognising the success of the Albanese government’s patient, professional and focused diplomacy, mostly conducted behind closed doors.

In the midst of this, it is important to give credit where genuine credit is due, by recognising the success of the Albanese government’s patient, professional and focused diplomacy, mostly conducted behind closed doors. This achieved the initially most favourable tariff rate of 10 per cent, which was then sustained through Trump’s various tantrums and iterations. This was achieved by very effective engagement by Ambassador Kevin Rudd and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade team starting late last year and then through the turn of this year. Their strategy has emphasised our free trade agreement with the US, and its positive trade balance with Australia, in the context of what has been an important alliance between our two countries, consistently respected by changing governments over decades.

That the Coalition remains unable to give credit where credit’s due really is a missed opportunity to show strength regarding good policy. Albanese’s achievement with his calm approach was also even more significant given the sustained pressure from our current opposition and its Murdoch media supporters continually demanding the prime minister rush over to the US to bend a knee in a face-to-face meeting with Trump. They kept banging that drum, hoping Albanese would go and be insulted, as so many others have been. The current members seem more keen to parrot Sky News demands to drop everything to make a “deal” with Trump, while offering no detail of what sort of deal he should aim to achieve. What else would the Coalition be prepared to give up to meet with Trump, with what trade-offs? At what cost? How can they ignore that Trump has form in not turning up for even scheduled meetings, as happened with both former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, who was left sitting in a hotel lobby, and Albanese, who attended the G7 summit in good faith. Moreover, what would be the opposition’s intentions regarding the protection of Australia’s Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, which American lobbyists and Republican senators have expressed a particular interest in hobbling?

In Australia, we need to understand the volatility and uncertainty that is President Trump. We have to mature beyond the simplicity of believing we share common values and objectives with the US. Evidently with Trump in charge this is no longer possible. He has demonstrated he doesn’t believe in free trade, nor in the international rules-based order that remains fundamental to who we are as a nation and to the image we want to project to the world. We have to take every opportunity to demonstrate our independence and to preserve our sovereignty.

This is clearly what Anthony Albanese has been about.

The Coalition has basically continued to attempt to paint Albanese as a weak leader. I can’t help but wonder in what direction and how the Coalition could have evolved without the coercion and dark energy of Sky News. Sadly, we can’t know, and hope for better times.

The opposition is deluded if they’re imagining they would do better than this government in talks with the US, and some recent statements by the likes of Angus Taylor, Jane Hume and others should be a cause for particular concern. Taylor as shadow defence minister has all but pushed the Coalition to a joint commitment with the US to the security of Taiwan. Taylor is inclined to buckle to pressure from the US to declare what we would do in the event of a war with China, and seems all too willing to commit the hoped-for AUKUS submarines to that purpose. Opposition Leader Sussan Ley obviously had hoped that in giving him the defence portfolio he could be effectively sidelined after his very poor performances as energy minister in the Morrison government and as shadow treasurer under Dutton. But it appears Taylor has ambitions for a Taylor government and is already positioning himself to that end. Sussan, he’s never gonna be a team player.

Another issue the media and opposition have run to complicate Albanese’s task with trade relations has been to criticise his visit to China. It cannot be denied that the prime minister’s China trip was a success, further cementing the significance of our economic relationship with our largest trading partner. It was also important as a base for further trade development. The government has put considerable effort into further trade diversification as opportunities flow from the effects of Trump’s tariffs on others.

The Albanese government has also had to tread a fairly delicate line between trade and defence issues, in particular the way AUKUS is discussed and further negotiated. How embarrassing is it that Scott Morrison has recently played the role as sort of a pretend ambassador, briefing the US congress on how best to deal with China, when his relationship with China was such that neither he nor any of his ministers could pick up a phone to their counterparts. This, of course, had catastrophic consequences. Scott Morrison is hardly one to give advice on matters of international diplomacy, and it would be dangerous to allow him to drift on to explain the significance of AUKUS to a joint security commitment with the US. Our nation can’t afford to have the delicate balance that seems to have been achieved over recent months derailed so unnecessarily.

Ironically, the Trump review of our submarines deal, and the delay in releasing its findings, has given the government time to consider how best to handle the issue. Public sentiment in Australia has moved strongly against such a one-sided deal in favour of the US, given its cost and the compromise of our sovereignty. Not wanting confrontation with our major trading partner, China, it is imperative that our government makes it clear to the US we will resist any further involvement as part of the American war machine.

In this regard, Australia’s political leaders across the aisle need to accept that Trump’s America is a bigger threat to the West than China. 

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on August 9, 2025 as “Albanese’s long game is paying off”.

American Politics

Joyce Vance Civil Discourse

Joyce Vance has said this about George Orwell’s 1984: which is the first Civil Discourse book club read. If you missed the original post, read about it here.

If you’ve started reading—I wasn’t able to wait and listened to the first chapter while walking on the beach this week—I’d love to know what you’re thinking. I had to stop and listen to this line a second time: “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.“

Winston Smith’s world is not right. And it’s not just the macro-political picture. It’s the little things, like the impossible time the clock is striking. You have a sense early on that he lives in a distorted reality. I’m struck again by the ability of fiction to drive home political themes in subtle but effective ways, by how much better we can understand the peril of our own time through this lens.

The book resonates heavily with me in this moment, and I’m sure it will with all of you, too. As you begin reading, we can start chatting about it here.

We are in this together,

Joyce Vance

Rachel Maddow Shows Why No-One Should Cave To Trump’s Bogus Lawsuits

Before Trump started suing media companies that offended him for any reason, there was Devin Nunes, the now chief officer of Trump Media, who sued Rachel Maddow for defamation, and Nunes lost.

Jason Easley Aug 6∙Preview READ IN APP 

After Rachel Maddow did segments on her MSNBC show talking about Devin Nunes and the Russia scandal, Nunes, who was then a member of Congress, sued Maddow for defamation in 2021.Instead of doing what so many large media companies and high-priced talents did when Donald Trump sued them for defamation in 2024, Rachel Maddow and NBC/Universal fought the case, and a funny thing happened.

Maddow and NBC won.

Reuters reported: In a 24-page decision, Castel said Nunes, a longtime supporter of U.S. President Donald Trump, failed to show Maddow was aware of a July 2020 article in Politico saying the FBI had received the package.The judge found no clear and convincing evidence that Maddow had a “high degree of awareness of probable falsity,” or any evidence that “defendant’s admitted political bias caused defendant to act with a reckless disregard of the truth.”

Nunes’ lawyers and Trump Media did not immediately respond on Monday to requests for comment. Lawyers for NBCUniversal did not immediately respond to similar requests.

There should not have been anything unusual about this outcome. Maddow and NBC did what media companies used to do when faced with bogus defamation lawsuits from subjects of stories.

They fought the case.

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Australian music pioneer, Col Joye, dies

Edited from a story by AAP reporters

Musician, entertainer and entrepreneur Col Joye has died aged 89, after a career that earned him dozens of gold and platinum records, studded with successive number one hits… Col Joye and the Joyboys were the first Australian rock band to reach the American Billboard chart in 1959, touring the US with Billy Thorpe and The Aztecs in the mid-1960s and early 70s.

Joye also toured Vietnam with singer Little Pattie to entertain Australian troops, most famously on August 18, 1966, at Nui Dat when the Battle of Long Tan began nearby. They also visited injured soldiers in hospital after the battle.

Beatlemania impacted Joye’s success, and it was not until 1973 he made another number one single: Heaven Is My Woman’s Love.

In 1983, Joye was awarded the Order of Australia for his work as an entertainer and his philanthropic work. In 1988 Joye was inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame. The ABC series Long Way to the Top (2001) noted his star power and honoured his career…

Australian singer and songwriter Normie Rowe told the ABC on Wednesday that Joye was one of his idols.

“Col was in my psyche right throughout my entire life. I watched him and I thought, ‘if I’m going to be a singer, that’s the sort of singer I want to be’.”

Sue Milliken named Cinema Pioneer of the Year (edited)

Jackie Keast· AwardsFilmNews August 5, 2025

Veteran producer Sue Milliken will be named Cinema Pioneer of the Year this November, recognised for a career that has helped shape Australia’s screen sector for more than five decades.

Awarded by the Society of Australian Cinema Pioneers, the honour acknowledges not just Milliken’s filmography but her behind-the-scenes influence across funding, governance and policy…

Milliken’s career began in the 1960s, working in continuity on projects such as Skippy. By the following decade, she had carved a path as an independent producer.

Her body of work encompassesThe Odd Angry Shot, The Fringe Dwellers, Black Robe, Sirens, Dating the Enemy, Paradise Road, My Brother Jack, Ladies In Black, which she co-wrote with director Bruce Beresford, and 66 episodes of TV series Farscape.

She also helped usher many more projects to screen via completion guarantor Film Finances, which she represented in Australia from 1980 to 2009, delivering more than $2 billion of production.

She chaired the Australian Film Commission during the mid-90s, helping establish its Indigenous Branch with then CEO Cathy Robinson, and has served on various boards including Screenwest and Screen Producers Australia, where she is a founding member and former president.

Her perspectives on the industry can be seen in her three books: Selective Memory, her memoir; There’s a Fax from Bruce, a collection of correspondence with Bruce Beresford; and a guide to producing, written with Andrena Finlay, Producing for the Screen.

The Cinema Pioneer of the Year award sits alongside a host of other honours for Milliken, who was appointed Officer of the Order of Australia in 2008 for her services to the industry. She is also a recipient of the Longford Lyell Award, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Australian International Movie Convention and the Chauvel Award from the Gold Coast Film Festival… 

Could you write a story in 300 words?

Mslexia <postbag@mslexia.co.uk> Friday 8 August 2025



What kind of writer are you? 

I’ve always thought of myself as a poet – and a performer more than anything – but when I read Martha Lane’s piece on flash fiction in issue 103 of Mslexia, it made me wonder… could I write flash?

Maybe you’ll feel the same. I’ve included the entire article below so you can see for yourself. 

If you’ve never tried your hand at the form, Martha’s piece might be a game changer – packed with practical advice, surprising insights, and just enough intrigue to make you pick up your pen and give it a go.

And if you find yourself feeling flashy? Our Flash Fiction Competition is open until 22 September. So if you’ve got a brilliant 300-word story, now’s the time to get it down.

I’m not allowed to enter, but I promise you – it’s well worth the price of admission. Place in the top four and you’ll be passing around a copy of Mslexia this Christmas, showing off your published work. Imagine that.

Lucy x
 
From Aesop’s fables to Ernest Hemingway’s famous ‘For sale: baby shoes, never worn’, flash fiction has always been a part of our storytelling landscape. And given the wealth of new literary zines publishing the genre, it looks like it’s here to stay. These up-and-coming platforms, alongside existing well-established outlets, mean an increasing number of opportunities for flash writers to get their stories showcased and read.

In the next three issues of Mslexia, I will delve into how to make your flash stories as good as they can be – finding ideas, making titles work hard for you, and creating endings that linger in your readers’ minds. Finally I’ll look at how to navigate (possibly even enjoy) the rollercoaster ride of flash publishing and how to build on your success once you’ve found a home for your work. But first, a little introduction into the big wide world of the tiniest stories. 

Flash fiction is essentially any story told in under 1,000 words. But there’s so much more to these little gems than their word count. Flashes are succinct stories that get straight to the heart of things. There’s no time for meandering, no space for backstories, minor characters or complicated world building: just intense flashes in the pan. Don’t be put off by this brevity though; flash fiction can tackle themes that are just as profound as those posed by novels: lost love, parenthood, grief and betrayal, to name just a few.

Flash fiction’s superpower is its scope and flexibility. As well as being used to tackle big topics and emotions, it is in a much better position than novels and longer short stories to explore those fascinating quirks of human existence that can’t be sustained for a longer narrative. Why banging your funny bone or a paper cut hurts more than some medical procedures; why we never seem to remember why we walked into a room; the irony of enforcing screentime rules on our kids from behind our phones; the fact house flies hum in the F key – those little moments that we might share over the water cooler but couldn’t expand into a TED Talk. 

What makes flash so enjoyable? The answer is concision. The aspect of flash that makes it so daunting to write is precisely what makes these stories so satisfying to read. Inciting incident, drama, conclusion – all in under four minutes? Yes please. 

So what stories work best for the genre? Flash fictions are often about emotionally draining things: grief and loss, trauma and heartbreak. The level of intensity that a writer can maintain – and a reader can take – in a short word count is much higher than in a longer form. In that sense, flash is similar to poetry. Indeed, flash is probably as close to poetry as prose can get, and relies on many poetic techniques to make it sing. Rhythm, rhyme and repetition can all be your friends when writing flash.

And what doesn’t work? It’s unlikely that a historical saga or epic adventure would work in a flash – though I’m not saying you shouldn’t try. The best stories are those that zoom in on a specific moment – a realisation, a turning point for your main character. You don’t have enough words for preamble or explanation. Your story should start with action, no matter how low-key that action is. For me the most memorable flashes are those that take an oblique approach to their subject matter; or in which the techniques chosen by the writer make a story we’ve all heard before seem fresh and new. 

Where do writers go wrong? Flash fiction shouldn’t be a vignette or descriptive exercise. It must be a complete story; you can be obtuse and lyrical, but there must be plot, movement and change, however minimal. Sometimes writers tackle a plot that is too complicated for a flash fiction; some stories simply can’t be condensed into the maximum word count without losing the essence of what they intend. And the most beautiful emotive words will be wasted if the pacing is wrong and the ending rushed. The best way to avoid these errors is practise; you won’t really find out which stories work until you write them.

While flash fiction is a very constrained form, its meanings are anything but. Some burn bright like pop art, while others are impressionist paintings, providing just enough information for the reader to conjure an image. The fun for the writer is choosing how much to give away, and how far to push an image – my advice is to push it a bit further than you think it can go! This push and pull between the reader and writer, how much the writer is willing to reveal, is what makes flash so great. 
 ENTER HERE

The Conversation UK The Daily

As Donald Trump tries yet again to force Vladimir Putin closer to some kind of peace negotiation, one strong bargaining chip is the unexpected power of Ukraine’s drone campaign. New research shows these drone attacks have had a far-reaching impact, forcing Russia to move its air defences, stoking fuel price rises and costing Moscow around US$700 million in just a few months.

President Volodymyr Zelensky’s calls for a ceasefire are now underpinned by this added threat Ukraine is able to pose – something Putin would not have predicted at the beginning of the war.

Week beginning 6 August 2025

Allison Tyra Uncredited Women’s Overlooked, Misattributed, and Stolen Work Rising Action Publishing | Rising Action, May 2025.

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

When reading research that demonstrates, yet again, the way that women and their accomplishments have been, as Alison Tyra says ‘overlooked, misattributed and stolen,’ it is difficult, heartbreaking, enraging and distressing. But it can also be enlightening and invigorating. Tyra accomplishes so much in her work, it is certainly enlightening, with its wide reach over the numerous ways in which women’s work can be “disappeared”. It also covers a vast range of professions and activities. And, if that is not enough to demonstrate the broad range of ways in which women’s contributions are unacknowledged, hidden, stolen, or misattributed, Tyra provides so many examples of locations in which these events can be found. In short, it seems that if there is a question about whose, where, what, and why women’s work has been overlooked, misattributed, and stolen, Tyra provides answers in this compelling read. See Books: Reviews for the complete review.

Rose Neal, E.D.E.N. Southworth’s Hidden Hand The Untold Story of America’s Famous Forgotten Nineteenth-Century Author The Globe Pequot Publishing Group, Inc|Lyons Press, May 2025.

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

E.D.E.N. Southworth, a nineteenth century writer, captured the imaginations of women wanting something different in their lives, even if it was imaginary. She was a prolific writer, published in journal and book form, raised uncomfortable issues, and introduced female characters who, it seemed, could do anything. They had to rise above the discriminatory society in which they sought to make their way. But rise they did. Rose Neal, emulating Southworth’s ability to connect with her readers has captured vividly the woman about whom she writes. Southworth was a stimulating writer, and every page of Neal’s biography exudes comparable enthusiasm about Southworth, her work, the tribulations she experienced, and so profoundly, Southworth’s world. Unlike Southworth, who at times had to curb her questing spirit to meet publishers’ demands, Neal appears to have sought out every piece of information available and used it, complimentary or not. Where none is accessible Neal’s speculation about how Southworth may have reacted or been part of an activity or group, is satisfying. See Books: Reviews for the complete review.

Discover women’s history in your area: ‘You just have to start looking’

The Guardian Sun 18 May 2025 06.00 AEST

She Shapes History tour featuring guide Sita Sargeant.
‘In Australia, women are represented in fewer than one in 10 places named after people,’ writes Sita Sargeant, pictured leading a She Shapes History tour. Photograph: Martin Ollman

Women are underrepresented in monuments and place names, but their stories are everywhere, says history tour guide Sita Sargeant, who shares her methods for celebrating local women’s contributions

Fewer than 4% of statues in Australia are of women. Through the monuments we build and the names we remember, we are loudly saying that women’s contributions aren’t worthy of respect. How will we ever close the gender pay gap, get more women into leadership positions and reduce violence against women if we can’t even recognise their historical contributions?

In 2021, I became so frustrated with women’s stories being overlooked and their impact underestimated that I felt I had no choice but to do something about it.

So I started sharing the stories of the incredible women who had shaped my home town of Canberra on a two-hour walking tour on Sundays. Walking tours felt like the perfect entry point. They’re accessible, engaging and fun. The stories stick because they’re tied to real places and told in ways that feel relevant. From the start, my hope was that our tours would spark curiosity and inspire people to dig deeper.

Sita Sargeant guiding a walking tour
Sita Sargeant guides a She Shapes History walking tour, which operate in Canberra, Sydney and Melbourne. Photograph: Martin Ollman

Once I started, I found that women’s stories are everywhere. You just have to start looking and, once you do, you won’t stop seeing them.

Four years on, She Shapes History is no longer just one frustrated woman with an idea. We run tours in Canberra, Sydney and Melbourne, have trained over a dozen incredible guides and welcomed thousands of people to walk with us and hear these stories. I’ve also spent six months travelling Australia to write a book about what I’ve found.

But you don’t need to start a tour to make an impact. Just choose one woman whose story resonates with you, do a bit more research on her and then share her story everywhere you go.

After years of telling women’s stories in entirely unexpected moments – from first dates to job interviews to chats with the bartender at my local pub – I’ve learned that no one will get mad at you for sharing a great story.

Look for women who have been commemorated

You’d be surprised by how many women have been commemorated – we just haven’t been taught to look for them, or learn their names.

Begin with your neighbourhood: Start where you live. Read the plaques. Look into the stories behind the names of nearby streets, parks and buildings. In Australia, women are represented in fewer than one in 10 places named after people. While that’s a pretty shocking stat, it still means thousands of women have been recognised.

Statue of a woman female convict in 19th century dress at historic Cascades Female Factory, South Hobart, Tasmania, Australia
Statue of a woman convict in 19th century dress at historic Cascades Female Factory, South Hobart, Tasmania. Photograph: Adam Fry/Alamy

Visit museums explicitly focused on sharing women’s contributions: My favourites include the Cascades Female Factory in Hobart, Her Place Women’s Museum in Melbourne, Miegunyah Historic House Museum in Brisbane, Story Bank in Maryborough and the Women’s Museum of Australia in Alice Springs.

Dive into local resources

Although more women than you might expect have been commemorated, the majority haven’t. This means you’ll need to do some digging. As you explore the history of your town or city, take note of any women’s names you come across, as well as any historical moments where women should be represented, but seem to be missing. The more research you do, the better you’ll become at spotting these gaps. Once you’ve gathered names, dive deeper into their stories.

Take a walking tour: Walking tours are an excellent shortcut for finding stories – tour guides have already done the research and selected the best ones.

Read local histories: Councils often publish town histories, self-guided walking tours and information about historical landmarks. While these resources rarely focus on just women, you’ll often find them mentioned throughout.

Visit local museums: These places are treasure troves of stories and often include perspectives overlooked by larger institutions. Don’t forget to carry cash for entry and donations, and check their hours before you visit— many are volunteer-run with limited opening times.

Explore cemeteries: Gravestones and inscriptions often tell the stories of community leaders, family matriarchs and remarkable women.

Talk to women: Ask the women in your life: your mum, grandmother, neighbours, colleagues, friends, or even the woman who runs your local pub. These conversations often uncover personal perspectives and overlooked stories you won’t find in books or archives. My favourite icebreaker (on tours, at dinner parties, even on dates) is simple: who is a woman who inspires you? Everyone can name someone.

Look for community archives: Your local library, council, or historical society might already have a history collection or community archive. Most of this isn’t online, so it’s worth popping in for a chat. Historical societies can be particularly valuable. Often run by passionate volunteers, these groups have the knowhow, resources and archives to help you dig into particular people or periods. To find your local historical society, search your town’s name and “historical society” online – something should come up.

Search online platforms: Start with Trove, the Australian Women’s Register, the Australian Dictionary of Biography and state or local archives. Don’t overlook local history blogs – they’re often packed with incredible stories you wouldn’t find elsewhere.

Preserve and share what you find

Don’t let all these incredible stories fade into obscurity – celebrate and share them with others.

Talk to the women in your life: Record interviews with women in your community and donate them to local historical societies, archives or libraries.

Write it down: Encourage women to share their stories through memoirs, essays or reflections.

Contribute to local histories: Many councils, libraries and historical societies accept photos, written stories, or oral histories, and they’re often thrilled to receive material about women. You might even find they’re working on a local project or publication you can contribute to.

Share online and in the community: Use blogs, social media, zines, podcasts or even walking tours to amplify these stories. Start Wikipedia pages for the women you find. Use art, photography or theatre to bring stories to life. Host panels, storytelling nights or film screenings celebrating women’s contributions. Use whatever tools you have to share the stories of women in your community.

She Shapes History by Sita Sargeant

Incorporate women’s stories into your everyday life: Teachers, bring women’s histories in your classroom; professionals, advocate for gender considerations in policy, health care and design; book clubs, highlight local women’s history or historical fiction. No matter what you do, there’s an opportunity to include women’s stories.

Nominate women for public commemoration: Submit the names and stories of women who deserve to be remembered to your local government for the naming of new streets, parks, schools, suburbs and other public landmarks.

Support movements for public art and place naming: Initiatives like A Monument of One’s Own or Put Her Name On It, campaign for more statues, place names and public art honouring women. Share their work, attend their events and help amplify the call for more visible recognition of women in our shared spaces.

  • This is an edited extract from She Shapes History by Sita Sargeant, published by Hardie Grant Explore (A$34.99)


An Appreciation of British Women Writers from 1960-1990

Miles Leeson ·2 August at 03:52 ·

A new online course, starting in September, studying the work of Elizabeth Taylor, Anita Brookner, Angela Carter, Alice Thomas Ellis, and Rumer Godden. More details on the blog, via the link below.

Literature Cambridge Online

We will study:

Elizabeth Taylor, Angel (1957)

Rumer Godden, In this House of Brede (1969)

Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber (1979)

Alice Thomas Ellis, The Birds of the Air (1980)

Anita Brookner, Hotel du Lac (1984)

A rare chance to study these five excellent works side by side.

Together, these novels map out different forms of post-war womanhood, overshadowed by tradition, perhaps, yet reaching – sometimes desperately, sometimes gracefully – toward real self-sufficiency and power.

Places are filling – do join us.

#womenwriters#rumergodden#angelacarter#anitabrookner

American politics

DC insider won’t minimize Trump’s repugnance | Opinion

Opinion by Robert Reich

 It gets bleaker and bleaker. He’s eviscerating environmental protections. He accuses Obama of treason. He’s ripping up labor protections. He wants to privatize Social Security. He fires the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics because he doesn’t like the job numbers. He forces the Smithsonian to take down an exhibit that includes his two impeachments. The European Union, Japan, Columbia University, and CBS are all surrendering to him.

Many of you ask me where I get my hope from, notwithstanding.

Three sources.

First, from all the young people I work with every day. They’re enormously dedicated, committed to making the world better. They’ll inherit this mess, and they’re ready to clean it up and strengthen our democracy. They also have extraordinary energy. And they’re very funny. It is impossible not to be hopeful around them.

Second, from history. We are now in a second Gilded Age that, like the first one (from the late 19th century to the start of the 20th), features wide inequalities of income and wealth, abuses of power by the oligarchs (then called “robber barons”), and a bullied and abused working class.

What happened then? The great pendulum of America swung back. The first Gilded Age was followed by what historians call the Progressive Era. Taxes were raised on the wealthy. Antitrust laws were enacted. Regulations stopped corporate malfeasance. Big money was barred from politics. And reformers — starting with Teddy Roosevelt in 1901 and extending through his fifth cousin, FDR, in 1933 — made life better for average working people.*

 I don’t know exactly how or when the pendulum will swing back this time, but I am certain it will. And the regressive moral squalor of Trump and his lackeys will be swept into the dustbin of history.

My third source of optimism comes from people I meet all over America, including self-described Republicans in so-called “red” states and “red” cities, who detest what’s happening to the nation and to the world under Trump (as well as under Netanyahu and Putin).

There’s a profound decency in the sinews of America. Most Americans are generous and kind.

Opinion polls show the vast majority don’t want ICE agents disappearing their neighbors off the streets and into detention camps. They reject Trump prosecuting his so-called enemies. They think it’s wrong for him to pocket billions from crypto and other pay-to-play schemes. They don’t like him or his lackeys verbally attacking federal judges, or silencing critics.

Over 80 percent believe the minimum wage should be raised, that no full-time worker should be in poverty, that corporations should share their profits with their employees, that working people should get paid family leave, and that child care and elder care should be affordable.

I don’t want to minimize the repugnance of Trump and his sycophants. Like you, I wince when I read the news. Some days I despair.

But there are sources of hope all around us. Find them. Cling to them. Never give up.

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.

*The Gilded Age, part 3 of what will be a four-part series, written by Julian Fellows, is currently being shown on television. There is detailed, animated and lengthy discussion on a Facebook site dedicated to the program. Although I do not read all the posts, I have yet to find any that refer to the way in which the “robber barons” are treating the working class, or criticism of the wealth and the way in which it is achieved.

An Assault on Truth – The Atlantic Daily

Monday, August 4, 2025.

Awarding superlatives in the Donald Trump era is risky. Knowing when one of his moves is the biggest or worst or most aggressive is challenging—not only because Trump himself always opts for the most over-the-top description, but because each new peak or trough prepares the way for the next. So I’ll eschew a specific modifier and simply say this: The past five days have been deeply distressing for the truth as a force in restraining authoritarian governance

In a different era, each of these stories would have defined months, if not more, of a presidency. Coming in such quick succession, they risk being subsumed by one another and sinking into the continuous din of the Trump presidency. Collectively, they represent an assault on several kinds of truth: in reporting and news, in statistics, and in the historical record.

On Thursday, The Washington Post revealed that the Smithsonian National Museum of American History had removed references to Trump’s record-setting two impeachments from an exhibit’s section on presidential scandals. The deletion reportedly came as part of a review to find supposed bias in Smithsonian museums. Now, referring to Presidents Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Bill Clinton, the exhibit states that “only three presidents have seriously faced removal.” This is false—Trump came closer to Senate conviction than Clinton did. The Smithsonian says the material about Trump’s impeachments was meant to be temporary (though it had been in place since 2021), and that references will be restored in an upcoming update.

If only that seemed like a safe bet. The administration, including Vice President J. D. Vance, an ex officio member of the Smithsonian board, has been pressuring the Smithsonian to align its messages with the president’s political priorities, claiming that the institution has “come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology.” The White House attempted to fire the head of the National Portrait Gallery, which it likely did not have the power to do. (She later resigned.) Meanwhile, as my colleague Alexandra Petri points out, the administration is attempting to eliminate what it views as negativity about American history from National Park Service sites, a sometimes-absurd proposition.

During his first term, Trump criticized the removal of Confederate monuments, which he and allies claimed was revisionist history. It was not—preserving history doesn’t require public monuments to traitors—but tinkering with the Smithsonian is very much attempting to rewrite the official version of what happened, wiping away the impeachments like an ill-fated Kremlin apparatchik.

The day after the Post report, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting announced that it will shut down. Its demise was sealed by the administration’s successful attempt to get Congress to withdraw funding for it. Defunding CPB was a goal of Project 2025, because the right views PBS and NPR as biased (though the best evidence that Project 2025 is able to marshal for this are surveys about audience political views). Although stations in major cities may be able to weather the loss of assistance, the end of CPB could create news and information deserts in more remote areas.

When Trump isn’t keeping information from reaching Americans, he’s attacking the information itself. Friday afternoon, after the Bureau of Labor Statistics released revised employment statistics that suggested that the economy is not as strong as it had appeared, Trump’s response was to fire the commissioner of the BLS, baselessly claiming bias. Experts had already begun to worry that government inflation data were degrading under Trump. Firing the commissioner won’t make the job market any better, but it will make government statistics less trustworthy and undermine any effort by policy makers, including Trump’s own aides, to improve the economy. The New York Times’ Ben Casselman catalogs plenty of examples of leaders who attacked economic statistics and ended up paying a price for it. (Delving into these examples might provide Trump with a timely warning, but as the editors of The Atlantic wrote in 2016, “he appears not to read.”)The next day, the Senate confirmed Jeanine Pirro to be the top prosecutor for the District of Columbia. Though Pirro previously served as a prosecutor and judge in New York State, her top credential for the job—as with so many of her administration colleagues—is her run as a Fox News personality. Prior to the January 6 riot, she was a strong proponent of the false claim that the 2020 election was stolen. Her statements were prominent in a successful defamation case against Fox, and evidence in the case included a discussion of why executives yanked her off the air on November 7, 2020. “They took her off cuz she was being crazy,” Tucker Carlson’s executive producer wrote in a text. “Optics are bad. But she is crazy.”

This means that a person who either lied or couldn’t tell fact from fiction, and whom even Fox News apparently didn’t trust to avoid a false claim, is being entrusted with power over federal prosecutions in the nation’s capital. (Improbably, she still might be an improvement over her interim predecessor.)Even as unqualified prosecutors are being confirmed, the Trump White House is seeking retribution against Jack Smith, the career Justice Department attorney who led Trump’s aborted prosecutions on charges related to subverting the 2020 election and hoarding of documents at Mar-a-Lago. The Office of Special Counsel—the government watchdog that is led at the moment, for some reason, by the U.S. trade representative—is investigating whether Smith violated the Hatch Act, which bars some executive-branch officials from certain political actions while they’re on the job, by charging Trump. Never mind that the allegations against Trump were for overt behavior. Kathleen Clark, a professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis, told the Post she had never seen the OSC investigate a prosecutor for prosecutorial decisions. The charges against Trump were dropped when he won the 2024 election. If anything, rather than prosecutions being used to interfere with elections, Trump used the election to interfere with prosecutions.

This is a bleak series of events. But although facts can be suppressed, they cannot be so easily changed. Even if Trump can bowdlerize the BLS, that won’t change the underlying economy. As Democrats discovered during the Biden administration, you can’t talk voters out of bad feelings about the economy using accurate statistics; that wouldn’t be any easier with bogus ones. Trump is engaged in a broad assault on truth, but truth has ways of fighting back.

Related: Donald Trump shoots the messenger. The new dark age.

Heather Cox Richardson Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson from Letters from an American <heathercoxrichardson@substack.com>

Sixty years ago tomorrow, on August 6, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act. The need for the law was explained in its full title: “An Act to enforce the fifteenth amendment to the Constitution, and for other purposes.”

In the wake of the Civil War, Americans tried to create a new nation in which the law treated Black men and white men as equals. In 1865 they ratified the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, outlawing enslavement except as punishment for crimes. In 1868 they adjusted the Constitution again, guaranteeing that anyone born or naturalized in the United States—except certain Indigenous Americans—was a citizen, opening up suffrage to Black men. In 1870, after Georgia legislators expelled their newly seated Black colleagues, Americans defended the right of Black men to vote by adding that right to the Constitution.

All three of those amendments—the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth—gave Congress the power to enforce them. *In 1870, Congress established the Department of Justice to do just that. Reactionary white southerners had been using state laws, and the unwillingness of state judges and juries to protect Black Americans from white gangs and cheating employers, to keep Black people subservient. White men organized as the Ku Klux Klan to terrorize Black men and to keep them and their white allies from voting to change that system. In 1870 the federal government stepped in to protect Black rights and prosecute members of the Ku Klux Klan.With federal power now behind the Constitutional protection of equality, threatening jail for those who violated the law, white opponents of Black voting changed their argument against it.

In 1871 they began to say that they had no problem with Black men voting on racial grounds; their objection to Black voting was that Black men, just out of enslavement, were poor and uneducated. They were voting for lawmakers who promised them public services like roads and schools, and which could only be paid for with tax levies.

The idea that Black voters were socialists—they actually used that term in 1871—meant that white northerners who had fought to replace the hierarchical society of the Old South with a society based on equality began to change their tune. They looked the other way as white men kept Black men from voting, first with terrorism and then with grandfather clauses that cut out Black men without mentioning race by permitting a man to vote if his grandfather had, literacy tests in which white registrars got to decide who passed, poll taxes, and so on. States also cut up districts unevenly to favor the Democrats, who ran an all-white, segregationist party. By 1880 the South was solidly Democratic, and it would remain so until 1964.Southern states always held elections: it was just foreordained that Democrats would win them.Black Americans never accepted this state of affairs, but their opposition did not gain powerful national traction until after World War II.

During that war, Americans from all walks of life had turned out to defeat fascism, a government system based on the idea that some people are better than others. Americans defended democracy and, for all that Black Americans fought in segregated units, and that race riots broke out in cities across the country during the war years, and that the government interned Japanese Americans, lawmakers began to recognize that the nation could not effectively define itself as a democracy if Black and Brown people lived in substandard housing, received substandard educations, could not advance from menial jobs, and could not vote to change any of those circumstances.

Meanwhile, Black Americans and people of color who had fought for the nation overseas brought home their determination to be treated equally, especially as the financial collapse of European nations loosened their grip on their former African and Asian colonies and launched new nations.Those interested in advancing Black rights turned, once again, to the federal government to overrule discriminatory state laws. Spurred by lawyers Thurgood Marshall and Constance Baker Motley, judges used the due process clause and the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to argue that the protections in the Bill of Rights applied to the states, that is, the states could not deprive any American of equality. In 1954 the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren, the Republican former governor of California, used this doctrine when it handed down the Brown v. Board of Education decision declaring segregated schools unconstitutional.

White reactionaries responded with violence, but Black Americans continued to stand up for their rights. In 1957 and 1960, under pressure from Republican president Dwight Eisenhower, Congress passed civil rights acts designed to empower the federal government to enforce the laws protecting Black voting.

In 1961 the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) began intensive efforts to register voters and to organize communities to support political change. Because only 6.7% of Black Mississippians were registered, Mississippi became a focal point, and in the “Freedom Summer” of 1964, organized under Bob Moses, volunteers set out to register voters. On June 21, Ku Klux Klan members, at least one of whom was a law enforcement officer, murdered organizers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner near Philadelphia, Mississippi, and, when discovered, laughed at the idea they would be punished for the murders.

That year, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which strengthened voting rights. When Black Americans still couldn’t register to vote, on March 7, 1965, in Selma, Alabama, marchers set out for Montgomery to demonstrate that they were being kept from registering. Law enforcement officers on horseback met them with clubs on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. The officers beat the marchers, fracturing the skull of young John Lewis (who would go on to serve 17 terms in Congress).

On March 15, President Johnson called for Congress to pass legislation defending Americans’ right to vote. It did. And on this day in 1965, the Voting Rights Act became law. It became such a fundamental part of our legal system that Congress repeatedly reauthorized it, by large margins, as recently as 2006.But in the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision, the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts struck down the provision of the law requiring that states with histories of voter discrimination get approval from the Department of Justice before they changed their voting laws. Immediately, the legislatures of those states, now dominated by Republicans, began to pass measures to suppress the vote. In the wake of the 2020 election, Republican-dominated states increased the rate of voter suppression, and on July 1, 2021, the Supreme Court permitted such suppression with the Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee decision.

Currently, the Supreme Court is considering whether a Louisiana district map that took race into consideration to draw a district that would protect Black representation is unconstitutional. About a third of Louisiana’s residents are Black, but in 2022 its legislature carved the state up in such a way that only one of its six voting districts was majority Black. A federal court determined that the map violated the Voting Rights Act, so the legislature redrew the map to give the state two majority-Black districts.

A group of “non-African American voters” immediately challenged the law, saying the new maps violated the Fourteenth Amendment because the mapmakers prioritized race when drawing them. A divided federal court agreed with their argument. Now the Supreme Court will weigh in.

Meanwhile, on July 29, Senator Raphael Warnock (D-GA) led a number of his Democratic colleagues in reintroducing a measure to restore and expand the Voting Rights Act. The bill is called the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act after the man whose skull police officers fractured on the Edmund Pettus Bridge.—Notes:https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/constance-baker-motley.htmhttps://www.oyez.org/cases/2025/24-109https://www.naacpldf.org/case-issue/louisiana-v-callais-faq/https://apnews.com/article/voting-rights-discrimination-democrats-supreme-court-gop-d4238972cbb94cb9ce02e59aae643f2c

*See Elie Mystal’s Bad Law, reviewed – Blog January 8, 2025. He has some trenchant comments on the Amendments associated with voting laws and equality.

*John Lewis The Last Interview reviewed – Blog November 17, 2021.

Canberra Writers Festival

OPENING NIGHT AND SPECIAL EVENTS

It’s time to get excited!  Over the coming weeks we will start to share the incredible line-up we have for you at this year’s Canberra Writers Festival.  But we can’t hold back some big news any longer…

Opening Night: The Haunting Australia of Jane Harper!
Thursday 23 October | 6.30pm
Gandel Atrium, National Museum of Australia 

Celebrate Opening Night with international best-selling author Jane Harper and her soon to be released, new haunting mystery, Last One Out.  No writer captures the deeply ominous presence of the Australian bush and its outposts, quite like Jane Harper. In The Dry, The Lost Man, Force of Nature – and now Last One Out – she holds a mirror up to our own fear. With this new masterpiece of Australian eeriness, you can feel the bush sunlight in your eyes and dust in your throat.  

Jane will be in a captivating conversation with Canberra’s own Alex Sloan, who will put the questions we’re all dying to ask about Jane’s meteoric rise in Australian novel writing, her craft in shaping such memorable plots and characters, and why she can’t turn her eyes away from the bush at dusk.

With Alice Matthews, ABC Canberra, at the helm as our Master of Ceremonies we will give you a night to remember… with special guest Canberra musical legend and author, Fred Smith.  Let’s celebrate and welcome the stellar line up of brilliant international, interstate and local authors we have in store throughout the festival.
Dalton Defies Gravity: Trent Dalton in Conversation
Saturday 25 October | 6.30pm
National Library of Australia

Presented in partnership with the ANU Meet the Author.

Australia’s bestselling-author of Boy Swallows Universe, Trent Dalton, is back with a bang ‘surprise’ new book – and he wants you to be the first to hear about it. Trent shook the literary world with his embellished memoir of petty crime, drug dealing and family violence in 1980s Brisbane. The way he captured doing it tough, in a uniquely Australian way, became a cultural phenomenon and the most successful Australian-made Netflix series ever.  

After a series of subsequent bestselling books, Trent returns with his most personal work yet, Gravity Let Me Go, again set in Brisbane, and about a journalist obsessed with the true-crime scoop of a lifetime. Dark, occasionally terrifying, but with wonderful moments of humour, light and Dalton-sweetness, Trent shows us again why we see ourselves in his work… could the characters be us if we’d just taken a few wrong turns?

In conversation with journalist, author and book enthusiast extraordinaire, Caroline Overington.

Week beginning July 30th 2025

Penny Batchelor The Woman Next Door Embla Books, May 2025.

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

The main character, Jen, has three dilemmas to deal with: her inability to become pregnant, despite two expensive IVF treatments; her and Gary’s financial position which makes saving for another IVF treatment difficult; and the new neighbour, Stacy, who has bullied Jen remorselessly at school. I needed to keep all these in mind as I metaphorically trudged through Jen’s turgid portrayal of her troubles. Jen is in her thirties but falls easily into school age behaviour when Stacy reenacts her past bullying – taking Jen’s friends and social occasions for herself, telling lies about Jen’s behaviour, and sniping at her for her childlessness.

One positive feature of Jen’s dealing with her next-door neighbour is that she recognises and regrets having been a people pleaser, leading her to misreading the sincerity of friendships. She begins building new friendships which are based on mutual caring and benefit, also reaching out to a friend who shared the torment of Stacy’s behaviour in the past. See Books: Reviews

Minka Kent The Memory Watcher Thomas & Mercer, May 2025.

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

Minka Kent always provides me with an excellent beach read, but this time as I negotiated Autumn Carpenter’s and Daphne McMullen’s stories, I felt that she had done more. Both women are absorbing characters, their personal and public faces vying with each other for attention and empathy. Each is dependent on the support of her partner, and vividly aware of being so. It is their dependence that is an enduring feature of the novel, even when the ending might suggest otherwise. It is the fraught nature of the way in which each interacts with their partners, families, the wider community, and the reader that keeps the tension high in this thriller.

Yes, The Memory Watcher is described as a thriller. However, it does not rely on bloodshed to be an engaging narrative. Autumn is following Daphne’s adopted daughter, at first on social media as Daphne records her ideal family in blissful photos of outings, meals, and family interaction. When the social media account is closed, Autumn must follow Grace in person – putting into effect her having managed to locate herself in close proximity to the McMullen family. She has cleverly manipulated her way into her partner’s life and proceeds to do so into the McMullen’s lives. But the question remains – Daphne has closed her social media account. Why? And she too, is leading a life outside her perfect family, and it is this life that becomes a drug – in reality and metaphorically. See Books: Reviews

Australian Politics

Tanya Plibersek is at Parliament House, Canberra.

·

So proud of these five new MPs who delivered fantastic first speeches yesterday. Some fun facts – our new Labor caucus is made up of 57% women, more young people, people living with disability and more people with diverse cultural backgrounds.

This is what democracy looks like.

Secret London

London Has Beaten The Likes Of Paris And Rome To The Title Of ‘Most Romantic City’

A new study by experts Pour Moi has crowned London as the world’s most romantic city, surpassing iconic destinations like Paris and Rome.

 Vaishnavi Pandey – Staff Writer • 2 May, 2025

London sunset in the skyline
Credit: Balate.Dorin, Shutterstock

As couples begin planning their summer getaways, a new study by experts Pour Moi has crowned London as the world’s most romantic city, surpassing iconic destinations like Paris and Rome.

This comprehensive global ranking analysed over 550 cities to reveal the ultimate hotspots for lovebirds seeking memorable escapes. And to no surprise to us, our capital city scored the highest!

Pour Moi created a “Romantic Score” for each city based on three key data streams: the number of times attractions were described as “romantic” by visitors on review platforms, the availability of “couple-friendly” activities and things to do and the volume of Instagram posts tagged with #datenight plus the city’s name.

These factors were combined into an indexed score out of 100, allowing for a definitive ranking of the world’s most romantic destinations.

Why is London the most romantic city?

London claimed the top spot with an impressive score of 79.11 out of 100. The city’s appeal lies in its diverse romantic offerings-from hand-in-hand strolls along the South Bank to sunset views atop Primrose Hill and intimate candlelit dinners in hidden West End corners. And this is just to name a few things.

Notably, 26.3% of London’s main attractions have been described as romantic by visitors, including highlights like The Meeting Place Statue at St Pancras Station and cruises along the city’s canals.

What are the most romantic cities in the world aside of London?

Following London, New York City ranked second globally with a score of 66.65. The Big Apple’s romantic reputation is boosted by its iconic cultural references in TV and film, such as Sex and the City and Gossip Girl, and a wealth of date night activities.

Miami took third place with a score of 54.64, known for its glamorous settings like the Perez Art Museum and the Versace Mansion, alongside numerous Michelin-starred restaurants and lively nightlife perfect for couples.

Other notable cities in the top 10 include:

  • Toronto, Canada (4th, 54.17)
  • Rome, Italy (5th, 53.38)
  • Brisbane, Australia (6th, 42.93)
  • Dubai, UAE (8th, 39.62)
  • Paris, France (9th, 33.21)
  • Melbourne, Australia (10th, 32.42)
Why London should be your next romantic destination

London’s combination of historic landmarks, scenic river walks, world-class dining, and vibrant nightlife makes it an unparalleled destination for couples. Whether you’re seeking budget-friendly romantic spots or luxurious experiences, the city offers something special for every pair.

As summer approaches, couples looking for a memorable romantic break might want to consider a long weekend in London – the world’s most romantic city.

A Spectacular Wes Anderson Exhibition Is Landing At The Design Museum This Year

Marking the first retrospective exhibition on the work of the whimsical film director, ‘Wes Anderson: The Exhibition’ is set to be one of the most anticipated arrivals at the Design Museum next year.

 Jack Saddler – Editor • 1 May, 2025

There’s something in the air between the Design Museum and idiosyncratic film directors at the moment. With an exhibition on Tim Burton welcoming in record numbers to the West London space, they’ll be welcoming in the weird and wonderful work of Wes Anderson next year.

The Design Museum announced the news of Wes Anderson: The Exhibition last year, which will mark the first retrospective look at the famous director, and details of the objects on display have just been announced.

Model of the Grand Budapest Hotel to be displayed at the Wes Anderson retrospective at the Design Museum
Credit: Thierry Stefanopoulos
Wes Anderson: The Exhibition

A meeting between the minds of the Design Museum and Wes Anderson will let visitors into the working of the director’s brain as they see work from his first filming experiments all the way up to his most recent pictures.

In conjunction with Cinémathèque française, it’ll be the very first time exhibitiongoers have the chance to truly examine the work of the whimsical director, with an overview of his entire filmography and all the motifs and references that go into everything from Rushmore [1998] to Asteroid City [2023].

Take a look at Max Fischer’s Swiss army knife from Anderson’s first film before marvelling at the spectacular model of The Grand Budapest Hotel [2014] that was used to capture the building’s facade and then examining the coat Gwyneth Paltrow wore in 2001 as Margot Tenenbaum. In fact, there will be dozens of costumes across the entire exhibition featuring garms worn by his star-studded assembly of actors featured in his movies, including Tilda Swinton, Bill Murray, Scarlett Johansson, Benicio Del Toro, Ralph Fiennes and many more.

Also featured at the exhibition is a full 14-minute screening of Bottle Rocket, the short film created in 1993 and featuring Owen Wilson. There will even be a number of Wes Anderson’s spiral-bound notebooks to gain an insight to his creative process; and a stop motion section will also show off original puppets used in Fantastic Mr Fox [2009] and Isle of Dogs [2018].

Wes Anderson: The Exhibition will be peppered with pieces that tell a tale of his career, including items from his collection. It’ll be a unique way to explore his impact on the modern world of cinema, and, of course, take in more of the gorgeous colourful scapes he’s famed for capturing!

‘Wes Anderson: The Exhibition’ will run at the Design Museum from November 21, 2025 – May 4, 2026, with tickets on sale now. Find out more here.

Trip from Canberra to Port Macquarie

Getting away from the cold in Canberra seemed a good idea, and it certainly has been a change. However, the cold of Mittagong is unremitting and the wind in Newcastle and Port Macquarie is a negative. On the other hand, eating in the sunshine on the foreshore in Newcastle was excellent, and a reminder of the inspirational urban development plans implemented by Brian Howe in the Keating Government. Port Macquarie is a lovely spot, with water to walk beside restaurants and good coffee, and most importantly, a wonderful stay in dog friendly Mercure Hotel. We have a large room with a small courtyard, and bedding and dishes for our dog. The restaurant provides a partly enclosed area where Leah is welcome. Our room facilities, although of second order importance, are a comfortable bed, lots of towels, a great shower, coffee and tea (real milk provided each day) and a two person desk. The abundance of power points, some next to the bed is an additional benefit. The check in was friendly, and staff are welcoming to Leah. A fabulous find.

Mittagong – cold but a lovely sunset

Newcastle from sun to gloom and sunny again

Eating in Newcastle – breakfast two mornings at The Pocket

The Pocket was close to the motel, the Reign Inn (another dog friendly accommodation) with outdoor seating. It was cold, but the food was generous and full of flavour. On the first morning coffees and toasted items were enough. But for the trips to Canberra (for three) and Port Macquarie (also three of us) cooked breakfasts were essential.

Lunches and dinners in Newcastle were at the pub close by, and then on the Foreshore in the sun.

Money Penny is a pleasant restaurant on the foreshore, serving delicious meals such as those we chose – humous and beetroot dip with sour dough, crispy cauliflower, and fish tacos.

Stag and Hunter pub provided a dog friendly space and huge meals.

A delicious lunch at Harbour Bar

Insalubrious stop between Newcastle and Port Macquarie!

Cherry Tree cafe serves good coffee, pleasant enough sweet goods, and has nice outdoor seating.

Port Macquarie

Bedding and bowls for Leah at Mercure Hotel

Walking and eating seem to be the best features of this holiday

St Thomas Anglican church

Port Macquarie was established as a penal settlement after discovery of the Hastings River in 1818 made it a suitable spot for establishing a community. By 1821 this had taken place and convict labour, under military supervision, was used to begin building features such as the Dispensary, now the Parish office, and the church pictured above. The foundation stone was laid in 1824 and the building completed in 1827. It was opened in 1828, where as well as a place of worship the nave was used as a school. In 1830 Port Maquarie was opened to free settlers. St Thomas’ Anglican Church was heritage-listed in 2002.

Bookface – a lovely coffee stop

Breakfast with Leah enjoying the coffee froth

Bird Rock at the Mercure has an elegant menu which we enjoyed in the outside dog friendly section. Although there are delicious main courses, we chose a tapas menu of onion tart, roasted cauliflower, patatas bravas, prawn profiteroles, sour dough, rocket and pear salad and oysters. Delicious!

Breakfast at Frankies before starting our trip home. Frankies is a friendly cafe with excellent service and huge portions of delightful food. On this occasion we opted for what we thought would be a small breakfast of toast and coffee …

Bulahdelah lunch – first stop over

The chicken tikka, and lamb wraps with coffee were very pleasant. However, closely adjacent to us was a table of three engrossed in a political discussion about Tulsi Gabbard (perfect in the eyes of the loudest) and Nancy Pelosi (dreadful in the eyes of the same man holding forth). His companions only dared murmur. The recent election results here were 37% national, 11% One Nation, 22% Labor and 6% Greens, with Labor gaining 39% on a two-party preferred basis. Alas, we have not met any of the Labor voters, and had to turn away from the political signs in the motel office. But, in their favour, they are dog friendly.

More from Secret London

Two Charming English Countryside Towns Are Finally Getting Train Stations Again – And They’re Perfect For A Weekend Escape From London

Southwest England will soon welcome two long-awaited railway stations, reconnecting these vibrant towns to the national rail network for the first time since the 1960s.

Credit: Shutterstock

For decades, the rolling hills and historic market towns of Southwest England have felt tantalisingly out of reach for anyone without a car, especially from London. But that’s about to change very soon. For lovers of scenic getaways, countryside walks, and quintessential English charm, an exciting transport upgrade is on the horizon.

In a major boost for local communities and countryside lovers alike, Southwest England will soon welcome two long-awaited railway stations, reconnecting these vibrant towns to the national rail network for the first time since the Beeching cuts of the 1960s.

This transport revival, confirmed after years of persistent campaigning and investment battles, promises not just quicker, greener links to the picturesque landscapes of the region, but also a boost for local economies and sustainable travel – heralding a new era where rural escapes are just a train ride away for Londoners.

New train stations in Devon and Somerset

Two new train stations, approved and fully funded, will reopen in the Southwest of England – one in Cullompton, Devon, the other in Wellington, Somerset – reconnecting these historic towns to the national rail network for the first time since the mid-20th century. Services are expected to commence by 2026, opening up smoother, greener travel routes from London and beyond straight into some of the region’s most beautiful rural landscapes.

Cullompton and Wellington return to the rails
Pulteney Bridge spanning the River Avon, in Bath England, UNESCO World Heritage Site
Credit: Shutterstock

Situated on the main railway line running between Exeter and Taunton, Cullompton and Wellington have been without active railway stations for decades. Their return marks not just a restoration of local connectivity but also a significant boost for the wider Southwest region’s transport infrastructure. With government backing securing an estimated £45 million for construction and delivery, these stations promise more convenient and sustainable travel options that reduce the need for car journeys or multiple bus transfers.

Both stations will link through Exeter St David’s, a major transport hub that offers direct trains to London Paddington, Plymouth, Bristol, and the Cornish mainline. This means that visitors whether from the capital or further afield will benefit from seamless, straightforward journeys without the usual last-mile travel headaches.

A gateway to the iconic countryside of Southwest England

Beyond practical travel improvements, these stations unveil easier access to some of the Southwest’s most striking landscapes and heritage sites. Cullompton sits on the doorstep of the Blackdown Hills, an officially designated Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.

From here, visitors can explore the lush grounds of Killerton House, wander the charming coastal town of Sidmouth, or venture into Dartmoor National Park, now more welcoming than ever following the recent legalisation of wild camping.

Over the border in Somerset, Wellington opens a direct route to the Quantock Hills with Exmoor National Park also within easy reach. The area offers a bounty of hidden trails, local farm shops, and authentic country pubs.

These new stations are part of a broader vision to enhance regional connectivity, support rural economies, and encourage sustainable transport habits. By reducing reliance on cars for countryside access, they contribute positively to environmental goals, reducing congestion and emissions.

The Dartmoor line and beyond

This development complements other initiatives in the region. For instance, work is progressing on the Okehampton Interchange station, scheduled for completion in 2026, which will extend rail services further into Devon, enhancing connections for West Devon, North Cornwall, and surrounding areas.

As these projects advance, the Southwest’s rail network is set to become an even more vital artery linking visitors to the best that England’s countryside has to offer – all accessible by train.

Plan your countryside escape with ease, knowing that by 2026, catching a train direct from London to hidden rural gems in Devon and Somerset will be simpler and greener than ever before.

Week beginning 23 July 2025

Emily Callaci Wages for Housework The Feminist Fight Against Unpaid Labor Basic Books | Seal Press, March 2025.

Thankyou, NetGalley, for providing me with this uncorrected proof for review.

Emily Callaci has brought together five activists for whom wages for housework was a part of their feminist work for improving women’s lives. It is important to recognise that this is what the movement sought to do, and to come to the writings, and Callaci’s introduction and commentary, with this understanding. It is also vital to acknowledge that wages for housework as an effort to address the unequal burden placed on women who might work outside the home, and then work unpaid inside the home, was complex. The women in this collection have addressed the complexities, making an important contribution to the history of the women’s movement, as well as making salient points in a debate that remains the subject of research today – who does most of the housework?

The collection is noteworthy for its inclusion of working class and black women, together with discussion of the middle-class nature of many of the 1970s feminist conferences and gatherings. Of particular note is Selma James’ work, including reference to the documentary, Women Talking, and her appearance at Ruskin College for the National Women’s Liberation Movement. Mariarosa Dalla Costa’s story begins sadly. Hoping to hear her voice on a tape, access won with great difficulty, Callaci was subjected to a male commentator’s reflections, and a small contribution by Dalla costa.

Fortunately, this brief appearance belies the material Callaci was able to garner though further investigation, including discussion with Dalla Costa and a marvellously detailed description of her stage appearance in a working-class area in Venice. See Books: Reviews for the complete review.

Zoe Fairbairns – Benefits

1984 came and went

This lecture, first given at University of Alcala, Spain, in May 2000, was published in: The Road from George Orwell, His Achievement and Legacy edited by Alberto Lazaro (Peter Lang, 2001) https://zoefairbairns.co.uk/1984-came-and-went/

Fairbairns raises some pertinent issues regarding wages for housework. As well as referring to the diverse opinions within the women’s movement she clarifies who was to be paid -women at home looking after children – and who was to make the payment – the government. The payment was aimed at providing women caring for children and doing the housework financial independence from their husbands.

Fairbairns says that some feminists supported women at home having the same access to financial independence as those in the paid workforce. However, others disagreed, suggesting that this payment would confirm wone in their position as those who should care for the children and housework, making it impossible for them to easily find other alternatives to this role.

Zoe Fairbairns saw the merit in both positions, saying: ‘Being on both sides is not a very comfortable position to be in ideologically, but it is the perfect posture from which to write a novel.’

The article discusses the government role in providing benefits at the time of writing the novel and the impact that had on both her novel and the way in which women and men were considered by the government – the old ‘breadwinner’ debate.

It is such a pity that I cannot provide the article as it is under copyright to the publishers of The Road from George Orwell, His Achievement and Legacy. However, the link will get you there, and to further information about Zoe Fairbairns’ work – a valuable link indeed. The novel Fairbairns wrote, and which is not only an excellent read, but pertinent to the book I have reviewed this week, is Fairbairns, Zoe Benefits 1979. London: Virago Press. 1998 Nottingham, Five Leaves.

Other novels by Zoe Fairbairns are:  Closing London: Methuen, 1987; Here Today London: Methuen, 1984; Other Names London: Michael Joseph, 1998; and Stand We at Last London: Virago Press, 1983.

Another review of Wages for Housework by Emily Callaci appears in The Evening Standard, and is republished below.

Wages for Housework by Emily Callaci, Review: should women get paid for domestic chores?

Story by Harriet Addison  • 1w • 3 min read

Housework is unbelievably boring. Time can always be better spent reading a book, staring out of the window, lying on the floor… Literally anything. But, does it count as work? Should it be paid for? In the 1970s, a group of women became fed up with a life of enforced domesticity, and decided that at the very least, if they must do it, they should be paid for it. “We want wages for every dirty toilet, every indecent assault, every painful childbirth, every cup of coffee and every smile”. A new book by historian Emily Callaci called Wages for Housework, tells the story of the group of feminists who created and drove this eponymous movement.

The women who started the Wages for Housework (WFH 1.0) campaign — who were small in number; never more than a few dozen members — had serious influence, even though many fellow feminists at the time dismissed them as cranks. This group believed that running the home, without financial gain, was exploitation of women. That there were two men who benefited from every woman stuck working for free in the home: their husband, the worker — and his employer. “Housework is the most essential part of the capitalist system”, Callaci explains. “When women are financially dependent on male breadwinners, the bosses have leverage against those men.” The campaign was of course not quite as simple as just being paid for housework.

I was rapidly persuaded that ‘Wages for housework’ was really just a punchy slogan for the real goal

I started off scoffing that of course housework shouldn’t be done for financial gain; just think about what would happen if we invited KPIs and performance-based bonuses into our houses. No wonder the second-wave feminists of the period didn’t support it – it would surely keep women stuck in the home for longer, at a time when they were trying to break out of it. But I was rapidly persuaded otherwise, that ‘Wages for housework’ was really just a punchy slogan for the real goal: to bring about a reassessment not just of enforced domesticity but of global capitalism. Or was it? Sadly, the messily constructed arguments make this book a real struggle to read.

Possibly it’s a book that works better when you dip in and out, rather than try and read it as a whole

Some chapters are like wading through mud, a list of facts to digest. By the end of the first, about one of the WFH founders, the clearly brilliant and fierce feminist Selma James, I was distracted by a dustball in the corner of the room. By the end of the second, about her fellow campaigner, the influential activist Mariarosa Dalla Costa, I couldn’t stop staring at a mark on the wall. Then a coffee machine that needed a clean. The irony!

This is no reflection on the message of the movement itself, or the people who drove it, or the incredible reach it had. This book, and the women whose story it tells, is about much more than the campaign itself. These women also fought against racism, and classism, and the entire construct of the capitalist society. James, a black American women, understood that the demands of the UK Women’s Liberation Movement in the 70s focussed too narrowly on middle-class white women. She knew that it was not the job itself which was liberating, it was the money.

Possibly it’s a book that works better when you dip in and out, rather than try and read it as a whole. It bounces around like a rabbit on hot coals. The structure, and the arguments, are meandering, the narrative incoherent. I didn’t take to the writing. It’s a shame that it’s so hard to follow, when the points are fundamentally interesting. It would have benefited from being half as long.

I’m glad it’s been written, I learnt an awful lot, and I’m sure serious fans of feminist theory will see it to the end. It’s a worthy movement which deserves its place in history, and their reach stretched (and stretches) far beyond its slogan. I’m just not sure that this book does.

Wages for Housework, Emily Callaci, Penguin, £25

Coreen Derifield We Were Still Ladies Gender and Industrial Unionism in the Midwest after World War II University of Iowa Press, July 2025.

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

The combination of a wealth of industrial information with a focus on women’s work, comments from women about their work and their relationships at work, and the integrity of the writing – warm but never missing a precise description or analysis of the events – makes this a work to read with enjoyment as well as to absorb new information.

Chapter 1, The Industrial Development of Iowa, provides a detailed background to the work, social environment, and industrial opportunities that women were eventually to join. Eventually, because as well as their own soil searching, they contended with expectations of wives and mothers. This is fully taken up in Out of the Home and into the Workplace and The Crucible of the Workplace. Union history with its emphasis on male members and their rights as workers and the ‘breadwinners’ (a familiar history this, of course) is laid bare in its sexism, but also its concern about the way in which society operated, with its gender roles clearly outlined. The latter, of course, so much more easily emulated if economic reality did not force some women into paid work. Negotiating Gender Roles in the Union, An Education in Workplace Rights and Encounters with Feminism are excellent chapters, concentrating on analysis as well as evoking the situations faced day to day by women in the workplace. See Books: Reviews for the complete review.

National Gallery of Australia

On this occasion we visited the general exhibitions.

The Kulata Tjuta Project was one of these. The cultural maintenance project was established in 2010 and shares the skills of carving and making the punu kulata (wooden spear) across generations. A small group of Tjilpi (senior Anangu men) from Tjala Arts in Amata, South Australia, sought to ensure that traditional knowledge and cultural connections were nourished and preserved. The group has expanded to 100 from across the Anangu Pitjantjara Yankunytjatjara Lands and is now a monumental collaborative project which joins the voices of senior and younger artists to speak of cultural resilience, continuity, and identity. *

*Edited, signage for artwork.

A walk around the gallery –

Rather different representations…

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Connie Francis was the voice of a generation and the soundtrack of post-war America*

Story by Leigh Carriage, Southern Cross University

 Connie Francis dominated the music charts in the late 1950s and early 1960s with hits like Stupid Cupid, Pretty Little Baby and Don’t Break the Heart That Loves You.

The pop star, author and actor has died at 87, and will be remembered for recording the soundtrack songs of post-World War II America.

Francis was born Concetta Rosa Maria Franconero in Newark, New Jersey, to Italian immigrant parents. At a very early age, Francis was encouraged to take accordion and singing lessons, compete in talent shows, and later she would perform occasionally on the children’s production Star Time Kids on NBC, remaining there until she was 17.

Within these early recordings you can hear her style begin to develop: her tone, great pitching, her versatility in vocal range. Her vocal delivery is technically controlled and stylistically structured, often nuanced – and even at this early stage demonstrating such power coupled with an adaptability for a broad range of repertoire.

At 17, Francis signed a contract with MGM Records.

One of her early recordings was the song Who’s Sorry Now?, written by Ted Snyder with lyrics by Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby in 1923. Her version was released in 1957 and struggled to get noticed.

The following year, Francis appeared with the ballad on American Bandstand. This performance exposed Francis’ talent for interpretation and her ability to bridge the teen and adult fanbase.

The song would become a hit.

It’s useful to listen to the original version to gain more insight into Francis’ vocal approach and styling. The original is an instrumental song of its time, with light whimsical call and response motives in a foxtrot feel.

But in Francis’ version, she demonstrates her ability to revitalise a late 1950s pop music aesthetic. In an emotional delivery she croons her own rendition, with the country styling elements of Patsy Cline.

The voice of a generation

Following Who’s Sorry Now?, Stupid Cupid (1958), Where The Boys Are (1960, the titular song of a feature film starring Francis) and Lipstick on Your Collar (1959) became the soundtrack songs of post-war America.

Francis was supported with songs penned by the some of the best songwriters from the Brill Building, a creative collective in Manhattan that housed professional songwriters, working with staff writers Edna Lewis and George Goehring.

In 1960, Francis released her hit Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool written by Jack Keller and Howard Greenfield. It was a teeny-bopper classic, and she became the first women to top the Billboard Hot 100.

Styled after some of the other greats of the time – such as Frank Sinatra (1915–98), Dean Martin (1917–95) and Louis Prima (1910–70) – Francis’ performance on the Ed Sullivan show highlighted her connection to her Italian heritage and ability to draw from a broad repertoire.

On the show, she performed Mama and La Paloma. Each performance is very carefully styled, a thoughtful approach to dynamics, sung in both English and Italian.

Don’t Break the Heart That Loves You, a number one hit from 1962, features Francis’ gorgeous crooning harmonies. Then, the song breaks down into an earnest spoken part and finishes with a powerful belted vocal part of long notes.

The song is full of confidence and hope.

Away from the microphone

Francis had two key roles in films, starring in Where the Boys Are (1960) and the comedy Follow the Boys (1963).

She was an author of two books. The second, Who’s Sorry Now?, became a New York Times bestseller.

Francis was involved with humanitarian causes. She was particularly involved with Women Against Rape, following her own violent rape in 1974, and the Valour Victims Assistance Legal Organisation, dedicated to supporting the legal rights of crime victims. A lesser known song in her repertoire, fitting to include here, is her version of Born Free from 1968.

As a singer, Francis worked at her craft and transitioned effortlessly from one genre to another, performing for over five decades. She will be remembered as a trailblazing solo artist, leaving a strong legacy in popular music culture.

She was the voice of one generation when she was a star. And in her final year she became the voice of a new generation as Pretty Little Baby, released in 1962, went viral on TikTok, with more than 1.4 million videos using her voice to share stories of their lives.

Leigh Carriage does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

*Where the Boys Are must have been one of the silliest songs ever. Thank goodness the post war women listening did not take it too heart in most cases. Lipstick on Your Collar at least had some spirit.

Made Up Stories, Kindling Pictures announce television adaptation of Sally Hepworth’s ‘The Soulmate’

Sean Slatter·NewsProductionTV & Streaming ·July 16, 2025

From left are Katie Amos, Imogen Banks, Asher Keddie, Bruna Papandrea, and Steve Hutensky.

Made Up Stories will team up with creator and producer Imogen Banks and Strife collaborator Asher Keddie to adapt Australian author Sally Hepworth’s novel The Soulmate for television.

The 2022 novel follows married couple Pippa and Gabe, who have two sweet young daughters, a supportive family, and a picturesque cliffside home, which would have been idyllic had the tall beachside cliffs not become so popular among those wishing to end their lives. Gabe has become somewhat of a local hero since they moved to the cliff house, talking seven people down from stepping off the edge. But when Gabe fails to save the eighth, a mysterious woman named Amanda, a sordid web of secrets begins to unravel, pushing bonds of loyalty and love to the brink.

Announced as part of this year’s Future Vision Summit, the television adaptation will be produced by Papandrea, Steve Hutensky, and Katie Amos for Made Up Stories alongside Banks for Kindling Pictures, Keddie, Hepworth, Rob Weisbach, and Fiona Seres, who also serves as writer and showrunner.

This is the second collaboration between Hepworth and Made Up Stories, after the production company announced it was optioning her ninth novel, Darling Girls, last year.

Hepworth said she was pleased to continue her creative relationship with the Made Up Stories team.

“There’s a kind of magic in finding creative partners who are as passionate about your story as you are. That’s what I’ve found with Bruna, Steve, Katie, and the team at Made Up Stories,” he said.

“I’m so excited to be collaborating with them, and with Imogen, Asher, Rob, and Fiona, to adapt The Soulmate – a novel that strives to dig deep into the layered, complicated truths about marriage, loyalty, and the secrets we keep from the people we love most.”

In Our Garden

Welcome back to Country: PM’s big statement as parliament opens

Peter Dutton claimed the Welcome to Country ceremony was “overdone”. Now the PM has opened the 48th Parliament with a big statement.

Samantha Maiden@samanthamaiden

Anthony Albanese has clapped back at critics of Welcome to Country ceremonies praising the practice as a “powerful” reminder that Australians are stronger together.

As Parliament prepares to sit for the first time since the election, Mr Albanese has delivered to rebuke to ex-Liberal leader Peter Dutton,

Mr Dutton spent the dying days of the campaign whinging about the ceremony and claiming it was “overdone.”

After securing a huge majority, the Prime Minister has made it clear he strongly supports the cultural practice.

“The welcome to country is such a powerful way to begin a new parliament,’’ Mr Albanese said.

“Like a lot of the more positive things about our nation, we shouldn’t take it for granted. This ceremony didn’t take place until 2007 and was controversial in 2007.

“It is not controversial today. Nor should it be.”

Mr Albanese said it was a “respectful” way of beginning the 48th Parliament.

“What a welcome to country does is holds out like a hand warmly and graciously extended. An opportunity for us to embrace and to show a profound love of home and country,’’ he said.

“It is a reminder as well of why we all belong here together, that we are stronger together and we belong.

The ceremony outside parliament.

The ceremony outside parliament.

“We keep walking, together. With every step, we feel the echoes through history, the footsteps nearly a century distant from us now of every First Nations person who trekked to the opening of the first

Parliament House down the hill.

“The footsteps of the members of the stolen generations who came to this place 17 years ago now to hear the words that they needed to hear “I’m sorry”.

Former Liberal leader Peter Dutton famously boycotted the National Apology to the Stolen Generations in 2008. He later apologised years later.

An Indigenous dancer at the Smoking ceremony to start the 48th parliament at Parliament House in Canberra. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

An Indigenous dancer at the Smoking ceremony to start the 48th parliament at Parliament House in Canberra. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

“Uttered by an Australian Prime Minister on behalf of the Australian nation. That was a day of catharsis, built on courage and grace,’’ Mr Albanese said of Kevin Rudd’s apology.

“Ultimately, it was a day of togetherness and a reminder of our great potential and promise as a nation.”

Liberal frontbencher Jacinta Nampijinpa Price and Peter Dutton have previously backed scaling back the use of Welcome to Country ceremonies, with Senator Price warning people are “sick if it”.

Speaking at a Voice to parliament No campaign event in 2023, former Prime Minister Tony Abbott also said he is “getting a little bit sick of Welcomes to Country because it belongs to all of us, not just to some of us”.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and son Nathan attend a smoking ceremony to start the 48th parliament at Parliament House in Canberra. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and son Nathan attend a smoking ceremony to start the 48th parliament at Parliament House in Canberra. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

“And I’m getting a little bit tired of seeing the flag of some of us flown equally with the flag of all of us,’’ he said.

“And I just think that the longer this goes on, the more divisive and the more difficult and the more dangerous that it’s getting now.”

Senator Price has described the tradition as “divisive”.

“There is no problem with acknowledging our history, but rolling out these performances before every sporting event or public gathering is definitely divisive,” she said.

“It’s not welcoming, it’s telling non-Indigenous Australians ‘this isn’t your country’ and that’s wrong. We are all Australians and we share this great land.”

She said “around the country” there were some people whose “only role, their only source of income, is delivering Welcome to Country”.

“Everyone’s getting sick of Welcome to Country,’’ she said.

It is instructive to see the way in which the Australian people voted, and a graphic showing the seats currently held in the 48th Parliament

House of Representatives

There are 150 seats in the lower house (House of Representatives) and a party requires 76 seats to govern in its own right.

The representation of parties in the Parliament is as follows: