This is the table we sat around last night to help our friends J and L celebrate their commitment to each other. They were married several months ago in New York and last night we hosted a party for some of their Australian friends and family.
When the first missionaries came to this land two centuries ago, they stole the Dreaming from the Aborigines and replaced it with the fear of God. They called the rituals that they didn't understand, bad. They took something that was untamed and joyous and put a barbed wire fence around it.
Toenails too long.
Droplets like stars on a clear night.
The rear of the bus was stuck on the road. The incline of the driveway has caused many a vehicle to scrape its undercarriage or get jammed. I know this because the driveway is 100 metres from our house.
I think that our distance from nature is already a cliché. City dwellers often have no relationship with animals or greenery. As a public artist I feel a sense of duty to draw attention to deficiencies in our everyday life... I usually go back to the sites to visit my plants or moss, sometimes to repair them a bit, but nothing more generally as they tend to get enough water from the air, condensation, and rain - especially in certain seasons... I believe that if everyone had a garden of their own to cultivate, we would have a much more balanced relation to our territories. Of course, a garden can be many things.
I finished reading this book a couple of days ago but wanted to blog about it today on November 19, exactly four years after Cameron Doomadgee's death, the event around which this book is based. He died while in police custody on Palm Island, an Aboriginal community off the north east coast of Australia.This book is everything it should be: a sad, beautiful, frightening account of one man's pointless death, interwoven with the brutal history of Palm Island and a golden thread of Aboriginal mythology. Every sentence is weighty, considered, even, restrained. Every character is explored for their contradictions, every situation observed for its nuances, every easy judgement suspended... It is The Tall Man's triumph that Hooper finds the common humanity in the accused and the accuser, the police officer and the street drinker, the living and the dead.
I move that today we honour the indigenous peoples of this land, the oldest continuing cultures in human history. We reflect on their past mistreatment.
This is my favourite zine. It's called You and has been distributed by Luke You free every week since November 2001.
Today marks the end of National Recycling Week. Thomas L Friedman, in Hot, Flat, and Crowded, labels events such as National Recycling Week, Walk Against Warming, and Earth Hour, as environmental parties – whereas what is really needed, what is essential and critical and vital, he says, is an environmental revolution.
Lawyers have a term for the tendency of Aboriginal witnesses to agree with whatever is put to them so as to be polite, avoid conflict and get off the stand as quickly as possible - it's called "gratuitous concurrence."
My brother-in-law and I once discussed the idea of a newspaper in which no bad news would be printed. A couple of days ago, The New York Times issued such a paper, a stunt initiated by The Yes Men.Early this morning, commuters nationwide were delighted to find out that while they were sleeping, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had come to an end.If, that is, they happened to read a "special edition" of today's New York Times.
In an elaborate operation six months in the planning, 1.2 million papers were printed at six different presses and driven to prearranged pickup locations, where thousands of volunteers stood ready to pass them out on the street.
Articles in the paper announce dozens of new initiatives including the establishment of national health care, the abolition of corporate lobbying, a maximum wage for C.E.O.s, and, of course, the end of the war.
The paper, an exact replica of The New York Times, includes International, National, New York, and Business sections, as well as editorials, corrections, and a number of advertisements, including a recall notice for all cars that run on gasoline. There is also a timeline describing the gains brought about by eight months of progressive support and pressure, culminating in President Obama's "Yes we REALLY can" speech. (The paper is post-dated July 4, 2009.)
"It's all about how at this point, we need to push harder than ever," said Bertha Suttner, one of the newspaper's writers. "We've got to make sure Obama and all the other Democrats do what we elected them to do. After eight, or maybe twenty-eight years of hell, we need to start imagining heaven."
Billy, left, was getting worse. She had stopped laying, had gone off her food and was becoming increasingly antisocial. Unfortunately PJ had to kill her yesterday. I asked him how he did it, thinking I wanted to know, but when he said he wasn't going to tell me I was pleased.Darwinian evolution tells us that we are incipient compost... I like the idea of literal reincarnation: that the molecules of which I am composed will, once I have rotted, be incorporated into other organisms. Bits of me will be pushing through the growing tips of trees, will creep over them as caterpillars, will hunt those caterpillars as birds. When I die, I would like to be buried in a fashion which ensures that no part of me is wasted. Then I can claim to have been of some use after all.
It's hard having three sisters, I'm always getting my memories mixed up with theirs. I was going to write that when I was younger I subscribed to a magazine called Ranger Rick, but I think that was my sister K. As I grew older I subscribed to Smash Hits, Mad Magazine, Fast Company and then Vogue Living. Many Travel Stories Begin as an Attempt to Impress Pretty Women. I'm a little... out of the loop. There are two wooden figures on my husband's desk. Sachiko must be considered "different" here in Japan. One day in 1934, he sequestered himself in his family's greenhouse in London to perform an experiment. Two five-inch syringes with bright orange caps have been placed atop the white linen of the grand banquet table, like little sterile centrepieces. We know exactly where the spill occurred: 44.7°N, 178.1°E. On a cold spring day in 2002, I found a damp and crumpled piece of paper on a beach near Reykjavík, Iceland. The facts are indisputable.
We have been cleaning out my grandfather’s garage. He died five years ago and now we live in the house that he shared with my grandmother. The garage has to go, being a relic of the age when Asbestos was considered the wonder product.Well - that big pot of stock became soup this evening and was sitting on the stove simmering while I read Amelia some stories and, thanks to still being a bit of a novice with electric cooking, a huge amount of pasta stuck to the bottom of the pot and burnt. The house is full of that evil burnt food smell. Big-P has just gone out to pick up two small pizzas. What a waste of stock! What a sad shame. It smelt so good just twenty minutes ago. I called my mum to moan about it and she said in all her wisdom “Ahh, life is full of burnt soup stories.”
I spent the night working at a wedding with my friend B. We wore long black aprons and poured drinks, cleared plates and called everybody Madam and Sir. I wondered beforehand how I'd find it (I loved it) and if I'd cry in the speeches (I did).
Here is a zine that Claire illustrated the cover for. It's called How Comics Can Change the World. Open it up and the first words you read are: "Do not pay money for this comic." I often think about these seven words. 
Last night we watched Seed Hunter, the fantastic ABC doco about the Australian scientist, Ken Street. Street is charming and candid and oh so likable as we follow him and his team on their noble crusade.As Australia and much of the world wrestles with hotter weather and a dwindling water supply, mass starvation at a global scale is on the cards if we can’t find ways to improve crop resilience. Scientists are exploring many solutions to adapt our food supply, including going back to mother nature herself to locate the genes that can withstand our changing climate; genes that, thanks to a high yielding monoculture, have almost disappeared. Australian scientist, Dr Ken Street, aka the ‘Seed Hunter’, spends his life searching for the tiny seed that could play a role in helping food producers around the world.
I love the taste of this water. I have often thought that maybe because it is sourced from a nearby spring it has all the goodness in it that my body needs to flourish. Our bodies are best when we eat locally grown seasonal food, so surely it's the same for local water?
