I’m not sure where it came from, but there’s been a bit of praise for the suburbs around the joint lately, and dissing of the dissers of the suburbs.
Age columnist Shaun Carney attracted a bit of ridicule recently in some quarters when he wrote a column making the rather tenuous and certainly debatable claim that the Rudd government faced a delicate balancing act between inner city and suburban voters on climate change.
The article itself was entitled “Leftists who sneer at suburbs betray Labor”.
Carney mentioned that he’d been spending time recently in Carrum Downs “for family reasons”. Writing as if he were an anthropologist in unfamilar territory, he informed his readers:
You cannot get to the suburb by train. There are connecting buses from Frankston that snake their way through the suburbs in between, making it a very long journey. It would be very difficult to get around if you lived in Carrum Downs and did not have a car.
Now, the funny thing about this whole “latte left v. suburban real Australians” thing is that I’ve never met any “leftists who sneer at suburbs” and I’ve met a lot of lefties in my life. Having read a really silly column - whose author I’ve fortunately forgotten - in the SMH earlier this year where the writer really did manage to convey the idea that no Fairfax reader had ever stepped foot west of some imaginary line running through, say, Marrickville, I am willing to believe that there are some very urbane snobs around the shop. But I’m not sure they’re actually lefties in any meaningful sense. Small l liberal toffs who vote Labor, perhaps. It might also be the case that I have a different view on all this because I grew up in the northern suburbs of Brisbane, and though I now live in the “inner city”, there really hasn’t been any such thing in this town in the same sense as in Sydney or Melbourne.
The text of the papal apology, delivered this morning at a Mass in St Mary’s Cathedral, can be read here.
The symbolism of the setting for the apology - a mass for seminarians and members of religious orders and the consecration of a new altar for the Cathedral - was no doubt intended by the Vatican to signal that the Pope was speaking sternly to those at the centre of the institution. But it’s also deeply problematic - as it suggests that the problem is only one for the church, excluding the victims who were left outside while the pomp and panoply of the liturgy took place for the exclusive benefit of the hierarchy.
We’ve done our best to provide a reasonably comprehensive coverage of World Youth Day here at LP, in part because the News Limited papers, being major sponsors of the Pope fest, have studiously ignored most of the actual hard news, except to cast stones at those criticising the Church’s conduct on several justifiable grounds, in favour of happy-clappy stories about the happy-clappy pilgrims and general hagiography. As I commented earlier, the irony is that B16 himself is treated more like a pop star than a Pontiff on a mission, so in the interests of balance and fairness, if anyone’s actually interested in the full text of what the Pope had to say, you can read it here. As journalist and veteran Vatican watcher John L. Allen jr. observes, it’s classic Ratzinger.
I’m writing from an office in the Sydney CBD. Catholic ‘youth’ (some of them looking a tad middle aged) have been streaming down the street towards the harbour for the past two or more hours. (The Pope is due to take a harbour cruise soon, so I guess they’re all going down to see him.) It’s official - there are a lot of people attending WYD. And they come from all over the world. I know this because they are all waving national flags. There goes the American flag, here’s New Zealand, Singapore, Brazil, Fiji, Australia, of course, and the Aboriginal flag … followed by a flag which is light blue with a yellow circle in the middle, Germany, Canada, more Americans, more flags which are unfamiliar to me… Continue reading ‘Greetings from Flagsville’
I hope that Anthony Foster and his family, who intend to confront Pope Benedict XVI and Cardinal George Pell in Sydney this week over the Catholic Church’s treatment of their late daughter, Emma Foster, who took her own life in January and her sister Katie, both of whom were raped as primary school children by Father Kevin O’Donnell, aren’t dismissed as “Catholic bashing” and raining on the World Youth Day parade or subjected to victim blaming as Anthony Jones was. Foster told the tragic tale of his daughters’ abuse and how it marked their lives horrendously for the worse, and probably brought Emma’s life to a close, on Lateline tonight.
It’s no secret that “the sectarian strand” is one of the less attractive aspects of Australian history, and interestingly, probably not one featured highly either in the so-called “black armband” or triumphalist narratives so beloved of our home grown Antipodean culture warriors. That may be because the deep cleavages - overlapping but not identical to class and ethnicity - around Catholicism and Protestantism needed to be elided and to be buried in order to construct the “Anglo-Celtic” identity which came into its own at the same time that the state aid controversy was settled into its grave and multiculturalism launched on its career. And not coincidentally. “Anglos” and “Celts” were on different sides of the political and cultural coin in the Great Southern Land of the Holy Spirit for most of its whitefella history. In a way, Gough Whitlam is probably the progenitor of the “mainstream” Anglo-Celtic Australian. But sectarianism typically rears its head as a defensive accusation whenever the Catholic Church is particularly prominent in public debate, and whenever criticism is directed at the Church’s institutional power.
It may well be that a residue of sectarian anti-Catholicism might be in play on the margins of all this, but one of the big ironies is that while Tony Abbott and others speculated that Pope Benedict’s message might not be communicated effectively, the Pope himself has seemingly become a football to be kicked around by the usual suspects in distinctly Australian culture wars which often have only a tenuous connection with his concerns. But are there not genuine issues - of public interest - that can and should be raised at a time when Catholicism is top of the pops in the media stakes?
I’m an ex-Catholic, 30+ years removed - still, I have the insider’s understanding of Catholicism. At least, I thought I did…
I’d always thought of ‘happy-clappies’ as Protestants. The folk Mass of the 1970s was a far more sedate and yes, folky affair than the sweaty swaying and fainting of the bible-bashing evangelicals.
I live, work and play in the area at the heart of World Youth Day but had told myself it would be easy to ignore it all. (Maybe I couldn’t quite believe that thousands of people would travel for an event like that.) Nevertheless, among the local soccer mums, special WYD resident parking permits began to be a conversational item a few weeks ago, along with road closures and the erection of security fences in Centennial Park. Two weeks ago in the park, a vehicle full of men in suits glided across the lawn as I walked my dog, at the Randwick Racecouse end - very secret-service-like.
I began to spy my first ‘pilgrims’ last week - young people with backpacks wandering near St Mary’s Cathedral or mulling around in Hyde Park (where there are huge WYD marquees). Continue reading ‘Greetings from Happy-Clappyville’
I hope that we will be spared the sermons from an authoritarian leadership about the spiritually dead, the soulless, secular uncaring, of liberal Australia society violating the sacredness of life etc etc as well as the repeat of the attacks on Islam and Muslim-Australians for undermining western civilization.
Can I suggest a theme? Sermons on reconciliation with a liberal Australia and secular humanism instead of ones on heartless and godless liberalism.
What the hell is with the New South Wales government? Down here in Victoria, our state government is at least trying to grapple with serious issues like how we’re going to move ourselves around our rapidly growing state capital. Meanwhile, in New South Wales, the government seems to be far too busy fighting itself and the NSW union movement to do anything much. Not to mention backbenchers publicly slagging off the entire front bench.
About the only policy output coming out of them right now seems to be Treasurer Michael Costa running his mouth off at the Garnaut Review in The Oz. As typing is not activism points out, it’s moronic.
Is there any prospect whatsoever of the NSW Labor Party getting itself sorted out and concentrating on dealing with that state’s considerable economic and social problems at some point between now and the next election?
If we took a holiday
Took some time to celebrate
Just one day out of life
It would be, it would be so nice
It’s school holiday time (which doesn’t - obviously - mean parent holiday time!)… I’m due to submit the first draft of my PhD thesis on Friday some time (possibly late-ish). The marking’s all done. The conference is over. But that wonderful thing called semester starts up again on the 21st. And I don’t have either the time or the money to take my preferred break - which was going to be an intertubes-less week in a cabin by a beach somewhere reading books, followed by a week of partay-ing in Sydney or Melbourne, followed by a week back in Brisneyland under the doonah. So give me some vicarious holiday goodness! Do we get enough holidays? What do we do when we take them? Are we ever away in a wired world?
To be fair to Morris Iemma and his bunch of clowns masquerading as a government, New South Wales isn’t alone in imposing risible and over the top security regulations for major “public events”. We’ve seen similar things in finance talkfests with Melbourne and CHOGM in Queensland saw Peter Beattie invent preventive detention for “known public nuisances”, as well as going to ludicrous lengths to prevent protest. But Iemma’s mob seem to have made it an art form, perhaps because as I’ve speculated before, their sense of authoritarianism compensates for their total ineffectuality in governing just about anything else than public events. (Compare - “public services”.) But the latest bunch of regulations for the Pope Fest really take the cake. It’s more or less private governance. Where’s the public benefit in preventing pilgrims attending World Youth Day in Sydney this month from being annoyed? Will their world really come to an end if someone hands them a condom or wears a t-shirt with an anti-homophobia message? What possible public justification does the NSW government have for denying basic rights to freedom of expression at the instance of the fragile petals in Cardinal Pell’s hierarchy?
Folks might remember I attended my erstwhile colleague Professor Anna Haebich’s book launch earlier this year, and invited her to write a guest post for LP on her book Spinning the Dream. I’ve just received this via email from our friends at Griffith REVIEW. If you’re in Sydney, this event would be well worth attending.
TONIGHT! Wednesday June 11
Spinning the Dream: Assimilation in Australia 1950-1970
gleebooks
upstairs at 49 Glebe Point Road, Glebe
6.30 for 7pm. $10 / $7 concession. Book gleebooks 02 9660 2333
Multi-award winning historian and author Anna Haebich will be in conversation with Julianne Schultz to discuss the experience of assimilation in Australia. Anna explores how Australians in the 1950s and 60s were challenged by new visions of the nation. Assimilation was heralded as the mechanism to sweep away divisions and exclusions of the past and absorb Aboriginal and new Australians into a common shared way of life. The rhetoric and reality of assimilation was to have a profound and lasting effect on several generations of Australians before it was abandoned in the 70s for multiculturalism. Today a form of ‘retro-assimilation’ has come to haunt public debate on national identity and nationhood. Anna’s new book Spinning the Dream (Fremantle Arts Centre Press) develops some of the ideas she explored in her Griffith REVIEW essays Retro-assimilation (Ed 15: Divided Nation) and A long way back - reflections of a genealogical tourist (Ed 6: Our Global Face).
Some of the tensions in Rudd’s governance and indeed in his Cabinet over climate change issues are discussed by Brian in this post. Brian’s thoughts could usefully be read together with Shaun Carney’s column in yesterday’s Age [via Gary Sauer-Thompson at Public Opinion]:
The central tension for contemporary Labor is the need to weave together its disparate supporting tribes and Rudd’s car plan, which co-opts concern about climate change to underpin the ALP’s more traditional working class base, tells us how he wants to do it. When Labor was last in power, under Paul Keating, it managed to hold on to most of its white-collar support base but lost office when parts of its blue-collar base, pummelled by the effects of economic deregulation, concluded it had lost touch. Since then, the white-collar left has coalesced more solidly around the Greens - an effect that has been turbo-charged by the death of the more moderate Democrats. This has two consequences, both of which make it harder for Labor to hold on to power.
In the wake of the controversy over the Vanity Fair photographs of 15 year old Miley Cyrus, which photographer Annie Leibowitz defended as “simple” and “beautiful”, Sydney has had a taste of the controversy about artistic representations of adolescent bodies with the opening of celebrated photographer Bill Henson’s latest exhibition at the Roslyn Oxley9 gallery in Paddington. Henson’s exhibition includes photographs of 12 and 13 year old unclothed models, taken with their and their parents’ consent.
Miranda Devine was quick out of the starting blocks to loudly condemn:
Such images presenting children in s*xual contexts are so commonplace these days they seem almost to have lost the capacity to shock.
The effort over many decades by various groups - artists, perverts, academics, libertarians, the media and advertising industries, respectable corporations and the pr0n industry - to smash taboos of previous generations and define down community standards, has successfully eroded the special protection once afforded childhood.
Larvatus Prodeo is an Australian group blog which discusses politics, sociology, culture, life, religion and science from a left of centre perspective. more»
I’m not sure where it came from, but there’s been a bit of praise for the suburbs around the joint lately, and dissing of the dissers of the suburbs. 
We’ve done our best to provide a reasonably comprehensive coverage of 
To be fair to Morris Iemma and his bunch of clowns masquerading as a government, New South Wales isn’t alone in imposing risible and over the top security regulations for major “public events”. We’ve seen similar things in finance talkfests with Melbourne and CHOGM in Queensland saw Peter Beattie invent preventive detention for “known public nuisances”, as well as going to ludicrous lengths to prevent protest. But Iemma’s mob seem to have made it an art form, perhaps because as I’ve speculated 
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