Sydney Mitchell Library News Today

A moving, unsettling social experiment staged as part of Vivid festival brings people together, two at a time

The house where 40 pairs of human ears were nailed up around the walls still stands up in the Gulf country, in a remote part of the outback most Australians have never seen.

Artists provoke and offend, but they also liberate us and help us understand who we are and where we’re going. Writer Stephen Orr makes a case for significant new investment in South Australian artists and cultural institutions.

Atrocities by white settlers against indigenous Australians over first 150 years include massacres, taking Aboriginals heads as souvenirs and a house with human ears nailed to its walls.

Photographer captured divine details of faces and places We’re sorry, this service is currently unavailable. Please try again later. Dismiss Photographer captured divine details of faces and places December 27, 2020 — 1.06pm Normal text size JON LEWIS: 1950-2020 One of Australia’s finest social documentary photographers and filmmakers, Jon Lewis, died in Byron Bay after battling perhaps the cruellest of dementias, Lewy body, for several years. He was 70. Jon was born in 1950 in Maryland, ...

Written By: lprent - Date published: 11:31 am, December 21st, 2020 - 30 comments From a few days ago (it seems like an eternity), RNZ reported “Govt to pump almost $3 billion into its Covid-19 response after report identified failings”. There were several points I’d make about the border controls and generally with our border and the long slow years in constraining...

Europe still has community transmission and an inadequate covid response. I mean, Im all for lessening flights further due to climate change, also happy for NZ to be forced by covid into a more regenerative way of living, but those are different rationales. Cricklewood 2.2.1 Ive been thinking about international air travel, I like the idea of a progressive taxation system as you dont want to make it impossible for people to visit family etc so for example you get one free...

Written By: advantage - Date published: 9:34 am, December 20th, 2020 - 22 comments New Zealand like most countries across the world in the last year, has gone deeper and deeper into public debt. It’s pretty clear that the New Zealand government’s response to economic crisis from lockdowns and global trade crashes by spending tonnes of debt money has been extremely effective. Yet for some, it’s simple: debts must always ...

"We have won so far because geographical isolation gave us about a week of decision-making space to lock down hard." The extra week was helpful – but much more important was being prepared to make that decision to lock-down hard. The Tory party would have been incapable of such a decision no matter how many extra weeks they were handed – and that was Eds point. A National government here would have (most likely) been unable to make that decision. Scomo looked like he wasnt capable of that ...

Population has always been a critical driver of events and prior to the Industrial Revolution we lived in a zero sum world, with energy and resources effectively limited to that which could be harvested from photosynthesis, one person’s gain was at the limit, always someone else’s loss. Very low density hunter gather populations could thrive (often quite nicely) because they rarely approached their local resource limits, but the invention of agriculture changed this dramatically. The next 1...