Tick tick tickComing up in May...

Poetic impermanence at work :

The Australian editor of Poetry International Web, poet and founding editor of Vagabond Press, Michael Brennan has just updated the Australian component of the site, including expanded entries with poems and critical work on Gig Ryan, JS Harry, Jane Gibian and my own poetry


                                                Hi Michael

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HAPPY ANNIVERSARY OTOLITHS
one year old today


                                                Otoliths #5 cover

The editor, MARK YOUNG, says :

It's also May Day, so arise & join in a chorus of ‘The Internationale’ with Paul Siegell, Andrew Topel, Jordan Stempleman, Ernesto Priego, Paolo Manalo, Eileen Tabios, Jeff Harrison, Katrinka Moore, Corey Mesler, Raymond Farr, Steve Rodgers, Robert Lee Brewer, Mark Cunningham, Martin Edmond, Steve Timm, James Sanders, Audacia Dangereyes, Thomas Fink, Spencer Selby, Maria Zajkowski, Richard Lopez, Marcia Arrieta, Tom Hibbard, Matina Stamatakis, Louise Landes Levi, Márton Koppány, Anny Ballardini, Jill Jones, Craig Santos Perez, mIEKAL aND, Dax Bayard-Murray, Ed Schenk, MTC Cronin, Alana Madison, Alexander Jorgensen, Andrew Taylor, Carol Novack (& Stan Crocker), Stephanie Green, Maurice Oliver, Caleb Puckett, David-Baptiste Chirot, Derek Motion, James Maughn, Michael Rothenberg, Tom Beckett, Nick Piombino & Richard Kostelanetz as they "change henceforth the old tradition".


                                                Mark Young, 2003

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Blackheath Philosophy Forum
on again this coming Saturday. May 5th.

Literature as Experimental Philosophy:
George Eliot on Truth and Realism
A talk by Moira Gatens
Professor of Philosophy, University of Sydney











In our era an idea is abroad that fiction has little to do with truth, and that novelists are a species of liar. George Eliot, one of our greatest 19th Century English novelists, considered her work in fiction to be both realist and truth-seeking. In one letter she referred to her writings as a set of experiments in life. Through an examination of some of her novels, this talk will endeavour to explain what Eliot meant by ‘realism’ and what is involved in her commitment to truth. Moira Gatens will argue that Eliot’s worldview still has much to contribute to moral philosophy today.

Blackheath Public School Hall
corner Great Western Highway and Leichhardt Street,
Blackheath

4.00pm Saturday May 5th
$5.00 entry

coffee and cake available

pub talk after the talk

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                                 Siena, 2002. Foto by Olivo Barbieri


: : PAPER SCISSORS ROCK : :
: : WHAT MAKES THE ART WORLD TICK : :

: : CRITIC, DEALER, ARTIST, CURATOR, COLLECTOR : :
How they co-operate or don't, how they put pressure on each other, or take turns to own the art. A forum on the different social actors and professionals in the contemporary art world, and their interdependence. The power of a work of art, the influence of critical evaluation, the role of the art market, the rhetoric of sales.

Petra Arends : Wayne Tunnicliffe : Ted Colless :
Peter Hill : John Young : Amanda Rowell :
Moderated by George Alexander : curator, writer, coordinator
Contemporary Programs, Art Gallery of NSW.



A component of An Incomplete World
Warhol, Lichtenstein, Kiki Smith, Hirst
Ruscha, Cindy Sherman, Richter
Sydney 19.5 - 29.7
Art Gallery of NSW

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Katoomba poem

                               Katoomba, (view from Leura), Autumn 2007

Sydney poet Adam Aitken has written a poem set in Katoomba, a tourist town in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney. He says - It is an allegory about the "history wars" debate, in which one side is the voice of white settler descendants who deny their complicity in the colonisation of the country and their part in the decline of Indigenous power. This suggests to me an image of the Garden gnome (the white settler) standing next to a stereotype "Native". Together they claim a false mateship and solidarity which the migrant/cosmopolitan stranger will never have. (The strange tourist only wants a view, some fresh air and peace and quiet, not politics.) A poem about (not)belonging (once again!)

Katoomba

While jogging
on a freezing winter's morning
history never feels
cleaner or more
freehold


than a 1950s
catalogue of multiplying accents
at Echo Point's landscape exclusive -
having settled here
for the "cure "
for walks, bush, art and open fire,
in short
for a sense of belonging.


After a couple of months of thinking
you are tolerance incarnated
you pass
a loin-clothed Aborigine
standing with a spear
on one leg
next to a white garden gnome
sharing smokes and taking in the view


as if they owned the place


and they'd seen you coming
and stared,
and knew all about you
a thousand years
before,
as if they owned the place
one thousand years
before.




                                            Adam Aitken, Glebe, Summer 2006

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Dear viewers

Just a note for the five regular visitors and the two or so strays :
'The deletions' is best viewed using Safari and Mozilla Firefox browsers.
And if you'd like to see larger versions of the photos just click on them.

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Scribblings poems

For the Time Being: The Bootstrap Book of Poetic Journals
edited by Tyler Doherty and Tom Morgan
has just been published by Bootstrap Productions



It's a collection of the kind of poetry that records, or, at least, begins from the quotidian of place, often written in the first person and usually taking off into poetic enquiry in a consciously temporal mode. Poetry that the editors describe as 'Journal Poetry' :

It includes work from:

Bob Arnold ↔ Ken Bolton ↔ Daniel Bouchard ↔ Pam Brown
Thomas A. Clark ↔ Jack Collom ↔ William Corbett ↔ Tyler Doherty ↔ Marcella Durand ↔ Ryan Gallagher ↔Jonathan Greene ↔ Joanne Kyger ↔ Louise Landis Levi ↔ Joseph Massey ↔ Rachel McKeen ↔ Tom Morgan ↔ Hoa Nguyen ↔ Shin Yu Pai ↔ Mark Pawlak ↔ Michelle Naka Pierce ↔Stephen Ratcliffe ↔ Michael Rothenberg ↔ Andrew Schelling ↔ Joel Sloman ↔ Dale Smith ↔ Stacy Szymasek ↔ Aaron Tieger ↔ Joseph Torra

For more information and to buy a copy at US $18
contact Derek Fenner and Ryan Gallagher at bootstrapproductions@gmail.com
Bootstrap Productions

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high hills poems

Wordly goods


on this last day
of February
outside Cupid's Cup Cakes
on the main street
of this utterly strange
hilly town,
dawdling down
to Iso Bar
to take account
of the planet's fields -
wild beast grazing,
a scene cut intermittently
with alluring products
carried up street poles
by narrow vertical lines
cabling connection
to anywhere else

hoping for a place
deep in the shade,
verandahs all around,
somewhere to contemplate
what brought us here
to such manicured beauty -
formal garden hedges,
well-tended kerbs

no gangs  no blades
up here in the hills,
just x-box and the dole

they say
the kids are drunk
or on ice
at their clubs
or anorexic wherever
in rehab.
hopeful beginnings,
promised more
than pleasure,
but
they're not grown up,
not a..d..u..l..t
just caught in a reverie,
not ready
for voting driving loving
working cooking
learning new languages
new skills, talents,
what legacy ?

*

without income
for the first time
in a long long time
sounds like a song
coming on
(undercurrent worry
too)
on the last day of February,
the end of four months
on the road,
anyway, without
a fixed address

and the sun shines down
around, all around,
waiting for the book exchange
to open
to hire a computer
to check the mail, and the spam
and the petitions,
to let the government know
we don't like it ! at all !
etcetera no we don't !
illegal detainees, climate change,
education policy, refugees,
equal rights for gays,
indigenous land rights,
justice, etcetera.
my ergonomic-chair activism,
today
the mere thought
of these emails
only exasperates

perhaps I'll delete them
straightaway

*

all my things
boxed and stored interstate,
I miss some of the stuff,
need it, even,
most of it
I've forgotten
as a sanyasin
travelling
on air
might

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My poem Worldly goods is set in Katoomba in the Blue Mountains, Ken Bolton, co-ordinator of the Lee Marvin Readings in Adelaide, wrote a poem in response, but he hasn't been to the Blue Mountains for many moons and has mistaken the place for Blackheath, a town that could benefit, variously, from having an Iso Bar :

Mademoiselle Apollinaire in Blackheath

      for Pam Brown


In the end you are tired of living between always between

& wend your way to the Iso Bar here rather than in
Adelaide tho there is an Iso Bar in Adelaide too

You have lived in Adelaide

You have had enough of leaving Sydney
for Melbourne never to arrive

Blackheath’s Iso Bar must do
connecting you electronically to the world

making modern the cow in the nearby field
the hill the old car coming down the road

& in it a modern farmer Denis Gallagher say

more a poet really than a farmer
a gardener

something modern like a well-tended kerb
or the distemper of youth

a lawnmower a ladder crack cocaine TV
anorexia

& the sun shines down
waiting for the book-exchange, a computer

& politics
—to be avoided some days

others to be embraced—
Politics

In our ergonomic chairs
You remove us from abstractions the expansion of the
   spirit—

producing heat
involving the body

Like something intense & blue in Chagall
the memory of an object—a shirt a book an

ashtray with paperclips & your pencils in
a bottle, bound with an elastic band

You will have them soon
A sanyasin travelling on the air at night

lands at home
the moths batting about you as you write

Life tossed off like a glass of spirits
For who can stand outside time




     Ken Bolton, Adelaide, a couple of years ago.

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Lingering in Leura

There's something odd about this town. Look at this hedge. Look at the height of the standard telegraph pole towered-over by this hedge and my car, reduced to Matchbox-Series size alongside this hedge. Who clips this hedge ? The shears giant ?

The people of Leura like to call it a 'village' rather than a 'town' and the tiny main street is, to quote a friend of a friend, a kind of 'Disney Village'. There are pot-pourri-style shops, olde worlde cafes and antiques and collectables, and stressed walls, lace curtains and more chintz and curlicues than Sydney's Paddington and Balmain combined.

If you drive down the main street and continue to the very end you come to a cliff edge with an enormous vista of blue mountains and valleys - nothing but old gum forests from there to the horizon. And, just above an ironstone amphitheatre on the cliff's edge, fenced-in, chained together and forever gazing at the vista are the grand figures of Olive Oyl and Boofhead.



A strange relationship. Did Olive Oyl ever meet Boofhead ? Did Popeye ? These are the deep pop cultural enquiries that gripped me as I gazed out at the huge vista myself.

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We are lingering in Leura while we wait to move to our next (and permanent) address in Blackheath. And, serendipitously for the blog, there is a strange stencil graffiti on the footpath just outside the house. It seems to be more in the style of the curlicues than under the influence of the comic book detainees. Heading up the footpath there are two more - spaced about thirty metres apart. Hmmm…. three alter egos, avatars, femmes fatales ?

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Slavoj Zizek posits ribett ribett ♥ slurp and burp

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Blue Mountains BreakMirror of the World

White cloud drifting up from the Megalong Valley - that's the morning view from the window of the rented house on Narrow Neck Road, Katoomba where we are staying for the first week of January. It's very quiet here. I remember Sasha once saying that it was so quiet at the writers' retreat in this town that all you ever heard was the occasional sound of some other resident using the photocopier. From this place we hear a variety of birdcalls, the distant metallic kind of creaking of a long coal train on its way through the mountains to and from Lithgow a couple of times each day and, at night, the rumble of trucks driving along the Great Western Highway some distance from here.

There have been a couple of storms since we arrived. The thunderclaps are incredibly loud.

The old refrigerator in the laundry of the house gives off an annoyingly constant hum as it goes into one of its cycles several times in the day and night.

The lack of noise is hardly something to complain about but I am looking forward to next week when we move to another rented house in Leura, the next town to the south,
which actually faces a through-road to Wentworth Falls where there'll be some traffic to occupy the enormous available soundscape.

I've taken the advantage of having plenty of time and no distractions over the holiday week to read many articles and essays in various hard-copy subscription magazines - Art Monthly, the London Review of Books, overland, The Monthly, real time and the latest issue of Artlink which has a series of interviews with the people they call elders of the artworld, meaning influential and ageing Australian art historians, curators, lecturers, gallery directors and visual artists like Bernard Smith, Daniel Thomas, Donald Brook, the late Joan Brassil, Frank Watters, Bert Flugelman, the late Joan Kerr, Butcher Cherel Janangoo, Ray Crooke, Sally Gabori, Paula Paul, May Moodoonuthi (Bentick Island painters who work from the Aged Persons Hostel on Mornington Island), film-makers Arthur and Corinne Cantrill and many others. There is also Marina Strocchi's article on the mid-1990's beginnings of the senior women painters from the Ikuntji Womens Centre west of Alice Springs in Central Australia, one of whom, Ningura Napurrula, was invited to have her work grace the walls of the recently opened Musée du Quai Branly in Paris.

I have also read Martin Edmond's new book Luca Antara : Passages in search of Australia. It is an unusual book - a 'bookish' book in that Martin recounts his own historical interests and research obsessions via the books he reads about them. These obsessions follow in the wake of the 17th Century Portuguese and Dutch voyages on the Indian Ocean side of Western and Northern Australia. The books and maps that Martin, whose day job is as a Sydney taxi driver, studies are acquired from extraordinary antiquarian bookshops - one of which leads him into an encounter with an odd couple and, subsequently, a libertarian-style sexual affair. Martin is an original, exacting, and measured writer and I found it very pleasurable to read his descriptions of Sydney, especially of buildings that no longer stand or are irrevocably altered and that I remember as being as striking to me on my arrival in the city in 1968 as they are to the narrator of the book on his discovery of the city after arriving there from New Zealand. Places like the Sydney City Library in the grand old Queen Victoria Building and the now-vanished Anthony Hordern Building.

Luca Antara is a memoir but it is also an almost-scholarly enquiry into some of the speculative tales and fables around the early seafaring discoverers of Australia. It is multi-faceted. For example, intertextually, the author deals with the topic of hoax when, for an agreed fee, he ghost writes an undergraduate essay that leads him to the fictional poet Ern Malley. There is a feeling of mystery, uncertainty and of the fantastic that backgrounds the entire book - what is real ? what is dependable ? - as his obsessions unfold in both intellectual and actual journeys to places that include the Marquesas, Portugal, Paris, the straits of Malacca, Malaysia, Lombok and into encounters with possessors of old manuscripts like the weirdly mysterious Mr Henry Klang . He vividly describes the wreck of the 'Batavia' - a subject covered by several other Australian writers recently - on the premise of being engaged to write a film script. He becomes enthralled by the tale of a C17th Portuguese servant called Antônio da Nova who, abandoned during a mutiny on the coast of Western Australia, is rescued by an Aborigine who leads him on a long journey across the top end which becomes, of course, another journey of discovery of this continent, Australia.

Luca Antara : Passages in Search of Australia is published by East Street Publications

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In December I visited Mirror of the World an exhibition of items on the theme books and ideas from the archives of the State Library of Victoria in Melbourne.
The catalogue explains - ”Books are mirrors of many worlds: worlds here and distant, past and present, real and imagined. Through text and image they act as keepers of ideas, of knowledge and of stories.
Mirror of the World: books and ideas provides an overview of the history of book production, design and illustration, dating from the Middle ages through to the present day.„
So it includes an ancient cuneiform tablet, the 15th Century book Myrrour of the worlde printed by William Caxton, hand-painted manuscripts and books of hours, the popular 19th Century folly, a midget library, old maps, etchings, aquatints, editions o Shakespeare, a selection of the 20th century classic orange and white Penguin paperbacks from the 1940s - 1960s, lurid threepenny thrillers (well actually 2 and 6 thrillers - cover price 2 shillings and 6 pence), woodcuts, topographical illustrations, Audubon's birds, and so on and artists' books.


      A palm-sized midget library and magnifying glass. 1895

The artists' books include a copy of the July 1915 war issue of Wyndham Lewis's magazine Blast with its futurist woodblock cover, the intensely decorative William Morris edition of The works of Geoffrey Chaucer and so on.
I was surprised to see, for the first time, a display of one of the open pages of the rare limited edition of the Katoomba-based Wayzgoose Press's book of Ken Bolton's poem Terrific Days of Summer. It's large and long - a wonderful object lying there encased in a glass box.








      The Wayzgoose edition of Terrific Days of Summer.


Mirror of the World runs through February.
The Victorian State Library is located at
328 Swanston Street
Melbourne
Entry to the exhibition is free.

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Season's greetings

Best wishes to visitors to The Deletions for the silly season.

Carnivores - polish up the cutlery
and enjoy your turkeys and geese.
Vegans and vegetarians - please use your hands.




I will be here
again in 2007






Good cheer
Happy new year
Pam Brown

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Michael Callaghan Elwood stencilsPoetry blogging

A retrospective exhibition of over thirty years' work by silk-screen printing poster artist Michael Callaghan opens at the Manly Art Gallery on Friday evening.
Michael was a printmaker with Redback Graphix in Wollongong and at the (in)famous Tin Sheds Art Workshop on City Road in Sydney during its heyday.

Michael Callaghan
A Survey 1967- 2006
6pm Friday 1 December
Manly Art Gallery and Museum
West Esplanade, Manly
To be opened by Ann Stephen
(curator with The Sydney Powerhouse Museum)



(Posters by Michael Callaghan)

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In Elwood

I've been staying in Elwood, just south of St Kilda which is on Hobson's Bay to the south of Melbourne city. It is a generally neat suburb of leafy streets, brick bungalow-style houses and, increasingly, blocks of modern apartments. Walking to Elwood Village shopping area I pass these little stencils and this entrance to a garage in Ormond Road. They're quite different from the tougher inner-city stencil style you encounter on the more unkempt northern side of town - kind of sweet really.

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On poetry blogging

Anny Ballardini editor of the multilingual poetry site fiera lingue has compiled an interesting analysis of poetry blogging as part of her project at the University of New Orleans.

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IMPRO LAB

The Studio at Sydney Opera House
and De Quincey Co present

IMPRO-LAB: transparencies

IMPRO-LAB involves a collaboration with two legendary
Japanese artists, musician Sachiko M (Peril,
Player Piano) and vocalist Ami Yoshida with
renowned Australian artists: dancers Peter Fraser,
Yumi Umiumare, Tony Yap and Tess de Quincey
alongside musicians Jim Denley (Machine for
Making Sense) on wind instruments, Chris
Abrahams (The Necks) on keyboards, poet/vocalist
Amanda Stewart (Machine for Making Sense),
video artist Sam James and lighting designer
Clytie Smith.

Friday 24th & Saturday 25th November
at 8.15pm
The Studio
Sydney Opera House
(Entry fee :Adult $30
*Concession $25)

For more info and booking click here

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Really brief notesfrom the Princes Highway

On the thousand kilometre drive down the east coast's Princes Highway from Sydney to Melbourne, Victoria, as we stopped off in various places I realised that a number of contemporary poets hail from the coast. One such stop was in a dairy farming town on a wide tidal river winding into a picturesque valley of farms sheltered by a distant low range - Moruya, once the childhood home of well-known poet John Tranter, friend, poetry colleague and editor of Jacket. (John's father, a teacher, farmer and soft drink manufacturer, moved the family to Moruya when John was four years old.) Tourist brochure - Moruya We stayed overnight in Bega, another dairy farming town in New South Wales, known for its cheese. A town associated, for me, with another friend, the poet and gardener Denis Gallagher who lived there for some time in the late 1970's/early 1980's. As most places in Bega closed for business around six p.m. and the pubs became disturbing sources of Indigenous peoples' loud existential arguing, we opted for dinner at the Bega RSL (Returned Servicemans' League) Club. It was a world unto itself - thick dark curtains covered every window to screen out daylight and summer's late sunsets and to affect, in fact, permanent evening. One huge room with a long bar and a glassed-in Keno booth on one end. The lurid green walls encased a square of rows of poker machines, smoking areas marked simply by a suspended sign that you step under from the non-smoking part of the room to the other, a pool competition with the usual chalk heiroglyphics on a blackboard and a traditional meat raffle in which a large number of locals participated, hoping to win trays of lamb chops, beef roasts and snags. All of this was accompanied by a cacophonous mix of sounds of the pokies, an enormous Sky channel sports screen, a juke box, the raffle caller and half-shouted conversations. Bega RSL Club, November 2006 Further along the highway there were half a dozen ways of heading west towards a hinterland dairy farming town with the slightly comical, beautiful name of Bombala. The formative home town of two experimental poets Michael Farrell and Geraldine McKenzie. Something poetic in the cow's milk on the southern New South Wales coast ? Crossing the border into Victoria you enter dark logging forests and soon arrive in the coastal towns of East Gippsland. Almost twenty years ago Laurie Duggan wrote a complex, poetic meta-text about Gippsland, from the dispossession of the Indigenous people during early settlement, gold digging, farming, through the years of world wars, rural industry, the Snowy River and its attendant myths and history, and so on, progressing up until the 1980's. The Ash Range compiles journals, newspaper stories, gold prospectors' and others' letters, historical photos, topographical lithographs and Duggan's notes and poems to construct a prose and poetry epic. The last poem in the book canvasses, in its final stanzas, some of the cultural ironies or clashes of 'civilization' and 'the bush' - I remember the final image of a phone booth in the middle of the bush. That book's packed away with the rest of our books and household stuff in storage in Melbourne. Lakes Entrance, East Gippsland, November 2006

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Moving south

It seems that I'm an itinerant. I've moved around all my life - from early on, when, due to unusual circumstances, my mother, father, brother and sister took off in separate directions when I was just eighteen months old until now - and that's many years later. According to my partner Jane and her French friends, I have what they call la bougeotte - from the verb bouger - to move, or get around. La bougeotte means having the fidgets. I don't think of it this way at all - I just seem to change address fairly often. Not including various residencies overseas, and not including various addresses in the same suburbs at different times, in chronological order, these are the places I've lived :

Seymour, Victoria. Camp Hill, Brisbane. Army Base Toowoomba, Queensland. Enoggera Army Base, Gaythorne, West Chermside, Kangaroo Point, Milton, Figtree Pocket, Brisbane, Queensland. Little Bay, Paddington, Darlinghurst, Surry Hills, Sydney, New South Wales. Carlton, Melbourne, Victoria. Paddington, Surry Hills, Sydney, New South Wales. Sherbrooke Forest, Monbulk, Dandenong Mountains, Victoria. Glebe, Sydney. MacDonald Valley, New South Wales. Annandale, Rozelle, Sydney. Mountain Lagoon, New South Wales. Parkside, Adelaide, South Australia. Newtown, Petersham, Camperdown, Ultimo, Bellevue Hill, Sydney. Blackheath, New South Wales and, finally, I'll say farewell from Rose Bay, Sydney.


















 Sultry morning, Rose Bay, Sydney
25th October 2006

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                   The famous saucepan (foto courtesy AWM, Canberra)


One of the stories that Rose Bay locals like to tell concerns a Japanese submarine and the damaged aluminium saucepan. It was taken from the kitchen of the place next door to where we've lived for the last four and a half years. It was demolished by a shell from the large Japanese submarine I-24. The I-24, which had launched the midget submarine in a famous attack on Sydney Harbour a week earlier, fired ten shells into the Sydney suburbs of Bellevue Hill, Woollahra, Rose Bay and Vaucluse on the night of 7-8 June 1942. The only one of these shells to explode fell outside the Yallambee Flats on Plumer Road, Rose Bay, where it caused considerable damage. Several slight injuries were suffered by civilians, and as a result, many residents of the Eastern Suburbs of Sydney took up temporary residence in safer locations such as the Blue Mountains of NSW.


                   Yallambee, 3 Plumer Road, today

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One way to enter the building at the University of Sydney that houses Badham Library, where I've worked for the past sixteen years is via the Graffiti Tunnel. I have been very fond of walking through this particular passageway and its ephemeral imagery.




             Graffiti Tunnel, University of Sydney, 2006

This time, we're moving south to Melbourne.


       A shipping container 'Art Box', Melbourne Arts Festival, 2005

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A note to visitors to The Deletions - you can click on any images that appear on the blog if you want to see them in larger sizes.

FULCRUM and SYNCITY

FULCRUM is proud to announce the publication of its fifth annual issue and the launch of its brand-new website.

FULCRUM: an annual of poetry and aesthetics, Number Five, 2006, edited by Philip Nikolayev and Katia Kapovich * 544 pp., perfectbound, exquisitely designed, cheaply priced * SPECIAL FEATURES: Poets and Philosophers; Poetry and Harvard in the 1920s * POETRY BY Stephen Sturgeon, Ben Mazer, Jeet Thayil, Vivek Narayanan, Glyn Maxwell, Joe Green, Landis Everson, Dan Sofaer, Billy Collins, John Tranter, Andrea Zanzotto, Don Share, Sean O Riordain, Greg Delanty, Michael Palmer, Kit Robinson, Brian Henry, Pam Brown, David Lehman, John Hennessy, Charles Bernstein, Charles Baudelaire, Guillaume Apollinaire, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Arthur Rimbaud, X.J. Kennedy, John Crowe Ransom, Alex To, Fiona Sampson, Fan Ogilvie, Richard Fein, Joyelle McSweeney, Justin Marks, Gerard Malanga, Alexei Tsvetkov, George Bilgere, John Wheelwright, Malcolm Cowley, R.P. Blackmur, Dudley Fitts... * ESSAYS BY Eliot Weinberger, Peter H. Hare, Simon Critchley, Marjorie Perloff, Lisa Goldfarb, Pierre Joris, Raymond Barfield... * ART Esther Pullman, e.e. cummings * INTERVIEW: Andrea Zanzotto * ...AND MUCH MORE!

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Kate Richards' and Sarah Waterson's
'sub_scapePROOF - a machinima'
is in SynCity
a survey show of dlux greatest hits!

Opening 6 - 8pm
Friday 20th October

australian centre for photography
257 Oxford Street
Paddington, Sydney

Exhibition runs 21st Oct til 26th Nov
Tues-Fri 12md - 7pm
Sat-Sun 10am - 6pm

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Vernal stirrings

                                              A & B, frisky


Spring

foyer's cat-sprayed dado walls
welcome mat in tatters
a neighbour announces
the first cockroach
of spring

fresh southerly change
chance of a shower
tell the dirty sacred ibis
feasting on boutique rubbish
from the skip
behind the Italian deli
to wing it

oddly elegiac
turning on the variety show's
latest episode
garden power reigns supreme
blue collar sensibilities
fill each fresh poem
and minds meet

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SIEV X

In October 2001, over 400 asylum-seekers departed from Indonesia in a grossly overcrowded, unseaworthy boat bound for Australia. Somewhere between the two countries the boat sank, with a terrible loss of life. 353 of the asylum-seekers drowned.The boat was known as the SIEV X.
The Australian government claimed it had no prior knowledge of the unfolding tragedy. Yet, from the beginning, government ministers and senior officials tried to mislead the Australian Senate and the community over important questions. What did the government and its agencies know about the boat and its fate, and when did they know? Did they have or should they have taken any responsibility for the tragedy? Did they have a duty of care that they shirked ?

This weekend a public memorial will be held in the Australian Capital Canberra to mark the fifth anniversary of this tragic incident:

Siev X Memorial Ceremony and Raising of the Poles

Weston Park
Yarralumla
Canberra

2 pm Sunday 15 October 2006

Ex- Australian-ambassador to Cambodia and Poland, Tony Kevin wrote an investigative book about the sinking of the SIEV X - A Certain Maritime Incident, published by Scribe in 2004. The book revealed a disquieting record of government misconduct, including Australian Federal Police involvement in a people-smuggling 'disruption program', and an extraordinary combination of stone-walling and professed ignorance by a government dedicated to micro-managing the deterrence of asylum-seeker voyages.

Many of the victims of this disaster have family members living in Australia on temporary protection visas. This book is dedicated to them. It is also for the rest of us because, Tony Kevin argues, nothing less than a comprehensive judicial enquiry into the sinking of SIEV X will suffice if Australia is to regain its national honour.



Tony Kevin retired from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade in 1998, after a thirty-year public service career. He served in the Prime Minister's Department, and was Australia's ambassador to Poland and Cambodia. He is currently an honorary visiting fellow at the ANU Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies. He has written extensively on Australian foreign, national security and refugee policies in Australia's national print media, including Eureka Street, Canberra Times, the Age, Sydney Morning Herald, the Australian, and Australian Financial Review.

He has also recently written a critique of the proposed Australian Values and English Test that Sylvia Lawson also covered recently - blogged here on The Deletions.

A letter to the editor of The Sydney Morning Herald Newspaper on this topic was published yesterday :

Language test for immigrants is a smokescreen
(October 13, 2006)

I write concerning the proposal that immigrants must speak English.
A language test on immigrants harks back to the dark days of white supremacy in Australia, and the test will prove absolutely nothing about immigrants' ability to integrate.

One of my happiest days in the Australian foreign service was December 5, 1972, with the end of the White Australia Policy.
To that time the Australian government excluded non-white immigrants by testing them in a language they did not know.

I have lived in non-English-speaking countries and understand how hard it is for the first generation of immigrants to operate in a second language. As any immigrant family will tell you, it is the second generation who become the native speakers of English, while all are part of the community in their own way.

My wife is an immigrant who speaks English. She has degrees in French, Russian and Chinese literature from the University of Michigan, University of California, Berkeley, and the Sorbonne.

She has more letters after her name than are in her name. You would think she is the sort of well-educated person Australia would welcome. However, her Australian experience was hellish. She wanted to integrate, but Australians, by and large, would not allow that.

That said, she and I made many dear Australian friends, but because of the attitude of the community at large, we prefer to stay out of Australia and make the occasional return trip to see friends and family.

My wife and I have become expatriates not because her language skills did not allow her to integrate and take on Australian values but because the pure merinos, the Australian-born Australians, were so uniformly hostile to her.

Is Australia ready for well-educated, white-collar immigrants? Are Australians ready to compete with them for jobs?
If not, how does Australia hope to allow them to make a life for themselves in Australia? Will these well-educated, English-speaking immigrants be satisfied making beds in hotels and serving in fish-and-chip shops?

The matter of English testing falls in the field of language policy and this debate needs to be informed by experts in that field.

The English language test is a smokescreen. In our experience the real problemf for immigrants trying to integrate into Australian society is the Australians, who are denying the values of those who seek to live there.

Geoffrey Thomas, Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo

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