Death comes for us all. We are outlived, as Barkandji man Woddy Harris would have it, by Mother Nature, who holds us in something that I think he would liken to ‘eternity’. By what logic, then, must Mother Nature also die? The Barkandji in Wilcannia and nearby Menindee had been protesting and putting their effort […]
Academia
If you’ve ever been at a Dutch PhD ceremony, you’ve come across the toga – which is, unfortunately not a Greek or Roman toga as pictured here. Instead, it’s a kind of black gown, made from heavy cloth, with velvet facings, accompanied by a white collar and a velvet hat that resembles the mortarboards that […]
With another COP starting today, and the question of climate change having played no role at all in the Dutch elections recently, and, well, for a zillion different reasons – it seems like a good time to ask the question: what books can help to make people move on this topic? (or if you think […]
I’ve been visiting family in Germany, with only a phone, so I couldn’t post on Sunday. But here are some crows from Hamburg.
In the Wilcannia cemetery a lot of plastic is on display. This cemetery is an important local monument not because it celebrates the working class, because it doesn’t. Unlike in Broken Hill, there are no tourist guides to the cemetery, no famous people that I know of. I camped on the river in Wilcannia, often […]
“An ELECTIVE DESPOTISM was not the government we fought for; but one which should not only be founded on free principles, but in which the powers of government should be so divided and balanced among several bodies of magistracy, as that no one could transcend their legal limits, without being effectually checked and restrained by […]
On the longer time scale that we feel in nature, the violence of colonial capitalism seems almost fleeting. ‘Mother Nature will outlast all of this’, Barkandji man Woddy Harris told me, gesturing across his hometown of Wilcannia, two hours’ drive from Broken Hill, and which has a majority Barkandji population. I wondered about this when, […]
One of the big puzzles in the last months, for those observing the politics in the US and elsewhere, is this: why is there apparently so little protest against the attacks on democracy and the rule of law, and why does it happen in some but not other cases? I want to share a hypothesis, […]