Culture

At this year’s Deadly Awards, an annual celebration of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture being held on September 27, all eyes will be on one of the fastest rising stars in Aboriginal music.

Yirrkala, in north-east Arnhem land, is home to the famous 1963 “Bark Petition”. This was a protest action by the Yolngu people that led to the first native title litigation in Australia’s history. I was there last month for the anniversary of that stage of their landmark struggle. The petition was an attempt by the Yolngu people to force legal recognition of their land ownership rights.

How ironic that The Clash should be on the cover of the British music magazine NME in the week that London was burning, that their faces should be staring out from the shelves as newsagents were ransacked and robbed by looters intent on anarchy in Britain.

There used to be snow On the mountain tops Now the rivers run low Nothing left for the crops Where will they go They who work the land When all the ancestral waters Have vanished in the sand? Free market policies And vanishing border lines Replacing highland pastures With open cut mines No choice but to leave A thousand years behind City lights on the horizon What will they find? Billboards by the highway Paper-thin lies Selling progress and consumerism As the land about them dies Welcome to decaying sewers And chemical smokestack plumes

Downfall: The Tommy Sheridan Story By Alan McCombes, Birlinn 2011 326 pages, pb £9.99 In the elections to the Scottish parliament in May 2003, the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP) polled just under a quarter of a million votes and won six seats. By any stretch of the imagination this was a remarkable achievement for a party well to the left of Labour. It was a beacon of hope and inspiration for socialists the world over. By 2011, the SSP’s vote had slumped to below 9000. It failed to regain any of the six seats it had lost in 2007.

You can see that western Sydney Aboriginal rapper Sesk has turned his life around when he holds his head up high. Not only does it give him an air of self-esteem - it also reveals that the large tattoo across his neck reading "GUILTY" has another word inked above it: "NOT".

I am and have always been a pro-active pacifist.. I long and pray for a peaceful caring world. A world of respect and sharing. Whats happened in London and Birmingham and Liverpool and what will be the rest of the country deeply upsets me.

Our Way to Fight Michael Riordon Pluto Press, 2011 “People safely outside the situation sometimes ask ‘Why don’t more Palestinians use non-violent protest?’ says Michael Riordon is his concluding chapter to Our Way To Fight. “The question ignores the long history of Palestinian attempts to seek justice through non-violent means, and the equally long history of official Israeli violence in suppressing these attempts.”

Black Swan By Carolyn Landon & Eileen Harrison 238 pages Allen & Unwin, June 2011 Bestselling author Carolyn Landon says the main revision she had to make in writing her latest book, Black Swan was editing all her anger out of it. "I had difficulty with my own voice," she tells  Green Left Weekly about the book, a memoir of Koori artist Eileen Harrison. "Mainly, it was getting my own angry and ashamed responses to what Eileen was telling off my chest. After I let off steam in the drafts, I eliminated most of my reactions.

Last year, the Sydney Underground Film Festival hosted the Australian premier of Oliver Stone's documentary on Latin America's revolutions South of the Border. This year, the festival is taking place this year on September 8-11 at the The Factory Theatre in Marrickville. Festival organisers have five double passes to giveaway for the film Better This World (see below) to Green Left Weekly readers. Be one of the first to email  [email protected]  with the subject line “911” to win.

Dick Smith’s Population Crisis: The Dangers of Unsustainable Growth for Australia Allen & Unwin, Sydney 2011, 228 pages   Those who say today’s big social and ecological problems stem from there being too many people on the planet face a special difficulty. As the Australian ecologist Alan Roberts once said, populationist authors need “to persuade their readers that the main thing wrong with the world was the existence of those readers themselves”.  

“If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the oppressed and loving the people doing the oppressing,” African American revolutionary Malcolm X, assassinated in 1965 at the age of 39, once said in a comment on the capitalist media that applies to contemporary reporting on English riots or refugees.