Culture

  • The deadly chemistry of profit

    Slow Death By Rubber Duck: How the Toxic Chemistry of Everyday Life Affects Our Health
    By Rick Smith & Bruce Lourie
    University of Queensland Press, 2009
    323 pages, $34.95 (pb)

  • Ecofeminism meets ecosocialism

    Eco-sufficiency and Global Justice: Women write political ecology
    Edited by Ariel Salleh
    Pluto Press/Spinifex Press, 2009

  • Tiger Woods: a brand before a human being

    The February 19 Tiger Woods press conference was an exercise in self-abasement that will achieve the opposite of its intended effect. I haven’t seen anything this painfully scripted since The Phantom Menace.

  • Dedicated to my brother

    My hands began to shake And my tears were held by my fight for strength As my body turned to ice They began with the story they were about to make Like a novel they began to tell what my ears could not bear to hear Their mouths moved but I

  • Whose Mardi Gras?

    Sex sells. So this year’s Mardi Gras flaunted itself. Its cod-piece was the python-esque parade snaking up Oxford Street, a ribald, risque body of bodies-politic. Marchers fed off a frenzied live street audience of more than 100,000 with even more watching on TV. It’s a show with a capital S, buoying pink-dollar tourism and state coffers by $30 million.

  • Time to fire up

    Free to a Good Home, By Catherine Deveny, Black Inc., 2009, 213 pp, $24.95 (pb)

  • Redfern's radical priest

    Ted Kennedy, Priest of Redfern By Edmund Campion, David Lovell Publishing, 2009 201 pages, $24.95

  • We are refugees

    No … politeness, happiness, humanity Have … pain, sorrow, suffering Nobody is here … to love us Nobody is here … to be honesty We are suffering without love We were expecting politeness We were looking for humanity. But We couldn't