Culture

The secret history of Pine Gap, Australia's CIA spy base

On December 9, 1966, the Australian government signed a public agreement with the United States to build what both countries misleadingly called a “Joint Defence Space Research Facility” at Pine Gap, just outside Alice Springs.

Officially, Pine Gap is a collaboration between the Australian Department of Defence and the Pentagon’s Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency. In reality this conceals the real purpose of Pine Gap as a CIA-run spy base designed to collect signals from US surveillance satellites in geosynchronous orbit over the equator.

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Perth artist paints Earth's grief

Below are the opening remarks by long-established West Australian artist, Lynne Tinley at the opening night of Earth Grief, a retrospective exhibition of her art. The exhibition was displayed at the Sustainable Housing for Artists and Creatives (SHAC) Colab2, White Gum Valley, Fremantle beginning on September 27.

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Grief is a passion, an emotional force; it is the dark cloud that brings the rain.

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Film exposes slavery in South East Asian fishing industry

This Australian-made film dramatises the experience of a 14-year-old Cambodian boy who is tricked into boarding a fishing vessel, where he is enslaved.

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If you don't hear these 10 political albums, you're missing out
If you don't hear these 10 political albums, you're missing out

Mat Ward takes a look at 10 new albums with something to say on politics and struggle around the world.

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Poem: A Pair of Appalling Pikers Pollute the Planet

This dastardly duo deserve dusty derision, writes John Monfries.

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Women's pain, medicine's shame

Women’s health and chronic pain has been ignored throughout medical history, writes Gabrielle Jackson. Pain, and more specifically, pelvic pain has been seen as an intrinsic part of womanhood.

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How professional sports have sought to harness mystical 'powers' for profit

This book is effectively a sequel to Jon Ronson’s The Men Who Stare at Goats, which inspired an hilarious film of the same name. That book exposed the US military's serious experimentation with all sorts of weird and whacky, New Age, mind-altering techniques to produce better killers.

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Marx's favourite writer Diderot: A subversive Enlightenment philosopher who opened new ideological fronts

Denis Diderot is now remembered, if at all, only as the name of a Metro railway station in an unfashionable neighbourhood of Paris. 

In his day, however, the 18th century Enlightenment philosopher was quite the subversive intellectual who parted the ideological fog of religious, moral and political backwardness for a view of the sunnier uplands of today’s society, writes Phil Shannon.

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When Our Turn Comes' launch debut single 'Climate Strike'

"Are we seriously going to wait until there is no North Pole before we step on the brakes?" 

Check out When Our Turn Comes' debut single "Climate Strike".

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Why 'progressive' arguments for limiting immigration are wrong

Is there a progressive case for restricting immigration into the United States? After reading Phillip Cafaro’s book, my answer is still no — but I readily concede that there are too many intellectual hacks who use progressive-sounding rhetoric to advocate anti-immigrant positions

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