It is the 14th February 2025 and the rebuilt version of my website has just gone live.
To celebrate the launch of my rebuilt website, I sit at my computer and ponder what blog post I might write. Goodness knows, the world throws up enough topics to rail against that I feel spoilt for choice. In fact, where does one start?
Today’s news throws up the shameful and disgraceful treatment of Khaled Sabsabi. But I am feeling a little too angry, a little too close to even tackle that topic. That the board of Creative Australia, including several Indigenous representatives, would unanimously public humiliate and dishonour an artist, whose very race and background has been challenged as non-existent this week in the Lattouf unfair dismissal case, for being “controversial”, should lead to outrage and alarm. But it won’t.
Art is meant to challenge and confront, to hold up a mirror to society to show society its reflection in a stark, honest and often unflattering light. But perhaps punk poet Patrick Fitzgerald was right when he spoke all those years ago and said:1
They turn it into a joke
Anything that threatens them
They turn it into a dog or cat that they can stroke
And that couldn’t bite it’s own tail.
How dare anyone speak up against or outside of the orthodoxy!
And that got me thinking, as I was looking through my old google drive and I found an old article I had written in 2015. I had submitted it and it had been through it’s peer review and accepted for publication. But then I was directed, by my higher ups and betters within the court, to withdraw it before publication. So, I did.
But seeing as I found it, 10 years after writing it, I thought I would share it here. And if you read on from here, and especially if you make it to the end, I would invite you to ask yourself the question – Has anything changed? After all, as Audre Lorde wrote “The Masters tools will never dismantle the Master’s house”2.
Here it is.
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