Michelle Arrow

Such a lovely tribute to Graeme. As Andrew notes, we need his calm, clear advocacy for the humanities now more than ever:

YouTube video by ChildishGambinoVEVO Childish Gambino - This Is America (Official Video)

This song is 7 1/2 years old now.

youtu.be/VYOjWnS4cMY?...

Please share. 💔

There’s a whole Honours thesis to be written about this one:

And this definitely deserves its place in the top 25

She’s definitely the best performer in this extravaganza

YouTube video by Oz Kitsch 42 COLDEST 100 | Brekky Boy | Centrelink Hold Music (2025)

COLDEST 100: 2026 EDITION
42. Centrelink Hold Music (2025)
Brekky Boy
#coldest100 #hottest100
youtu.be/TtXmkwRS9vY

Also outstanding:

This is outstanding:

And one more thing. Students. If you have a professor who is, for some reason, outsourcing their own job to ChatGPT....drop the class.

If they tell you to "ask ChatGPT" for sources, drop the class.

Because they apparently don't know their own discipline well enough to teach it.

Rich private schools are gouging parents with huge fee increases while also pocketing millions a year in govt money – yet 98% of public schools don’t get their minimum funding.

Should Labor be pouring billions a year into the private system while public schools are underfunded?

I cannot be party to silencing writers, which is why I am resigning as director of Adelaide Writers’ Week | Louise Adler Cancelling the Australian Palestinian author Randa Abdel-Fattah weakens freedom of speech and is the harbinger of a less free nation

Powerful statement from Louise Adler and a huge loss to see her go from AWW.

Postdoctoral Fellow, Creative Writing - Cairns, QLD, Australia - Townsville, QLD, Australia - Other, QLD, Australia College of Arts, Society and Education | James Cook University Fixed term to December 2029 Part-time (20%), increasing to 60% by 2027  Located at either the Cairns Nguma-bada campus or Townsville Beb...

📣Postdoc in creative writing 📣

careers.jcu.edu.au/jobs/postdoc...

‘A nation of rich cowards’: Australia needs its dreamers but the arts are underfunded, undervalued and despised We need a society that values its visionaries, those who go against the grain to create new dreams that reveal other ways of being

‘It’s financial stupidity to enter the humanities in any of our universities, and the current federal government has done nothing to abate that.’ Great piece by Ben Quilty on our undervaluing of the arts in Australia:
www.theguardian.com/artanddesign...

BREAKING: 3 members of the Adelaide Festival Board have resigned after it refused to reverse its decision to rescind Dr Abdel-Fattah's invitation. No statement has been issued but their names have been quietly removed from the website.

Four people are now responsible for the ongoing crisis.

The Adelaide Writers Festival now wrecked by the Adelaide Festival Board, half of which was appointed late last year: a marketing executive; a former politician; a local councillor/real estate agent; an airport manager; a lawyer; a media consultant; and a banker. Another public arts takeover fiasco.

Where’s Tony Burke?

It’s times like these you realise that arts ministers have no interest in defending the arts, and that govts are willing to burn millions of $ for political reasons.

Adelaide’s board has just squandered millions of $ and months of work and countless opportunities for writers…

Bendigo Writers Festival, Meanjin, now Adelaide Writers … powerful vested interests would rather destroy the cultural institutions they are supposedly responsible for than allow certain voices to be heard

As authors abandon Adelaide Writers’ Week after cancelling of Randa Abdel-Fattah, is free speech in tatters? The decision to silence a Palestinian Australian author goes well beyond the standards of the Racial Discrimination Act and ordinary standards of free speech.

Denis Muller on the Adelaide shitshow

theconversation.com/as-authors-a...

Imagine if the board of a major arts org issued a statement saying they would respect and defend the programming decisions of their staff? Unlikely to happen, but it would be an invigorating and much needed win for artistic and curatorial freedom.

That they’re coming after the judges reflects their belief that they now completely own the public square. This is late-stage McCarthyism.

My statement regarding my decision to withdraw from this year’s Adelaide Writers Festival.

Anne Summers: Living in the Seventies | Australian Women's History Network Vera Mackie joins Michelle Arrow and Zora Simic in commemorating fifty years of Anne Summers' 1975 feminist blockbuster, Damned Whores and God's Police.

As we approach the end of 2025, historians @michellearrow.bsky.social and @zorasimic.bsky.social reflect on Anne Summers’ 1975 book, Damned Whores and God’s Police, fifty years later.

Read more here ⬇️
www.auswhn.com.au/blog/anne-su...

Australia had the ‘gold standard’ on gun control. The Bondi beach terror attack may force it to confront its surging number of weapons There are now more guns in the community per capita than in the aftermath of the Port Arthur massacre, with at least 2,000 new firearms lawfully entering the community every week

Looks like we've become complacent since the gun restrictions of the 1990s - time for even more stringent rules. The worst gun violence in Australia in 30 years...

It's wild that there appears to be more current concern for the Lost Library of Alexandria than for the British Library. The BL's crisis exemplifies the accelerating destruction--through apathy as much as by design--of human knowledge & learning. I'm not even being dramatic.

THIS 👇

How did the 10 prime ministers since Whitlam change Australia? As prime minister, Whitlam changed the country in profound ways. 10 experts assess how the prime ministers since shape up as agents of change - for better or worse.

And putting Whitlam in a longer context - short essays on all the PMs since Whitlam here:

theconversation.com/how-did-the-...

Extraordinary and occasionally inept: before The Dismissal, the Whitlam government changed Australia forever With a bold reform agenda and occasional administrative chaos, Whitlam’s three-year government had, and continues to have, a profound effect on Australian life.

It’s that time of year when too much Whitlam is barely enough! Here’s my addition to the fray:

theconversation.com/extraordinar...

That’s so kind of you, Kristen - thank you!