Eve of a New Day

Red Ink

On several occasions this week I have felt overcome with excitement at the occupation of Wall Street. It feels like for too long Americans, and Australians, have been happy to sit back and accept the status quo dished out by big business. Finally, finally, people are standing up and saying No More.

A couple of days ago, the philosopher Slavoj Zizek spoke to Occupy Wall Street protesters at Liberty Plaza. Here's something he said that has stuck with me:

In an old joke from the defunct German Democratic Republic, a German worker gets a job in Siberia; aware of how all mail will be read by censors, he tells his friends: "Let's establish a code: if a letter you will get from me is written in ordinary blue ink, it is true; if it is written in red ink, it is false." After a month, his friends get the first letter written in blue ink: "Everything is wonderful here: stores are full, food is abundant, apartments are large and properly heated, movie theatres show films from the West, there are many beautiful girls ready for an affair - the only thing unavailable is red ink."

And is this not our situation till now? We have all the freedoms one wants - the only thing missing is the red ink: we feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom. What this lack of red ink means is that, today, all the main terms we use to designate the present conflict - 'war on terror', 'democracy and freedom', 'human rights', etc - are FALSE terms, mystifying our perception of the situation instead of allowing us to think it. You, here, you are giving to all of us red ink.

There are videos of his speech here. Even if you only have a minute, it's worth watching just for that. As the protesters aren't allowed megaphones or any form of amplification, the crowd close to Zizek repeats each sentence after him for their fellow protesters further away.

Thank you. We hear you loud and clear.

High 5-ing the World

Resolution? Promise? Goal? I don't know what you'd call it, but a year ago we made one.

In a conversation about where we'd like to be as a family, we quickly realised that the future we were planning didn't include a car.

Three years ago we gave up shopping at supermarkets, a year ago we gave up air travel, two months ago we gave up eating out of season and we're slowly transitioning towards giving up our mobile phones. But giving up our car feels like the biggest decision we have made so far.

It took us a year of preparation. We started a log book so we could see all the reasons we were justifying using the car. We biked, walked, carpooled and used public transport as much as we could, and after surviving the winter, knew that we were ready.

The town we call home has limited public transport options—no trams and no trains—so we knew we'd have to be a bit more organised whenever we wanted to leave. But on the plus side, we live in town, so it's a five minute bike ride up to the post office or library.

A week ago, we drove our car to Melbourne and delivered it to its new owner. The second he drove away it started to pour, and it dawned on me for the first time, the reality of our decision.

The next day, PJ started converting our carport into a bike/tool/potting shed.

After researching and test riding several cargo bikes, we finally made our decision. Yesterday PJ and I bussed and trained to Melbourne where we picked up our Kona Utes. Our first ride was a two-hour stint from the nearest train station, home.

My legs feel strong today, though my arms are a little sunburnt. Not from waving down passing cars to give us a lift, but from feeling so overwhelmed with freedom, I couldn't help high 5-ing the world.

We Rode

I thought we'd get a crowd of 20 people, I had hoped we'd get 30, but 40 turned up, which is about 1.3% of our small town's population.

We rode bikes and scooters. We rang our bells and we blew our whistles. We waved to people we know and those we didn't, standing on the footpath. We slowed the traffic to the pace of our cheers and wheels.

We reclaimed public roads as public space.

Then we all sat around with our celebratory ales, toasting the mighty and the free.

If you're this way inclined, please feel free to join the Daylesford Critical Mass Facebook page.

Or if you're that way inclined, please feel free to tune into ABC Ballarat this coming Monday at 6.40am (yikes!) to hear me talking about the event.

I look forward to riding with you in a month!

Thanks for the photos, Kate.

En Masse

We made it! The weather here is still chilly and un-springlike, but the coldest wintry days feel like they're behind us.

We have walked and ridden our bikes on 90% of the journeys we made this winter past, and I am happy to report I haven't had a single cold. PJ takes a raw garlic clove at the first hint of a sniffle, but I swear by my daily intake of spirulina. And lots of time spent outdoors.

The advent of the warmer weather is bringing with it more people on bikes in this little town of ours, but not necessarily more bike awareness, so we thought we'd change that with our very own Critical Mass.

If you live anywhere near the Central Highlands, we're meeting at the zebra crossing outside Daylesford Primary School at 5pm on the last Friday of each month, which means our inaugural ride is tomorrow.

If you're going to come along, please do come say hello. For those of you I've never met, here's what I look like:

And yes! That is a puppy in my basket. Introducing Zero, the newest addition to The Artist as Family. He's a 9 week old Jack Russell and he'll be coming along tomorrow too.

Hope to see you there!

(Thank you, Kate for the photos.)

Overlooked

Just over a year ago I was deeply moved as I took part in Deborah Kelly's tribute to one man's stance against the tyranny of his government.

So when PJ and I received an email about Ms Kelly's latest project, Muffled Protest, we jumped at the chance to be involved.

Here are some photos from yesterday's action in Melbourne, that aimed to highlight the overwhelming injustice of incarcerating asylum seekers and their children in detention camps—how blind we have become to the suffering of others.

Parade

PJ and I took part in the annual New Year's Eve parade down the main street of our town last night. Here we are in our trashy costumes, as snapped by our dear friend Glen, moments before a giant storm came to wash away 2009:

And here we are last year:

Thank you again, Ian for helping us with the signs.

Happy, happy new year, y'all!

Bike Week

It's Bike Week here in the Land of Meg; a whole week of posts dedicated to the wonder that is the bicycle.

Two days ago, this wonder was on display in our town for all the community to experience.

To celebrate International Day of Climate Action, two local green groups screened the film, The Age of Stupid, which I implore you to see if you have not yet.

To offset the carbon generated by the projector during the screening, 12 grid-connected bikes were set up in the middle of town on Saturday, the day of the screening, to generate the 2,000 megawatt hours needed to power the film that night.

As the bicycle is the most efficient means of self-powered transport, I have always thought that pedal power = a lot of power. But compared to coal power, which we receive at the flick of a switch, pedal power is an inefficient, time-consuming way of producing electricity. But boy oh boy was it a fun way to learn that it takes nearly all day to create enough juice to screen an 89 minute film!

Happy Bike Week, y'all!

Equal Love

Photo

Yesterday was the National Day of Action for Same-Sex Marriage, which culminated in 150 couples getting illegally wed outside the Australian Labour Party National Conference in Sydney.

I am ashamed of the Australian government's policies on many issues, but I am especially regretful of its refusal to budge on its homophobic Christian stance on gay marriage and same sex civil unions.

Have you seen that video that's doing the rounds at the moment of the couple and their bridal party dancing down the aisle? It's oh so cheesy, but I must admit that I have clicked replay on it more than once. There's something really lovely and liberated about the way the bride dances down on her own; no man to give her away, she's doing it on her on terms. My one wish for that couple is my one wish for all couples: that their love and commitment to one another be mightier than all the statistics stacked against them, and more honourable than our policy makers are.

Anti-Social Climbing

It's been nearly 18 months since Prime Minister Kevin Rudd made his sorry speech to the stolen generation and still, tourists are allowed to climb Uluru, which is a sacred site for local Aboriginal people.

This week a draft management plan has been released for the Uluru-Kata Tjuta national park, calling for, among other things, a ban on people climbing Uluru. The plan also points out the environmental impact of climbers, such as erosion along paths and the effect on wildlife of rubbish left behind.

Earlier this week, Julian Morrow from The Chaser dressed up in mountaineering gear and attempted to scale the spire of St John's Anglican Church in Canberra, where Prime Minister Rudd was giving an address and where he and his wife were married in 1981.

When it was reported in the news, The Chaser's stunt was called inappropriate and of poor taste.

But why? Because spiritual sites should not be climbed?

I am Dr. Tiller

I am Dr. Tiller is a website that was created as both a memorial to the lifework of Dr. George Tiller, the Kansas physician who was shot dead by an anti-abortion sociopath, and as a living testimony to the courageous lives of abortion providers.

Here you will find stories of individuals who have dedicated their lives to making abortion safe, legal, healthy, and accessible to women and girls. These people may be nurses, counselors, escorts, volunteers at abortion funds, or abortion doctors themselves. We share our stories in hopes of ending clinic violence, to alleviate the shame associated with the abortion experience, and as an homage to Dr. Tiller's outstanding and courageous life work.

(Thanks for the link, Dr P.)

Tank Man Tango

Yesterday I received an email from my friend Trudy:

Your participation is welcome to this international memorial for Tiananmen Square, on the 20th anniversary: 4 June, 2009. It's an ephemeral memorial made of dancing bodies in homage to the lone man who stood up to the tanks. A dance routine has been choreographed based on the movements of this man. This commemorative dance will be known as Tank Man Tango, it will take place in dozens of cities around the world and will be streamed on the Internet.

This afternoon I joined a group of people gathered to do the Tank Man Tango. Here some of us are, posing for the photographer from the local paper. Kerry stands in the foreground, embodying the Goddess of Democracy, the 10 meter tall statue created by the Chinese students as part of the Tiananmen Square protests.

I live in a small peaceful town, faraway from places where democracy is not tolerated, where violence is the answer if you dare ask the question. I thought that I would go this afternoon, do the dance and come home to cook a nice hot dinner. But as I moved my body, and shook my arms in defiance, I thought: I stand for something.

I opened up the paper this morning and read about still more violence perpetrated against Indian students and now Chinese students too. I stand for these students. We all shook our plastic bags, imitating the man who stood bravely before the tanks 20 years ago. I stand for that man. I try to avoid buying anything packaged in plastic, so the irony of waving my toxic pompoms was not lost on me. I stand for what the plastics industry doesn't give a shit about.

We stomped out the movements of one person's dance of anger against his government. I stand for just one person. He swung his arms and stomped his opposition onto his rightful place to be free on his land. I stand for his freedom. I stand for his right. I stand for the rights of all people to stomp their dance on their own land. I stand for their dance. I stand for your dance. And I stand for the people who don't have hands to flail, who don't have bags, who don't have legs, who don't have land. I stand for the land.

One Candle

My friend Crumbs and I have been friends since we were five. (That's 30 years!) Today her daughter celebrated her third birthday, so Z and I went down to Melbourne for her party. 

It was an afternoon of privileges – to have such lovely friends and to have known them all for so long, to have all this party food to eat, and to be able to travel by car, four trains and a tram in absolute safety without a hiccup.

Not so for so many. When we arrived in Melbourne we were met by 2,000 of Melbourne's Indian population who were protesting against the rising number of violent attacks against its community.

The protest began at the Royal Melbourne Hospital where an injured Indian student is battling for his life, and concluded at Parliament House with a candlelight vigil in support of the 500 Indian students who have been attacked over the past four years.

As we celebrated the wonder of Crumb's three year-old and sang Happy Birthday, I quietly dedicated one of the candles on her cake to the 500 students and their families.

The First Lawn

From One Green Generation:

Have You Heard? There Will Be An Organic Food Garden At The White House.

Michelle Obama is tearing up part of the South Lawn and planting an organic food garden for her family. How cool is that!

Michelle Obama has never grown a vegetable garden. The White House hasn’t had a garden on the South Lawn since Elanor Roosevelt planted a Victory Garden during World War II.

So How Did This Happen?

The Obamas have been lobbied to create a garden since before they entered the White House - even before Obama was elected!

Roger Doiron and Kitchen Gardeners International led that cause with their Eat The View Campaign. Roger created a YouTube video that became viral, a Facebook campaign continued the charge, the cause was joined by Alice Waters and other famous chefs, and people like you and I joined the cause by signing the petition, forwarding the idea to our friends, and so on.

The Obamas’ pediatrician had a hand as well. You see, the chaotic life of politics led the Obamas to eat out a lot, to have fast food and packaged meals regularly. Then Malia and Sasha gained weight! So the pediatrician gave Michelle a lecture in nutrition, and the family began to change their eating habits.

The family’s Chicago chef, Sam Kass - who came with them to the White House as assistant White House chef - is an advocate of the local food movement. He’ll be overseeing the garden himself.

The White House Executive Chef, Cristeta Comerford, and the Pastry Chef Bill Yosses will both be arranging their menus around the garden.

One of the White House carpenters, Charlie Brandts, is a beekeeper and has offered to keep two hives to provide fresh honey.

And you and I - who have come together to create a movement of local, seasonal, fresh, organic, home-grown food - we have had a large hand in making this happen. We have helped make it popular, we have helped make it important, we have helped redefine normal. Together.

From here, the White House garden will inspire many, many others to grow their own food, to pay attention to nutrition, to support local food systems. And we will all continue to do our parts as well. Together, we are changing the world.

Free Birth

Our friend Jacinta, who gave birth to both her sons at home, organised this peaceful protest this morning.

Photo: The very talented John Mayger

Click for bigger image

As of July 2010, all midwives in Australia will require insurance in order to be registered. Hospital employed midwives are covered by their hospital’s insurance policy or by membership of the nurses’ union. Private midwives need to be insured too but no insurer is willing to cover them. The Government supports private obstetricians with insurance but now refuses to help private midwives. 

No insurance = no registration.

Private midwives will have to cease homebirth practice, move overseas to work or face prosecution. Homebirth will be driven underground. Some women will birth at home alone without skilled, professional support. 

Whether you would choose homebirth or private midwifery for yourself is not the issue. As of July 2010, women’s choices around birth will be even more restricted than they already are. If women lose this option now, they will never get it back.

Doesn't every woman deserves the right to choose where, how and with whom she wants to give birth?

Women!

Happy International Women's Day!

From one of my favourite female writers, Catherine Deveny:

It's International Women's Day this week and I'm wearing camouflage after my seven-year-old son handed me a tampon and said, "Here's one of your vagina bullets".

It's still a battle of the sexes. Quilting conventions, goddess weekends, hens' nights, book groups, chick flicks, women's studies and scrag fights aside, the gender war is still raging. The rumoured truce is a myth. Who said we're waving a white flag? Listen closely and you'll hear many still screaming blue murder. It's a bit hard to hear them, though, because most are gagged, bound and kept in cellars.

The gloves are off but we're still wearing the matching belt. Although I'm not one of the missing in action, I have war wounds and battles to fight despite my thin veneer of shock and awe and my reputation as a shoecide bomber.

The rest here.

ChillOut

I love living in a small community. It's like living in the heart of a city that doesn't have any suburbs.

I love this town's terrain and small population and I also love that it's a popular tourist destination that attracts weekenders in the thousands.

This weekend our lovely town is playing the hostess with the mostest to around 25,000 gay and lesbians who are here for the twelfth ChillOut festival, the largest gay and lesbian festival in regional Australia.

And today we played the hosts with the mosts to Sharon and Deb, who are visiting from their lovely home in Tasmania, next to my folks' place.

Two Fires

This is the first image that came up when I did a google image search for 'two fires'.

After our successful panel at TINA last year, PJ, O and I thought we would submit a proposal to present another panel at another festival.

I am excited to announce that we have had our proposal accepted.

The festival is called Two Fires and it takes place in Braidwood, NSW at the end of March. 

From their website:

The Two Fires Festival is a celebration of poet and activist Judith Wright’s impressive double legacy, and an opportunity to explore the ongoing relevance of that legacy in today’s world. It aims to stoke the two fires of arts & activism.

The theme for this year's festival is Coming Together and the theme for our panel is Social Warming. I'm not quite sure PJ and O have finalised what they're going to be talking about, but my paper is about my experience of becoming a stepmother. For just as charity begins at home, so does social warming. 

Unknown Online Doors

As well as teaching a course on blogging at the local neighbourhood centre next month, I am running a course called Exploring the World Wide Web. In it, people who are not confident knocking on unknown online doors will learn all about Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter and more. The neighbourhood centre's course guide came out this week with my courses listed. To celebrate, here's this:

Artist Filippo Minelli says:

All my Contradictions have the same motivation/meaning. Technologies and the marketing behind them usually push the almost religious aspect of their evolution, as also said by Leander Kaheny in his Cult of Mac book, and the users are pushed to live in an intense way the abstraction from reality, living technologies only as an idea and sometimes without even knowing their real functions. And this aspect works for the social-networks too. 

The idealization connected with these experiences provokes a small-but-important detach of the perception of reality and what I want to do by writing the names of anything connected with the 2.0 life we are living in the slums of the third world is to point out the gap between the reality we still live in and the ephemeral world of technologies. 

It's a kind of reminder, for people like me which I'm an Apple user and also have social-network accounts that the real world is deeply far from the idealization we have of it, not only in the third world and even if technologies and globalization are good things.

Guerilla Grasses

PJ recently said that growing our own heirloom vegetables feels like one of the most politically potent acts we can do in the face of neoliberal capitalism.

Plant as protest. Plant as poem. Plant as placard.

I have recently discovered the work of Edina Tokodi aka Mosstika, who, in the tradition of political guerilla gardeners is a cultivator of eco-urban sensitivity and a planter of important seeds.

Mosstika says:

I think that our distance from nature is already a cliché. City dwellers often have no relationship with animals or greenery. As a public artist I feel a sense of duty to draw attention to deficiencies in our everyday life... I usually go back to the sites to visit my plants or moss, sometimes to repair them a bit, but nothing more generally as they tend to get enough water from the air, condensation, and rain - especially in certain seasons... I believe that if everyone had a garden of their own to cultivate, we would have a much more balanced relation to our territories. Of course, a garden can be many things.