Vox Pops

A while ago, I heard culture was defined as “what we do here”. It’s a simple and easily recognisable concept; you can think about it from a scale as broad as global geo-political trends all the way down to what each of us call a potato scallop. Every country in the world is developing their own response to the Covid pandemic, built on the backbone of their culture. Each society is developing responses that will create our expectations from our government and how we will hold each other to account. In Australia, Victoria has led the way in developing our culture – people in other states may not have lived it yet but they know what’s in store when there’s another outbreak, because now they will also know what it takes to succeed. Another part of our culture: Australians like winning. Australian culture helped us to set a national focus for how we would manage this pandemic. We decided that we wanted to prioritise protecting our citizens from an increased chance of death from this ins...

To my friend who posted All Lives Matter-type memes.  I spent this morning making you something that I hope helps you. I didn’t feel like engaging in a Facebook tit for tat – I didn’t feel like the tension it brings, I didn’t want to drag this out into the open for everyone to scrutinise and generate an arena for nasty judgmental commentary. I want to encourage you to think differently. Here goes. 1.   There were massive and devastating injustices to people of colour throughout history. I think you know about some of this – so I’m not going to spend a lot of time here. I think you know that hundreds of thousands of people were taken from their homes, separated from their families, bought and sold like livestock to live as slaves to the benefit of others much richer and more privileged. I want you to re-read that last sentence though, and think about all of the suffering contained in it, because this is where today’s suffering started.  The su...