Issue 2:
ARTICULATING SILENCE
The Demos editorial team bring you a preview of some of the exciting pieces to come with an exploration into the many meanings of silence.
Silence: An Absent Presence?
For the most part, scholarly literature illustrates silence as a state that is predominantly characterized by an absence.[1] The defining features most frequently attributed to silence are absence of sound[2] and speechlessness.[3] It is not only this notion of...
Beyond Categorisation: In Conversation with Udeni
Aditi Razdan interviews Udeni Appuhamilage Meet Udeni Hanchapola Appuhamilage: a Fulbright Scholar, a clinical psychologist from Sri Lanka with experience in trauma, psychosocial, and humanitarian work, “3 Minute Thesis” winner and an academic at ANU’s school of...
Is Patriotism Something to Strive For?
January 26, the ‘Great Silence’ and a new kind of love As the Canberra winter retreats and the magpies unforgivingly begin to swoop, I am reminded that soon enough another summer will roll around, bringing with it another Australia Day. Each year on January 26 we are...
Protecting the Forest at New Heights
The Story Behind the Little Red Toolangi Treehouse – Odette Shenfield interviews Hannah Patchett In 2013, Hannah Patchett spent a month in the Little Red Toolangi Treehouse to protest logging in the Toolangi State Forest. During her time there, she garnered widespread...
Going In
I’m knee deep in my newest purchase: a giant maze of unique fingerprint arabesques spread out before me that delineate Namadgi and Brindabella National Parks. I couldn’t be more thrilled. While focusing almost obsessively on the complexities of the map I can already...
up up up outta town
Let’s go hiking man, I need to go hiking he said to me. I suddenly agreed thinking that everyone needs to get outta town, sometimes. So we sped down the road out out out to wilsons prom where we once as schoolchildren went, he directed: left, right, straight, stop!...
Complicity and the Lolita Complex
In my life, art and pop culture have helped me understand and navigate the confusing world around me. There are few things more intimate than reading, watching or hearing something that resonates with your interior world, but for many of my formative sexual or...
I am a Feminist
I am a feminist. I have a powerful body made of solidarity, Built on the strength of our call for justice, Found through the fists of time, Silenced by constant exploitation. I am a feminist. I have won that right at least. Won the right to be disadvantaged, Won the...
“If We’d Had Women, We’d Have an Agreement”
Gender and Peace-Making in Israel-Palestine United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325, passed in 2000, called for the mainstream involvement of women in conflict resolution and management. The Resolution intended to promote equal participation in peace...
The OED Definition of Love
He is thirty-five centimetres taller than I am. I want to love and fly, I tell him, when we are naked for the first time. (He is the first boy to see me naked). Sunday afternoon plays like a reel of film in my mind; in every frame there is some part of my body – the...
Decolonising Queer* Identities
I’ve always thought that queerness was about living and thriving in the margins. It’s about fighting for rights, right? And ‘rethinking relationships’, and challenging dominate ideas about the body. Evidencing the pervasiveness of this idea, many members of the...
Brotherboys and Sistergirls: Changing the Way Queer* Identities are Defined
– Isabel Mudford interviews Kellum Steele Could you tell us a bit about how you came to be living in Wadeye, after growing up in Melbourne? For my whole life I’ve wanted to learn about Aboriginal culture and gain an acceptance from my people. It was hard growing up...
A Minute’s Silence
“Silence was a deeply established tradition. Men used it as a form of self-protection; it saved those who had experienced the horrors of war from the emotional trauma of experiencing it all over again in the telling. And it saved women and children, back home, from...
The Syntax of Space
Four...
Feminism: An Exclusionary Movement?
“What woman here is so enamoured of her own oppression that she cannot see her heel print upon another woman’s face?” Audre Lorde The importance of the third wave of feminism is that it is meant to cater to every different conception of what it means to be a woman,...
Verboten
I didn’t see the trucks pull up. An odd cargo was not unloaded overnight. There haven’t been any inexplicable disappearances. Those were not strangers in town. I received no unusual mail, had no calls. The fires were not deliberately lit. Everything is as I left it....
Rapture
That child’s hand above your head; the hand of a little girl long dead. Kakadu. Djidpi Djidpi. Two blocks of ochre. One grinding hollow. A grinding stone. Five moments of pressure. Thirty reed brushes. Voices echo off the high sandstone ceiling: thirty young lilts and...
The Clamour of Political Beings
Politics is a noisy place. This can be seen its everyday machinations: parliamentary speeches, the bustle of protests, various heated discussion on the value of free speech. This essay seeks to investigate how western political philosophy has placed a primacy on...
Manifesto
Manifesto Comrade, Comrade, Can you feel the revolutionary foment? The fog of ideology is lifting from our eyes – let us complete our historical mission! We listened on with equal parts admiration and revulsion, swayed before your certainty. You had the look,...
For the Love of the Land
Coal seam gas through the eyes of a QUT Big Lift student “I don’t think you’re listening. I don’t think anyone is listening.” Grief can never be simplified to a process. Mourning a loss is more than crying heavy tears that lead to inevitable acceptance. When a...
When Dust Gets in Our Eyes
If you live in metropolitan Australia, chances are you rarely think about soil erosion. If you live in a regional or remote area, you probably battle with wind and/or water erosion on a daily basis. That is the reality: soil erosion is ever-present in Australia with...
Beyond National Security: An Interview with Scott Ludlam
– Odette Shenfield interviews Scott Ludlam On December 1st, in the wake of the Paris attacks and during the Paris Climate Negotiations, I sat down with Greens Senator Scott Ludlam to talk about national security. Why do you think the discourse of national security is...
Silence and The Captive Mind
Czeslaw Milosz introduced the Western world to ketman, or the practice of concealing ones true motives or beliefs to give the outward appearance of conforming to authority. A Polish poet, novelist and diplomat who survived Nazi, and later Soviet occupied, Poland...
Nothing Breeds Nothing
THREE There were trees outside when they arrived. One day, he sliced everything down. There’s only quiet, filling the room until she’s choking – she used to hide it better but it’s harder, now, and she can’t grasp the edges of it and he doesn’t try. He’s happy in the...
Victims, Not Perpetrators: Rehumanising Refugees in the Wake of the Paris Attacks
It was one of my first shifts back at work and everyone was lamenting the tragedy of the Paris terror attacks, when one colleagues turned to me and said, “I hope it wasn’t one of the people you helped through Greece that did it.” Everyone stopped and stared at me, but...
The Silent Subjects of Mental Illness in India
The kind of silence I wish to discuss permeates everyday life: mental health, particularly in developing countries. Having done previous research[1] on development and humanitarian organisations’ lack of critical engagement with psychosocial emergencies and...
The Doll Lady of Wisconsin
On the first anniversary of my mother’s passing, a letter was forwarded to me from the Holocaust Centre. My mother had been prominent in Holocaust Education. A woman in Wisconsin was writing a book and looking for my mother to provide her with background...
Poetry For Fighting (They Say)
Held-square, something un-defined above sets short bare legs running. A grey metal shod cane keeps one man from fighting but not from war. Lone family sedan stopped at curb has eyes peering out windshield. Heavy coats insulate all to-some degree. There is an absence...
Teaching Tolerance and Seeking Justice in a World of Disadvantage
For too many people, our world is broken, and too many of us have stood silently for too long. There is too much hate, intolerance, and disadvantage in the world, but local, state, national, and international law all fail to produce solutions. We have forgotten that...
Cockroachery
No evidence that cockroaches tell time by the large plain face of the clock we bought from Kmart to replace the clock that fell and smashed my cobalt teacups. At the same hour every night they make the long journey from the immovable dresser to the bookshelves. We say...
Talk the Talk
“We’ll be live in five.” I feel something on my forehead. It hovers there like a nascent thought awaiting identification, categorisation, validation. “…four…” Maybe it’s a flower. I feel it growing. Blossoming out from a bud. Opening to the...Past Issues
