Issue 4:
PUSHING THE BOUNDARIES
Introducing Demos issue 4: the editors take a look into what boundaries mean to Australian identity today.
‘Look’
‘Look’ is based on a media image of a young boy displaced by conflict. It uses the gaze of the subject and the audience to address the power of witnessing. The audience is free to view the image without confronting the gaze of the subject, or the reality of the...
Learning the Language of the Enemy: An Interview with Matthew Zagor
– Matthew Zagor interviewed by Odette Shenfield Matthew Zagor is an Associate Professor in Law and a specialist in refugee law. Last semester, I was privileged to study his course in refugee law. As an educator, he incites in his students passion and dedication for...
Wide Games
Then came the Wide Game. It seemed a strange name to the uninitiated like Bronte, but meant only, it seemed, that they weren’t confined to their Scout Halls around the region and could wander far – and wide. Camp Trafalgar, where all the different troops met up, was...
Seeking Refuge: The Climate Change Emergency
In 1990, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned that the impacts of climate change would lead to the relocation of millions of people around the world.[1] More recently, as our attention is captured by reports of nations being swallowed whole by...
‘Beached Whale and Skyscraper’: Two Poems
BEACHED WHALE The black fender of a car; a thousand plastic bags that tried to become (new) lungs. SKYSCRAPER At night a thousand furious eyes. Blank in the day, revealing...
Effective Justice: Reinvesting in the Vulnerable
Australian incarceration rates are at an all-time high, prisons are overcrowded, and the majority of people who spend time in prison re-offend; it is time that prison reform was on the political agenda. In June this year, the Australian Red Cross released...
‘Limits of Force’
Of and For Our Bodies – Zoya Godoroja-Prieckaerts In April this year, Zoya Godoroja-Prieckaerts worked together with Clare Jackson to create an exhibition called Tensions Between at the CCAS gallery in Manuka. They used this opportunity to explore the similarities and...
Same Words, Different Tongues
Humans tend to throw up walls upon encountering ideas we don’t understand. Spectrums of experience are broken down into boxes; identities have their variations chiseled away until they become square-shaped pegs for square-shaped holes. Thus, with boundaries delineated...
Cultural Mixing in the Globalised World
The concept of cultural mixing is strongly felt in today’s world where the boundaries between nation states, people and communities are more porous than ever before. On the border between the United States of America and Mexico, generations of Mexican migrants have...
‘Echo’: Art by Rebecca Worth
I created this body of work because I was fascinated by the way that identity is shaped through the relationship between parents and children. The identity of a parent and child becomes intertwined, both depending on the other for illumination, shape and...
‘Strings’: Art by Azzah Sultan
http://azzahsultan.com/Fibre-Art A lot of the misconceptions directed at Muslim women pertain to false ideas about how Islam treats women. In my art piece Strings, I created portraits of five different Muslim women from different ethnic backgrounds and embroidered a...
Indigenous Education and Western Boundaries
‘The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts’ C.S. Lewis, 1943[1] ‘Through the My School website we have for the first time developed a national index of socio-educational advantage for every school in the country that allows us...
‘Hostel’: A Poem by Rachel Kirk
The darkness in the room is ripe and heavy, giving off the heady scent of bodies, breathing. In another language only breathing sounds the same. I shift an arm and she moves too, my double in the bed next door. Skin rubs against cheap sheets and rustles, soft – the...
Looking at Photomedia Artist Wei Leng Tay’s ‘The Other Shore’
– Olivier Krischer interviewed by Annette Liu and Esther Carlin As you enter Wei Leng Tay’s exhibition ‘The Other Shore’, you are drawn in by the darkness. The space is contained, and the dark grey walls allow the lightboxes mounted on the wall, and in frames on the...
Placeless Proletariat
‘It is the rule of the border in general that the refugee challenges … it is the justice of national sovereignty itself that the body of the asylum seeker refutes.’[1] The poor often find themselves at society’s boundaries, borders and margins. Their bodies hover at...
Home Sweet Home
In my piece Home Sweet Home I wanted to look more deeply into what it means to be an American Muslim woman. I posted a message on the social media websites: Facebook, Tumblr and Instagram requesting Muslim women to donate scarves in the colours red, white or blue. I...
Remembering and Forgetting: Australia’s Constructed History
The study of history is in many ways an attempt to learn from the past; in some cases, so we do not repeat its mistakes. Yet we forget all the time, due to neglect, and limited human capacity to process information. Wilful forgetting is, however, a way that we...
The Gweagle Shield
The first of these two letters was written by Rodney Kelly, a descendent of Cooman, the original owner of the Gweagle Shield. Rodney’s letter was sent to the British Museum, requesting that the shield, which was the centerpiece of the recent Encounters exhibition at...
‘Out of Sight’
The rails shriek over here Pass silver-eyed birch bordering lush cornfields, defining amber wheat. Hey Maria, in the northern forests, pines tall and trim, are well-kept like a fine beard. Young soldiers of time, Standing guard for the mill. I saw again,...
Reconciling Culture and Feminism
[13/03/2016 10:56] Mum: “Tomorrow is nonbu” [10:59] Me: “Nonbu is nombadai right” Mum: “Yep” Me: “The one with the yellow string where we praise men to the stars” Mum: “We praise everyone” Me: “I clarify only. It’s supposed to be right” Mum: “Ya” Me: “Ok. Send...
Nina Simone
Writer and performer: Gabriela Falzon Director and Cinematographer: Adam Thomas...
White People in Indigenous Affairs: A Conservator’s Perspective
I am a privileged, white Australian on the precipice of a new career as a conservator. My training is in the classical western tradition of conservation, which favours the material integrity of an object above any intangible value that may be applied to it. This...Past Issues
