Libertango.

Last night the compound had a screening of Death or Tango – the film about the “Federico” el orquestro typico in Buenos Aires….

There was lots of Astor Piazzola and I swooned hearing it again. Tears dribbled into my eyes, I could feel my blood pumping, feel my cunt moistening, feel my crazy little soul dancing inside me… my soul – does such a thing exist? – in love with crying bandoneons, stormy skies, crashing waves, (Emily) Bronte landscapes, and lyrics like “I want to make my heart drunk… my tears follow your shadow, my tears on your eyes, on your closed eyes I cry….”

Where the fuck was I?

Texting the Brixton cowboy – “I want to go to Argentina!” thinking of him on the tube, Piazzola on his I-pod. He texted me filth in return…. No longer in Buenos Aires, I was straddling him, fucking his mouth with my cunt, or his cunt with my mouth, then my cock….

Where the fuck was I?

Sitting in the place where I got married 6 years ago… wearing a 3 piece suit, blue not white, but sitting there all the same, trying to believe where I was, trying not to think of the exwife, her return, her place here, her place in me….I sipped mulled wine (vino caliente) and thought of England, Argentina, Piazzola and Petersham.

Mi Buenos Aires
Querido….
Cuando yo te vuelva avez?
No hablas penas
Ni Olvido

I found Carlos Gardel easy to love but fifteen years ago Piazzola used to grate on my ears… it was too mad, too intense… the mad, wild lyrics of tango subsumed into chords, beats, sensation. I think I really fell in love with Piazzola when I could finally leave … what do I call this ex?

How the hell do I find a name better than the one he had for himself? He was an engineer, a poet, and a revolutionary. He was 11 years older than me. He gave me a language, an education, a family. He taught me cooking, history, politics. We fucked for 5 years, lived together for 8. He got me hooked on avocado “palta” for breakfast, long baths to music, long endless hours in bed, reading, talking, reading, writing….

His own language, of exile, of tragedy, of political failure, matched my own sense of exile from myself, displacement from home that was familiar and hated… or maybe it was a distraction – denying my own petty struggles by dreaming about bigger ones…

So now, what do I call him? Mi Viejo Companero? (companero – is somewhere between comrade, friend and lover) and veijo means old... and he was old, is an old memory….

It was HALF MY LIFE AGO and I was still a country girl. Scruffed and starved after my first year in the city, Scraped and scared from a cervix operation, caused from a nasty infection, from nasty sex with a nasty housemate who I still wouldn’t mind killing if I could….

Ell veijo companero fed and cuddled me and seduced me with Chopin, Neruda, and Gato Negro. He was the poet, the older man, cultivated, educated… he educated me, and I fell in love with him. Still so young and ex catholic I decided that my heart was more important than my nether regions… opened my legs and tried not to think of the cute queer fresh faced girls around me… played the role of friend, confidante, agony aunt.. ran coming out workshops for baby dykes while adding ideological padlocks to my own closet….

And after five years of this bullshit – I looked older than him, certainly older than I look now. His own moniker is a play on Nabokov’s famous book – masculinised but diminutive…. And he was and remained young, while I aged. He used to joke about drinking the blood of virgins to keep his youth – but sometimes it didn’t feel like a such a joke….

The bullshit was not only about my closet – but his own demons which were writhing around haunting him. He started waking up screaming the names of dead friends in the middle of the night, started self medicating with even more Gato Negro y macoña. He couldn’t listen to Cumbias any more or sweet songs by Sylvio Rodriguez – but needed darkness – intensity –anything to match the pain, and scream back at the demons – and so daylight hours became filled with Astor Piazzola…. Adios Nonino getting darker and crazier, and crazier and darker, and trying to fuck the pain away but each of us moving off into our own caverns of despair….

My own genitals protested. I developed chronic thrush and I think my clit invaginated whenever he came near…. My stupid head, my stupid heart wanted to comply, wanted to soak up his pain, desire, anger, hope….. drowning in his sorrow instead of facing my own. My patermonster was dying of cancer. I didn’t want to know, or care.…. It took a long time to realise that I do the best thinking between my legs, not between my ears – and to trust my body more than my ideas, my words, or those of anyone else….

I used to call him ‘Mi Novio’ (the fiancée…. Lover) as he hailed me as “Amore” or “La Reigna Margarita” or when I didn’t want to fuck “Maracona de Mierda” (dyke of shit) – to which I’d respond: “Boracho Juevon Culiado” (arse fucking big balled drunk).

So – it wasn’t until I’d left el Viejo Companero – left his house, left the music, the vino caliente, the three day parties for rain, for onions, for the sun – where Petersham would morph into Temuco while Chilenos shared stories of brujeria and danced the Cueca in the rain with more vino caliente and zopaypillas…. It wasn’t until my last year in art school – when a teacher put on Libertango while I was drawing – that I could feel the bandoneon loco move into something else….

And so now – ten years later… Piazzola moves me again… moves me inwardly, physically and mentally – as again I drift somewhere between nostalgia, hope and amnesia.

Amnesia gives me hope, because I forget about how much pain I felt about El Viejo Companero, how the first year after we broke up felt like hell. Every single day. How I couldn’t fuck or dance, didn’t want to see friends. How I had to leave el barrio and walk somewhere different. How I took a flat in Randwick, a job in Maroubra and staggered along Coogee cliffs hating myself, hating my life and feeling so empty and hollow and dumb – until finally words found me – and I started writing, writing madly daily, wildly – mad desire, mad anger, mad critiques…

Now thinking of Abel and the end of the marriage, and wishing I could end my feelings, but having to face them as unrequitable. Anticipating her here, in my face, nearby but not near…. As my chest clogs with tears…. (pleurisy sounds like pleurer – French for cry, for rain). As my bowels stiffen, and eyes water and hands shake, and stomach tremors…. As I choke on my tears, clutch, cry and shit – and this just in anticipation – all I can remind myself is that one day I’ll forget this – that it will drift into other pleasures, distractions and delights….

So again – I reach for my phone – send a mad desiring text somewhere – remapping my circuits of pleasure onto virtual space – share SMS hugs with other friends – swap mad ideas for text porn/internet porn/print porn/porn reviews/pornformance – remaking, reinventing bodies and language and space into something somewhere, sometime different but still here – another reality creating itself from the impossibility of the present.

Pat is right

We are young
Heartache to heartache
We Stand!
No promises, no demands
Love is a battlefield

zoo and I seem to be having an online love in comparable to the skanky jane/artswipe marraige of late '06.

I was inspired by another set of postings on skirts are bleeding - to think of the benatar - which reminds me of texta queen which reminds me of Abel - coz we were both obsessed with that song after seeing textas stirling karaoke rendition - in platform boots....

Strange silly synchronicity - which probably has LOTS to do with the smallness of sydney sapphic circles much more than anything else.(Did I tell you about the 'blind date' I had from pink sofa.... where I walked into a room and the new date was THE ONLY PERSON I didn't know?)

So today - I listenin to abel's CD she burnt me last year of classic faves.... which starts with the benatar....... then segues to lots of other stuff - that made my eyes water so I had to change to Patti Smith instead.

It's funny how the universe finds time to drop precious little turds of personal growth opportunities in our mouths at SUCH SPECIAL TIMES....

I spent last week getting increasingly weepy and mopey and miserable and piney and wishing for the wifelife and being reminded of her nipples and craving her body and missing her eyes and her skin and her softness and her voice and EVERYTHING.

And it was just like the Kathellisism song.... (which you can hear online)

and I want to kiss your neck
I want to touch your skin
I miss the small of your back
I miss the stubble on your chin
(yeah - well maybe the latter is a bit of an exaggeration for her bumfluff - but er.. yeah)


And I spent the weekend doing lots of sobbing and waking up in the middle of the night and texting the brixton cowboy to send back some chuckles and smut and a nice reminder of somewhere different and very far away from where I was and am aright now and a very different way of fucking and everything very very different and all in aid of remapping my circuits of personal longing and desire into something that should no longer be so piney and pathetic....

and so yesterday I woke up to his call and after being cooed and chuckled into a state of contentment - decided to check my email.

A message from Abel. guiltily I let my pathetic girl heart flutter with joy and opened it.... and read that she'll be joined by shewhoimnotallowedtocallslutanymore for a few months - as of next week. Yep. Next door. in the garden, in the barrio, at art openings, on the scene, at the sly. the happy bloody couple rubbed right into my face on my turf. Isn't Paris enough for them? Isn't Belle Ile? why here?

Bodies speak so much better than words, as thoughts flit between various ambiguities....

so I was tapping out a response... while shaking... and interrupted by bellows of pain emanating from my mouth... I haven't wept uncontrollably over a keyboard since ... Monday May 24th 2004 - when I read pred's last posting.

Weeping, shaking, running between keyboard and bathroom as my nether ends also opened and I thought "Oh, great - another bout of weight loss coming on - and all those fucking 'you look so attractive' comments when I feel so shitty"

then started plotting escape and hiding strategies, silently to myself. Made dates for bands, the zoo (I mean taronga), harbour trips, visiting friends out of town - anything to get out and away, far, fucking away from this shit. Felt glad to be not the only one. felt glad that that I've got Hermano Grande around the corner in case of random urge to silently sob into beer...emailed zoo and TEDG. Texted MFCC, replied to Abel, read over advice of Wonderboi....

fingers could talk, mouth could only howl, and I wandered shakily into uni somehow. dressed in war paint. Bright colours to ward off nasty dark pain. Pink hair, green tights, pink skirt, sacred heart on my chest. Talismans. Necklace from Kath, Top from TEDG....Was this march 2006 or July 2007 and how will I fill in july 2008? still this FUKKED UP?

Stupidly vainly noted the flatness of my belly and loose fit of skirt and hated myself for being SUCH A GIRL. Girls like to disappear. girls like to be skinny and passive and like to be looked at. and the thinner they are, the sadder they are the more passive and pathetic, the more they can be picked up by a big strong hero eh?

I'm not a girl.

I strode out of the house into the sunlight, reciting to myself "crisis is the condition for change, for challenge, for contingency, for the brilliance and beauty of indeterminacy, for becoming, for surprise."

then chuckled as I thought again of Pat Benatar....


wooo ooohhh hooo
WE ARE STRONG
No one can tell us We're WRONG


so is there reason to this wallowing?

Kind of. Part of me, however brutal and hard and hellish - means that what I asked for WILL COME. Abel will be here - NOT as my wife, or my ex - but with someone - with whom I find it impossible to revert back to any friendly nostalgia trip.

I'll be forced to move on, to protect myself - to not seek out contact - to stop trying to pretend that things are *cool* between us.

somewhere in my thesis I wrote about how pain produces amnesia - and I'm amazed by my own amnesiac relationship to pain. I always forget how bad migraines are when I haven't got one, I always forget how much Abel - HURT me. - and she of course doesn't want to remind me.....

so - daily little stabs of hell - will hopefully drive me to protect myself - to move and keep moving on, to grow into my own becoming....

does this sound like hypocrisy?

I have brought other lovers here, and Abel has been so 'civil' and 'nice' and non jealous, and so 'decently sapphic' around them.... that maybe I should reciprocate. but I only took lovers after we broke up. I was clear about when and why I would start bringing people back home... and I haven't used any lovers or friends to drive a wedge between myself and a relationship I didn't want to face or resolve or have the courage to end first.

I *know* I'm not perfect - but I don't make promises I don't intend to keep - and I tend to tell people what I'm doing and with whom - because I believe that sex and love and proud beautiful things and don't want use them for hiding, for shaming or for silence...

I know that Love is often really stupid and girly and spiteful and the spite comes form the most surprising places. A close friend who made some catty comment about another friend 'having no self respect' - like it was an insult - and not a reason to show this person MORE RESPECT. Maybe I feel so abject and pathetic so often - that I don't feel the need to distance myself from peoples abjection and pathos - but to actually give them affection, respect and support. Maybe i'm just too perverse for this world.

I've always been bad at sport. Always fallen over, missed the ball, tripped on my feet, broken my glasses and come last in the race. If I viewed sex as a contest I'd never leave the house. for me- sex is the thing that happens on the sidelines. Sex is drawing a silly face on the ball or pretending its an egg, sex is zig-zagging across the running field or swimming in circles instead of laps, sex is trying to catch the girls on the netball field instead of the ball - sex is the divine perverse mad possibility of doing everything in the WRONG WAY for the RIGHT REASONS.

I know that love and sex have some dark, dark, angry elements. I know my own heart has a mean posessive selfish controlling streak - but I'd rather grow back my hymen than reduce sex and love to a matter of competition. I had nearly 8 years to fukk abel in any manner both of us could have desired - and if I couldn't do then what I can do now - then so be it. I hope she's happy with shewhoimnotallowedtocallslutanymore and i hope that shewhoimnotallowedtocallslutanymore is a better fuck than I was. As much as I ache, and miss and pine for Abel - I'm HAPPY to have moved on, and happy about what I've learned and am learning and will learn and experience.

Anyway - there's a nice story to end all of this. I followed the Brixton Cowboy's advice and took the credit card into a decent sex shop and bought some indecent objects and used them indecently with my a very obliging friend.... and I discovered new ways of fucking, new ways of desiring, new parts of myself, of herself - of how bodies and feelings and gestures and roles can be remade and rethought and refelt. We fukked to patti smith, plotted mad performances and laughed and cuddled into the night.

Red white and blue

Red white and blue
Here's a pic of zoo
Writing poems is cheesy tho
…so I’ll have to end here and return to prose…..


this pikki of Zoo – is coz it was bastille day and she was in red white and blue (ok – red and blue and black – but with her white skin – she looked a tricolour treat)

and zoo was part of the late nite- early morning fun and madness at kooky , and zoo write things on her blog as I think them and vice versa – and zoo is my favourite breakup buddy and we have this strange crossover of words, and dressups and tears and absolute silliness that is divinely beautiful, and helps me to love my life.

At the moment I love my life and my friends so desperately that my mouth waters. At times my life is more brilliant and brave than any of my wildest dreams – and its not so much me – as having good – no great people around me. And my world is filled with colour and light and madness and hugs and sheer mad joy…. A lot of the time.


And so I’m sad and shocked to spend so much time feeling so incredibly sad – which is how I have felt in the past week. As soon as I stop the mad whirl, the crazed rush into the light, I sit and get filled with gloom and hell and sobs. I spent the past week hibernating. Sleeping 12 hours a day, I dreamt about waking up on the Boulevard Michel with blocked ears and my backpack – looking for ear candles and finding only bookshops. Wondering why the fuck I was in Paris, where I don’t want to be, don’t want to remember, don’t want to return to….

When I woke up from the dream above, my ear left ear was blocked and I thought of My Favourite Consort Cure – and beery ear candling in blighty – where my ears and chest were blocked with phlegm so much of the time…. Yesterday, my chest was blocked again. My Favourite Consort Cure put her hand on my chest and felt the grief, tried to massage it out and felt her own eyes fill with tears. I was blocked, numb, dumb with pain. Eyes just sad, mumbling…. Eventually I shed a few tears and we cried and cuddled and slept.. then we woke up, hung out with the posse, freaked up, went out dancing and laughing.

Me: madly - when life is unbearable I 'cope' by putting on a mask - by pushing myself in extremis into something else... wearing a wild and scary mask, dancing out every fukking fibre of pain. No I wasn't drunk, I wasn't high, I don't need to be - I just need movement, madness, to be suspended in something while my own dervish tears itself apart.

And so, today i woke up with a rash on my chest where her hand had been, and a nasty sinus migraine from where i should have cried. I walked into the sunshine, went to a rally, chatted with friends, bought fruit at paddies, came home and collapsed.

tonight - another nice synchronicity. zoo's latest posting strangely echoed my own dillemma. One would think that being held in such an incredible network of sexy brilliant freaks, of close human contact, of being able to fuck people I love, and love people I fuck and not be jealous or neurotic but happy and open and confident, and be surrounded by people who i love - and no I don't have to fuck all of them or even most of them, and no - i'm not sex addicted either - but just lucky enough to be in a very nice couple of spaces at the moment - that I'd be *happy* and not pining after something that in many many ways I was glad to get out of.

then i wonder what it was that My Favourite Consort Cure cured me of in the first place, and why she can't cure me of this other thing - the wife life syndrome - this old scarred shadow under my skin, in my hands, in my mouth, in my tits, sometimes even in my vagina - that as much as I try to shake, fuck, dance, kiss, fantasize, laugh, shit and weep it out of me is still there.

I associate My Favourite Consort Cure with relief, with movement, with life and my sheer joy to be no longer in love with or heartbroken by the consort - to be unrebounding - to no longer be flailing in the space of heartbreak and lurching into another one. I am so glad to share sex and friendship and intimacy and honesty and pain in a SANE way - that is caring, that is intimate, that IS trusting and intense but doesn't have this clinging girl need to be taken and fused and remade with someone else. I can and do walk and dance on my own feet, and so do my other lovers. we don't hold hands in the street. this is a relief. we do dirty dance and pash on the dance floor. (sometimes wiht each other) this is a delight.

and i wonder how the hell Abel got so deeply inside of me, - actually no i don't I remember how - and I vow - please god don't let that happen ever again.... or at least not to me....

then I get scared and sad and scared again that i'll never get over her unless I do fall for someone like that again - that I do open up and fuse myself into another mummy/baby dyad. As much as my ovaries are screaming at me to breed - and my uterus twitches at the smell of lactation and the sight of infants - the fact is, I feel incredibly releived NOT to have or be anyone else's 'baby' at the moment.

I feel relieved to stand on my own feet - not to cling or be clung to - that i want to have this, hold this, enjoy this sensation for just a little bit longer, while I grow just a little bit older.

but growing older *hurts*. If I sit still, I fall back into memory, sensation and loss. I sit mired in the past and this stupid, stupid state that I wish I didn’t feel anymore. sometimes I feel so much pain that I don't know where it ends and where I begin. I don't know how to end the marraige - how to move on and separate her from my being. It's not only the joint wills and immigration files under the bed, it's not only the boxes and boxes and cupboards of photos, letters, notes, drawings, postcards, objects accumulated together. It's not only the music, the language, the injokes - the mad flights between languages. It's not only clothes that I've worn that she's worn, the sheets, the furniture, the objects the spaces.... everything here that is linked to our shared life.that's OK - TEDG has broght in new furnishings and objects, we've moved the furniture, I changed the bed and brought others onto my sheets, into the bath onto the furniture....

but there's my thesis - which started out of working as a life model - which was intimately connected with Abel - she also worked as a model - my major argument - the major raison d'etre - comes out of a performance piece we did together 5 years ago. Each time i sit in my intellectual blankness - I'm returned to this connection, and it aches. There is also the ART, and the fact that I haven't painted since we broke up. Every vulva, every painting on the wall is about her, her body, our conversations, our desires, my desire, her soul, this desperate love that I felt with every breathe. and I wonder - do I have to throw out every single painting, every vulva I'm made? how do I exorcise her out of me?

and then if I do - what will she do in return? how will she punish me?

ex-catholic me - fears this the most. I don't trust that she will let me go - I'm scared of being haunted by desire, by sadness, by guilt, by a sense of responsibility - for the rest of my life. given that I've known her for 9 years - given that it took her 6 months to move out of the house - given that she didn't 'break up' with me - just kind of said -that she was in love with someone else and didn't want to fuck me - this is understandable.

given that she lives so close and so easy to touch and so nice to touch and hold and talk to. given that she gets along so well with my other lovers/friends/flatties - given that she so often, so easily - fits in - I want to keep her in - to keep whatever silly shred of nostalgia and connection we've got let - to feed the fantasy that we can have could have did have the great relationship - and that it can continue - as something open and expanded and we can walk on our own two feet -and only sometimes hold hands....

which is a myth - a nice little story that i tell myself, while ignoring the nasty gaping heartbreak/terror/guilt ghost.

Meanwhile i try so desperately to invent and live out other stories - for the way if might have been. My long distance affair with the brixton cowboy - a litany of phone calls and correspondence almost as lengthy as that between abel and I - my own girlie musings over photos and gushing at the sound of his voice - trying to live out a long distance affair - not as a craving for contact - not as a demand to move - but as a sharing of distance - as an enjoyment of the possibilities that distance provides - and the freedom - that if we don't ever see each other again - then certain things don't matter - and we are free to reinvent ourselves and our desires and share our own mad desires and mad affairs and adventures. Making the gap into a space of possibility instead of loss.

this is all philosophically sound and sexually inspiring and ethically noble and will make a great novel one day - but day to day my life is as pathetic and tragic as any sod with a broken heart. I fantasize about an elaborate ritual, some incredible performace that will break this spell of longing and love that I have for her. then i imagine how I'd rope her into it. then I realise what the problme is. which is, in these scenarios - she doesn't exist, move, negoitate or articulate her own condition or desires - that I project onto her - the stuff that is within *me* - and it is this that I have to exorcise and leave behind or bury or burn...

that i fuse her with mine - with my demands, ideas and needs and she doesn't resist. or she runs away. this is the nasty rub. this has to end. I have to make my own ending for this story - and one that has a more delightful twist than me navigating the brixton cowboy around the marais by text.... but one that involves me being able to walk away from abel and my sad stupid crushing longing.

so much of me clings to the past, I recite and remember and rehearse old anniversaries - so so scared of letting go and losing the past. If i was a better buddhist - I'd embrace the immanence of death - and the necessity of loss for life to continue - but i've still got far too much catholicism on the inside. I still want to light a candle to my grief, my longing, my pain - to make a little shrine to it, to embellish it - to not let it go and walk away.

Like i said - it's about me, and not about her. and i'm still just a sad silly thing a lot of the time. Grief is just slow and sad and hard.

Bastille Day

Today I was part of a fine mob that strode the streets for the sake of citizenship, respect, human rights and land rights. Instead of truckking in down to CAPITAL - we decided to all catch an extra 3 hours post-kooky sleep and head over to the block.

Inner west trains weren't running so I took shanks pony through the sunny barrio down to redfern - and stood around nervously waiting for the posse to show, wondering why the only other honkies were rag weilding trots and sleep deprived deviants....

OK - I know about the latter - I've waxed lyrical on the discrete powers of a mrginal life - a contingent slippery impossible existence - how it promotes a move towards the life affirming desires and death defying activism.

I don't want to define kooris and queers according to some negative slave-like 'alterity' type blanket. I don't think we are 'united in our oppression' and I don't believe that our 'oppression' can be compared - in fact I think it is obscene to do so. sitting in bed with my ADSL, angsting over my PhD - waxing lyrical about my funky friends I met either at university or on a university funded international research tour - REALLY cannot be compared to the monstrous state of affairs experienced daily by aboriginal australians - either as fukked over members of the stolen generations or as currently being fukked over members of remote communities.

Also the ontology of queerness is about individual movement, social mobility (or motility) - the basis of being able to move through and remake space according to desire and connection - whereas the ontology of indiegeneity is about having access and connection to LAND - a specific relationship to very specific spaces that link blood, bodies, memory and desire - and how that is constanty fought for against the colonising push to evacuate land from people, history and memory and turn it into a free floating speculative signifier: mining 'investment' or tourist dollars or 'real estate' - all as slippery and seductive as my own fantastic flights between genders, bodies and becomings.

so i don't want to pretend that I can evade the problematic condition of my own whiteness, my own social privilege and the type of subjectivity in which I, as someone socially mobile, sexually fluid and and intellectually active am implicated.My position, however crusty and critical - is still 'avant-garde' -and I am part of the thin edge of the beige wedge that gentrifies areas like Redfern and Spewtown and disperses the 'marginal' or non recuperable populations... like indigenous people... who belong to and are and own the land.

Im interested in how my own condition of mobility, movement, of blighty diasporic becoming can engage with the condition of fixity, belonging, custodianship of space. i'm interested in how my own mad psychogeographies of NEVER being here Of marching on bastille day - not in 1789 but in 2007 and not in paris but in redfern, and amongst people still unable to deal with the events of 1788, but using the language of 1789: good hold humanitarianism 101 - to stare down neocapitalist monstrosity in the face - can actually produce something DIFFERENT, and maybe better.

so - what I'd say - or guess at what united me today was hearing the brilliance and power of the aboriginal speakers. Of hearing really cogent political analysis, really well researched FACTS and sympathetic engaged analysis of the 'little children are sacred' report and how it is being used as a political football by Howard (and Rudd). And witnessing the fact that for the many indigenous people that are fukked over and fukked up - there are many who continue to be brave and wise and brilliant.

And you won't see any of it in the herald, or on the ABC or anywhere mainstream - that seems to delight in giving bad news that makes people feel even more powerless and isolated and silent than we actually are.

so this is a funny segueing link between the personal and the political - because I WENT along - not only as part of a civic gesture of solidarity and of protest - but to be reminded that indigenous australia is still alive, kicking dancing, speaking, acting and thinking critically about land, sovereignty, human rights and whatever it is this nation could be apart from an increasingly viscous little penal colony.

It's time to SCREAM

I've posted up some of the stuff I've received about Johnny H's new ruse to resume indigenous genocide/ecocide policies in central australia because actually it makes me so heartsick that I can barely speak.

I can't even laugh about it, or turn it into fodder for CACA or schappylle scragg and
I think it is the appropriation of child sexual abuse in the interests of really nasty racism, that is breaking my heart the most.

So i'm joining the posse and heading down to cnutberra myself on saturday morning - straight after kooky for the: protest 11am on 14 July, Tent Embassy to Parliament House Canberra.


I'm *sick* of the way I "cope" with AUSSIE fascism largely by avoidance: avoiding the media, avoiding talking about, reading about, thinking about and admitting how bloody terrible it is.

i HATE how the mass media lies, and my attempts at indifference form a silence that enters into me. the way that my disgust and rage at the racism of the current government destroys my own capacity to articulate the words that might break this horrible deadening violence.

I'm not denying that there is most likely shocking levels of sexual violence in indigenous communities - but if I really thought the men in suits of canberra gave a flying fuck about children and women getting raped I'd be tempted to think that running tanks into northern territory communities *might* have some purpose - other than dispersing, dividing and destroying aboriginal society even more.

I'm also always amazed how the mock moral outrage about sexual violence gets used among men in their own games of power and status. I *don't* see any difference between jailbirds bahsing and raping 'rock spiders' and so called 'good' men condemning and legislating against what are usually weaker, more abject, black, poor, inept, drunk men ... Sexual abuse of women and children occur at every level of australian society and in every suburb, including marrickville and mosman.

white middle class men don't call their kids 'cnuts' in the middle of the street, they don't hit them in public and don't throw loud drunken parties where the neighbours call the cops - but they DO beat their wives and fuck their daughters and their sons. and they do it a lot. the only thing that stops them is allowing white women and children to have enough financial and emotional independence so they can fight back/get out and get over this kind of crap.....

I keep thinking about the old Reclaim the Night chant: "break the silence about sexual violence" - and it makes me want to do a detournement:
"about racist violence"
"about eco-violence"
"about legal violence"

and it reminds me of che guevara's deinfition of solidarity: recongising that your own liberation (mine from the silence of childhood sexual violence) depends on fighting for the liberation of others (native title and indigenous self determination).

as a feminist, it is absolutely in my interests to STOP the tanks and defend indigenous communities right to heal from two centuries of genocide and dispersal and to maintain connections with each other and with their land.

who's coming on saturday?


Call to rally in protest at Howard's military interventions on Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory - please forward to your networks and join us on 14th July 2007 at 11am, marching from the Tent Embassy to New Parliament House, Canberra.


When questioned about the detail of the Government's plans for Indigenous communities in NT Howard said yesterday (Wednesday) that they were working on it? and the legislation would be ready in a few days.? - Legislation????? -Since when does it require legislation to provide a comprehensive community based response to the 97 recommendations of the Little Children are Sacred report?? Since when does it require legislation for teams of doctors, nurses and counsellors to work in Aboriginal communities with those communities? Only if Howard is about to make his stated grab for the lands of up to 70 Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory would legislation under the federal race powers act be required. He has made no secret of the fact that if he deems it necessary the Government would compulsorily acquire those lands.


Mal Brough also stated yesterday that, still in spite of the recommendations, he is still pushing for sexual health tests of Aboriginal children, saying he is looking into ways in which parents could be 'encouraged' to give parental consent. Coerced would be a more appropriate term, especially as Brough says a pecuniary solution might be considered. Does he really think we will sell our children's safety and wellbeing? It is becoming horribly clear what the role of the army and police is to be on those communities, to take over, quell dissent and protest at the legislative theft of their lands, and remove dissenters from their lands once the legislation is passed. The WA Premier is to be congratulated on his level-headed approach in refusing to send police and sending health care and counselling teams instead. His clarity in seeing through the agenda behind the Howard solution is commendable and we call upon the Leader of the Oppostion, Kevin Rudd, and all other State Premiers to follow his example, and to reject Howard's proposed legislation.


And let's send our thoughts and voices of support to those 30,000 plus Aboriginal men and women whose jobs, education programs and vocational training through CDEP in urban and major rural centres, will be gone on 1 July, eliminated by John Howard. To act in a manner that disenfranchises, discriminates against and willfully disadvantages a race of people is, by definition, racism. It is to take away people's Human Rights and their rights under Australian Common Law.

SCRAGGGG ALERT!!!!!

Fans of Scragg - get ready to wet yourselves BIG TIME
this wed - coz youse are all in for a treat!

Its all in celebration of Independence Day - and the
tru blue values that made this country great - eh wot?


First Up: Aussie Icon schappylle scragg is gonna put
her 2 cents in to the namby pamby art education debate
- letting those westies who are so up themselves just
what aussie culcha really is......
(http://caca-mayhem.blogspot.com/)


she'll be right near Darling harbour from 6-8pm on
wednesday July 5th -at 168 Day Street (that's across
the road form sega World - youse can't miss it).
At the cereal box art show

Her bridemaid Starella has another mate called 'the
promotor' who has a totally excellent plan for making
showing that art is easy as cornflakes!

there's be free piss so come along and get shitfaced!

RIGHT AFTER - get on down to Newtown to join the QUEEN
OF SCRAGG'S Kath Ellis - in a musical tribute to all
things rockin and rolling....


At BuzzBar: 351 King street Newtown (south bit just
down from the station - it's orange and youse can't
miss it!)

schappylle is even gonna join the musos for a couple
of Rad's covers - in between talking all about her hot
honeymoon with Darryll .(she'll be there a bit after 8
or 9.....)

it's gonna go off - an it's the last magical
hubris/guinness/kathelissism/lizmartin jam (at least outside of their loungerooms) for a while so youse
might as well come along.