Here is a new book that has to be one of the finest of the year. It takes us to the heart of Gaza and to incontestable truths about the suffering and resistance of the Palestinian people. Cactus Pear for my Beloved (Penguin Australia) is [...]
The Powerhouse Museum at Ultimo is in imminent danger. Its Board and CEO Lisa Havilah are pressing ahead with plans to close it on 31 December for three years - despite the NSW Labor Government's stated intention to retain it as Australia's leading science and [...]
Stories of indigenous and Palestinian lives Melissa Lucashenko Edenglassie UQP, October 2023; Sara M Saleh Songs for the Dead and the Living Affirm Press, August 2023 BOOK REVIEW by Judith White For peoples dispossessed by colonialism, living under constant threat to their identity and their very [...]
By JUDITH WHITE This should have been a day when we all walked a little taller as Australians. When we took a step towards healing with First Nations peoples, and a reckoning with the colonial past. Instead we have a day of pain and shame [...]
Sydney Migraine By ANNIE GODFREY There are two ways of getting a high Green Star rating. One is to build a sustainable building. The other is to spend large amounts of money on green technology and expensive materials with a very high embodied carbon, to [...]
Sydney Modern: the ultimate cultural cringe By JUDITH WHITE On Saturday 3 December Sydney Modern, the controversial new building at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW), will open with a fanfare of publicity and a nine-day festival. The public unveiling has been preceded [...]
Sydney media are abuzz with stories about the lavish taxpayer-funded expenses bill run up by Art Gallery of New South Wales director Dr Michael Brand. First Daily Telegraph reporter Christopher Harris dug up the statements of Brand’s public-purse credit card, which listed several restaurant bills [...]
Donald White (standing, centre), with the chemistry department of Salford Tech, c.1932 A life devoted to public education My father Donald White (1904-1983) was a lifelong advocate for public education. He is commemorated in a feature about my memoir Children of Coal on a blog [...]
Joseph Lycett Aborigines using fire to hunt kangaroos c.1820, National Library of Australia BOOK REVIEW By JUDITH WHITE Worried about the prospects for life on earth? Well, we have just been given a message of hope born out of profound historical knowledge. On the eve [...]
By JUDITH WHITE My Uncle Dick was a Manchester electrician and lifelong trade unionist who survived the Thai-Burma railway in World War Two, but never afterwards joined a military parade or wrapped himself in the Union Jack. His prisoner-of-war diary, previously unpublished, forms part of [...]
