Arena – Critical * Radical * Australia * Earth

Mar 2023

Australians are being asked to vote in support of the constitutional establishment of an Indigenous Voice to Parliament while the work of successive governments, Coalition and Labor alike, has been complicit in the killing of First Nations people.

The Limits of Human Control: Nuclear technologies threaten all life, so why do we persist?

Arena Quarterly no.13

John Hinkson

Mar 2023

The hubris of science towards the everyday world is not a new phenomenon, but where the practices of technoscience now frame our world this tendency is radically escalated.

Beyond Burnout: Finding Meaning in Contradictions

Arena Online

Matt Rogers

23 Mar 2023

Overcoming burnout doesn’t mean we have to add more and more activities to our schedules to balance our lives at work. Fitting in another yoga class, a run before work and a counselling session on top of all of our other responsibilities may contribute to a feeling of burnout in some, despite how useful these activities may themselves be to others.

The Wolvadoodles: A Review of Sub-Imperial Power

Arena Quarterly no.13

Richard King

Mar 2023

The ‘rules-based international order’ is not a set of rules at all, and still less a set of principles. It is a set of material military arrangements that seek to ensure and enshrine US dominance.

In ‘The Far-Off Afterwards’: D. H. Lawrence’s Kangaroo at 100

Arena Quarterly no.12

William Holbrook

Dec 2022

On the occasion of its centenary, Kangaroo ought to be read at the level of ideas. The book, in fact, sums up to being one of the most compelling and prognostic critiques ever made of democracy in Australia.

Solastalgia: Every climate change challenge has an internal as well as external dimension

Arena Quarterly no.12

Robert DiNapoli

Dec 2022

In the end, the notion of solastalgia may prove more helpful looking forward, for it charts much of the difficult mental terrain that the world will have to traverse.

Once Were Revolutionaries: Memory and activism—my father and fieldwork in Turkey

Arena Quarterly no.12

Christopher Houston

Dec 2022

I remember the sweet smell of the state Caykur tea factory, intimate, like perfume in the air; and the shabby suitcase traders from the ‘East’ in towns along the way, selling Russian cameras, samovar teapots, and handicrafts in makeshift harbour bazaars.

The betrayers of Julian Assange

Arena Online

John Pilger

10 Mar 2023

Will Albanese back Australia or Washington on Julian Assange? If he is 'sincere', as the more do-eyed Labor Party supporters say, what is he waiting for? If he fails to secure Julian's release, Australia will cease to be sovereign. We will be little Americans. Official.

What the meaning of Don Dale Is

Arena Online

John B. Lawrence SC

9 Mar 2023

The prison’s survival is a measure of our country’s moral decline.

Warmongering in the Australian Defence Establishment

Arena Online

Binoy Kampmark

9 Mar 2023

The Red Alert exercise is yet another dangerous exercise in the manufacturing of consent for war, an amorally bankrupt exercise that will sideline peaceful approaches. Again, Australian personnel and citizens will find themselves perishing in conflicts at the behest of an insensible hegemon.

From the Archive

Green Pathways to a People’s Future

Arena Quarterly no. 1

Adam Bandt

‘Fire’ may be an appropriate way to think and talk about the climate-change emergency, not just because we are literally dealing with a burning world but also because it does not bring with it the concerns associated with ‘rule by emergency’.

From the Archive

The Tip of the Democracy-Sinking Iceberg

Timothy Erik Ström

There is a curious and seldom-told backstory and parallel story to the high-profile Cambridge Analytica scandal, one that makes the notorious firm seem like the tip of the democracy-sinking iceberg.

Philosophy Will Ruin Your Life

Arena Quarterly no.12

Justin Clemens

Dec 2022

Why? you might exclaim, quite legitimately. Why do these philosophers do such things? There are at least two problems with asking this question. First of all, Why? is the philosophical question par excellence. Why do I have to eat this spinach? Why is the sky blue? Why do you ask such stupid questions?

Dispatches from the Forum for Dwelling Justice

Arena Online

Dwelling Justice

9 Mar 2023

The Dwelling Justice Forum brought together leaders, activists, community-based practitioners, scholars and film-makers to stage a conversation about precarity, racial violence, incarceration and dispossession and how these dynamics shape the ways we dwell, and fight for dwelling justice, here on stolen land.

He’s On A Roll: ‘Holding Patterns’ by Alisdair Cannon

Arena Quarterly no.12

Kathleen Mary Fallon

Dec 2022

There are shades of Swift in Cannon’s solutions to the Birth-Strikes movement: ‘have your child and shoot a banker … gun down a fossil fuel executive … kill a politician for each child you have’.