Dean Biron teaches in the School of Justice, Queensland University of Technology. His most recent fragments have appeared in Overland, Meanjin, Screen Education, The Conversation and The Guardian.
Now it is the curlew that crouches like a ghost in the shadows of all of those lost creatures, waiting for that future time when it too will exist only in photographs or behind museum glass.
What’s really sucking the life out of things is this traditionalist drive to be borne ceaselessly backwards, a program that diminishes the dozens of equally transcendent recording artists who’ve roamed the fallout zone since punk detonated the Beatles-led classic-rock hegemony circa 1976.
In May 2014 the Abbott government announced, with typical bombast, the arrival of a new super-agency in an already cluttered law-enforcement environment. Backed by fresh legislation and with armed troops fitted out in coal-black uniforms, the Australian Border Force (ABF) was to epitomise an increasingly belligerent approach to policing a frontier that then Immigration Minister Scott Morrison termed a 'strategic national asset'.
