Archive: Arena Quarterly #8

Time Travel Through Unfinished Business

Arena Quarterly no. 8

Kathleen Mary Fallon

Dec 2021

A story.

From the US Maelstrom to Political Economy

Arena Quarterly no. 8

Evan Jones

Dec 2021

University campuses across the United States were implacable scenes of angry debate and protest. There were clashes with helmeted police in adjoining streets. In April 1968, students occupied administration buildings at Columbia University, one of the causes being the university’s conducting of classified war research. There is an iconic photograph of student leader Mark Rudd sitting defiantly at the university president’s desk…

Cultural Appropriation and the Politics of the Imagination

Arena Quarterly no. 8

Simon Cooper

Dec 2021

If art has largely been stripped of its transcendent power—a casualty of commodification and oversupply—and is now measured by utility, it is simultaneously policed for its potential negative effects. In another reversal, much of this comes from elements of the ‘Left’ rather than conservatives.

Who Are You?

Arena Quarterly no. 8

Robert DiNapoli

Dec 2021

What caught me by surprise was how quickly I’d lost touch with all the nuances of whole-body presence that, once upon a time (was it really only twenty months ago?), we routinely read and responded to in any of scores of encounters on any given day…

Australia’s Nuclear Future?

Arena Quarterly no. 8

John Hinkson

Dec 2021

…if Australia can’t renew itself within terms appropriate to its own region—that is, renew our relations with Indigenous Australians, as well as the peoples of the Pacific and of Indonesia and Asia generally—it will remain an outpost supported only by imperialist powers…

Revolution in Myanmar

Arena Quarterly no. 8

Nick Cheesman

Dec 2021

Whereas the military junta sanctions its violence through a conception of state sovereignty as commandment, its opponents upend this repressive notion of power by investing the popular will, the power to constitute political order anew, in theirs.

Fracked Futures

Arena Quarterly no. 8

Kirsty Howey

Dec 2021

If production proceeds in the Beetaloo Basin, it will unleash a carbon bomb of huge proportions, and expose the Northern Territory’s environment and people to numerous other risks associated with fracking, including contamination of groundwater supplies, which make up 90 per cent of the Territory’s consumptive water use.

What Are the Submarines Really For?

Arena Quarterly no. 8

Clinton Fernandes

Dec 2021

The decision to acquire nuclear-powered boats reflects what has been the Australian Way of War for more than a century: to operate inside the strategy of a superpower by contributing a well-chosen, niche capability to augment the larger force.

Forever Partnership, Forever War

Arena Quarterly no. 8

Alison Broinowski

Dec 2021

…if the next war is against China, over Taiwan, the South or East China Sea, or some contrived event, Australia will become involved, will be a principal target, and will lose the war. China is not the Taliban.

Editorial, Arena no. 8: Battening Down the Hatches

Arena Quarterly no. 8

Alison Caddick

Dec 2021

Despite all our problems—all our terrible forebodings—it seems we remain wedded, yet, to a form of life that is, simply, unsustainable, and to a form of human organisation that is ethically bankrupt.

When the General Calls: Military Tactics Against COVID-19 in Australia

Arena Quarterly no. 8

Warwick Anderson

Dec 2021

…the lesson of history that I'd so reluctantly distilled was, in effect, to organise the Australian vaccine rollout as if it were a practice of pacification and counterinsurgency. That is, to follow the style of colonial militarisation from which ‘ordinary’ public health had derived over a century ago...

Relational Medicine

Arena Quarterly no. 8

Lisa Stefanoff

Dec 2021

Re-mediating the oldest intimate communication practices—a message from a caring friend or relation—is helping to counter diabolically antisocial influences.