Category: australia
No Award reads Auslit (that’s set in England and France): Tell the Truth, Shame the Devil by Melina Marchetta
Bashir “Bish” Ortley, a London cop — currently suspended after his drinking problem led to an incident with another cop — gets a phone call: a bus full of British schoolkids has been bombed in France, and his teenage daughter was on board.
And worse, one of the other passengers is Violette LeBrac, whose mother has been in prison for thirteen years after she confessed to helping her father bomb a supermarket — and Bish was the cop who took four-year-old Violette from her mother’s arms after the arrest.
Violette is the obvious suspect, but before the investigation can even begin, she has disappeared, taking a thirteen-year-old boy with her.
Controversial OzYA opinion: I’m really ambivalent about Melina Marchetta’s work. Looking for Alibrandi was my favourite book in grade nine, but then it became assigned reading for grade twelve advanced English, and didn’t really hold up.
So I’m not a wholehearted Marchetta fan. I’ve liked some of her books, hated one, didn’t bother with her fantasy series. And YET, when I heard that her next book was a thriller aimed at an adult audience, I was intrigued. (Crime fiction: my other passion.) I bought Tell the Truth, Shame the Devil from Kobo and spent the weekend on the couch, inhaling it.
It was wonderful.
Dutton is a racist cabbage + action points for Australians
Australia’s super racist Immigration Minister, mouldy cabbage Peter Dutton, has a long documented history of gross racism. There’s the time he laughed about people in the Pacific losing their homes due to rising sea levels, literally everything he’s ever said about refugees ever, and, this week, he was pretty offensive to Lebanese Australians. Please read on for details and action points.
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Down Under Feminist Carnival 102!
Hello Lolstralia and our antipodean Kiwi neighbour, and of course any other visitors to the blog! No Award brings you the Down Under Feminist Carnival, Edition 102! We last hosted edition 90, yes, 12 months ago, and that we keep hosting in November is only a little bit of a coincidence.
With thanks to Mary, Thalia, Chally, Bec and Ana for submitting links.
Steph says: I felt really overwhelmed trying to ‘categorise’ links this month, and I’m still not happy with where things have ended up – like, if something is about motherhood and missions and the Stolen Generation, is it right to put that under Indigenous business, or parenting, or gendered stuff? We’re complex and it’s complex and feminism definitely, as we all know, has a tendency towards the normalisation of whiteness and then the ghettoisation of anything outside of that. So anyway, we can definitely chat about that in the comments if people feel like it.
A reminder: how the carnival works
Last month’s carnival: at bluebec.com
If you’d like to host a carnival: fill in this form to host. Hosting a carnival is a good way to really immerse yourself in antipodean feminists for a month, I find – it gives me a focus I don’t give it the rest of the year, flitting as I do from linkspam to linkspam and all the stresses in between. It’s very intense, but because we only host once a year it’s also okay 😀
An Island Full of Sand
Singapore is a tiny island with minimal resources, and so it’s been importing sand for land reclamation for 50 years. At first it purchased from its (poorer) Southeast Asian neighbours; those neighbours have since banned sand exports to Singapore. This has resulted in SAND PIRACY.
If you’ve been following my travel tumblr, you’ll already know a little bit about this, but today’s post here at NA builds on my blogging there and includes SANDING BY for SAND UPDATES so it’ll be a new adventure even for you!
Deep Water
I promised Stephanie that I’d watch SBS miniseries Deep Water over the weekend, and report back to No Award about (a) whether or not it’s worth watching, and (b) whether it contained any amazing/hilarious auscore.
Unfortunately, my plan hit the most Australian snag ever — my internet was too slow to stream the final two episodes via the SBS app. And I’m on the NBN. I mean, really.
(I was attempting to airplay to my AppleTV from my iPad — I might have had better luck hooking my laptop up to the TV, but I was like, come on, it’s 2016, we’re not animals here! Also, I have to rearrange half my living area to make a stable place for the laptop to sit, and it’s all a lot of effort when the series is just $9.99 on iTunes. Or $7.99 in standard definition, and let’s face it, it’s not like I have the bandwidth for HD or a TV that will do it justice.)
The fact that I’m going to pay money to finish the series probably answers question (a) — I was enjoying it, and found it a worthwhile way to spend a Saturday evening (but not enough to move my laptop). But Stephanie was probably expecting a proper post, and I guess that’s fair, so…
This Again: “Asian Flavours” in SFF
It was a big weekend, and Liz and Steph were pretty distracted by the AFLGF (and also Steph had a busy Singapore weekend), so somehow we managed to miss the theme of Canberra’s SFF con, Conflux, this year with three white guests:
Three white guests, and the theme ‘Red Fire Monkey.’
NA’s AFL GF Post
It’s Grand Final week! We also posted about this last year, so I guess this is tradition now.
This year, Stephanie’s team, the Sydney Swans, are playing Liz’s team, the Western Bulldogs. OH WHAT AWKWARDNESS, WHAT POTENTIAL FOR SCHADENFREUDE AND ALSO CATS DRESSED UP IN TEAM GEAR!
Liz reads: 4 Australian novels
How amazing is fiction? People just MAKE UP STORIES, which I then buy and read and insert these ideas from other people’s heads into my brain!
Er, yes, I’ve read some Oz fiction lately — two crime novels, two YA. Let’s have a look.
birds of australia: special CASSOWARY DAY post
This Saturday is World Cassowary Day! So Steph (not Liz, obviously) is delighted to bring you a guest post by regular bird guest poster Michael on this magnificent bird. Forgive the tagging – although Hayley couldn’t join us for this post, I can never let go an opportunity to tag something Ornithology’s David and Margaret, and nor should I be expected to. If you’d like to hear more from him, you should follow Michael on twitter.
Statement from Liz: FOR THE RECORD, it was I who suggested that we get Michael and/or Hayley to commemorate World Cassowary Day. I can’t say I’m delighted to share a continent with prehistoric murder birbs, but I respect them and their homicidal ways, and I wish them well. (I also wish they had a whole continent just to themselves, where they can be TERRIFYING in peace, but I understand and acknowledge that my attitude of Birb Separatism is problematic.)`
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