It is Monday! And today is particularly Mondayish, here at No Award.

REMINDER that there is now a No Award twitter.

ICYMI, apparently the Australian government has literally been paying people smugglers to take asylum seekers back to Not Australia, in a complete inability to understand the impact of MONEY in SUPPLY and DEMAND. Prime Minister Tony Abbot dodges questions on people-smuggler payment claims (SMH) (SMH!!!?!); Tony Abbott refuses to say whether Australia paid people smugglers (The Age).

Spook Magazine writes about our national tragedy, the fact that David and Margaret left us and we’ve no one to replace them. Will there ever be another Margaret + David?

Yesterday Steph and Liz, in the grown up company of Noted Fatberg Zoe, visited the Qianlong exhibition at NGV:I. We also detoured into something something embroidery of England 1600-1900. Highly recommend a visit; “A Golden Age of China: Qianlong Emperor” ends 21 June and includes many small necked outfits, much to Noted Fatberg Zoe’s delight; drunk people in English embroidery runs until 12 July.

THE PAST: Fitzroy before it was gentrified, with words and pictures at Our ABC.

Pozible for LittleWren, a mago for young ladies

In No Surprises (sometimes I think we should have called this blog “No Surprise” except that’s a bit too Radiohead), How can a mini-series about British settlement show no Aboriginal people? The answers are a) Australia likes to believe there are none; b) Australia likes to believe there were none; c) Racism; d) This is a trick question, who do you think you are, the answer is all of the above.

By contrast, the ABC’s adaptation of The Secret River doesn’t sugarcoat the violence driving the spread of white people through Australia.  No Award hasn’t read The Secret River, but the Australia Council for the Arts’ Protocols for Producing Indigenous Australian Writing highlights it as one of the best examples of a non-Indigenous author writing about Indigenous history.

(Also, that document is an amazing resource and starting point if you are a non-Indigenous person interested in writing about Indigenous issues or characters.  It was published in 2007, so unless there’s been a new version and I need to update my bookmarks, it’s a bit out of date.  But as I said, it’s a good starting point.)

On a slightly related note: former Continuum Guest of Honour and novelist Ambelin Kwaymullina wrote Walking Many Worlds: Aboriginal Storytelling and Writing for the Young.

Indigenous peoples are unlikely to ever use the written word in the same way as those to whom the English language belongs; we reinterpret and subvert to make someone else’s form communicate our substance. In the end, we are not writing. We are speaking, singing, laughing, crying. And we know it is desperately important to be heard.

At Crikey, why don’t many more train travellers bike and ride? Feel free to ask Steph this one in detail, because the answer is ‘VLine hates cyclists’ and passively does everything it can to discourage bikes on trains.  (Liz adds, also, bikes on trains at peak hour are just really inconvenient and everyone stares at you with hate in their eyes.)

Look, I’m not saying that winters are only going to get worse in Our Climate Dystopia, but for a little while we’re going to have some more severe cold weather events, and it’s well noted by people from countries where it actually gets cold that Australian houses are shit in the weather, so it’s nice to have an article to point to about that. Australian houses are just glorified tents in winter.

The Evil Reign of the Red Delicious – Liz is perplexed by the way this article frames the scourge of the Red Delicious as a uniquely American problem, but nevertheless, she’s always up for hating on the world’s most terrible apple.

Phil Tippett was demoted from Dinosaur Supervisor to Dinosaur Consultant for Jurassic World.  He did a terrible job at that, too.  THIS ISN’T AMATEUR HOUR, PHIL.

Link to Linkspam: as usual, Natalie Luhrs provides an excellent round-up of reading material in general, and in particular, this week, to the responses to Tor’s decision to throw one of its leading creative directors under a bus after she dared call noted white supremacist and misogynist Vox Day a white supremacist and misogynist.

The first comment expresses something Liz has been thinking since it happened, that publicly reprimanding an employee is unprofessional and bullying.

(Note: the top picture on the linked post is from Eliza Bennett’s A Woman’s Work Is Never Done series, in which the artist embroiders her own hand.  I find it deeply upsetting and horrible, and I don’t even have self-harm triggers.  It also makes me angry, in that it’s meant to be a statement about the lives of women who perform menial and manual labour, yet it’s something that only someone who doesn’t perform that sort of work can do.

But honestly, I just find it so upsetting and grotesque that I suspect I bypass common sense and go straight to I Don’t Like It, Therefore It’s Problematic And Also Objectively Terrible.  Which is ridiculous, because like I said, I bypass common sense.  For example, I had to stop typing this three times so I could get up and take a walk around the office and flex my un-injured hands for a few minutes.  Seriously, it makes my hands so tense, they get muscle spasms and a week of arthritic pain if I see it and don’t block it fast enough.

My point being, I guess: warning, trigger and otherwise.)