FEAST OR FAMINE

The First National Australian Migrant and Refugee Women's Alliance (AMaRWA) Conference was held in Canberra from 28-30 April 2013. The objectives of the conference (called Stand Up!) align with the Australian Government's National Plan to Reduce Violence against Women and their Children (2010-2022). AMaRWA's vision is to represent the voices and interests of the 6.6 million migrant and refugee women in Australia at the national level. AMaRWA identified violence against culturally and linguistically diverse (CaLD) women as being a national concern because it is a barrier to their ability to participate in the workforce, to protect their children from harm, and to engage with mainstream society. In Australia, 33% of women have experienced physical violence since the age of 15, and almost 20% have experienced sexual violence. Figures may be higher among women of non-English speaking backgrounds because they are usually less likely to report violations. Globally...

Today is ANZAC Day—a day to commemorate the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps. The soldiers and service-people of the corps are commonly known as Anzacs, and the spirit of courage and friendship (referred to as “mateship”) is a strong feature of the Anzacs. ANZAC Day is held each year on April 25. It is the anniversary of the landing on Gallipoli in 1915, the first major military action fought by Australian and New Zealand forces during the First World War. But it is also a day to remember all Aussies and Kiwis who served and/or died in all wars, conflicts, and peace-keeping operations. The Commemorative Ceremony for Torres Strait Islanders is also held on ANZAC Day after the dawn service at the First Nations memorial plaque. Thirteen years after Australia became a federal Commonwealth, the First World War commenced. In 1915 the Anzacs aimed to capture the Gallipoli Peninsula in Turkey to open up the Dardanelles for the British and allied ships. At the time, Istanb...

Today, 23 April 2013, Australia’s population reached 23 million, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. According to the Canberra Times, in 1918 the population was just 5 million. Each year the population grew at an average of 1.7%, with the state of Western Australia increasing greater than the national rate (at 3.4%). Making up the 1.7% growth, or 1,048 people per day, is one birth every one minute and 44 seconds and a new arrival from overseas every 2 minutes and 23 seconds, minus a death every 3 minutes and 32 seconds. That equates to a population increase of one person every minute and 23 seconds. This represents the fastest growth rate in the developed world. This compares to a growth rate of 0.9% in the United States, 0.6% in the United Kingdom, and 1.4% in India. Globally, the rate of growth is 1.1%. Australia’s increase is largely made up of migrants, which were predominantly male in the early years. By 1979 there were more women than men arrivin...

From a Distant Shore: Australian Writers in Britain 1820-2012 (2013) commences with Geoffrey Serle’s “unanswerable” question—whether expatriate writers “wrote more or less, better or worse, after digging up their roots.” The authors add, “Sometimes, for a host of reasons, the writer’s art flourishes abroad; sometimes it falters and dies.” In trying to answer the question, the authors present portraits of 45 expatriate Australian writers over 200 years in chronological order. These include writers such as Henry Handel Richardson, Clive James, Barbara Hanrahan, Nikki Gemmel, Randall Stow, and even Barry Humphries as a dramatist. But what is expatriation? And does the distinction of expatriation dissolve with the globalization of the book trade? The authors considered “postcolonial, diasporic, nationalistic and other theories of expatriation … but chose a more author-centered, eclectic approach.” Exploring expatriation’s impact on Australian published writers, discus...

The ParisWife (2011) is about Hadley Richardson, the first wife of American author, Ernest Hemingway. Written in the first person—as if by Hadley’s own hand—the author wrote the novel “as accurately as possible” because “the true story of the Hemingway’s marriage is so dramatic and compelling, and has been so beautifully treated by Ernest Hemingway himself, in A Moveable Feast, that my intention became to push deeper into the emotional lives of the characters and bring new insights to historical events, while staying faithful to the facts.” At 18 years during the First World War, Hemingway was wounded in the legs when he was stationed at Fossalta in Italy. Elizabeth Hadley Richardson met Hemingway in Oaks Park near Chicago, after the war in 1920, when Ernest was 21 and she was 28. A year later they married. Planning on returning to Italy when he had money, Hemingway was talked into going to Paris. When Hadley inherited money from her uncle, they did. “If you...

A More Perfect Heaven: How Copernicus Revolutionised the Cosmos (2011, a signed copy by the author) was initially intended to be a play, a short drama. However, the author generously introduces Copernicus and tells the aftermath of his publication, sandwiched between a two-act play. In 1510, aged 40, Nicolaus Copernicus re-envisioned the cosmos with the Sun as the centre, and not the Earth as was the theory at the time. It was unheard of to think that the Earth moved around the Sun, for scientists believed the Earth was static. Copernicus concealed his theory for 30 years fearing ridicule from his mathematician peers and the Church. At the age of 25, Georg Joachim Rheticus travelled to Frauenburg in Varmia, northern Poland (now Germany) to meet Copernicus. This is where the play commences. The play dramatizes the “unlikely” meeting between the scientist Nicolaus Copernicus (who was also a Catholic priest) and his uninvited visitor who convinced him to publish his...

Do you look at someone you don’t know and think “that person looks like a Ulysses?” New software has shown that it’s possible to take an educated guess at a person’s name with just one look at their face (New Scientist, 6 April 2013). Researcher Andrew Gallagher of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, says that parents’ choices for their children’s names are influenced by factors such as gender, ethnicity, friends, family, and popular names or influential people at the time of the birth. Names are important. In related research, the team cites that “implicit egotism” is often used to decide upon a child’s name—that is the tendency to gravitate toward people, places and things that resemble the self. This, the team states, is why a disproportionate number of people choose a partner with a similar name to their own, such as Eric and Erica, and why more people with surnames beginning with Cali- live in California, and why people with the name Baker are more likely to be ba...