Writing on the World Around Us.
On 18 May, Australians will cast their votes in an election that has workers’ rights at centre-stage. In what has been declared by the social-democratic opposition Labor Party as a “referendum on wages”, the proposed policies on workplace relations have not been more divergent in over a decade. Continue reading “Australian unions seek to “balance the power of the powerful” in historic election”
Faced with a construction boom in the 1970’s, front-line neighbourhoods and unionised construction workers in Sydney formed a radical coalition to protect their communities. Continue reading “Sydney’s Green Bans: the worker boycotts that saved the city”
Under the waters, in the skies, how many shades of blue can be seen in the Ría de Aldán? On the ridges and in the shallows, how many greens? Continue reading “Light and Life on the Ría de Aldán”
Leaping ahead of the aesthetic norms of their own time, a group of young artists in nineteenth century England brought with them the legacy and lore of past worlds to create something wholly new, a body of work whose creators took on the name of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a movement whose manifesto celebrated the romantic, the imaginative, and the natural. Continue reading “Life as a Dream: The Allure of the Pre-Raphaelites”
From the sea the old man comes. I didn’t see him enter, only exit, as if he had never been on land. He is brown and round, his belly protrudes over skinny legs, and his back is bent. He is nude, and moves slow. Continue reading “The Seduction of the Sea”
Our Lady of Carmen, the seamen’s protector, is every year taken from her shrine in Church of San Cibrán out to the sea, o mar, where her melancholic face looks down into the depths searching for the sunken souls of this town of seafarers. Continue reading “Our Lady of the Sunken Souls: Festa do Carmen”
Before Christ, before the Emperor Augustus, in the isolated lands of Gallaecia, there was a Celtic culture which peppered the highlands and coastlines of modern-day Galicia with their hill-top settlements. On these stone castros the Gallaeci built their civilisation Continue reading “Unearthing Gallaecia: The Ruins of Monte O Facho”
The Romantics said that experience is heightened, deepened, by the sublime – the feeling of marvel mixed with fear at the sight of raw natural beauty: a mountain’s peak, an ocean’s depths, the desert’s breadth… On the Cíes there is this sublimity… Continue reading “Atlantic Island Explorations IV: A Return to the Real on the Illas Cíes”
Marco Polo took half a lifetime to reach the Orient, another half to return to Venice. My ancestors took half a year to reach the antipodes, and they never saw their homeland again. Today it takes half an hour to cross a country, half a day to cross a continent. Continue reading “The Space-Time Contraction”
