OnDusk

I’m just going to put this here and be on my way.  Let me guess.   Your most savage opposition to what’s officially known as Australia Day is focused on two individuals?  Both female. Lee Lin Chin and any day now you will squeeze out some sanctimonious drivel about Miss Jessica Mauboy . Because that’s where you go everytime.   You avoid the organisers, Meat and Livestock who paid for an ad about lamb chops, the ad agency, governments -- or to put it another way -- you avoid the men and aim straight at the women. To call you out on your consistent sexism feels like bullying. I feel like I am standing on your dick.  But seriously, why is it - boy - that you are only trying to get up in someone’s face when it’s about a girl who you can argue has done you wrong?   Women who, lets face it, don’t even know you’re alive? And gee, wind up another female and let them go at it for you?   Here, have a tissue.   * drops t...

Congratulations on joining Twitter. These are my top 3 tips for new comers.  Tip #1 Twitter is not dying. It has over 300 million users so it will be around for a while. You have not missed the boat if you are starting now.   So - welcome ! Tip #2 Hey country... resist the urge to go track down the larger or more prominent blackfella accounts to tell them you don’t like the way they go on. This is what THAT looks like. If you start like this.... via GIPHY ...and it doesn't work out...you may want to do this... ...but it ends up looking like this... And if anyone tells you this.... ....they're probably doing a whole lot of this... #Tip 3 No one is in charge of the black voices.  A big Twitter account is like a sand castle. Some people have just spent a lot longer on the beach.  It's true, you do get people who have put a lot of effort into building their sand castle. When people have gone ho...

The truth is out there By Siv Parker Something about their beat alerted me to a secret in my midst.   Mrs Petersen had come around for a cup of tea with mum. Mum drank a lot of tea with various women in that mining town. Her CWA gang. Her book club cronies. Her tennis team members.   Most of the time there was nothing of interest to eavesdrop on. But this day felt different.   And then I was booted. ‘Siv, please go read somewhere else, we’re talking.’ No offer of a treat, no bribe, nothing. Just take your primary school library book and get. I gave a sign that I no longer required sheltering, and lobbed a bombshell, 'Mum swears'. I got a reaction but not the one I’d been saving up for and expecting from declaring my earth shattering worldliness. Mum snorted and Mrs Petersen smiled though it didn’t set her tightly rolled helmet of curls aquiver. I fired off two more bombshells. 'All the time. ... Really badly.' Mrs Petersen replied, 'we...

Hitting Home by Siv Parker Dear reader, this post is full of triggers.  But quite frankly, I am not dragging the dead carcass of endless, inexcusable and swiftly smoothed over 'male on female violence' into 2016.  Writing gets it out of my head. I rarely see actual violence these days.   But I know what it looks like.  Years ago I was part of the unofficial rescue team for my partner’s brothers – both of them, his brothers who drunk or sober, high or low, beat their girlfriends, destroyed their homes and cried about how they were the unlucky ones. I tell you, I wasn’t very sympathetic. I didn’t like either of them. I disliked the mother even more, who would ring at all hours expecting us to retrieve one or the other and some days BOTH of them because she was worried the police might be called. Call the police, was my response. She’d coo in this horrible wet-lipped mumble.   I took it for some kind of baby talk, an...