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Yearly Archives: 2021

Wealth, power and justice

The 12-month jail sentence handed down last month to coal protester Eric Serge Herbert sent a chill of fear through activist circles. As it was intended to do. The sentencing magistrate, Janine Lacy, imposed the severe sentence after Herbert delayed a coal train in Newcastle for a few hours. His action was part of a campaign by Blockade Australia, a protest group to which he belongs. While Blockade Australia sponsored 20 anti-coal protests aimed at the major coal port over a period of 11 days, the state's police and court system responded with equal or greater…

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Read more about the article Newcastle’s Obelisk and “the social evil”

Newcastle’s Obelisk and “the social evil”

Was Newcastle's famous Obelisk once a site for illicit sexual assignations? It may have been, if I have understood the transcript of an 1866 public meeting correctly. The transcript, created as part of an elaborate joke apparently designed to reflect discredit on Newcastle's young municipal council, is a record of a meeting at which a reluctant candidate for office, Mr C. W. Williams, was quizzed over many aspects of civic life. Mr Williams was not a highly educated man. At the time the law allowed unwilling candidates to be elected to Newcastle's municipal council against their…

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Read more about the article Adrift on the river of time

Adrift on the river of time

I wrote the column above in The Newcastle Herald back in February 2005. That's nearly 17 years ago, as the crow flies. I use that seemingly odd expression deliberately, since it seems to me that time moves like some rivers: sometimes running pell-mell in a straight line through tight canyons of circumstance, sometimes meandering gently through sun-kissed meadows and sometimes twisting and turning through unexpected rapids and past overhanging branches at such a rate that the only thing to remain in your memory after the hectic passage is a few blurry images and a sense of…

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