Thursday, November 23, 2023

Ignatius Hirudayaraj

 My Father doesn't exist on the Internet.

I google his name expecting to see some rare snippet of lost information about him

As if the ghost of his passed life will somehow emerge

In the memory of someone who was so inspired to enter it into:

a post/ a comment/ a reflection/ a reference...

For me to see

And to know that

His life made a difference to someone somewhere,

Other than me.


My Father doesn't exist on the Internet.

That's because he died in 1987

A few days after my 9th birthday

During the same week when a much-loved and much-loathed political man in our city died too.

So, there was a public mourning,

And much wailing and gnashing of teeth...

For me to ponder

That I knew that the people around me were not mourning for him or anyone like him

But for themselves and the void in them for now so to co-exist with mine.


My Father doesn't exist on the Internet

He's not there for me to look up or follow or stalk

He's not there for me to sound off to about war and regret

And failure, and the shape of clouds.


My Father doesn't exist on the Internet.

Saturday, January 28, 2023

The Voice to Parliament 2023

Far be it from me to ever claim that I am anything but mostly ignorant of the lived experience of the First Nations people of this land; of those who continue to experience one of the worst ongoing atrocities ever to be committed on Indigenous peoples anywhere in the world through time and space in the history of our civilization. But I do want to weigh in on the sad debate that is currently doing the rounds as it relates to the contentious realm of the colonial project that continues to be modern-day Australia.

I hope that while doing so I do not seem unknowing of my place and status as an immigrant living as a guest on Wurundjeri country of the Woi-Wurrung language group of Indigenous people - members of the Kulin nation.

There are very few occasions in history when one is invited to be a part of the turning back of time as it relates to our barbaristic, predatory and unconscionable actions through our collective history as colonists who have come to inhabit a geographical region in the world today having displaced in our wake a culture that thrived and cared for this land over so many millennia that the comprehension of its passage, itself, challenges our sense of time. 

The imminent Voice to Parliament referendum is a singular event in history in which I am honoured to be allowed to play a part, but to see the vile misinformation and innuendo being spread about its value to modern Australia, blak and otherwise, is disheartening and cruel; both to the memory of the atrocities committed on the original inhabitants of this land, and the clear opportunity that it now presents - to retell a history of dispossession and disgrace by writing a new story that could point towards a future of hope and regeneration.

I acknowledge the groundswell of scepticism and suspicion that has now emerged about the referendum's enactment from what, effectively, are two factions; one - that is made up of academia and activist groups that bemoan the small step that The Voice represents when viewed against the entirety of what needs to be done towards actively decolonising this country, and two - a group that merges disingenuous multi-national corporate interests centred on the mining and resource extraction industrial-complex with the recalcitrant 'quiet Australian' contingent of white-supremacists who will never change their inherent racist prejudices and will forever fight against any acknowledgement of the continuing devastation their enduring actions have spawned over the last six hundred plus years all over the world.

To the first group, I say - Leave your ivory towers, your vast libraries and secure tenureships aside for a minute; desist from your weekend activism and put down your fashionable banners for just a second, and see the referendum for what it is... a small step down a long, rickety staircase of emancipation and reconciliation for the multitudes of people who now collectively make up this continent and whose own cultural histories, wherever they come from in the world, may include revolts, genocides, and erasure from the 'white' history text books. Acknowledge that all this moment in history represents is but incremental progress towards the future that we all want and strive for - one that embodies a true and authentic decolonisation, once and for all, and a collective moving on from a violent and unforgivable past.

As for the second group, there is really nothing anyone can say to convince you to change. But know this; you cannot stem the tide of history. There can be no future without reckoning, there can be no sustainability without acknowledgement, there can be no progress without reparation, there can be no You without I.

Vote Yes to The Voice.

Saturday, September 24, 2022

The Queen Is Dead...

The news over the last few weeks has been like a tediously long hallucinogenic trip that has overstayed its welcome. 

But what it has done for the world's understanding of how much we are still beholden to the idea of a supposedly divinely preordained 'chosen' bloodline to represent the standard of what being human entails is... revelatory, to say the least.

The pomp and splendour and ceremony and the keeping of 'tradition' via the funeral rites for a long-reigning monarch and the investiture of a new one has certainly beguiled the world, taking with it every last vestige of self-respect and dignity that we, as a species, once collectively thought we possessed.

With respect to the post-colonial world, the scales have scandalously fallen from our vision of 'empire', revealing a not so much decolonised world as one whose nostalgia for a violent submissive past has not worn thin despite decades of supposed evidence-based academic reckoning and multi-national self-determination. 

You can hear it all around you - plaintive responses of, "the 'Commonwealth', the 'Commonwealth'" abound whenever any mendacious readings of the horrors of British colonisation are challenged. Leave aside the blatant inequity with which treaties and arrangements for withdrawal from their colonies by Britain were negotiated with the rudimentary representatives of its erstwhile subjugated lands only after they were stripped bare of any semblance of agency with which they could capitalize on their remaining 'natural resources' after the 'global economy' had had its say.

This isn't a curious all-encompassing amnesia so much as a shouting down of all unbiased thinking and expression.

The West has certainly revealed itself over the past few weeks for what it has always been; a craven, despairing beast unwilling to face upto its cannibalistic mercantilist history that dominated so much of the world for hundreds of dark and terrifying years (for the subjugated). A time in which large swathes of the world lost its own 'history' and 'culture' and 'traditional practices' and socio-religious identities. 

I cannot abide a world that 'they' have made up, whatever human sensitivities I may hold for the passing on of a 90-year old affectatious white woman. A culture and a people that has not gotten over its predatory past must be confined to the dustbin of history. 

'Their' time is at an end.