One must get ones’ collective nouns and metaphors right!
Elephants in high tea country
Those are locals not foreigners mate! No need to stare them down… or charge.
A rare instance of a dead elephant in the Sri Pada ranges … SRI PADA = Adam’s Peak in Sri Lanka
Filed under accountability, heritage, taking the piss, travelogue, war crimes
Island-hopping: from Lanka to Cocos to Christmas and thence to Manus perhaps
Sri Lankan asylum-seekers arrive at Christmas Island airport after being flown from the Cocos Islands yesterday. Picture: Colin Murty Source: The Australian… ALSO SEE Rowan Callick: “Airlift to Manus swings into action,” http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/election-2013/airlift-to-extend-manus-swings-into-action/story-fn9qr68y-1226687190919 AND
Kamal Wickremasinghe, “Bogus refugees are making waves in Australia,” Daily News, 29 July 2013, http://www.dailynews.lk/?q=features/bogus-refugees-are-making-waves-australia
Profound sorrow. Selvamalar and Balamanokaran lose their son at sea off Java
Paul Toohey & Ashley Mullany, in The Advertiser, Sunday, 28 July with title as “I just want my baby boy back”
About 1000 asylum seekers have died trying to get to Australia illegally by boat since the Labor Government was elected. The Sunday Times was on the scene in the immediate aftermath of the latest boat tragedy this week and, in a common but rarely captured story, can tell why one woman took an extraordinary risk to reach her husband in Perth and suffered the most painful loss of all. Special report by Paul Toohey in Java and Ashlee Mullany in Perth.
SHE was sold a cruel lie by the people smugglers. He will never meet his son. She was told she would travel on a luxury ocean liner from Indonesia to Australia. They showed her photos of the ship that would transport her, her beautiful son and her brother to their new life in Australia. It was a superb vessel, with three storeys of cabins. “I believed them,” she said. Continue reading
A grieving Tamil couple … and credulous Australians
Michael Roberts
The headline picture in The Australian was — and remains — gut-wrenching, harrowing. It is a tale of searing suffering: a young Sri Lankan Tamil couple have just lost their ten-month old infant after a boat with asylum seekers that had set off from Java sank off shore. Take Peter Alford’s story filed from Java yesterday.
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Hard line unheard or unheeded by asylum-seekers
The Australian·20 hours ago
A baby boy and a 10-year-old girl are believed to be among the dead after an asylum boat sank off Java. THE asylum-seekers from the latest sinking tragedy….
The two are Antony Jayaseelan and Rose Anu Resana, Tamils of Catholic background. They were among the 204 people on board on a boat that had left Cidaun in Java on Tuesday and then floundered in the sea, leaving 44 missing and 4 confirmed dead. It would seem that these asylum-seekers were not aware of the new Rudd-government’s hardline policy. Said Jayaseelan: “We didn’t know but even if we did know we could not stay in Sri Lanka.” Continue reading
Filed under asylum-seekers, Australian culture, australian media, cultural transmission, economic processes, ethnicity, historical interpretation, immigration, Indian Ocean politics, island economy, legal issues, life stories, people smugglers, politIcal discourse, Sinhala-Tamil Relations, slanted reportage, sri lankan society, Tamil migration, truth as casualty of war
Hang Son Doong Cavern in Vietnam — Selections
Filed under landscape wondrous, photography, unusual people
Black July 83: Two Statements in The NATION
I: Editorial: “Black July 83 never again,” 21 July 2013
Remember Black July ’83’ is a print-ad campaign designed by the advertising agency JWT for the Centre for Policy Alternatives (CPA), a controversial NGO that has come in for a lot of flak from multiple quarters on grounds of financial dishonesty and aiding and abetting separatism. ‘Never to repeat’ is the payoff line. The campaign is to be launched shortly, The Nation learns. ‘Black July’ is remembered and remembered differently and for varying purposes by those who remember. Whatever these differences may be there is commonality in agreement on one thing: it should never happen again.
A Scene in Borella–Pic from Victor Ivan
There’s nothing to say that ‘Black July’ will not recur. There’s nothing to say that it must. On the other hand, if it is not to happen again, it is important to remember what happened. It is important to acknowledge that it inflicted a deep wound on the nation, the people who make it, their collective and individual memory; a wound that has bled into many other lacerations. This has been a common view expressed by many across the political spectrum. Continue reading
Black Memories: July 1983
GROUNDVIEWS, 18 July 2013
In August this year, Groundviews will launch a compelling collection of content to commemorate 30 years since Black July. The content will feature original podcasts, photography and writing on a dedicated website. Building from the critically acclaimed Moving Images two years ago, Groundviews brought together leading documentary filmmakers, photographers, activists, theorists and designers, in Sri Lanka and abroad, to focus on just how deeply the anti-Tamil pogrom in 1983 has shaped our imagination, lives, society and polity.
Photo by Natalie Soysa, for Groundviews
The resulting content, featuring voices never captured before, marrying rich photography, video, audio and visual design with constitutional theory, story-telling and memorialising, has no historical precedent. Curated by Groundviews, the project is an attempt to use digital media and compelling design to remember the inconvenient, and in no small way, acts of daring, courage and resistance during and after Black July. Continue reading
