It’s a quiet Friday lunchtime when I meet Tasmanian filmmaker Ninna Millikin in Hobart’s charismatic suburb of Battery Point. I wait in a small park surrounded by nineteenth-century cottages, and we find a window seat in a cosy café nearby. It seems appropriate that we meet in such a distinctive part of Hobart given what…
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Striborg When attending festivals of any sort, I find it’s always important to remind yourself to keep high expectations in check. It’s really easy to fall into hyper-criticality when you’ve payed a lot of money or travelled a long way to attend a curated event. This is especially when that event is MONA FOMA, which…
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Mona Foma (or MOFO) is the summer art and music festival hosted by Hobart’s Museum of Old and New Art (better known as Mona). Held each year in January, the festival has a national reputation and is considered to be a stalwart of Tasmania’s cultural fabric. Reviewing a whole festival is a difficult task- every aspect…
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Tasmania’s Asta was blown away by the reception she received on her East Coast tour, which took place earlier this year. ‘I’ve released three singles, but I’d been behind the scenes a lot and I haven’t really been out in the open’, she says. ‘For me, that tour was such an amazing experience because I…
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After months of campaigning and debates, Tasmania is set to become the third Australian state to decriminalise abortion. The Reproductive Health (Access to Terminations) Bill 2013 has passed the Legislative Council, in amended form, after extensive late night debates. The bill passed this afternoon with nine votes in favour and five against. The Reproductive Health…
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Texas judge rules new abortion restrictions unconstitutional. Despite Wendy Davis’ 11-hour filibuster blocking a super restrictive anti-abortion law in Texas, the law passed in July, banning abortions after 20 weeks and requiring doctors to perform abortions at special facilities. But the good news is that this week a judge ruled that the new regulations are…
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My hometown of Hobart, Tasmania, has been seeing red this month with globally-acclaimed contemporary arts awesome-machine, MONA’s (Museum of Old and New Art)new winter festival, Dark MoFo, giving the sleepy state capital a much-needed winter shake up. During what is usually the dead season in terms of tourism and, well, anything else, really, the contemporary…
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The Tasmanian Upper House has passed a bill that will allow same-sex couples the ability to legally adopt children. These changes to the Relationships Act aim to ‘remove unfair discrimination against gay parents,’ giving same-sex couples the right to be eligible to adopt children in Tasmania. The bill passed the house of assembly in…
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A Tasmanian pharmacist, Rod Scaife, has claimed that he will boycott stocking and selling RU486, the controversial abortion drug, if it becomes legal in Tasmania. Scaife’s statement comes after the Australian Pharmaceutical Benefits Advisory Committee recently recommended that RU486 be covered under the benefits scheme. If the drug is legalised and incorporated in this scheme,…
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Like countless other young women, the “war on women” during the 2012 American presidential election campaign was a shock to my system. It can seem so easy to take our rights for granted in a time and culture where post-feminist discourses tell us that we can “have it all”; where Beyonce’s power-femininity dominates the all-American-male…
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Tasmania has a lot of problems that ‘mainlanders’ might not know about. As Jonathan West writes in his essay, “Obstacles to progress”, ‘Tasmania ranks at the bottom among Australian states on virtually every dimension of economic, social, and cultural performance.’ It’s perhaps timely then that this island state is investigated through an entire issue of…
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