A small assembly of works that have stuck with me, moved me, or maybe even riled me up – in the vein of Waypoints but more one sided.
This week is NAIDOC Week – a week to celebrate the culture of Aboriginal Australians while not ignoring its activist origins in the 1938 Day of Mourning. The theme for this year is Voice. Treaty. Truth. And I have been endeavoring to surround myself with the voices of Aboriginal people – and a great place to start is the NITV NAIDOC coverage. I particularly enjoyed Hidden women of history: Isabel Flick, the tenacious campaigner who fought segregation in Australia by Heather Goodall and not just because Isabel reminds me of my own nan.
Born in 1928, Isabel had shown how tenacious she was from a young age – although denied access to the Collarenebri public school, she was determined to teach herself to read and write. And she did. On the veranda of the local manse as a child and then in every place she worked and lived, Isabel grabbed every shred of knowledge and skill she could, determined she would not be defeated by segregation and exclusion.
What a firecracker – with so much more in the full article
There are so many amazing women out there that don’t show up in the spotlight of curriculum or history books, and I am so glad that Heather Goodall helped Isabel record her life story and turn it into a book. I also wanted to mention the UNSW on campus light exhibition – NAIDOC After Dark which I wandered around last night while listening to the accompanying playlist.
I listen to at least 2 hours of podcasts each day (on my commute and lunchtime walk and this week I wanted to share Nuku Women – Nuku #15 Kim Tairi. Sometimes I am even lucky enough to have a small amount of work that can be done while listening to podcasts, and I have been discovering more and more Library podcasts that make me feel less guilty for listening during on library $$$. The Nuku Women project is by Qiane Matata-Sipu and is phenomenal, and I am sorry that I hadn’t heard of it until I found library twitter talking about the episode with Auckland University of Technology University Librarian Kim Tairi. I have added Nuku to my podcast feed now and am diving deeper into the project outside of Library hours. I wanted to highlight Kim’s interview as it tackles some of the stereotypes I have already mentioned taking ire with, as well as getting into some deep and juicy reflections on what makes libraries worthwhile. I was cheering while listening to Kim dig into how we need to break down the barriers that keep people out of libraries – ‘Libraries belong to the community’.
We’re publicly funded – so this is your place. I work here, but this is your place.
Say it again for those in the back Kim!
Something else that shone out to me was the importance of listening to people whose material is in our collections – with the knowledge we have in our institutions. With the push to digitisation time and consideration need to be built into the process, rather than just racing ahead to make it available digitally and chucking out the physical. We’re not at a place where this goes without saying, and I don’t think it’s useful to think we will ever be ‘good enough’ to not emphasise the care that is required in handling knowledge. As Kim says – ‘It can take a long time – but isn’t it worth doing properly?’
My next bite is Giving Amazon’s Side of the Story – I’m including this one purely so that I can out myself as a union member and activist as early as possible in this blog. Rarely can I read anything about Amazon without feeling equal parts rage and sadness. It was so refreshing to read this Jacobin piece by Marc Kagan and feel like I was finally being met on my level by a journalist. I’ve seen plenty of pieces about the abject misery of working in Amazon warehouses (or as an Amazon delivery driver) but very little that goes past the human interest aspect of oppressed and mistreated workers to the source of that misery and torment – managers, CEOs, company owners etc. People in charge whose profit line depends on our backs as capitalism relies on the grind of the proletariat for its never ending growth. Read the piece and join your union and I will endeavor to write more about this in the future.
Lastly Tiny Private Mind-Motions gives a joyfully specific phrase to refer to a weird thing that my (and apparently everyone else’s) brain does. The one I will share from my brain this week is that while I was trying to be careful while eating breakfast on the train to work my brain was inexplicably reinforcing this by saying ‘here comes the aeroplane’ like I am a little baby. Gosh I’m glad it’s the weekend.