Grace Brooks

Jan 22, 2024 | jacobin.com | Grace Brooks

When Israel launched its campaign of ethnic cleansing in Gaza last year, hundreds of thousands of Australians who support the Palestinian cause organized and attended protests, including many rank-and-file Australian Labor Party (ALP) members. Labor prime minister Anthony Albanese did not join them. Instead, he quickly affirmed Australia’s solidarity with Israel.

Aug 21, 2023 | jacobin.com | Grace Brooks

Between October and December this year, Australians will vote in a referendum to enshrine an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice to Parliament in the Constitution. Championed by Labor prime minister Anthony Albanese, if the voice referendum passes, it will require parliament to legislate for a body of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to advise the government of the day.

May 16, 2023 | overland.org.au | Lucy Sussex |Grace Brooks |Jared Davidson

‘Did I just see what I thought I did?’Open is a photograph album from pre-World War Two France—a My Trip book of a world facing cataclysm. Shots show student hikers in rural France, including my father. They have found on the track an abandoned teddy bear, with one paw upraised, in what looks like a Nazi salute. So they responded, jokingly saluting a fluffy bear Führer. These students were hardly ignorant of the imminent conflict.

Mar 15, 2023 | overland.org.au | Daniel Ray |Grace Brooks |Fred Pryce

The internet is abuzz with fast–propagating Lydia Tár memes. She’s a lesbian icon girlboss. She’s flirting with the LA Philharmonic. And, of course, there’s the new film Tár, described by Universal as ‘starring Cate Blanchett as the iconic musician Lydia Tár … widely considered one of the greatest composer/conductors.’ The film relishes in the specifics of her biography—Lydia is an EGOT winner. Lydia is the Berlin Philharmonic’s first female chief conductor.

Mar 14, 2023 | overland.org.au | Daniel Ray |Grace Brooks |Eloise Ross

It is perhaps no surprise that James Cameron’s Avatar films—respectively the first and third highest grossing film of all time—fail to offer an imagination which exceeds the banal territories of capitalism. But, through their lip-service and surface-level ‘critique’ of it, the films show us precisely the way contemporary capitalism operates. The principal target of this critique is extractive capitalism and its exploitation of the environment and of Indigenous cultures.