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It was mid-February in Athens and cold and sunny as we sat on the balcony of an apartment sipping cloudy ouzo and eating salty olives. Vallejo Gantner and I did this almost every afternoon to celebrate another day’s end of Athens Burns Bright; Creative Ecology Tour. “Mate, I signed the contract, it’s real, it’s happening,” Gantner said, breathing out a big
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Rebetien are four musicians (pictured above) from Athens who are headlining this year’s Melbourne Rebetiko Festival. I spoke to bouzouki player, vocalist and the group’s co-founder Fotis Vergopoulos as they were about to hop on a bus to Port Fairy Folk Festival and then fly to WOMAdelaide. Rebetiko began as the music of Greek refugees from the Asia Minor Catastrophe
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Immigration is what Australia has been built on and there is no indication that it will change soon regardless of recent dog whistling, writes Fotis Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced the “fair dinkum” reduction of the migration ceiling from 190,000 permanent migrants to 160,000, last week. This announcement was cynical and far from ‘fair dinkum’,
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Russell Anderson the head of the National Ethnic and Multicultural Broadcasters Council is thrilled about the new role of independent ethnic broadcasting and digital convergence on the even of the 2018 NEMBC Conference. Next weekend, the National Ethnic and Multicultural Broadcasters Council, (NEMBC), is bringing together over a 150 ethnic and multicultural broadcasters at its annual
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Lydia Dobbin and her team in Play On began a minor revolution. They perform classical music by Xenakis, Mendelsohn and Britten and then follow it with a DJ who ‘navigates diverse genres and pivots towards the counter-culture’. This concept is staged in underground car parks and other non-traditional spaces and was founded by Melbourne-based Dobbin and her co-conspirators,
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Fotis Kapetopoulos speaks to Julian Burnside QC who will be delivering the annual Walter Lipmann Oration on Thursday, September 13 at the Melbourne Town Hall presented by the Ethnic Communities Council of Victoria. It is a cold, wet and dark afternoon at the lawyers’ end of Melbourne’s CBD. The office of human rights advocate and barrister Julian
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Kon Karapanagiotidis OAM, founder of the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre talks to Daily Review about his new book ‘The Power of Hope’. Kon Karapanagiotidis OAM is tired. He’s suffering a throat infection and has just returned from ten-day national book tour for The Power of Hope. Or How Community Love and Compassion can change the World.
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Greg Mackie OAM was responsible for me reading William Burroughs’ Junkie. I spent many hours in my twenties leafing through books in his Imprints Bookshop on Hindley Street while avoiding my university readings. Mackie is the founder and chairperson of the annual Adelaide Festival of Ideas, (AFOI) The theme of this year’s festival ‘Who’s at the
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With friends like the former Prime Minister Tony Abbott, who needs enemies? The proposed Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra has died in the trench warfare between the post-modern left and the new right. According to The Australian this week, the ANU’s incoming history department head, Professor Frank
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It is a good time for Cory Bernardi and Osman Faruqi to hit the history books On Monday May 28, Cory Bernardi tweeted “Mourn/Commiserate the Fall of Constantinople to the hands of the Islamic takeover”. The leader of the Australian Conservatives suggested people visit a “Church (or Cathedral in your vicinity)”, or “watch a film
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