Strange New

Kamehameha the Great became the sovereign monarch during a time of rapid transition for his islands. His rivals were no longer limited to the kings of Hawaii, Maui, Oahu and Kauai. Ambitious men had arrived from America, England, France, Portugal and Spain, either offering their war material and service personnel to the highest bidder or staking a claim of the islands for themselves and their masters.

Meet Otis Dooda. Yes, that’s his name. Go on and have a good laugh. He’s heard it all before. He’s been called things like Otis Poopy Stink and Otis Toilet Twinkie. That’s right, yuck it up and get it out of your system. We’ll wait. All right then. This is the story of Otis and the Dooda family (including their rat named Smoochie) moving to New York City, and the incredibly strange, but true, things that happened to them. It all started with Otis getting cursed by a guy in a potted plant in their apartment building lobby, and then meeting a bunch of their neighbors, including a farting pony named Peaches who was disguised as a dog.

In a riveting combination of memoir, reportage and political and intellectual history, Ashenden traces the strange career of the great Australian silence—from its beginnings in the first encounters of Black and white, through the work of the early anthropologists, the historians and the courts in landmark cases about land rights and the Stolen Generations, to still-continuing controversy.

Provoked by a half-hidden account, Ashenden sets out to understand how the story of ‘relations between two racial groups within a single field of life’ has been told and not told, in this town and across the nation. In a riveting combination of memoir, reportage and political and intellectual history, Ashenden traces the strange career of the great Australian silence.

From the marriage equality debate to the COVID-19 lockdown, ‘free speech’ has become the new battleground in Australian society. What does the furore over one footballer’s social media postings reveal about how it got that way?

Metaphysics, the secret doctrine of the Dead, is traditionally and invariably couched in intrigue and mystery within the darkness of seances, haunted buildings, ghosts and demons; not truly taken seriously. Talk of death in our age is frowned upon, for the World has no answers to offer but to avoid discussion. This is changing now in front of us, old habits are fading as internal knowledge breaks through the barrier of conventional discussion and allows our society to more freely examine personal internal experiences having more validity than the physical world symbols we presently judge by.