VERY URGENT Vietnamese national HPN

The Minister for Immigration and Boarder Protection

Parliament House

Canberra, ACT

2600

Dear Minister,

I implore you to exercise your statutory discretion to cancel the deportation order applied to  the Vietnamese national called HPN.

In the name of common humanity, I request you agree to his application for ministerial intervention to prevent him from being deported and separated from his partner Kesinee Kingrak and 10-month-old daughter Lily.

 Vietnamese national HPN has applied for ministerial intervention to prevent him from being deported and separated from his partner Kesinee Kingrak and 10-month-old daughter Lily. Photograph: Kesinee Kingrak

The Guardian 30 December 2017

Yours sincerely,

Stewart

30 December 2017

Mr Turnbull, Mr Shorten, I condemn you policies about our most vulnerable people.

‘Examine almost any contemporary political problem, from Australia’s growing economic inequality to the declining performance of our school students relative to the rest of the world, to our dying coral reefs, and you will find the fingerprints of John Winston Howard.

Having lived through the Little Winston years, I'm entitled to feel enraged at the way he entrenched the Right in this nation.’

Mike Seccombe “It’s all John Howard’s fault.” in The Saturday Paper Edition No. 188 December 23, 2017 – January 26, 2018 p 1

Seccombe is correct. Howard’s destructive legacy, even though he is not dead, still infects all that is good. For example, he more than any other prime minister, codified the vilification of people who are refugees or seeking asylum with us.

A 32 year old man who fled the ‘stans’ region lives in Melbourne’s east where buses run every hour in daylight and where flats are cheapest.

“My brother worked in the garage that serviced US vehicles. Terrorists bombed it and killed him.

Then they looked for me.

Why?

Because he was my brother and he had co-operated with the Americans.

I was scared of every man who came towards me in the street – going to the shops, walking to the barber, going to visit my friend.”

People have the right to live without fear.

I see the issue as about fundamental human rights; they are universal.

Our political leaders see it as about political advantage.

A 26 year old woman fled the middle east. She lives as far west in Melbourne as you can and still find a regular commuter bus – on weekdays.

“My brother found me in bed with my girlfriend.

He said something like, ‘Sister, I’ll give your four choices. Pick one. Would you like to be stoned to death buried up to your neck in the middle of a soccer pitch? Would you like to be beheaded? Would you like to be hung? Would you like to be pushed off a six-storey building?’

People have the right to marry the person they love.

I did nothing in the Howard years.

I’m not going to do nothing now.

Even if it's only a few hours a week, I’ll try to undo a few fragments of Howard's legacy.

I can think.

I can write.

I can manage projects.

So:

I’ll write a blog – one that I know  the monitors of political parties will pick up.

I’ll volunteer to paralegal with Refugee Legal – even if only one day a week.

How to get help

Australian Brandenburg Orchestra: Noël Noël!

Australian Brandenburg Orchestra and Australian Brandenburg Choir

Melbourne Recital Centre

Saturday 9 December 2017

Carols in the Domain? No, because 1. I live in Melbourne and 2. the music is rubbish. Why then did Saturday’s ABO program sound as if I were there?

Untill this year Oz Brandenburg’s Noël Noël! programs have been an oasis of joy, intelligence, clever musicology and superb performance – just as the rest of the 2017 series had been. Maddeningly, last night’s was CitD without the under-bum grass.

Constructing a program around a musicals singer was dangerous. That alone prevented the development of any logical program thread. There’s not much American theatre Christmas music that’s anything more than supermarket junk. Those songs that were programmed last night demonstrated that.

ABO is one of the best baroque bands in the world but I got no obvious enjoyment, no enthusiasm from them last night. Incredible performance values in their playing of course but the sparkle, the wit – something to work with – was missing. The superb, spikey arrangements of familiar and unfamiliar Christmas music or the very interesting (intriguing?) Middle Eastern and Nordic programs of of a year or so back were not there. Too much saccharine muzak.

Singing Fauré’s very legato Cantique de Jean Racine with a very percussive piano didn’t work. It was especially annoying that there was a 15 piece baroque orchestra with chamber organ sitting mute beside the piano. 
A contemporary Twelve Days of Christmas was pointless when the words were unintelligible and the props are too small to see from Row Q: no idea what it was about. And giving a platform for an emerging Oz composer, Alex Palmer, is great, but only if the piece has enough musicality and harmonic interest to sit alongside Palestrina, Gibbons and di Lasso. His arrangements of trad. pieces didn’t have the edge that arrangements of previous years have had. 
Treating Once in Royal David’s City as a music theatre selection was a crime against humanity. Updating mid-C19 music can work well of course but it needs a good rationale. I wonder how the first verse would have sounded with Mrs CF Alexander’s awful ‘poetry’ sung unaccompanied by one of ABC’s superb countertenors from the back of the circle.

I’ve recommended ABO for four or five years with the caveat ‘include the Christmas recital’. I couldn’t do that on the basis of the 2017 Noël Noël program.

I couldn’t find the motivation to try one more year to reach the Wilcocks descant. It’s ABO’s tradition to end to these concerts with While shepherds watched and it’s a good one. But it was as if Adolphe Adam’s one-hit-wonder, the ‘carol’ with zero harmonic interest, leached the energy from poor Dr Wilcocks’s superb nod to English cathedral Christmas music.

I could find little to applaud last night. But I’d had a brilliant G'n'T for dinner outside MRC in the warm evening breeze. It was memorable.

Mr Turnbull, NOT IN MY NAME

Behrouz Boochani, Iranian Journalist and refugee imprisoned on Manus Island.

The wretched of the earth,
because they were no longer safe where they lived,
sought to come here.

With a determined cruelty,
we kidnapped and imprisoned them
in Pacific lagers. 


Australia built a hell for refugees on Manus. The shame will outlive us all. Richard Flanagan 


And if,
in these next few days,
any harm should come to Behrouz Boochani,
...
the responsibility for that crime
will not fall to the PNG government 
or its police.
It will be Peter Dutton’s.

The Turnbull Liberal Government stands condemned II

The Saturday Paper 4 November 2017

The Turnbull Liberal Government stands condemned

We are better than this:

https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/sites/default/files/styles/cartoon/public/Cartoons/tsp_cartoon_181.jpg?itok=uX7U__HV

 

 

 

 

Bring them here

 

The Minister for Immigration and Border Protection

The people we Australians have put on Manus Island are seriously at risk

The Liberal Party members of The Parliament of Australia can make them safe.

In the name of humanity do it now - today.

 

Mr Dutton

You are making decisions on behalf of the taxpayers of Australia and your decisions are harming innocent and vulnerable men on Manus Island.

Please stop your harsh cruel policies and return food, water and protection to the men in the detention camp on Manus Island immediately!

This inhumane treatment has gone on long enough! It is time to give these men, and the families on Nauru, an opportunity for a new beginning in a safe environment. You must remove them from these tropical hell holes. Either bring them here to Australia or allow them to resettle in New Zealand. It is not acceptable to place them in the community where the locals do not want them and there is no protection for them.

If you must continue to turn back boats, so be it. But there is no justification for the mental and physical torture you have condemned the asylum seekers to on Manus Island and Nauru. They reached the shores of Australia and they are Australia's responsibility. They are not 'illegals'. They have committed no crime. All they are guilty of is fleeing persecution (not unlike Josh Frydenberg's mother).

If any harm comes to any of the men on Manus Island, you will be responsible.

 

Yours sincerely

 

Stewart Jackel

Melbourne.

Friday 3 November 2017

 

First Dog on the Moon says:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/nov/03/mps-are-craven-milksops-desperate-for-your-approval-call-them-about-manus

*Thank you to Nettythe1st in First Dog's Comments 3 November 2017

ANAM: Glories of the French Baroque

Brenda Rae and an ANAM orchestra directed by Benjamin Bayl

Friday 6 October 2017

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall

There was a cello on the southbound #1 tram. The left hand of its minder was practising – a concerto I learned later – on the case. Lightning Brain decided the cello was most likely on its way to The Con, The VCA or ANAM. It got off near Bank St: ANAM.



Cello - or part thereof



The cello was learning Dvorak. The concerto is 1894 – Very Romantic Czech. Last Friday its minder swapped that for early-ish 18C French Baroque – Rameau. Clearly that involved a completely different mid-set and a whole new set of techniques. I have wondered for some time, is there anything these ANAM musos won’t tackle; is there anything won’t perform brilliantly when they do?

True, they’re all music grads; true, they’re all rigorously selected by a tough audition but they are all more than technical skill. They are musicianship, they are musical intelligence, they are music-performance energy at a level that’s almost unheard anywhere else in this city. And all this was evident with Jean-Phillipe Rameau and Brenda Rae.

There’s a direct line from Rameau to Ravel: intelligence and dry-wittedness – acerbity even. If you don’t get that you bugger it. If you don’t get the dance Rameau wrote into the score you bugger it. Brenda Rae got it. Benjamin Bayl got it. The ANAM orchestra got it.

Ms Rae’s voice has the depth, the colour, the strength and the intelligence to sing – I mean really sing – Rameau*. Her singing up front beside the conductor showed her superb technique. So did her singing up the back with the woodwinds – as a member of the orchestra. This was not just an exercise in musical democracy but the best place to be the solo part of a sort of French concerto/ballet. But her stellar technique – the apotheosis in the sense of the elevation of someone to divine status – was saved until last: singing on her bum lasciviously removing her high-heeled Roman sandals.

Brenda Rae en-Baroque

Philip Lambert’s superbly researched and beautifully written treatise in the program notes talks about Rameau’s cracker-jack, foot-stomping dance tunes, clothed in richer, more imaginative music than the establishment. A lot of this concert made me laugh. Was I musically faux pas-ing? Lambert’s notes say not. When was the last time you laughed in a classical concert?

The Rae/Bayle/ANAM combination generated a semi-standing ovation. Why are Melbourne audiences so mean-minded in this regard? This performance demanded the full foot-stomping, bravo-ing/brava-ing, hands-above-your-head clapping sort of applause.

*If she sings more than one Rameau is she singing Rameaux? … Sorry!

ANAM: Adam McMillan in Recital

Adam McMillan

ANAM

South Melbourne Town Hall

Friday 28 April 2017

MOZART Sonata for Piano in A minor K310

CHOPIN Scherzo No. 2 in B-flat minor op. 31

RAVEL Gaspard de la nuit

Every once in a while I hear a musician who encompasses a suite of prodigious talents – technical and musical.

I knew about Adam’s prodigious virtuosic talent; it was no surprise today. But the repeat of Gaspard - I first heard him play it in late 2015 - left me gasping again. This is Ravel: dapper, perfectionist, every note carefully crafted and located. With Gaspard that’s a lot of locating. Adam’s job was to make sure every note emerged from its exact location – technically.

He did that again in this recital apparently without any stress even though the note/second rate is close to the human limit. Very soon though my ear stood back a bit from the canvas of notes. I got something very different. I began to get the pictures again: water ripples, a corpse swaying on a gibbet against that dark, dastardly, inexorable tolling bell, an evil nymph. And they’d been built in my head by Ravel’s and Adam’s notes.

It was extraordinary playing - beautiful, captivating.

Adam
Adam, 2017 : https://www.anam.com.au/whats-on/2017/recitaladam

Adam describes himself as an accompanist - teacher. Accompanists are a rare breed of musician, born not made, who, once they are technically adept, can play with another musician by getting inside their head; knowing what they are going to do before – sometimes well before – they do it.

Mozart - a rare minor key sonata.

Here then, came the big test: could he get inside Mozart’s head to find his piano sonata in A minor?

Adam, 2016 : http://www.limelightmagazine.com.au/features/paul-dean%E2%80%99s-brand-new-ensemble-q-hits-brisbane

The age of the two boys is about the same (22/23) but there is two hundred year time and culture gap, a huge type-of-instrument disparity and, I suspect a big personality divide. Mozart’s mother had just died but that awful event is set against the background of his dirty-minded, irreverent nature. Adam did something clever, something that he could only do when he knew the notes, the rests, the pedalling, the dynamics markings - all safe in his head. He ignored the score in front of him and took himself off into a private salon high up on the left hand corner of the ceiling. There, he and Wolfgang put their heads together.

Out came pathos, anguish, wickedness (in the nicest sense) and impudent, cheeky music.

Here’s the second movement, Andante cantabile con espressione:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e7/Mozart_Piano_Sonata_Amin2.ogg

Adam emerged on Friday (18 September) night with the ANAM orchestra conducted by Matthias Foremny playing the acerbic, witty, metronomic piano line in Kurt Weill’s Der Silbersee Suite. Another style, another way of thinking that Adam seemed to slip into with complete ease.

I'd go a long way to hear Adam play.

https://thetalent3mbs.com/2017/04/07/adam-mcmillan/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvC498PtsgI