Sixty minutes

The Sixty Minutes story I mentioned a while ago is on tonight. They will be looking at gay marriage and interviewing real, live gay people. Should make for interesting viewing. I think my mother has watched Sixty Minutes every Sunday night since the program began, so she'll watch this one with particular interest, I'm sure.

Petition

Warren Entsch, Queensland MP, blokey bloke, and one of the most unlikely of gay rights activists, "is proposing a private member's bill to extend the principles of anti-discrimination to abolish legal inequities in the treatment of people in interdependent and same-sex unions".

If you are a registered Australian voter (sorry, overseas readers), you can fill out the digital petition on Entsch's website.

Straight Australia policy

The Australian reports today that civil union legislation passed recently in the ACT will be overturned by the federal government. The newspaper reports: "John Howard confirmed that federal cabinet had agreed to scuttle the ACT legislation, saying it was an attack on the institution of marriage." It also reports ACT Attorney-General Simon Corbell's response: "This is not about the institution of marriage, this is about the raw politics of John Howard and Phillip Ruddock's conservative social agenda."

Apparently gay and lesbian activists are now saying that Australia has an unwritten "straight Australia policy". For those of you who are overseas readers, this statement refers to a particularly mean-spirited part of Australia's past. The "white Australia policy", although never an official policy as such, referred to the range of practices by which immigration officials attempted to keep non-whites out of Australia in the early 1900s. For example, applicants' language skills would be tested--but not necessarily their English skills alone. If applicants passed the English test, they would then be tested in another language, and another, until they failed, and were refused permission to immigrate.

Archival information from the ABC website: "A German subject was released last week from Maitland prison and by commonwealth authorities in Newcastle submitted to a test in the Greek language although he speaks German, English and French. As he could not pass the test, he was sentenced in Newcastle to six months imprisonment for being a prohibited immigrant…"
--Telegram from Paul Von Bari (German Consul General) to Governor- General (Hopetoun), December 8, 1903, Australian Archives A6662/1 200

So, a "straight Australia policy" now. No matter what tests we pass, our government will keep changing the rules.

Too small to see

Lately, I've been thinking about invisibility, the ghost world of things that are all around us, yet unseen.

So much of the world is invisible. Invisible, and yet real—like scents, which can make us dizzy with lust or other, simpler, appetites. Scents, which make us wistful or thrilled at the spice of fresh pencil-shavings, the earthy smell of first rain. Or sounds, which can have the power of a stroke or a slap. We are more confident with objects—a leaf, a crayon, a glass of milk— for they can be held, examined, inspected. We trust these objects, or ourselves, overmuch. We only know a part of the story. Invisible before our very eyes is the composition of matter, the atomic structures of things. We see fully, and yet not at all.

The invention of the microscope changed the way people saw the world. For the first time, it was clear that there was a world beyond our capacity: there were things too small for the eye to see. We were limited by our own vision, until we built new tools, new ways of seeing. Now we know that the world is made of atoms, by tiny things too small to see. They are even too small to view through a microscope, so scientists draw diagrams of them instead, until the time comes when new tools are made for seeing. For the same reasons that scientists draw diagrams, I write. Beyond sight there are elements that I need to understand. I am drawing pictures of my own tiny world, and the things that are beyond view. I am drawing pictures of the microscopic structures of the heart.