Love and Rage is a series of talks, panels, lectures, and workshops agitating for a better tomorrow, today. Panels bring together leading First Nations thinkers and activists with Palestinian rights advocates, perspectives from the broad left and trade union movement, as well as small press and radical journal publishers. Punctuated by performance poetry and music, a workshop in feral business, a deep dive into basic income and reflections on how we can move through precarious times, Love and Rage unpacks the end of empire and the bin-fire that is neoliberal capitalism.
Curated and produced by Tarneen Onus-Browne, Mel Tan, Lucie Loy, Daniel Lopez and Dario Vacirca for the Nicholas Building Association ❤︎₊ ⊹
Thanks to Ross House, Melbourne Theosophical Society, Wax Music Lounge
Program Details
We are operating this event on a pay-as-you-feel basis. All money raised through ticket sales will be equally distributed to Pay the Rent and the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network.
Please only reserve tickets if you intend on coming along as spaces are strictly limited. We tried to avoid it but there is some overlap with sessions, so please select with care.
Blak and Palestinian Solidarity and Struggle
Saturday, December 2
10:15-11:45
Ross House
Panel discussion moderated by Tarneen Onus Browne. With guests Gary Foley, Dr Crystal McKinnon and Micaela Sahhar.
In a world marked by shared histories of colonisation, genocide and displacement, the solidarity between First Nations people and Palestinians is a testament to the strength of Indigenous solidarity across so-called borders. First Nations historians Gary Foley, Crystal McKinnon and Palestinian journalist Micaela Sahhar will share their experiences of First Nations and Palestinian solidarity over the decades in a historical time post-referendum and the fight for freedom of Palestinians.
What is not do be done?
Saturday, December 2
12:00-13:30
Ross House
Panel discussion moderated by Daniel Lopez.
With guests Colleen Bolger, Tim Kennedy, Tom Ballard and Jeff Sparrow. Presented by Jacobin Australia.
After two years of Labor government, workers and unions still face low wages, insecure jobs and a notoriously hostile industrial relations regime. Renters and homeowners still face skyrocketing rents, mortgage repayments and housing prices. And we all face the consequences of decades of neoliberalism, under-funded social services and an approaching climate catastrophe. Whatever the left has been doing, it’s clear that it’s not working. So maybe it’s time to ask the question: what is not to be done?
A Knife Fight in a Phone Booth? The Stakes of Australian Literary Criticism
Saturday, December 2
14:30 - 16:00
Ross House
Panel discussion moderated by Jonathan Dunk.
With guests Evelyn Araluen, Jeanine Leane, Elias Grieg, Hasib Hourani. Presented by Overland.
In the 1970s when John Forbes sardonically described the discourse of Australian poetry as a knife fight in a phone booth, invoking an absurd disparity between the significance of the territory being contested and the viciousness of the struggle— he coined an indelible phrase often since invoked as a talisman against the volatilities of debate. But where the ‘Poetry Wars’ of Forbes’ caricature were fought over relatively superficial questions of formal experiment and American influence, heated literary arguments today often hinges on culture, gender, and authenticity. In this panel three leading writers and critics will discuss the consequences of misrepresentation, and the importance of politically committed criticism.
Keynote with Celeste Liddle
Saturday, December 2
16:15 - 17:00
Ross House
Celeste Liddle is an Arrernte woman, a trade unionist, an activist, a feminist, a social commentator and an opinion writer.
Liddle hosted the IndigenousX program from 19 June 2015. She has been a regular columnist for Eureka Street since 2017. She has also been a columnist and featured writer for Daily Life, The Saturday Paper, and The Guardian, and provided commentary for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) and Special Broadcasting Service (SBS).
In May 2021, Liddle was preselected by the Victorian Greens for the seat of Cooper in the 2022 federal election.
As of 2023, Liddle works as National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Organiser for the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU). She was instrumental in ensuring that the NTEU vocally supported the campaign to raise the age of criminal responsibility in Australia.
Basic Income Australia
Saturday, December 2
12:30-17:30
Ross House
Birthday party and information session.
Presented by Basic Income Australia.
Learn about the basic income movement in Australia, and celebrate a year of milestones with Basic Income Australia.
BIA are a diverse network of professionals and activists across Australia raising political and grassroots awareness of a Universal Basic Income to support its implementation.
This all day gathering will feature talks, presentations, resources and networking into one of the more progressive approaches to dealing with poverty, precarity the increasing demands placed on our social ecology by competive, market driven economies.
Feral Business
Saturday, December 2
14:30-17:00
Melbourne Theosophical Society
Monetary Experiment with Artist and trader Kate Rich.
To stand against the forcefields of business as usual, we need some radical tricks, acts and altered forms of confidence. Join a crowd of your peers for a hands-on experiment in summoning, adjudicating and disseminating funding. This experimental gameplay is designed to intervene directly in the infrastructural dramas of how we fund our work, with real resources and relations at play. A venture into radmin, or radical administration, this is also an opportunity to get out of our own patterns or habits and into different ones. Today's proceedings are not supplied as best practice, or a model for anything. Instead the interest is to stage (with care) spiky issues in dealing with money, and mobilise conditions in which other forms of thinking and action could take root.
Poets in Hell
Saturday, 2 December
17:30-19:30
Wax Music Lounge
Live performance poetry П. O., Elena Gomez, Lucy Van, Ouyang Yu. With MC Gareth Morgan
Poets in Hell — yes OK but are they passing through like Dante or there for good like Ezra Pound? Did they go on purpose or were they dragged down kicking and screaming? And is it because they were bad at being good or because bad people don't like poetry? Tbh, we suspect hell is a metaphor. But what for??
We simply do not know. All we can say with any certainty is that Love and Rage is pretty stoked about the poets we've booked to read in hell. Gareth Morgan is going to MC, so that's a strong start. And we'll hear new and old poems by Elena Gomez, Lucy Van, Ouyang Yu and П. O., who turned up to a recent party I was at with a bag of apples he shared with everyone. It was such a refreshing treat.
We can't promise more apples (it's not our tree) but we can promise a lineup of genuinely exciting Melbourne poets reading really good poems. There'll also be drinks, chapbooks and people you either know already or would like to meet. And as John Milton said, "better a poetry reading in Hell than a Robert Manne lecture at the Wheeler Centre."