The power & value of collectivism. At the core of the library value proposition. And inclusive of everyone. Why I work in libraries

What a great migrant story born in a refugee camp in Tanzania 🇹🇿 Great goal Great game Nestory Irankunda .

What a game by the @Socceroos 🇦🇺 A massive win at the #FIFAWorldCup. We’re all cheering you on back home 💚💛

She was 57 years old. White hair. No carefully managed image. No media training designed to make her more palatable. Just thirty years of accumulated knowledge and the calm, unhurried authority of a woman who had spent her life mastering her subject. She sat on a BBC panel, answered questions about immigration and politics, cited evidence, made arguments — and then went home. The next morning, her inbox looked like a crime scene. Her name is Mary Beard — Cambridge professor, classicist, one of the most respected scholars of ancient Rome and Western civilisation alive. And the internet had decided that a woman speaking with quiet authority on television needed to be punished for it. The messages were not criticism. They were not debate. They were rape threats. Death threats. Coordinated campaigns of personal destruction targeting her appearance, her age, her voice — anything that could be used to remind her that spaces like the one she had just occupied were not meant for her. Most people would have gone quiet. Mary Beard went further in. She did what scholars do when they find a pattern that disturbs them: she followed it backward. Through decades. Through centuries. Through millennia. All the way back to some of the oldest texts in Western civilisation. And she found it had always been there. In Homer's Odyssey — one of the foundational works of Western literature, nearly three thousand years old — there is a scene that most readers pass over without registering its quiet violence. Penelope comes downstairs and asks the poet to sing a different song. Her own son, Telemachus, cuts her off. He orders her back to her room and tells her plainly: speech is the business of men. She goes. Mary Beard read that scene and recognized it immediately. Not as ancient history. As a pattern. In ancient Rome, women who dared to speak in public were not described as orators or thinkers. They were described as noise — disorderly sound, something that did not deserve to be called language or argument. Their voices were not speech. Their thoughts were not thoughts. In the medieval world, women who claimed public authority were labeled as witches. Elizabeth I — Queen of England, ruler of a nation — had to rhetorically reshape herself into something masculine just to be taken seriously as the leader of her own country. The silencing of women who speak with authority was not invented by social media. It was not a modern pathology or a cultural accident. It was built deliberately, over centuries, into the very foundations of how Western civilisation defined who gets to speak, what authority sounds like, and who is allowed to take up space in public life. Mary Beard had found something important. In 2017, she published Women & Power: A Manifesto — short enough to read in an afternoon, substantial enough to reframe everything you thought you understood about why this keeps happening. Her argument was precise and devastating. The problem is not that women lack the ability to lead. The problem is that the model of leadership itself — the template for what public authority looks, sounds, and feels like — was built by men over centuries and has never been redesigned. When a woman enters public life and doesn't fit that template, she is not failing. The template was never built for her. It was built specifically to exclude her, and it has been doing exactly that, efficiently and continuously, for three thousand years. The solution, Beard argued, is not to teach women to perform power the way men have always performed it. The solution is to dismantle and rebuild the very concept of what power is allowed to look like. She kept teaching. She kept writing. She kept appearing on television — white-haired, unhurried, carrying her decades of authority without performing it, without packaging it for comfort, without apologizing for it. The threats continued. But other messages began arriving too. Letters from women and girls who had spent their entire lives feeling that every door was slightly too narrow, every table slightly too high, every room slightly reluctant to make space for them. Women who had spent years wondering what was wrong with them — why they couldn't quite fit, couldn't quite belong, couldn't quite be taken seriously no matter how much they knew or how hard they worked. They read the book and understood, perhaps for the first time, that nothing had ever been wrong with them. The room had been designed without them in mind. That is not a personal failing. That is a three-thousand-year-old architectural decision. And one Cambridge professor with white hair and a calm voice — who refused to go quiet when the internet told her to — spent her career documenting it, naming it, and handing that knowledge to everyone who needed to hear it. Telemachus told Penelope that speech was the business of men. He was wrong then. He is still wrong now. And Mary Beard has three thousand years of evidence to prove it. via The Inspireist #FeministFriday #HERstory

HYPOCRITES OR COWARDS? Australia doesn’t elect (or re-elect) politicians from either side who point to the need for hard changes. And we haven’t for a couple of decades So we get governments who have promised to do nothing And then they deliver on that promise (To be fair, they still proved effective crisis-fighters when needed, such as the Coalition during COVID or Labor during the GFC) Our failure to change is increasingly weighing on Australian living standards A few years ago I wrote that “The government can do what it has promised to do, or it can do what it should do” And I finished with “the nation is better off if our politicians choose courage over consistency. Or, if you like, I prefer hypocrites to cowards. So, I hope budget night will be filled with broken promises” The vibes are increasingly that the coming budget will have some broken promises. And I get that people are grumpy about that But I’d still prefer it to the alternative

Journalism as generous as the story told by Tony Wright in Saturday’s @smh

No one will ever come close to the great PJK when it comes to his ability to tear down an opponent

The arts sector in Australia is in crisis, and the federal government thinks encouraging more philanthropy is the answer. But donations from the rich won't fill the gap left by chronic government underfunding. @Skyelark0 #auspol

Trump’s impunity in America’s backyard along with his contempt for Europe/NATO is playing sweet music in Moscow. Where does it leave Australia? @ANUausi

Amy, agree 100%. This is exactly what Bad Faith Politics is designed to do. Exhaust us. The LNP's Bad Faith Politics destroying Australian democracy Bad faith questions and proposals aren't seeking solutions: they're designed to confuse and exhaust. Notice what Ley, Duniam and Scarr won't answer: Which specific values? How would you test them? What evidence shows this works? They're "exploring," "considering," "canvassing options." These are classic bad faith tactics. Propose what you won't define. Invoke problems you can't solve. Demand others prove everything while proving nothing yourself. This is the Liberal Party's entire strategy now. No net zero plan - just bad faith questions about others' proposals. No immigration policy - just undefined "values" screening. No solutions - just systematic bamboozlement until Australians are too exhausted to demand actual governance. Bad faith conduct has replaced evidence-based policy entirely.The goal isn't solutions; it's wearing Australians down until we stop demanding them. Australians must recognise this manipulation and refuse to accept it. #auspol

Opinion | The Liberal party’s betrayal of younger voters on net zero isn’t just a moral failure – it’s electoral stupidity - And a betrayal of people & planet. Just look at the “deniers”! Bloated with delusional self-interest. Deserve oblivion. apple.news/A2_3pfEhZRgKwECjT…

This is an excellent article that comprehensively debunks all the climate change deniers crap about renewables. theguardian.com/environment/…

Treasury modelling makes it clear that the transformation to cleaner, cheaper, more reliable energy is a golden economic opportunity for Australia and we’d be mad to miss it. To turn Australia’s back on net zero and practical climate change action would be an act of economic insanity, but that’s what the Coalition is now proposing to do.

It was such a pleasure to speak to the wonderful Sally Sara on @ABC about uncovering the secrecy & deception behind the dismissal of Gough Whitlam. #auspol Changing Australia: Jenny Hocking & finding the truth behind the Whitlam dismissal abc.net.au/listen/programs/r… via @ABCaustralia

Well said. 👏👏👏

It’s officially ranked the second most beautiful library in the world - and it’s here in South Australia. This Friday, the State Library of South Australia’s Mortlock Chamber is re-opening its doors - after a temporary closure for new carpets to preserve its 141-year-old historic beauty. 📸 Jake Wundersitz

How great have this batch of bowlers been for Australia for how long now?! Not only supreme with the ball, they continue to get us out of danger with the bat as well. Bloody champions! #AUSvSA

A warning to any Australian political leader who wants to align with Donald Trump - Australians really don't like him. This from the respected Pew center global survey ... smh.com.au/politics/federal/…

Really pleased to see @KeithConlon awarded the Key to the City. No one in SA has done more to inspire interest in our history and heritage. #MrSouthAustralia #Adelaide

Obama just said what everyone’s thinking but too many are too cowardly to admit: If he had blacklisted press, targeted dissent, and cracked down on student protestors, the right would’ve set the sky on fire. But Trump does it? Crickets. This isn’t policy, it’s power. And the Constitution is just collateral when it’s your cult leader lighting the match.