by Edward Hasbrouck, Activist Post: The Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) have been working together for years to steal travelers’ money. The DEA pays informers to finger people who might be flying with large amounts of cash, and gets the TSA to identify these people when they go through TSA checkpoints at airports, claims […]

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  The First World War was one of the most important events of the twentieth century. Though Europe was the epicenter of the violence, it was a global conflict on a larger scale than any previous war, resulting in millions of fatalities.   One of the most curious aspects of the First World War was the willingness of young men to throw themselves into deadly combat. Britain was no exception, with many enlisting as soon as they could, desperate to serve their country in dark times.   However, they soon learned the truth about this terrible conflict, and there’s one man who captured the horrors of trench warfare better than anybody else: Wilfred Owen.   Wilfred Owen’s Upbringing & Early Influences William Shakespeare by John Taylor, c. 1610. Source: National Portrait Gallery, London   Wilfred Owen was born on March 18, 1893 in Shropshire, England. Growing up, he was the oldest of four children. His father was a railroad employee who struggled to support the family.   Wilfred and his family moved houses several times in the 1890s, ending up with a house in the town of Birkenhead. Here, Wilfred attended the Birkenhead Institute and was introduced to writers such as William Shakespeare and Charles Dickens. He was a clever and hardworking child, developing an academic rivalry with his friend Alec Paton.   At fourteen, Wilfred and the rest of his family moved again, this time to the county of Shrewsbury. His education continued at the Shrewsbury Technical School on the east bank of the River Severn beside the English Bridge.   Wilfred’s exercise books shed light on his studies, which involved epic poems such as Horatius by Thomas Babington Macaulay and The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser. He continued reading and analyzing Shakespearean plays like Macbeth, Twelfth Night, Much Ado About Nothing, Othello, and King Lear.   Historians are unsure exactly when Owen started to pen his own poetry. But one of his earliest surviving poems is entitled “To Poesy,” which seems to have been inspired by the English poet John Keats.   After graduating from the technical school, he joined the Wyle Cop School (also in Shrewsbury) as a pupil-teacher before working as a lay assistant in Dunsden alongside his studies at University College, Reading. On Sundays, he would assist with Holy Communion, Bible class, Sunday School, and church meetings.   Owen left England in 1913 to work as a part-time English teacher in Bordeaux, France. One year into his time as a teacher, Europe became entangled in one of history’s most notorious conflicts: the First World War.   The First World War Begins Photograph of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife departing from City Hall shortly before their assassination, unknown photographer, 1914. Source: Imperial War Museums   Following the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand (the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne) by a Serbian-backed terrorist, Austro-Hungary declared war on Serbia on July 28, 1914. Russia’s support of Serbia brought their French allies into the fray. Germany declared war on Russia and France soon after, and Britain entered the conflict when the Germans violated Belgian neutrality.   Confronted with the prospect of fighting on two fronts, the Germans enacted the Schlieffen Plan. This involved invading France quickly before Russia managed to mobilize. However, the Battle of the Marne in early September resulted in a loss for the Germans, and they were forced to retreat behind the River Aisne, where they started to dig trenches.   Trench warfare–a core part of Wilfred Owen’s war poems–is associated with the First World War more than any other conflict. Mud and filth defined life in the trenches. Moments of terror punctuated long stretches of boredom, with surprise artillery attacks being commonplace.   Artillery was often used to pound enemy trenches and flatten barbed wire, opening the opportunity for soldiers to move across No Man’s Land and capture the enemy trench. In reality, those on the receiving end of the artillery would simply wait until the danger passed, reemerge from safety, and mow down the approaching enemy with machine-gun fire.   Poetry in the Trenches Photograph of a trench from World War One by an unknown photographer, c. 1914-1918. Source: The National WWI Museum and Memorial, Kansas City   It’s hard to pinpoint Wilfred Owen’s immediate reaction to the war, for he rarely dated his poetry manuscripts. However, we do know that “The Ballad of Purchase-Money” was one of the first he wrote once the conflict had started.   In contrast to the famous “Dulce et Decorum Est,” this earlier poem presents war in a positive light, viewing it as an honorable pursuit. In September 1915, more than a year after the outbreak of war, Owen returned to England and enlisted. His battalion was posted to Hare Hall Camp in Essex. Here, Owen lived in a barrack hut and trained alongside his fellow soldiers, performing well in musketry, reconnaissance, and drill.   After fourteen months of training, Owen was posted to France on active service. He was commissioned as a second lieutenant and experienced two of the most horrific periods of the First World War: the winter of 1916 to the spring of 1917 and the closing months of the conflict in 1918.   Owen wrote throughout this period, capturing the brutality of trench warfare. “Anthem for Doomed Youth,” one of Owen’s most well-known poems, uses phrases like “choirs of wailing shells” and the “rapid rattle” of machine-gun fire to describe the conditions on the Western Front.   “Exposure” describes how helpless men are before the enemy sights, centering on the futility of the conflict. Similar sentiments are expressed in “Greater Love,” challenging the Victorian romanticization of war.   The final lines of the aforementioned “Dulce et Decorum Est” encapsulate Owen’s perception of the conflict most effectively, describing the “old lie” of dying honorably in the context of war. Having witnessed the appalling conditions on the Western Front, he fervently rejected the romantic image of war he initially described in “The Ballad of Purchase-Money.”   Death & Renown Photograph of Armistice Day celebrations in Birmingham, England, 1918. Source: Imperial War Museums   Wilfred Owen didn’t make it to the end of the First World War. On November 4, 1918, just a week before Armistice Day, he was shot dead in France. Though he was physically no more, the poet’s influence was far from over.   At the time of his death, Owen had been an almost-unknown poet. The only people who had read his work were his mother and a small group of poetic friends. Two of these friends, Siegfried Sassoon and Edith Sitwell, edited a collection of Owen’s poems (twenty-three in total) along with other fragments of his work. This collection was published at the end of 1920.   Approximately one decade later, Edmund Blunden (like Sassoon, Blunden was also a poet who had fought in the trenches) edited a larger collection of Owen’s poems. This collection was published in 1931 and helped to elevate the poet’s reputation even further.   Portrait of Wilfred Owen by an unknown photographer, c. 1915-1918. Source: Imperial War Museums   Yet Owen’s popularity was still far from its peak. Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem, composed for the consecration of Coventry Cathedral in 1962, utilized Owen’s poetry, capturing the imagination of concert-goers and radio listeners. Once again, Owen’s work grew in popularity.   The great war poet’s reputation continued to grow when his younger brother Harold published a three-part memoir entitled Journey from Obscurity: Memoirs of the Owen Family between 1963 and 1965.   Given Owen’s popularity, his works became a subject of debate and analysis among those interested in poetry and the First World War. Dominic Hibberd, for example, published multiple biographies: Owen the Poet (1986), Wilfred Owen: The Last Year (1992), and Wilfred Owen: A New Biography (2002).   As well as inspiring fictional works like Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy (1991, 1993, and 1995) and Stephen MacDonald’s Not About Heroes (1983), Owen’s life and work are now taught at schools and universities across Britain. His poetry has also been translated into multiple languages, including German, French, and Russian.   World War I Poets Beyond Wilfred Owen   It’s important to remember Wilfred Owen is one of many British writers who captured the horrors of the First World War. The work of the aforementioned Siegfried Sassoon has also become part of Britain’s remembrance culture.   Photograph of Siegfried Sassoon by an unknown photographer, c. 1914-1918. Source: Imperial War Museums   Unlike Owen, Sassoon enlisted as soon as the war broke out. Though initially enthused by the idea of war, he too became critical of how the conflict was conducted, especially after the Battle of the Somme. His most famous poem, “Suicide in the Trenches,” was published during the First World War in Counter-Attack and Other Poems (1918).   Isaac Rosenberg, meanwhile, became known after the war ended. He was a pacifist at heart but joined the army for financial reasons. (He came from a poor, poverty-stricken family in London). During his time in the trenches, Rosenberg wrote many poems, including “Break of Day in the Trenches,” his most well-known work. Like Owen, he died in combat during the final year of the war and became famous long after his death.   Rupert Brooke, on the other hand, achieved fame in 1915. Having won prizes for his poetry and attended the University of Cambridge, he rocketed to fame when his poem “The Soldier” was read out in St. Paul’s Cathedral, London. He died several months later, but like his fellow poets, his work has become part of British culture.   It’s vital to remember, therefore, that Owen’s work is just one segment of a much larger piece of British history. For those who want to dig into the poetry of the First World War, Owen should be seen as a springboard to a wider topic.   As important as it is to acknowledge this fact, there’s a reason Owen is the most well-known war poet in British history. Even more than his contemporaries, this exceptional writer captured the futility and horror of the First World War, exposing the romanticized myth of an honorable death.

  Australian history as we know it today began when British explorer James Cook disembarked at Botany Bay in 1788. It is a relatively recent history. On the other hand, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders maintain that they’ve been in Australia from time immemorial. Over the years, Australian art has come to incorporate both cultures, Aboriginal and Western.   What we see when we look at the works of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australian artists is a shared history of change, violence, meetings, and (hopefully) reconciliation. John Brack, for instance, takes us to 1950s Melbourne, a colonial space shaped by post-war optimism and dominated by typically Western values. Contemporary artist Ben McKeown paints a completely different Melbourne, a multicultural metropolis filtered through the perspective of his Aboriginality. Finally, as we dive into the works of Aboriginal artist Clarise Tunkin, we are taken to Australia’s Red Centre, and to the complexity of modern Aboriginal dot painting.   1. The Car, by John Brack: The Face of Post-War Melbourne  The Car, by John Brack, 1955, Source: National Gallery of Victoria   In The Car (1955), John Brack (1920-1999) paints the prototype of the perfect Australian family (by the standards of the time of course). Husband and wife sit in the front, while their two kids, a boy and a girl, sit in the back. They’re all turned toward us, except the husband who’s busy driving. He’s the perfect family man; with his eyes on the road and his hands firmly placed on the wheel, it tells us that he is a reliable man, someone who will keep his family safe. If Drysdale’s artwork shows us a remote, post-war Australia still recovering from the effects of the Great Depression, John Brack is the voice of post-war Melbourne.   Macheras’ picture collection offers us a glimpse into the city Brack knew, Old Vintage Melbourne, 1960-1990, by Chris Macheras, Source: Scribe Publications   Brack is mostly known for his Collins St, 5 p.m., with its mass of office workers streaming homeward, all staring in the same direction, numbed and oblivious to each other, but the painting fails to capture the feeling of growing optimism that was shaping Melbourne.   On the other hand, The Car, The Bar (1954), The New House (1953), Men’s Wear (1953), and The Breakfast Table (1958) could have only been conceived and created in a fast-growing, dynamic but mainly white city such as 1950s Melbourne (the White Australia policy, restricting non-white people from immigrating to Australia, would remain in place until 1973).   The 1940s were marked by death and destruction (the 1942 bombing of Darwin, the largest center in Northern Australia, sent shockwaves across the continent, to the point that some even called it “Australia’s Pearl Harbor”). The 1950s, on the other hand, were years of growth, prosperity, materialism, and optimism.   John Brack in his studio, picture by Robert Walker, 1988, Source: Art Gallery of NSW Archive   In 1956, Melbourne hosted the Olympic Games, the first in Australia. The city’s first skyscraper had been approved the year before. The Car screams movement and optimism. It is the product of a society on the rise.   Nonetheless, if we take a closer look at the painting, we might notice something haunting and unsettling about the faces of the members of this (apparently) happy family. They’re angular, eery, eyeless, almost inhuman. The woman looks straight at us: she’s laughing, but her face is grotesque, her smile stiff. Is she really laughing? The children in the backseat are not smiling. Is this really a happy family? As great artists do, Bracks invites us to look beyond the façade of optimism that reigned at the time.   2. Spring Street End, by Ben McKeown: A Multicultural Melbourne Spring Street End, designed by Ben McKeown, 2011, photograph by Viki Petherbridge, Source: Australian Tapestry Workshop   Melbourne features in many of Brack’s paintings. What we see when peeping into living rooms and shop windows through his eyes is a colonial city. The traditional owners of the land on which the city was built are never in the picture, as if they never even existed: there is no trace in his works of an Aboriginal Melbourne. The works of Aboriginal Melbourne-based artist Ben McKeown (1976) tell a different story.   McKeown is a descendant of the Wirangu people, the traditional owners of the west coast of South Australia, a region that stretches east to Lake Gairdner and west to the head of the Great Australian Bight. Spring Street End is arguably one of McKeown’s most emblematic works. Now permanently exhibited at the State Library of Victoria, it was woven by hand by a team from the Australian Tapestry Workshop, made up of Milly Formby, Pamela Joyce, Milena Paplinska, and Emma Sulzer.   A postcard of Spring Street in colonial Melbourne, Source: City of Melbourne   In McKeown’s tapestry, the urban grid of inner Melbourne becomes a topographical map. The use of the aerial perspective is typical of Aboriginal dot paintings, one of the oldest and unbroken displays of art in the whole world and a storehouse of knowledge for Aborigines (about the land and its resources, as well as human relationships). In looking down at the city’s grid from up above, instead of campsite waterholes, meeting places, waterways, goannas, or emu and kangaroo tracks, we see streets, buildings, and trees. By employing the aerial perspective typical of Aboriginal art, McKeown bridges the gap between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal art and reaffirms the Aboriginal history of Melbourne. Traditional Aboriginal paintings have several layers of meanings that often go unnoticed by non-Aboriginal people: Spring Street End is no different.   Spring Street End (detail), by Ben McKeown, 2011, Source: State Library Victoria   Streets and crossroads are framed by small yellow dots, and, as McKeown points out in an interview for State Library Victoria, “ochre yellow is a traditional pigment used for thousands of years by Aboriginal people for decoration and ceremony.” Dots become a visual cue, a coded message underlining the Aboriginal connection to the country. Through the dots, we become aware of a silent presence, that of the Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung and Bunuurong/Boon Wurrung peoples of the Kulin Nation, the owners of the land on which Melbourne was built.   In his works, McKeown has been influenced by the research of Norman Tindale (1900-1993), who in 1974 assigned the Wirangu an area of tribal land of over 56,000 km sq (just over 21,600 miles). It was only in December 2022, however, that native title was finally granted to them, recognizing that more than 5,000 square kilometers (more than 1900 miles) of land from Acraman Creek, south of Smoky Bay, to Port Kenny, encompassing the sacred rocks at Murphy’s Haystacks, has and always will be Aboriginal.   The Cutting Off Ceremony for Spring Street End, 2011, photograph by Viki Petherbridge, Source: Australian Tapestry Workshop   Initially concerned mostly with entomology, during several expeditions throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Tindale recorded an incredible amount of genealogies from Aboriginal communities from all over the continent, including over 50,000 Indigenous peoples, as well as thousands of photographic portraits. Years of field research across remote Australia resulted in Aboriginal tribes of Australia, their terrain, environmental controls, distribution, limits and proper names (1974), one of the first comprehensive attempts made by a non-Aboriginal author to dismantle colonial prejudices regarding Aboriginal alleged backwardness.   Tindale focuses especially on the Aboriginal relationship with the land, stressing their cultural and geographic bond to the country — a bond too many times disrupted by colonial encroachment, which resulted in displacement and alienation on the Aboriginal side. These are precisely the themes McKeown’s works deal with: alienation and belonging, as well as the unique bond Aborigines have to their country and how it has changed since contact.   Nawarla Gabarnmang, in Arnhem Land, Northern Territory, picture by John Gollings, 2015, Source: John Gollings website   The 1860s were a crucial decade for the Kulin. Ever since the first contact with European settlers and in 1803, relations between the two groups had been cautious, if not friendly. This precarious balance was soon to be destroyed.  Over the next decades, they were discouraged and prevented from visiting their ancestral lands. From the 1860s, following the 1869 Aboriginal Protection Act, reserves and missions were created across the state of Victoria. The act gave the Board for the Protection of Aborigines the power to determine (and limit) where and how Aborigines and their children were supposed to work and leave.   According to the 1901 census, 46 Aboriginal people were living in Melbourne at the turn of the century. Melbourne had quickly become the city Brack knew: a colonial space, inhabited mainly by white Australians, with pockets of (sometimes significant) Aboriginal cultural resistance.   McKeown has stated that he deliberately decided to focus “on the top end of Spring Street,” because “in many ways it is the heart of Victoria; the place that holds the official history and the memory of tomorrow.” Spring Street End is a reminder of the Aboriginal history of Melbourne. It is also a reminder of Aboriginal strength and resilience, of their survival and their ability to adapt despite years of destruction and dispossession.   3. Minyma Marlilu Tjukurrpa, by Clarise Tunkin: Heir of a Long Tradition  Minyma Marlilu Tjukurrpa, by Clarise Tunkin and Kay Baker, Source: Japingka Aboriginal Art   Aboriginal dot paintings are like haikus, the traditional Japanese three-line poems: there is more than meets the eye. Each painting has several layers of meaning. Behind what looks like a colorful abstract pattern of lines, dots, and circles lies a story that only the initiated can fully comprehend.   Symbols are employed as narrative elements, as a coded proto-language to communicate practical and cultural knowledge. The range of symbols employed by Aboriginal artists today derives from their ancestors’ hunting and tracking culture. They transcend space and time. Aboriginal dot painter Clarise Tunkin (1993) is part of this shared history. A member of the Pitjantjatjara people, she was born in Alice Springs into a family of artists — her mother is Teresa Baker, her grandmother Kay Baker, and her great-grandfather is the famous Jimmy Baker.   Aboriginal dot painting symbols and their meanings, Source: Horizon of Reason   Most of her works are centered around the story of Marlilu, one of the Pitjantjatjara ancestral creation figures. Clarise was taught about her by her mother, who often took her to the rockholes and locations connected to these stories.   In Minyma Marlilu Tjukurrpa, which Tunkin painted with her grandmother Kay Baker, we’re looking at the land of the Pitjantjatjara from an aerial perspective. Traditionally, the circles (or set of concentric circles) represent campsites, fireplaces, or waterholes. Multiple concentric circles connected by wavy lines point to running water, while parallel lines linking various circles together represent people—or ancestral Dreamtime figures—traveling from one place to another.   Such depictions point to the overall purpose of Aboriginal art: to ensure survival in the harsh outback, where water and bush tucker could be hard to find if one didn’t know where to look. However, Aboriginal dot paintings are more than simple geographic maps.   Anangu artists at work on the Uluru statement canvas, photograph by Clive Scollay, Source: The Monthly   Embedded in Aboriginal painting are the stories and myths of the people who have inhabited these lands from time immemorial. Similarly, the stories of the Dreamtime are more than just stories: they are a storehouse of knowledge about the land and how to manage it, about its waters and rockholes, as well as about human relationships.   The U shape, for instance, indicates a person sitting cross-legged, with the U being the shape left on the sand while sitting. Women are usually shown by juxtaposing the U shape with the objects they might carry (a digging stick, usually, or a coolamon, the traditional Aboriginal bag used to carry bush food or water). Similarly, animals are represented by their tracks. This can be a set of mirror-image shapes for kangaroos, a track with three points for emus, and four E-shaped marks for possums. Some of the symbols Aboriginal painters use today can be found painted or engraved on rock art sites across Australia.   Clarise Tunkin (right) with Teresa Baker Tunkin holding their painting Minimya Malilia-Nya, Source: Art by Farquhar   This is the case for Nawarla Gabarnmung, for instance, a rock shelter in south-western Arnhem Land, west of Maningrida, in the Top End of Australia’s Northern Territory: according to carbon dating, the site has been visited by Aboriginal people for more than 45,000 years. The art movement of Aboriginal dot painters is far more diverse than one might think at first glance.   There’s Nada Rawlins (1936), for instance, who paints the story of the five most important waterholes in the country of her ancestors in a style that seems to echo that of Swedish painter Hilma af Klint. There is also Rusty Peters (1935-2020), who blends the traditional elements of Aboriginal art with silhouettes of trees, and Alison Munti Riley (1966), with her powerful series about bush food and the Seven Sisters Dreaming. Then there is Betty Muffler (1944), with her paintings devoid of color.   Acclaimed Pitjantjatjara artist Alison Munti Riley, Source: This is Aboriginal Art   There’s Linda Syddick Napaltjiarri, with her eerie figures wandering in the desert, a reminder perhaps of the journey she herself undertook as a child with her family as they crossed the Gibson desert, from their traditional Pintupi lands near Lake McKay to Mt Liebig. There’s Rosemary Petyarre (1950), a bush woman and niece of famous Aboriginal artist Emily Kame Kngwarreye, with her paintings of bush medicine leaves. There’s Gabriella Possum Nungurray (1967), the oldest daughter of beloved artist Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri, who depicts the Dreamtime stories she inherited from her mother and grandmother. And there’s Daniel Boyd (1982), who paints colonial figures and scenes in the style of dot painting.   This variety of approaches is a testimony to the uniqueness and resilience of Aboriginal culture in modern Australia. With her artworks, Clarise Tunkin reaffirms the beauty of Aboriginal Dreamtime stories, as well as the importance of a parallel art form too often ignored and denied by non-Indigenous Australians.