Tag Archives: reflection
The Artist as Global Citizen: Cai Guo-Qiang in Brisbane
In the mid 1990s I taught English in Xiamen, a coastal city in southern China. Xiamen (also known as Amoy) has a lovely subtropical climate, and today it’s a favourite holiday spot among the Chinese. But from 1842 to the Second World War, it was a treaty port. After the First Opium War, the British […]
Immigrant Woods
My mate Pete and I had just left our Saturday morning coffee gathering when we noticed a tremble of dark feathers in the street. A female blackbird (which in fact is brown) was not doing well. Unable to fly, she had struggled through the grass and stumbled down the curb into the road. I picked […]
Not the Penny Lane You Knew
If a Liverpool cityscape springs to mind, it surely includes the Three Graces: the trio of grand, century-old buildings that line the Pier Head. Liverpool’s waterfront sentinels no longer tower over their neighbors as they did even a decade ago. To the south, they’ve been joined by the limestone Museum of Liverpool and the dark […]
Thoughts on Migration in Europe – thriving and surviving in an unequal utopia
Z. speaks English in an accent that is not easy to place. He manages to mumble and be charming at the same time. His clean-shaven face, silver necklace, gelled short black hair and tracksuit do not make it easier to assume anything about his origin – only stereotypes of migrant Middle Eastern youth in Europe […]
