Letter to the Vice-Chancellors and Board Members of Australian Universities

 14/5/2024

 

To Vice-Chancellors and Board Members of Australian Universities

 

I wish to:

 

1. Support the absolute right for students to protest/camp etc. peacefully on university campuses.

2. Denounce the genocide being enacted by the Israeli military in Gaza. Further, to note the ongoing systemic oppression and neo-colonialism enacted by Israel’s government, military and settler-culture.

3. I wish to affirm universal human rights.

4. Speaking from a pacifist position that rejects all forms of violence, I wish to restate my many decades-long objection to weapons production (for anyone anywhere), the military in all its forms, and places of learning being used directly or indirectly for these purposes. It is abhorrent that universities have so deeply connected themselves with ‘defence’ — an industry of death.

5. Speak against any form of support for such violence.

6. Speak in support of diverse communities across the globe that respect each other, share space and materials, and are mutually supporting.

 

Thanks.

 

Sincerely,

 

Emeritus Professor John Kinsella, poet, environmentalist, peace activist and writer

Cease the Attacks on Rafah/Gaza

 

Cultivation

 

One of my students showed me the orchards

of her family deleted, the land rewritten.

And photos of the displaced and lost.

That was a year before the invasion

 

of Gaza and the erasure of trees

down to the splinters of stories.

The granaries broken, houses

split open, and now the last refuge

 

to be raised and offered as proof

of ‘resolve’. Buzzards, sparrow-

hawks, griffons... no longer raptors

but lost to the vanishing point.

 

Erosion is policy and endgame

its intonation. The Israeli military

is attempting to rewrite definitions

of suffering. To bulldoze lexicons.

 

Closing the crossing, harrying

the edges, compressing and dispersing

the soil until it is dust or slurry.

Cultivating a ruin whose fruit is death.

 

 

 

            John Kinsella

 

 

 

Threnody

 Threnody

 

Each martial act shatters the desert owl’s

hold on the grace of night which has seeped

into day through rips in walls of sky,

through holes in the carpet of earth —

fractures of rock and pits of sand.

 

Each martial act undoes the baby’s

cry for milk, the silently feeding lips

which would continue into sleep;

and when shells lob as precise

as history it wakes before it dies.

 

Each martial act is enabled by the silence

of ‘learning’, the immanence of ‘making

a living’, an expression that falls as dead

prayers over distance, over the local.

The desert owl remembers differently.

The desert owl remembers the same.

 

 

            John Kinsella