Latest news with #Cabramatta
The Age
06-08-2025
- Business
- The Age
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Haymarket needs more than food and lanterns Ho-hum, another artist's impression appears of what a re-imagined area of Sydney could be ('Plan shines a light on Haymarket', August 14). Having just returned from the Covent Garden area of London, there are a few more components required for our Haymarket than a cluster of Asian restaurants amid strings of lanterns. The area around Convent Garden comprises at least 10 major theatres and museums, which are the magnet to the area. Around Sydney, most of us are lucky to have pretty good Asian restaurants and suppliers where we live. It is hardly worthwhile to travel to this end of town to eat a Thai meal on the pavement opposite the Capitol theatre. The precinct needs to offer a couple of other theatres as an adjunct to the area's single live venue. Fairy lights and a few more Asian restaurants would not attract someone from the suburbs or even nearby Barangaroo/ Darling Harbour, but a vibrant theatre district would give a more balanced reason to go there. Greg Vale, Kiama I suggest the City of Sydney not waste taxpayers' money trying to create a new commercial Asian-themed precinct in Haymarket. Restaurants and vitality are more organic than this and they spring up where people have access to them and will provide patronage – think of Harris Park, Cabramatta, Lakemba or Burwood. Plans like these for Haymarket, while probably well-intentioned, remain artificial and generally look and feel to have a contrived air about them. Dale Bailey, Five Dock The mandatory artist's impression of the proposals for Haymarket and Thai Town shows hanging lanterns hovering above the road and pedestrian space. This is an undoubtedly beautiful image, one probably proposed by a designer who has travelled widely in Europe and Asia, where it is possible to attach the necessary supporting cables to adjacent buildings. In Australia, however, this is rarely possible for a range of structural, legal and bureaucratic reasons. This means that poles specifically and exclusively used for the cable attachment become necessary, and these are usually expensive additions that gobble up the art budget and detract from the worth of the artwork. The piece at the Parramatta Road end of Norton Street is an example of this, where a beautiful floating sculpture is suspended from big fat poles that take up half the footpath. Similar columns were needed for the 'clouds' of Lindy Lee's Garden of Cloud and Stone in Thomas Street in Chinatown. These concepts need more thought.
Daily Maverick
22-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Maverick
How refugee comics empower displaced voices amid global crisis of migration
Comic books and graphic novels written by refugees counter the one-dimensional version found in most visual media. There are more refugees in the world today than at any other point in history. The UN estimates that there are now more than 120 million people forcibly displaced from their homes. That is one in every 69 people on Earth. Some 73% of this population is hosted in lower- or middle-income countries. From the legacies of European colonialism to global inequality, drone warfare and climate instability, politicians have failed to address the causes driving this mass displacement. Instead, far-right parties exploit the crisis by inflaming cultures of hatred and hostility towards migrants, particularly in high-income Western countries. This is exacerbated by visual media, which makes refugees an easy target by denying them the means of telling their own stories on their own terms. Pictures of migrants on boats or climbing over border walls are everywhere in tabloid newspapers and on social media. But these images are rarely accompanied by any detailed account of the brutal experiences that force people into these situations. In our new book, Graphic Refuge: Visuality and Mobility in Refugee Comics, we show how a growing genre of 'refugee comics' is challenging this visual culture through a range of storytelling strategies and innovations in illustration. Comprising multiple images arranged into sequences and interspersed with speech bubbles and caption boxes, refugee comics disrupt a media landscape that tends to reduce migrants to either threats or victims. Many different kinds of visual storytelling live under the umbrella of refugee comics. They include short strips and stories, such as A Perilous Journey (2016), with testimonies from people fleeing the civil war in Syria, and Cabramatta (2019), about growing up as a Vietnamese migrant in a suburb in Sydney, Australia. They also include codex-bound graphic novels such as The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui (2017), and interactive web-comics such as Exodus by Jasper Rietman (2018). They further include documentaries made by journalists about the specific experiences of individual refugees. They also include fiction by artists who combine elements of several refugee testimonies into representative stories. Additionally, there are both fictional and non-fictional artworks made by migrants and refugees themselves. A history of being forced to flee Refugee comics address different forced mass displacements over the 20th and 21st centuries. These include the 1948 Nakba, the 1970s' flight of refugees from Vietnam and the displacement of people from Syria and other countries in sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East in the 2010s. These refugee comics challenge anti-migrant images in at least three ways. First, they often integrate the direct testimonies of refugees. This is enhanced by the combination of words and pictures that comprise the comics page, which allows refugees to frame the way we see and respond to images of displaced people. For example, in The Unwanted by Joe Sacco (2012), familiar images of migrants crossing the Mediterranean on small boats are narrated by a refugee called Jon. His testimony turns our attention to the fears and desires that drive people to attempt dangerous sea crossings. A second way comics challenge anti-migrant images is by allowing refugees to tell their stories without disclosing their identities. Because comics are drawn by hand and use abstract icons rather than photographs, refugees can tell their stories while avoiding any unwanted scrutiny and also maintaining personal privacy. This reintroduces refugee agency into a visual culture that often seeks to reduce migrants to voiceless victims or security threats. For example, in Escaping Wars and Waves: Encounters with Syrian Refugees (2018), German comics journalist Olivier Kugler dedicates two pages to a man he calls 'The Afghan' because he didn't want his name or identity revealed. Kugler presents this man's testimony of failed attempts to get to the UK, but he never draws his face or refers to him by name. The third way comics challenge anti-migrant images is by shifting our attention from refugees themselves to the hostile environments and border infrastructures that they are forced to travel through and inhabit. Refugee researchers describe this different way of seeing as a 'places and spaces, not faces' approach. For instance, in Undocumented: The Architecture of Migrant Detention (2017), Tings Chak walks her readers through migrant detention centres from the perspective of the people who are being processed and detained. Drawing displacement This emphasis on place and space is built into the structure of our own book, Graphic Refuge. We begin by focusing on graphic stories about ocean crossings, particularly on the Mediterranean Sea. We then turn to comics concerned with the experience of refugee camps, and we also ask how interactive online comics bring viewers into virtual refugee spaces in a variety of ways. It is the obliteration of homes that forces people to become refugees in the first place. Later in the book, we explore how illustrated stories document the destruction of cityscapes across Syria and also in Gaza. Finally, we turn to graphic autobiographies by second-generation refugees — those who have grown up in places such as the US or Australia, but who must still negotiate the trauma of their parents' displacement. Whereas most previous studies of refugee comics have focused on trauma and empathy, we take a different approach in Graphic Refuge. We set out to show how refugee comics represent migrant agency and desire, and how we are all implicated in the histories and systems that have created the very idea of the modern refugee. As critical refugee scholar Vinh Nguyen writes in our book's foreword, although it is difficult to truly know what refugee lives are like, those of us who enjoy the privileges of citizenship can at least read these comics to better understand 'what we — we who can sleep under warm covers at night — are capable of'. DM First published by The Conversation. Dominic Davies is a reader in English at City St George's, University of London in England; Candida Rifkind is a professor of graphic narratives at the University of Winnipeg in Canada.
