By Jo Dyer
The red dust has now settled on the 2024 Garma Festival, a very different forum from the surging optimism of last year. After the crushing disappointment of the Voice rejection, this year’s Festival was one of reflection, of mourning, and a determination to renew. Anthony Albanese was there again, acknowledging the pain of the failed referendum and proffering a modest bag of cash, but with nothing substantive to say. His attempt to redefine Makarrata from the formal commission for truth-telling, to which he’d previously committed, to “just being the idea of coming together” was a specious backflip that did little to inspire confidence the “Great Silence” of the last nine months in Indigenous Affairs would be meaningfully broken anytime soon. Malarndirri McCarthy has her work cut out for her.
Dutton, of course, was not at Garma at all, with more to say to the people of Israel than our own First Nations. On his way back from a Zionist junket to Jerusalem, he piped up only to reassure his base there would be no “revisiting of truth-telling” under a Government he led, oddly implying he’d visited the notion before. With his embrace of Trumpian-style politics ever-tightening, Dutton’s willingness to exploit racism’s dark shadow for electoral gain heralds a rancorous election campaign in 2025, and a man sanguine at its impact on our exhausted First Nations’ brothers and sisters.
Also sanguine at the impact of their actions is one Linda Reynolds, whose defamation suit against her former staffer Brittany Higgins gets under way this week. Seemingly oblivious to the fact her ongoing vendetta against a young rape survivor trashes her reputation more comprehensively than a few Instagram posts ever could, Reynolds continues to paint herself as the real victim of the Lehrmann debacle, noting on her way into the courtroom that she was “very much looking forward to, finally after three and a half years, having the opportunity to tell the truth”, presumably conceding that her Spotlight sit-down with Liam Bartlett was something other than the truth, riddled as it was with now-acknowledged inaccuracies about what she knew and when. Reynolds has also had to concede she regularly leaked confidential information to Janet Albrechtsen to encourage and enable Albrechtsen’s venomous writings against Brittany, something that surely assists to prove the truth of Brittany’s central allegation of a campaign of harassment against her. Were I Mark Dreyfus, I’d be looking closely at Reynolds’ follow-up comment that she was “very glad the Attorney General does not have any reach here in the Supreme Court of Western Australia”, a remark carrying the scurrilous implication that, if he could, the nation’s first law officer would seek to undermine the independence of the courts to influence or stymie Reynolds’ tawdry case. There’d be a lawsuit in that, I’m sure, if politicians bringing defamation actions were not so ridiculous.
Meanwhile, the Olympics got under way in Paris in fine style with a clutch of decapitated Marie Antoinettes at the windows of her old prison, a grand backdrop for French metal band Gojira’s version of France’s revolutionary anthem Ça ira (sample lyric: The aristocrats, we’ll hang ‘em all!), and spittle-flecked Christians revealing themselves to be as hilariously ignorant as they are rabidly intolerant as they excoriated the Opening Ceremony and its “ugly, sick, grotesque” parody of The Last Supper featuring a rainbow of joyous Queer performers, except that the excerpt wasn’t based on The Last Supper at all, but rather Le Festin des Dieux (The Feast of the Gods), and depicted a line-up of Greek and Roman deities at a wedding on, appropriately, Mount Olympus, a fact which also explains the otherwise incongruous addition of the blue-painted nude Bacchus arranged on a platter.
More seriously, the culture wars over women’s bodies ratcheted up a notch in Paris, with Algerian female boxer Imane Khelif getting accused of being a man. Italy’s previous champion grandstanders, its football team, had nothing on countrywoman Angela Carini, who forfeited her first-round bout after only 46 seconds after copping a punch to her nose she said wasn’t fair and caused her “extreme pain”, which, at least to the uninitiated, seems a hazard of the job. Despite Khelif having uncontroversially boxed in many international competitions since her debut in 2018 – including the Tokyo Olympics, where she finished out of medal contention, and the 2022 World Championships, where she won silver – a ferocious rhetorical storm ensued, and the cis-woman found herself accused of being a man. The first time her eligibility was questioned was after the round-of-16 at the 2023 World Championships when she defeated a Russian boxer, at which point the Russian CEO and President of the now-disgraced, decertified and Gazprom-financed International Boxing Association, an organisation so corrupt that even the IOC has severed relations with it, resurrected a hitherto unknown “independent” sex-eligibility test from 2022 to disqualify her on unidentified grounds. All very fine and normal. The IOC stood firmly behind Khelif, Carini has since backtracked and Khelif’s boxed her way into medal contention so there is some justice in the world.
In the interim, the usual suspects had massed at the culture frontlines to pontificate about Khelif’s body, a pastime endured by female athletes of colour for decades. Their bleating number included one Donald J Trump, who erroneously described Khelif as “a person who’s transitioned”. Whilst one might have thought he had better things to do than policing random Olympians, Trump’s outburst is in keeping with so much of his tanking campaign – performative, mendacious and entirely wrong. Its implosion will give us something to watch when the last medal has been won in gay Paree.
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