Radio Reversal Podcast

In this episode, we pick up where we left off in the last episode, following the threads that Dr. Jamal Nabulsi introduces in Righting the History of Palestine, and digging deeper into the origins of zionism as a modern political ideology. With help from staunch anti-zionist Jewish academics and activist collectives, as well as Palestinian organisers and activists, we aim to better understand the function of zionism in the present conjuncture, and what we need to do to contest the powerful zionist narratives that sustain and mask the genocide being committed by Israel in Gaza.

In this episode, you’ll hear from Jewish academic and activist Dr. Liz Strakosch on behalf of the newly formed Doykeit collective. You’ll also hear from Palestinian Dr. Muntaser, Jewish academic and long-time Palestinian solidarity organiser Dr. Jordana Silverstein, Palestinian organisers Remah, Omar, and Dania, as well as a brief excerpt from Tamil activist, community organiser & Greens candidate for Mayor, Jonathan Sriranganathan.

Over the course of these conversations, we learn more about the role of zionism in shaping the settler colonial occupation of Palestine, and it’s profound limitations as a response to the persistent problem of anti-semitism in Europe. Over and again across the Justice for Palestine Magandjin movement we’ve been offered the critical reminder that the genocidal settler colonial occupation of Palestine can never resolve the problem of anti-semitism, white supremacy, and racism, because, as Dr. Liz Strakosch puts it, “there is no safety in building a fortress on stolen land….the only safe world is a world where white supremacy has ended.”

As with our previous episodes, this content includes graphic descriptions of colonial violence, as well as individual reflections anti-semitism and racism. If any of these conversations trigger difficult emotional responses, we encourage you to reach out to trusted family and friends to process those responses, or to seek free, confidential counselling support from Lifeline on 13 11 14.

If you want to dig deeper into the material you’ve heard here, we recommend checking out the following sources:

https://www.instagram.com/loudjewcollective/?hl=en

https://www.tzedekcollective.com/

https://overland.org.au/2024/02/here-and-now-our-call-for-justice-and-liberation/

In this first episode, we draw together speeches, interviews, public discussions and readings, to get a sense of what has been happening in Gaza since October 2023, and the relationship between the current atrocities and a much longer history of Israeli settler colonialism. We end the episode with a special reading from Dr. Jamal Nabulsi’s incisive 2021 essay Righting the History of Palestine (available here), to better understand the historical conditions that have created the conditions for genocide in the present, and to foreground the powerful and continuing history of Palestinian resistance.

Like most of the episodes in this series, this carries a strong content warning for graphic descriptions of genocide, war crimes, racial violence, gendered and sexual violence. If any of this content is likely to be triggering, we recommend that you make a plan for supporting yourself in advance, including making sure you have friends or family to call if you need help or care, or contacting services like Lifeline (13 11 14) for free, anonymous counselling support.

In this episode, you’ll hear from staunch Palestinian organisers and community members, including (in order) Khawla, Malaak, Remah, Hidaya, Zayd, Jamal and Muntaser. You’ll also hear from Muslim comrade and organiser Binil, and Radio Reversal producer Anna.

If you’d like to access the full audio archive of the Justice for Palestine Magandjin struggle, please get in touch with us via substack and we’ll organise access to anything you need.

The central purpose of this podcast is to honour the power of Palestinian resistance in this moment, and to learn from the struggle as it unfolds here in Magandjin. If you’re listening in and you’re not yet involved in the Justice for Palestine Magandjin movement, please consider signing up to our mailing list so that you can get up to date details about upcoming events, calls-to-action, and ways to support the movement for Palestine. You can also follow us on facebook, instagram and twitter to stay up to date. You can also follow the amazing work of Queensland Muslim Incorporated, and campaigns directly targeting the expansion of the weapons industry here in so-called queensland, including Shut Down Ferra and Wage Peace.

If you’re listening in from further afield, we suggest following the incredible work of the Australian Palestine Advocacy Network (APAN) to keep up to date with organising happening in your area.

We also encourage everyone who is getting involved in the struggle for justice for Palestine to also recognise the intimate connections between settler colonialism and racial violence in Palestine and the continuing violence of occupation on this continent. There is a rich and powerful tradition of Blackfulla Palestinian solidarity in this place, which you can trace here and here.

We also encourage listeners to get involved with and support campaigns against settler colonial violence on this continent, including the work of the Black People’s Union, Warriors of the Aboriginal Resistance, Stop Blak Deaths in Custody, Treaty Before Voice, the Brisbane Aboriginal Sovereign Embassy, and independent Black media sites like Amy McQuire’s incredible substack, Black Justice Journalism.

Solidarity with all Indigenous peoples’ globally struggling against injustice, extraction, occupation, and oppression.

Today’s episode is the third and final instalment of our introductory mini series, Learning Out Loud, and it follows on from last week’s sampling of our joint podcast launch party with fellow fresh Zed-casters Paradigm Shift on Sunday 24th September 2023. For that event, we welcomed our incredible community of listeners and contributors to join the RR collective (Anna, Nat, Shreya & Han) and Paradigm Shift’s Andy Paine for a wholesome-as-heck live-radio-style mixtape.

Last week we heard from Kevin Yow Yeh, Prof Chelsea Watego, and Dr David Singh, along with a poetry performance by Jonathan Sriranganathan. They each helped us dive headfirst into some meaty discussions about community radio-ing and community organising, and the possibilities that come from being less “public intellectuals” so much as (as Prof Watego so aptly put it!) “nerds on the frontline.” This was accompanied by the slightly chaotic fun of everyone’s favourite experimental house band, It’s Science And Feelings - aka Jodie Rottle, Matt Hsu, and me (Han).

The soundmaking-as-kinmaking continues throughout today’s episode, which features performances by protest-as-pedagogy singer-songwriters Phil Monsour and Andy Paine, along with Lamisse Hamouda performing a poem by Portuguese artist Grada Kilomba along with her own work.

To gear you up for the density of all this brilliance, Nat and I got together to recap our favourite moments of the launch, and to engage with some of the thinking about making art that is entangled with politics. We dig into “companion thinking” - an extension upon Sara Ahmed’s idea of “companion texts” (found in her 2017 book Living a Feminist Life) - and the article by me and my companion thinker & bestie Jodie Rottle, “Companion Thinking in Improvised Musicking Practice.” Other texts mentioned in this intro include Julietta Singh’s Unthinking Mastery, Octavia E. Butler’s Parable Series novels, Joyful Militancy by carla bergman and Nick Montgomery, and the work of Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha. Don’t worry, this is not the last substantial reading list you’ll get from us (you’re welcome)!

Following the performances, Andy and Lamisse sit down for a chat along with radical poet, musicker, and political nerd Jonathan Sriranganathan about making art and making change. This is a deep and insightful discussion not to be missed, exploring some of the challenges to making bold statements and experimental works in an age of Everything Is Forever On The Internet. Picking up the themes of fumbling through artmaking in public, It’s Science And Feelings close us out with some more sonic theory-making.

We are so incredibly grateful for the support we have received, both on our launch day and as we put these first podcast episodes out into the world! Thank you for tuning in, please do subscribe - here, and on your favourite listening apps - and send this episode to any friends you think might need a bit more Radio Reversal in their life. We also very much value your feedback and thinking in-company with us, so please do dive into the comment section and let us know your thoughts.

In this second episode of the Radio Reversal Podcast, you’ll get to hear some of the live conversations we recorded during our launch party last week.

Over the course of the episode, you’ll hear a conversation with our dear friend and host of the Paradigm Shift on 4zzz, Andy Paine, talking about why our long-standing broadcast radio programs are finally going digital. You’ll also hear a chat between Anna and one of the *unmatched stars* of Gogglebox, the current host of Let’s Talk - Social Justice, Kevin Yow Yeh about the space that community radio creates for critical, thoughtful, engaged and grounded work. Kevin also gives a shout out to a recent interview with the wonderful Gunggari person and National Director of the Change the Record Coalition, Maggie Munn, and particularly their just-for-the-joy-of-it podcast side project, Gay Football Friends.

We are also very excited to share a gorgeous poetry performance by the extraordinary poet, writer, community organiser & politics nerd Jonathan Sriranganathan (you can find more of Jonno’s poetry via Rivermouth). As Jonno says in their set, we’ve been thinking and dreaming and organising together for so long now that it is impossible to find where each of our projects begin and others end. It remains such a privilege and a joy to be learning out loud together!

And if that’s not already enough, we wrap up with a rich and playful chat about the power and possibility of community-controlled media with the unbeatable duo behind Let’s Talk - Black Politics, Professor Chelsea Watego & Dr David Singh. We talk about their experiences of Aboriginal community-controlled media, and their upcoming podcast project - Read the Play - the first season of which is set to be released in Winter 2025. You’ll also hear David mention a rich conversation that we had on the live version of Radio Reversal a few months ago about the idea of the present conjuncture, interpreting the crisis, and the importance of conjunctural analysis.

You’ll also be hearing the joyful musical theorising of Matt Hsu, Jodie Rottle, and our very own Han Reardon-Smith, playing together as It’s Science And Feelings. This crew created a whole audio soundscape for the event, which you’ll hear in this recording, shot through with the joyful sounds of a community coming together to celebrate community controlled media and the things we can do together. It makes for the most incredible and joyful You can find some details about their other projects here, here, and here!

Phew! A huge second episode, setting the stage for much more to come! We hope there’s something here for you. And as always, we are excited to hear your reflections, thoughts, suggestions, concerns, and queries.

The Radio Reversal collective is a long-standing audio collective based in so-called brisbane. Since 2012, we have been producing and presenting a weekly, research- and interview-based live radio show on community radio station 4zzz (102.1fm). As a collective, we come together around a shared vision of anti-racist, anti-capitalist, anti-ableist, abolitionist, Indigenist, queer feminist political education. We are committed to using the tools of audio production and storytelling to platform and amplify grassroots community organising, critical theorising, and political art, music, and activism.

After many years of making live radio, we see the podcast as a chance to deepen and extend our existing on-air radio work by re-composing materials in themed ‘seasons’, to help us draw out key insights and reflect on what we’ve learned. In these first couple of episodes, we’re going meta: digging into the why of this new podcast project, and what listeners can expect from the Radio Reversal Podcast.

Over the course of this episode, you’ll hear us talk a bit about the broader “pedagogy” of Radio Reversal - that is, how we understand our experiences of teaching and learning through radio-making. For some bigger reflections on pedagogy and what it means to think about it beyond traditional ideas of education, we recommend digging into: Paulo Freire's landmark "Pedagogy of the Oppressed" and bell hooks extraordinary “Teaching to Transgress”, both of which we discuss in passing in this episode. We also allude to some of the ways that traditions of abolitionist organising and theorising have shaped our approaches, which you can follow up by digging into Dylan Rodriguez’s excellent piece here. If you listen especially carefully to the podcast (ha!) you’ll also hear Shreya mention a wonderful piece by Radio Reversal co-founder Fern Thompsett and her comrade Eli Meyerhoff on “militant co-research” and the possibilities of free education projects that stand in uncompromising solidarity with Indigenous sovereignty. This work in turn references this extraordinary piece by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson on “Land as Pedagogy”. You can also check out some of Eli’s longer work in his wonderful book “Beyond Education: Radical Studying for another world.”

In the context of these conversations on pedagogy, we also talk about some of the companion projects of Radio Reversal, including the Brisbane Free University. Many of the regular producers of the Radio Reversal podcast also come together as participants and organisers of the Brisbane Free University Radical Reading Group, which meets fortnightly to discuss a variety of texts that help us to navigate the political questions of the present conjuncture. If you’re interested in getting involved with the thinking and organising we do through the free university, please get in touch!

G’day friends & comrades,

Welcome back to another episode of the Radio Reversal Podcast.

Late last week, I shared an episode called “Refusing to pinkwash a genocide” which looked at some inspiring examples of local, autonomous organising against the normalisation of Zionist settler colonialism and genocide in Gaza. Today, I’m coming back to the core of this series on crisis, disaster & collective futures to ask: how can we think about the crisis when the crisis is permanent?

As of today, it's 610 days since the Israeli Occupation Forces began their most recent genocidal siege on Gaza. It’s more than 76 years since the Zionist occupation of Palestine began with the events of the Nakba: massacres, displacements and the ethnic cleansing of huge swathes of Palestinian land. It’s 237 years since the first British penal colonies - prisons - were established on the homelands of the Gadigal, Dharug and Dharawal peoples of the Eora Nation. And it’s just over a week since Kumanjayi White, a young Walpiri man who lived with complex disabilities, was killed after being restrained by off-duty cops in Mparrtwe, Alice Springs. And then, just a few days ago, we heard reports of a second Aboriginal death in police custody in the Northern Territory in as many weeks. Kumanjayi White’s death in police custody is the 597th Aboriginal death in custody since the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody handed down its findings in the 1990s - many of which, as Senator Lidia Thorpe has consistently pointed out in Parliament, are yet to be implemented.

So as we look back at the unending crisis conditions of colonialism, what does it mean for how we look ahead? What does it ask of us - to think about these current atrocities in the context of a much longer, ongoing crisis?

To dig into this, we’ll begin by sharing an interview between Han and our dear friend and intellectual guiding light, Dr. Jamal Nabulsi, who provides a bit more historical and political context for the events of the Nakba and their continuation into the present. We then turn to two speeches from the recent Nakba commemoration here in Magan-djin, including Remah Naji and Binil K. Mohideen.

We then turn towards this continent, to think about the significance of commemorating the 76th anniversary of the Zionist occupation of Palestine from the vantage point of 237 years of ongoing colonial occupation of this continent. To help us see the linkages between colonialism in Palestine and on this continent, we turn (as we so often do!) to Darumbal and South Sea Islander writer and academic, Dr. Amy McQuire. We’re so excited to be sharing a sneak peak of Amy’s opening remarks from the plenary panel discussion of the Activism for Palestine conference, hosted by Justice for Palestine Magan-djin over the weekend. We were lucky enough to head along to record a couple of the conversations that happened as part of the conference to share with anyone who couldn’t attend in person, to help inform our collective struggle going forwards. We’ll be packaging those up and releasing them here in the coming weeks, as part of a community resource pack coming out of the conference.

For now, we just wanted to share this short excerpt from Amy as a way to understand the deep linkages that connect the current genocidal violence in Palestine with the ongoing war against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people on this continent. For more content drawing these links, check out these brilliant Blackfulla-Palestinian solidarity resources compiled by Anna Cerreto and the Institute for Collaborative Race Research.

I want to quote a section from Amy’s speech at length here, because it really helps to clarify the connections between colonial violence on this continent and in Palestine:

(In an article I was reading recently) the author mentioned that the Mt Morgan mine was once the largest gold mine in the world. Mt Morgan, as many of you would know, is on the land of the Gangalu, and is just outside Rockhampton, near my own Darumbal homelands.

So I went down a bit of a rabbit hole in reading about this – and it led me to another fact. By 1907, the mine had produced $60 million worth of gold. And so one of the original owners of that mine, and the largest shareholder, a man by the name of William D’Arcy, was made enormously rich on the stolen resources of Gangulu people. He then used some of that money to invest in the oil fields in Persia, where his company – which was at the time called the Anglo-Persian Oil Company - struck oil in 1908.

Now why am I telling you this history?

Because that Anglo-Persian Oil Company later become a company by the name of British Petroleum, which we know today as BP.

And so when I found this out, the first instinct I had was to google the words BP and Israel.

BP owns and operates the Baku-Tbilsi-Cehan pipline, which Azerbaijan uses to supply Israel with crude oil. And this oil is used to fuel Israel’s military operations. This oil is sent through this pipeline to produce JET FUEL for the f-35 planes that are dropping bombs on the men, women and children in Gaza. The pipeline supplies 28% of Israel’s crude oil imports.

Not only that, BP operates in West Papua. This is from the Global Atlas of Environmental Justice: “In Bintuni Bay of West Papua, BP’s Tangguh LNG project has been under public scrutiny for alleged connections with excessive surveillance and violence enacted by security forces. Indigenous Papuans have been relocated, and selective compensation has led to tensions and divisions among Papuan residents…” And this is just some of the horrific things BP has been accused of doing in occupied West Papua.

So the genocide of Gangulu, and of First Nations tribes in Queensland (because the gold mine brought in waves of settlers to neighbouring lands, like my Darumbal homelands) is intrinsically connected to the current day atrocities not just in Gaza, but in West Papua.

And it is not just these extractive and exploitative industries, this outright GREED and WEALTH and FORCES OF ENVIRONMENTAL DISTRACTION are connected to each other, but also that they have BENEFITED ENORMOUSLY from these connections. If we wonder why some people can look at these images of horror and terror enacted upon the bodies of Palestinian people and are comfortable with it, it is because they look with their eyes blinded by their own wealth, their own greed.

Their version of humanity is tied to the pursuit of profit; their version of humanity is a process of gardening; a cultivating of space in which Palestinians, West Papuans and Indigenous peoples are made to disappear, or as we know happened in this country, are made to become less than human, are seen as FLORA and FAUNA.

But in thinking about these connections of imperialism, and greed, I also thought about what these connections tell us about both why and how we fight for Palestine, and West Papua.

We fight because not only are these colonial violences connected, and not just in the past, but very much in the present, but also because are connections are Indigenous peoples are much more powerful than any connections that they have. If their networks of violence and greed are connected, then the opportunity to rupture those connections in one part of the world, means a HUGE BLOW for imperialism everywhere.

Which is why solidarity – the building and grounding of connections – is so threatening to them.

As Amy explains, the connections between Indigenous peoples globally form a rich ecosystem, with roots intertwining across the globe. Colonial, capitalist, patriarchal states try to prune this unruly mass; weeding out dissent and resistance wherever they find it. Our work as activists is not to try to cultivate or control or regulate this vast ecosystem, but rather to learn to understand ourselves as part of it; to allow our struggles to grow and flourish together.

We have been reminded of these deep connections this week in a particularly devastating way. On the anniversary of the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020, many of us heard the tragic news that a young Walpiri man from the community of Yuendumu had been killed in an interaction with off-duty police officers in a supermarket in Mparntwe, Alice Springs. Kumanjayi White was a vulnerable young man who is mourned by his family and community. He died after being restrained by off-duty police officers in an interaction that is eerily similar to the murder of George Floyd. The police officers who restrained him have yet to be stood down by the NT Police, and no announcements have been made regarding an inquiry into his death.

All across the continent, communities are mobilising to demand that the institutions and individuals who are responsible for his death face accountability. Kumanjayi White’s family, include his Grandfather, the venerable Elder and activist Uncle Ned Hardgraves, have renewed their calls to disarm police across the Northern Territory. Almost four years ago, the Yuendumu community began the karrinjarla muwajarri campaign to demand a police ceasefire across the Northern Territory in response to the fatal shooting of Kumanjayi Walker by Constable Zachary Rolfe in 2019. They wrote:

We do not want any more reports or inquiries that are not acted on. We already hold the answers and strategies we need. We do not want any more consultations with governments who do not listen to us.

We demand our self determination, our rightful decision making authority, and our resources to be restored to us. This is a list of our demands. What we are calling for is karrinjarla muwajarri, a police ceasefire. Indefinitely.

To get across the ongoing campaign to disarm, defund and dismantle the police across the continent, in the last part of this episode, I catch up with Wanjiriburra and Birri Gubba activist and film-maker Sam Watson to talk about some of the demands made by Kumanjayi White’s family, and how Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities around the country are mobilising in response to his death.

Gatherings like this are happening all over the country, so if you’re not based in Magan-djin, check out this post for links to events happening all across the country. The community of Yuendumu and the family of Kumanjayi White are also looking for financial support so that family can travel from Yuendumu to Mparntwe to demand answers and mourn their loss. Please give generously to this fund so that the family and community can mourn the loss of Kumanjayi White with dignity.

We’re ending this week’s episode with a devastating and vital speech at this Saturday’s rally from Gungarri woman and academic Dr. Raylene Nixon. Raylene shares some of her own family’s experiences navigating the coronial inquest into the death in police custody of her beloved son, Stevie-Lee Nixon McKellar. We’ll be returning to the rest of the speeches from this protest in a future series, but we wanted to finish with Raylene’s words this week because they offer a vital and timely reminder to push as hard as we can for the family of Kumanjayi White right now, and to take this opportunity to put as much pressure as possible on all of the institutions and individuals who are responsible for his death.

All in all, there’s some very big and heavy content today, so please take care of yourselves in the midst of listening through it all. For me, what I’m holding onto amid the horror and grief of this moment is the shimmering reminder that just as the threads of violence and repression criss-cross the globe, shared by colonial powers and capitalist forces internationally, so too do lines of resistance and dissent. Families from so-called Australia to Gaza, from Tamil Eelam to Kashmir, from West Papua to Sudan find common ground in the knowledge that the state acts with violent impunity; that all we have is one another. Mothers of those disappeared by repressive state forces come together to organise and strategise for truth and justice; finding common cause in prison waiting rooms and at community protests and in the futility and violence of official inquiries. There are whole constellations of people across the globe who will not forget those who have been disappeared, maligned, incarcerated, or disbelieved. As always, our work is to find each other and build a network strong enough to dismantle the regimes of repression bit by bit, place by place, until these empires, like all before them, eventually fall.

Yours in solidarity,

Anna

(Radio Reversal Collective)

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit radioreversal.substack.com

Hello friends, and a huge thankyou for joining us for an unprecedented two-episodes-in-a-week of the Radio Reversal Podcast. In this first episode, we’re amplifying a couple of important expressions of autonomous political resistance and solidarity that we’ve seen here in Magan-djin this week. In particular, we’re looking at how diverse communities are working to challenge the forces that work to normalise colonial and racial violence in all its forms - from here in so-called australia, to Gaza, and beyond.

As evidence of the ongoing genocide in Gaza continues to mount, communities around the world are gathering together, refusing to stay silent, and refusing to allow this violence to be normalised or legitimised by the state. People are finding ways to escalate their organising; to disrupt and cause a ruckus; to get in the way of the gears of the colonial capitalist state.

All of this work is experimental. It’s an ongoing project that relies on us sustaining each other to keep trying out different tactics, to keep learning from our experiences, and to keep working to embody our commitments to justice and liberation in all of the work we do.

And like all political work that aims to interrupt entrenched regimes of violence, these experiments are often messy and challenging. We face up against the limits of our power; we find the points at which we are compromised and limited by our own investment in existing systems. We experience points of friction and fear; we face criticism and contempt. It is humbling - and powerful - to be part of communities that strive on regardless.

So this week, I wanted to share some conversations about some ongoing and important struggles against intersecting sites of colonial and racial violence, and the work that people are doing to challenge the normalisation of this violence in the here and now.

I kick off this episode by reflecting on a really interesting autonomous action organised over the weekend by workers, patrons and performers at the Wickham Hotel. In case you missed it, over the weekend, a loose collective of performers, workers and patrons of the Wickham Hotel downed tools and refused to take shifts or perform their sets to protest a decision by Aus Venue Co, the parent company who owns the Wickham Hotel, to book an event hosted by the State Zionist Council of Queensland. '

For some context: the State Zionist Council of Queensland is a political lobby group set up as an umbrella organisation for other Zionist groups in Queensland with the express purpose “to promote and communicate Israel’s interests within the broader Queensland community and to promote Queensland’s relationship with Israel” as well as “to create an atmosphere within the community that values Zionist thought and expression…and pride in Israel and her achievements.”

Now, there’s been a lot of pretty ridiculous and hateful media coverage of these protest actions by the mainstream media and conservative politicians, who have worked hard to position this as a hateful or anti-semitic protest rather than a principled refusal to support an event hosted by a Zionist political lobby group. Much has been made of the fact that the social event coincided with the Jewish celebration of the Shavuot, which celebrates the giving of the Ten Commandments to Jewish people on Mount Sinai. Despite not being there in person, Lord Mayor Adrian Schrinner felt confident to circulate a front page story from The Courier Mail article with the headline “Backed by Green Hate,” a story which focused a truly unhinged amount of attention on the fact that Jonathan Sriranganathan had attended and supported the protest.

Indeed, much of the mainstream media coverage completely fails to mention that this action was organised by workers, performers and patrons of the Wickham Hotel, and that they had tried a number of other measures to ask their parent company, Aus Venue Co, to cancel the booking. It also conveniently erases the context of this protest being organised and formulated by queer and trans members of the Wickham community who were deeply uncomfortable about the venue being used by a political lobby group that actively supports Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land, and at least tacitly supports the current atrocities in Gaza. Certainly, the State Zionist Council of Queensland has done nothing over the past 608 days to raise concerns about Israel’s current actions in Gaza, or made any attempt to censure the Israeli government or the Israeli Occupation Forces. Considering that their stated goal is to foster “pride in Israel and her achievements,” and to encourage closer connections between Jewish Zionists in Queensland and the state of Israel, I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that this suggests that the organisation actively supports the ongoing Israeli invasion of Gaza, and the now well-established war crimes being conducted.

In this context, it is not hard to see how disingenuous the arguments being made across conservative media and by politicians (including both the Lord Mayor of Brisbane and the state Premier) really are. To claim that these actions were “spreading hate” by making Jewish people feel unsafe at a religious event is to wildly misconstrue both the nature of the protest and the political function of the State Zionist Council of Queensland. Organisers involved in this action were predominantly targeting the decision of Aus Venue Co to host an event by a political lobby group who are supportive of the actions of the Israeli government. The fact that the event in question is a social event is irrelevant. To accept the idea that protesting an event like this is inherently anti-semitic would be, as Jonathan Sriranganathan put it - like suggesting that it constitutes religious discrimination if protesters interrupt a Christmas party hosted by Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party (or indeed, by Labor MP Jim Chalmers, which Justice for Palestine Magan-djin planned to do in 2023).

And yet, these are the lines that the mainstream media has consistently been running, along with attempting to use the presence of people like Jonathan Sriranganathan and Remah Naji as evidence that this autonomous action was a Greens event. Leaving aside how frustrating and disrespectful this is to all of the people who were actually involved in organising the action, it’s also emblematic of the continuing pressure to censure higher-profile figures including people like Jonno and Remah, as well as academics like Mununjahli and South Sea Islander Professor Chelsea Watego, writer Ren Wyld, and academic Dr. Randa Abdel-Fattah.

So we figured that it was worth spending some time this week getting to the bottom of what this action was really about, and how it came about.

I start this episode with a chat to drag performer and artist Lulu LeMan, who stopped her performance on Friday evening at the Wickham in order to join talks with workers and management about the planned picket for Saturday night. I then share a live radio interview with two of the organisers who helped workers hold a picket on Saturday evening: Oriela, who is a non-binary Lebanese person and a proud disabled dyke, an advocate, and a long-time patron of the Wickham; and Bizzi, who is a Wakka Wakka and Arrendte Burlesque performer and writer with deep ties to the Wickham performance community. We talk about the work that went on behind the scenes to build some momentum for a protest against this booking, and in opposition to this exploitative use of a beloved queer venue to pinkwash an event hosted by a Zionist political lobby group. If you’re not familiar with the term, Dean Spade explains that pinkwashing is:

“a term activists have coined for when countries engaged in terrible human rights violations promote themselves as “gay friendly” to divert attention from terrible human rights violations, in this case diverting attention from the brutal colonization of Palestine. Israel is the country most famous for pinkwashing, engaging it as a strategy in their rebranding campaign for the last decade.”

This particular angle has been largely erased in media commentary about the picket, which, as Oriela and Bizzy explain, was largely focused on challenging the use of an iconic queer venue for this particular State Zionist Council of Queensland event.

Another key thread that has been largely ignored by mainstream commentary is the fact that this picket was organised by a collective of workers, patrons and performers and included the incredible decision of workers from the Wickham Hotel deciding to refuse to work if the booking went ahead. To talk about the importance of this action, I catch up with dear friend of Radio Reversal, Ari Russell from Unionists for Palestine, to put this action in the broader context of workers organising against the ongoing genocide in Gaza. We talk about how hard it has been for many of us to find ways to leverage our power as workers; and the ongoing struggle to build a sense of collective power in a time of record-low union membership and ineffective trade union bureaucracies.

In this context, it is especially important to highlight the significance of autonomous worker-led action like this event. It might not be perfect, but it’s worth emphasising how powerful it can be for workers, performers and broader community to flex their muscles together in ways like this; standing, as Lulu LeMan put it, against pinkwashing, against the exploitation of workers, and in solidarity with queer Palestinians. We wrap up by talking a bit about an ongoing crowdfunding campaign to support workers and performers who lost wages as a result of refusing to work during this event, which you can find and support here.

Another jam-packed episode full of revolutionary potential and tantalising threads. As usual - we’d love to hear your thoughts, concerns and questions. Get in touch with us here or via social media to let us know what you think!

Yours in solidarity,

Anna (for the Radio Reversal Collective)

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit radioreversal.substack.com

Hello friends and comrades,

This week’s episode of the Radio Reversal podcast features an interview with Dr Jeff Rickertt, renowned People’s Historian, for Labour Day 2025. Han speaks with Jeff about histories of labour organising (particularly here in so-called queensland), the early formation of unions, and the tensions and contradictions these movements expressed and revealed regarding race, gender, and colonialism. They spoke also about the history of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander organising, particularly Aboriginal labour strikes as a strategy in anti-colonial struggle, often outside of the systems of mainstream/whitestream organised labour. They explored labour organising as a site of solidarity and transformative politics, discussing some of the recent examples of labour organising against the genocide in Gaza, and how workers have attempted to leverage their collective power to refuse complicity in this genocide.

This is part of our ongoing series on Disasters, Crisis & Collective Futures. The polycrisis shapes and reconfigures the nature of work and working conditions; the possibilities of labour organising to contest the crisis conditions of colonial racial capitalism warrant exploration and action. But organised labour movements can also be sites of liberal reform, sites where (some) workers are strategically drawn back into complicity and cooperation with capital in order to ‘stabilise’ the crisis without addressing the conditions of exploitation and injustice that (re)produce it.

As we face down emboldened fascist movements, growing political repression and overt genocidal violence in Palestine and beyond, we’re looking back to think about the long history of workers organising on this continent, its tensions and contradictions, and what we ought to be doing collectively as workers in this moment.

A reminder! On Sunday May 18th, 1pm in King George Square, people are gathering in rememberance of the 77th anniversary of the Nakba and to protest the ongoing genocide of Palestinian people. Bring your pots, pans, and wooden spoons to protest the deliberate starvation of Gaza by Israel. Make noise, stand together.

We’ll see you out there.

In solidarity,

Radio Reversal Collective

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit radioreversal.substack.com

Hello friends & comrades,

Welcome to another episode of the Radio Reversal podcast, continuing our current series on crisis, disaster & collective futures. This week, we’re turning our attention to the recent federal election here in so-called australia. Last Saturday, roughly 1 in 3 people voted Labor, 1 in 3 voted Liberal/National, and 1 in 3 voted for someone else.

Has anything changed?

With the centre-right-wing Labor party now dominant nationally, what lessons should we take from this election? Is running for elections still worth the time for those of seeking deeper radical change? Where should we all be putting our energy?

In this episode, we talk through some of the initial results from the election, and what we might be able to learn from these trends. With help from Mununjahli and South Sea Islander Professor Chelsea Watego’s new “Let’s Talk Race on the Run” series, we debunk the unhinged-from-reality narrative that this election constituted a “progressive” victory against Trumpism, and work to contextualise the election results in the context of the broader waves of repression that we’re seeing in this moment.

We wade through the mixed results that we saw for the Greens in this election: minor swings against the party in the lower house, an increase in the Senate vote, and some absolutely massive swings towards some key candidates, including our dear friend Remah Naji in Moreton, and Huong Trang in the seat of Fraser. Notably, both of these candidates ran on explicitly pro-Palestine platforms, and both Remah and Huong are actively involved in activism and community organising beyond the Greens. Both the Moreton campaign and the Fraser campaign drew explicit connections in their campaigns between racial justice, environmental justice, housing justice, and anti-colonial solidarity, focusing more directly on discussions around refugee justice, Palestinian liberation, and Land Back for First Nations communities on this continent. Perhaps not coincidentally, Remah & Huong are both the children of refugees: Remah’s family were displaced from Palestine during the 1948 Nakba and she grew up as part of the Palestinian diaspora in Jordan; Huong grew up in the seat of Fraser and describes herself as “the daughter of Vietnamese boat people.” Both Remah & Huong saw significant swings towards them, particularly in the most racially and culturally diverse and working class parts of their electorates.

But beyond these interesting shifts in voting patterns, and the rise in the Greens vote in outer suburban, less wealthy, more culturally diverse parts of the city: we also spend some time in this episode coming to grips with the loss of local Greens representatives Max Chandler-Mather in Griffith, and Stephen Bates in Brisbane, as well as party leader Adam Bandt, who is now confirmed to have lost the seat of Melbourne. As the only major political party that has been consistently outspoken on the genocide in Gaza, it should have come as no surprise to any of us to see the forces of Zionist repression at work in a coordinated smear campaign against the Greens in this election: one which sought to position the Greens as, to quote LNP Senator James McGrath on the ABCs election night panel, “a disgusting, racist, antisemitic party full of horrible people.” The scale of scare-campaigning against the Greens was unprecedented in this election, with record amounts of money spent by the property sector, the fossil fuel industry and the zionist lobby. You can see some more targeted commentary on this by Jonathan Sriranganathan in this excellent piece, and in these reflections from the wonderful Omar Sakr.

We reflect on what the scale of campaigning against the Greens in this election - and in the specific context of an ongoing genocide in Palestine - might tell us about the danger that any kind of anti-colonial solidarity (or perceived solidarity) poses to the political establishment. We reflect on Dr. Jamal Nabulsi’s argument that the scale of violence and repression that we are witnessing in this moment is a direct response to the very real threat that anti-colonial solidarity poses to the settler colonial order. But we also think about the very real limits of electoralism as a standalone vehicle for transformation: if nothing else, the scale of this negative campaigning has laid bare the impossibility of outperforming these powerful forces while we’re still trying to win “on their terms”.

So - what does this all mean for what’s to come? We end this episode with a generative reminder from local organiser Bec from the Community Union Defence League who are right now organising eviction defence, food support and mutual aid for folks sleeping rough in Musgrave Park. In case you missed it, the Lord Mayor, Adrian Schrinner, announced a couple of weeks ago that they planned to forcefully evict all homeless people from parks across the city on the grounds of “community safety” and “public accessibility”, despite the fact that no suitable housing could be provided to folks sleeping rough. I doubt that it is a coincidence that they decided to move ahead with the evictions only a few days after the federal election, perhaps in the hope that many organisers would be burnt out from the long election campaign. What they didn’t bank on was the scale of popular opposition to these evictions, and this week we’ve seen inspiring solidarity with hundreds turning out early each morning to support folks facing move-on directions, to challenge these evictions, and to refuse to allow this violence to go uncontested.

As always, we’d love to hear your thoughts, criticisms and questions - please do get in touch! And stay tuned for our next few episodes, digging into labour struggles during times of crisis (in honour of Labour Day last week!), and pulling apart the ongoing discourse of “gender crisis” being circulated in right-wing media and its role in whipping up a moral panic about trans liberation and queer justice.

Yours in solidarity,

The Radio Reversal Collective

(Artwork by Anna Carlson for the Anti-Poverty Network & Community Union Defence League for the current struggle for housing justice in Magan-djin. This original A2 lino print is currently available as part of a fundraiser for Palestinian families run by our friends at The Resistance - you can find it here if you want to make a bid and secure yourself a copy!)

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit radioreversal.substack.com

Hello friends!

We’re back with another episode in our running series on Disasters, Crisis, and Collective Futures - this time looking at the “slow violence” of environmental disasters and degradation, the links between this violence and settler-colonialism, and the long standing practices of Aboriginal refusal and resistance against the crisis conditions of colonialism.

This series began with podcast Episode 12 - After the Flood, and continued in Episode 13 - Disaster Communism with Nick Southall and Episode 14: "Crisis Colonialism" & the expanding frontiers of empire. In these episodes - in the wake of Cyclone Alfred - we spoke about so-called “natural” disasters and how, during them, the horizons of political possibility, and the ways we relate to each other, can shift and change. We talked about how those moments of disruption can be seized by colonial and capitalist actors to expand frontiers of extraction and control, and also how communities experiencing disruption sometimes radically reorganise themselves around principles of mutual aid and collective care.

Something we’ve talked a bit about in this series is that crises, disasters, are not evenly distributed. Some people are far more frequently faced with disaster conditions - often as a result of state violence and neglect, capitalist exploitation, (and the “externalities” resulting from those activities), and because of the ongoing violence of settler-colonialism.

For those of us who tend to experience disasters as short, sharp, and intermittent or rare shocks, it’s important to consider:

* what the uneven distribution of disasters and crises tells us about the material realities of colonialism and capitalism

* how we can be in solidarity with people more regularly exposed to disasters, including people who’ve been doing the work of fighting for kin and Country and justice, and fighting against the forces of colonialism and capitalism, for hundreds of years.

To help us think these things through, we could not be more delighted than to be bringing you this conversation with Rikki Dank, Gudanji and Wakaya woman and one of the directors of Gudanji For Country. Gudanji For Country is a grassroots First Nations organisation working to protect Country from colonial exploitation, overgrazing, mining, and fracking, to educate, advocate, and to create sustainable futures.

This interview with Rikki covers a wide range of topics, including the relationship between the slow violence of environmental degradation and colonialism, the links between climate change and colonial capitalism, the history of damaging, extractive practices on Gudanji Country and across the Beetaloo Basin and elsewhere (from the damage wrought by early colonising pastoralists through to contemporary fracking), and how Aboriginal People have fought and found ways to care for community and Country in defiance of the colonial-capitalist apparatus.

Through this interview, we see the long emergency of colonialism and of climate change, not as something expressed only through short and sharp big events (like Cyclone Alfred), but also through creeping pollution, contamination, degradation, exploitation, displacement, and damage to lifeways. In learning to pay attention to these different temporal expressions of disaster and crisis, we can better learn how to organise ourselves and our struggle as climate change escalates.

Rikki Dank also spoke with us of Indigenous futurities and possibilities, of healing Country, of care, and of love - love as a feeling and as an orientation to the work of struggle, of organising, of activism, of building and maintaining community, of care, of creating possibilities for each other. She speaks of love as a feeling, love as an action, love as the steadfast refusal to be dispossessed by settler-colonialism, or to give up.

(The centrality of love also brought to mind our conversation with Nick Southall about disaster communism a few weeks back - he also spoke of love, and the love of people and for people that helps drive us into and sustain us in struggle).

We hope you enjoy this conversation with the wonderful Rikki Dank, and encourage you to follow her work with Gudanji for Country by signing up to their newsletter, following them on Instagram, and if you can, consider supporting their work through a donation.

Yours in solidarity,

The Radio Reversal Collective.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit radioreversal.substack.com