"OUT OF SIGHT OUT OF MIND"

Children in Detention

If you're a Perth blogger like me, or if you're going to be in Perth in October or November this year, you may want to take yourself down to KULCHA in Fremantle to check out the art of Adam Janali Ozala:

Ozala is a Hazara refugee from Afghanistan. For three and half years Ozala waited in detention centres for his claim for asylum to be approved. Unable to communicate to the outside world, he began painting and drawing political cartoons and caricatures to express his suffering. To commemorate Refugee Week, Ozala will exhibit a collection of these artworks at KULCHA. Don't miss this powerful insight into one man's struggle for freedom.

You can read Adam's story here, and meet him in the flesh on an opening night event at KULCHA on Thursday 26th October, 630pm. Visit Project Safecom for more details. (I'll be there, having met him in person myself on several occasions.)

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On a completely different topic, Salon has a provocative interview with Richard Dawkins regarding his latest book, The God Delusion. For some reason--perhaps I had been swayed by the hype--I've always had Dawkins pegged as a strong or positive atheist, but his position is actually much closer to my own:

Well, technically, you cannot be any more than an agnostic. But I am as agnostic about God as I am about fairies and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. You cannot actually disprove the existence of God. Therefore, to be a positive atheist is not technically possible. But you can be as atheist about God as you can be atheist about Thor or Apollo. Everybody nowadays is an atheist about Thor and Apollo. Some of us just go one god further.

I'm hoping the ABC will screen Dawkins' BBC series The Root of All Evil, but since the managing director acquiesced to the authoritarian-right-dominated board and implemented his conservative affirmative-action programme, I doubt we'll ever get to see it. (Unless they screen it after Songs of Praise.)