Som Chai meets my family & friends
I am so excited that Som Chai is now in Oz and has been granted a partner visa.
He's met my family and friends, and even come along to Uni with me.
It is wonderful having him here with me - no more lonely nights or awkward outings on my own!
I can throw my wish list in the fire now because he fulfils all my dreams. I am so proud of him - he is charismatic, generous and kind, and he is also Budhist and a meditator!
I wondered whether there was a difference between art made by a human and art made by a machine? So I made a fan that painted, and I became a painting human fan.
Conclusion: there was no difference.
Just an Ordinary Peasant is based on my uncle’s experience as an inmate at Treblinka extermination camp in 1944. His memoir recounts that while being forced to carry corpses from the gas chambers to an open-air pyre, he was handed a sack which held little children who were still alive. The guard commanded the sack be thrown into the fire. The woman I play in Just an Ordinary Peasant is a hybrid character created from the memoirs of my uncle, my parents and my own research. She sings and dances and also throws a sack of babies into the fire. This piece explores my own biases as well as questions the culpability of ‘ordinary people’ who were accomplices to the atrocities carried out during the Third Reich.
JEW
Who Draws the Line?
Perpetrator, Victim,
Mute & Healer
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Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace laureate, defined indifference as “the most insidious danger of all”.
And the great civil rights leader Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. added that “the hottest place in Hell is reserved for those who remain neutral in times of great moral conflict.”
To you all - the universities and government bodies of the West:
Today, after the massacre on Israel, 7.10.23, a great moral conflict has been delivered to your doorsteps.
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Rise to the occasion.
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Lead with moral principles, not only with administrative regulations.
Speak up.
 Victim |  Perpetrator |
|---|---|
 Mute |  Healer |
Declaration of Guilt
The Nazis first came for the Communists,
But I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews,
And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists,
But I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Catholics
and I was a Protestant,
and so I didn’t speak up.
Then they came for me,
But by that time there was no-one left to speak up for any one.
Pastor Niemoller, 1955