Right Now is an online media organisation dedicated to monitoring and analysing – in great and necessary depth – human rights issues in Australia. They are a not-for-profit yet have managed to secure funding (Roselina Press! well done!) to pay writers real money for a series of focused, long essays. I don’t need to say anything about how it feels these days, in our sunburned country, to be paid real money for a longform piece on a topic of immense importance, do I? Mine is on how a great many of the first-gen thinkers and public intellectuals have been effectively barred from participating in Australia’s public life from 1940s to the present day. The big question: how can we account for the on-going disinterest, contempt even, shown by the mainstream Australian society to the vast immigrant intellectual capital? The essay is illustrated rather strikingly (I think) by Steve Tierney. This pic on the left is his work.