Linda Jaivin

Correctional is a migrant family story, prison memoir, record of a spiritual journey, love story, and morality tale. It is also an examination of race and policing in America and a critique of class on two continents. It is the record of an imperfect life closely and critically examined. Although personal revelations abound, author Ravi Shankar insists this book is not a ‘confessional’ but a ‘correctional’. Most simply, it is, he tells us, ‘the true story of how, in the middle of a seemingly successful life, I suddenly ended up in jail.’

On 9 June 2019, a million people poured into the streets of Hong Kong, kicking off a protest movement that would last seven months, see pitched battles between citizens and police on tear-gassed streets, and shake the territory to its economic foundations. Bruce Lee’s ‘be water’ defined its fluid and agile tactics. But tear gas smoke, flaming Molotov cocktails, chants of ‘If we burn, you burn with us’ and the politically incendiary slogan ‘Reclaim Hong Kong, Revolution of our time!’ showed fire to be the movement’s true element.

The fires that are burning across Australia are changing this place, quite possibly forever, and with it our natural, social, cultural, and political narratives. The fires are writing new stories into the very rocks and soil of our land, this land that has always had stories engraved in rocks and soil, this always-was-always-will-be Aboriginal land. Our newest story is pyrogenic. Born of fire, it will throw green shoots out from blackness. It must.

The Chinese Communist Party is arguably the single most powerful organisation in the world.