The Wild Reed

Thursday, April 23, 2026

Australian Sojourn – April-May 2026

Part 4: Gunnedah

I share this evening a few images from my recent time in Gunnedah, my Australian hometown.

Gunnedah and its surrounding area were originally inhabited by Indigenous Australians who spoke the Kamilaroi (Gamilaraay) language. The area now occupied by the town was settled by Europeans in 1833. Through my maternal grandmother’s family, the Millerds, my family can trace its connection to Gunnedah back to the town’s earliest days. For more about the town’s history and my family’s connection to it, see the previous Wild Reed posts, My “Bone Country” and Journey to Gunnedah.

Above: A depiction of Gambu Ganuurru, “Red Kangaroo,” the Indigenous Australian warrior and leader of the Gunn-e-dar people of the Kamilaroi tribe. After his death in the late 1700s, he was buried in the traditional way inside a carved tree.

Above and below: In driving from Port Macquarie to Gunnedah, one of my favorite sights is the area just on the other side of the mountains before one arrives at the town of Walcha. The landscape is dotted with popler trees, which at this time of the year (autumn in Australia) stand like columns of living flame. Just beautiful!

While in Gunnedah I stayed with my dear Aunty Ruth, my mum’s younger sister and only surviving sibling. We had a wonderful time.

While in Gunnedah I caught up with a number of childhood friends and neighbors, and enjoyed visiting places and viewing sights that feel part of my very bones.

NOTE: Commentary on the following images to follow.

Above and below: Gunnedah vignettes – April 2026.

Above and below: Aunty Ruth’s lovely home.

Above: Lunch at the Club House Hotel with Aunty Ruth and my cousin Therese.

NEXT: Armidale

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Australian Sojourn, March 2025 – Gunnedah
• Family Time in Melbourne, Guruk, and Gunnedah (2024)
• Australian Sojourn, March 2023 – Gunnedah
• Photo of the Day – March 25, 2023
• Across the Mountains . . . From Guruk to Gunnedah (2019)
• Family Time in Gunnedah (2019)
• A Visit to Gunnedah (2017)
• Australian Sojourn, May 2016 – Gunnedah
• Australian Sojourn, March 2015 – Gunnedah
• A Visit to Gunnedah (2014)
• Journey to Gunnedah (2011)
• This Corner of the Earth (2010)
• An Afternoon at the Gunnedah Convent of Mercy (2010)
• My “Bone Country” (2009)
• The White Rooster
• Remembering Nanna Smith
• One of These Boys is Not Like the Others
• Gunnedah (2006) – Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

Images: Michael J. Bayly.

Monday, April 20, 2026

The Time for Illusions Is Over: Henry Giroux on the Democratic Party

Scholar and cultural critic Henry Giroux penned the following words over seven months ago. Sadly, they remain as relevant and true today as they did then.

________________

The Democratic Party has forfeited every claim to moral and political credibility. It is not a bulwark against fascism but an accomplice to it, a party of cowardice and complicity that props up the most barbaric features of gangster capitalism-extending from staggering levels of inequality to its refusal to support national health care. Its leadership, craven, visionless, and drunk on Wall Street money, has become a machinery of war and despair. It is wedded to the military-industrial complex and normalizes through its silence a culture of war, misery, and cruelty. It sends billions in weapons to Benjamin Netanyahu, an indicted war criminal, fully aware those arms sustain a machinery of occupation and repression. With one act, fighting to cut off the flow of weapons, the Democrats could help end this slaughter. Instead, when Netanyahu recently visited the White House, they shook his bloodstained hand and smiled for the cameras, their shamelessness captured in a widely circulated, obscene photograph. This betrayal abroad mirrors the Party’s collapse at home. The Party’s cowardice is written into its very DNA.

It is a party of whiners, trapped in ideological smugness and a flaccid discourse of compromise. Given its political and ethical weakness, it is ironic that on occasion it drapes itself in the hollow language of “resisting Trump’s authoritarianism.” This becomes more obvious when it advocates, on occasion, working with the regime, even as it props up authoritarians abroad and tightens the screws of neoliberal cruelty at home. Moira Donegan writing in The Guardian is right in stating that the Democratic Party is the party of self-sabotage, that is, it has a vision of American politics in which (they] have no power to set the terms of the debate on their own.” Its neoliberal policies have hollowed out working-class communities, shredded social protections, remained largely moot in calling out Trump’s regime as a criminogenic organization, and left despair in their wake, conditions that became the breeding ground for Trump’s authoritarian ascent. They created the void that fascism fills, and now they tremble before the monster they helped unleash.

. . . [T]he Democratic leadership refuses to lift a finger for candidates who represent genuine hope. Their refusal to support Zohran Mamdani in New York is not an oversight but a betrayal. Schumer and Jeffries embody the Party’s moral bankruptcy: Schumer the coward, Jeffries the gutless tactician, both locked in servitude to corporate power, both content to preside over a politics of endless war, mass incarceration, obscene inequality, and the normalization of state terrorism. They are the pallbearers of democracy, not its defenders. Commenting on the fact that Jeffries and Schumer have so far refused to endorse Mamdani, journalist Mehdi Hasan wrote in a recent column for The Guardian, “If you want to understand why the Democrats are polling at their lowest point for more than three decades, look no further than these two uninspiring Democratic leaders in Congress.” Mehdi only gets it partly right: these two politicians embody not individual cowardice, but a party that supports genocide in Gaza, refuses to stand up to the military-industrial-academic complex, and could not care less about the future they are destroying for young people.

The American people deserve more than these moral zombies. What is needed is a new party, one unafraid to fight for radical democracy and the dignity of all. A party that calls for the end of staggering inequality, a universal wage, free health care, free quality education for all, housing for everyone, strict gun restrictions, the abolition of poverty, and the dismantling of the warfare state. A party that will slash the bloated defense budget and redirect those trillions into schools, hospitals, homes, and the expansion of social rights. A party that will name criminalized capitalism for what it is: a death-dealing order of greed, violence, corruption, and disposability.

The time for illusions is over. The Democratic Party cannot be reformed, nor can it be trusted to halt the march of authoritarianism. What is required is not the rehabilitation of a party of cowardice, but the creation of a new political formation, one that does not tremble before fascism but confronts it head-on. A movement that refuses to confuse capitalism with democracy, that rejects the barbarism of endless war and the plunder of Wall Street, that refuses to sacrifice children in Gaza or in America’s streets on the altar of profit and power. Such a movement must be rooted in the struggles of ordinary people, grounded in solidarity and sustained by collective courage.

The future belongs to those who can imagine and fight for a radically different order: a socialist democracy grounded in solidarity, justice, and care. It belongs to those who demand free health care and education, who insist on housing and dignity for all, who struggle for racial, gender, and economic equality, and who reject the culture of disposability that treats lives as expendable. It belongs to those willing to rise up, organize, and fight for a world where freedom, justice, and equality are not a privilege of the few, but the common inheritance of all.

– Henry Giroux
Excerpted from “The Democratic Party:
Architects of Cowardice, Accomplices to Fascism”
CounterPunch
September 8, 2025

Saturday, April 18, 2026

Australian Sojourn – April-May 2026

Part 3: Guruk

I’ve spent the last four-and-a-half days in Guruk (aka Port Macquarie) on the mid-north coast of New South Wales. Here with me during this time was my older brother, two of my four nephews, and my two great-nephews. They had all traveled up from Melbourne on Monday, April 13. My younger brother and his family, who live just south of Guruk, also joined us on a number of occasions. The primary purpose of our gathering in Guruk was to spend time with our mum/grandma/great-grandma (right).

Although she continues to make a good recovery from the stroke she experienced last April (just a day after my return to the U.S. after a month-long visit), my mum has moved into the assisted-living hostel that is part of the retirement village in Port Macquarie that’s been her home since 2013 – first with dad and then, after his passing in 2019, on her own.

As well as spending time with mum/grandma/great-grandma, my family also enjoyed time at the beach and a visit to Billabong Zoo, “Port Macquarie Koala and Wildlife Park.”

Above: Four generations are pictured in this photo – my mum, her eldest son Chris (my brother), Chris’s eldest son Ryan and third son Mitch, and Ryan’s two sons Ramy and Jake.

NEXT: Gunnedah

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Last Days in Australia (July 2025)
• Family Time in Guruk (2025)
• Home to Be With Mum (2025)
• Last Days in Guruk (April 2025)
• In Birpai Country (2025)
• Family Time in Melbourne, Guruk, and Gunnedah (2023)
• Return to Guruk (2019)
• Family Time in Guruk . . . and Glimpses of Somaliland (2019)
• Guruk Seascapes, From Dawn to Dusk (2017)
• Port Macquarie, Wingham, and Ellenborough Falls (2015)
• Port Macquarie Days (2014)
• Thanks, Mum!
• Happy Birthday, Mum! – 2024 | 2018 | 2017 | 2014 | 2013 | 2011 | 2010 | 2009
• Congratulations, Mum and Dad! (2009)
• Catholic Rainbow (Australian) Parents (2006)

Images: Michael J. Bayly.

Tuesday, April 14, 2026

Australian Sojourn – April-May 2026

Part 2: Gulmarrad

On Sunday, April 12 I boarded a train at Broadmeadow and traveled north to Grafton and that area of New South Wales known as “Northern Rivers.”

Here in the village of Gulmarrad I stayed with my friends Mike (with me at right) and Bernie, whom I first got to know in Goulburn, where Mike had been the principal of the primary school at which I taught from 1988-1993. Before relocating to the U.S. in 1994, I taught two of Mike and Bernie’s seven children – Jeremiah (in 1989) and Tess (in 1992).

I’ve stayed friends with all the members of the family ever since our shared time in Goulburn, and I always try to catch up with as many of them as I can each time I visit Australia from the U.S. Mike and Bernie’s second eldest son Raph visited and lived with me in the Twin Cities for a good part of 2004. He visited me again in the U.S. in 2011. Back in Australia in 2014, he cycled over 1900 kilometers in memory of his sister Tess and to raise awareness and funds for melanoma research and prevention. (For more about this inspiring achievement, click here, here, and here.)

Since last July, Mike and Bernie have been storing and taking care of mum’s car for me. Indeed, since the time of my visit with them last year, they have let me know that I can consider as my Australian home their home in Gulmmarrad, now that mum is residing in an assisted-living facility in Port Macquarie. What a generous and beautiful gift! But that’s just who Mike and Berie are.