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Red Bull Flying Bach returns to Australia and will be back in New South Wales and Victoria, and debuting in Queensland, Western Australia and South Australia in September and October.
Best explained as classical music meets urban dance moves. Breakdancing choreographed to Bach’s composition of the ‘Well-Tempered Calvier’, which dates back to 1722.
Watch the videos below to see what to expect and take part in the contest to win a double pass ticket to this extraordinary show.
Red Bull Flying Bach 2014 will be showing at QPAC in Brisbane September 24–26.
Westender’s Red Bull Flying Bach 2014 Contest
Westender has six double pass tickets to give away for the shows in Brisbane. To enter you must answer the two questions below correctly to qualify. The contest ends 11.59 pm 17.08.2014 and winners will be contacted and announced within a week from that date.
Questions
What is the name of the breakdance crew that is part of Red Bull Flying Bach?
What is the Aboriginal name for where the West End area of Brisbane is located?
Send your answers to jimmy@westender.com.au with name and phone number. Email subject should be as followed: Westender Red Bull Flying Bach 2014 Contest !email subject text must be exact as shown above!
Contest Rules
Only one (1) double pass ticket per winner
Only one (1) attempt per person, no repeated tries at the questions
More info about Red Bull Flying Bach 2014
Red Bull Flying Bach 2014 Australian tour dates:
• State Theatre, Sydney: 4 shows, 9–12 September
• Crown Theatre, Perth: 4 shows, 17–20 September
• QPAC, Brisbane: 3 shows, 24–26 September
• Arts Centre, Melbourne: 4 shows, 1–4 October
• Festival Theatre, Adelaide: 3 shows, 7–9 October
Today Stripe announced its global payments platform is open for business in Australia.
Australian merchants can now create a Stripe account in minutes and instantly begin accepting payments in more than 100 different currencies, receiving deposits in Australian dollars in their current accounts.
Stripe’s technology can be seamlessly integrated into any app or website, and only requires an existing Australian bank account. Furthermore, Stripe’s service has been designed to allow business to scale from start up stage to billion-dollar multinational organisations.
“I expect the pace of innovation to pick up significantly now that Stripe is here,” said Niki Scevak Startmate, Blackbird VC. “While payments solutions in Australia have been incremental improvements, we think the arrival of Stripe could mean that new kinds of businesses will be easier to start than ever in Australia; particularly online software and services businesses like Campaign Monitor or Atlassian, marketplaces like Freelancer or 99Designs, and subscription businesses.
“In keeping with Stripe’s ethos of simplicity and developer-friendliness, subscriptions, multicurrency, and one-tap purchasing are standard features and requires no additional work to integrate. Currency functionality that previously represented a quagmire of paperwork and integration work can now be implemented in minutes.LIFX, reinventors of the light bulb, are using Stripe to help sell their smartphone controlled, wifi-enabled, multi-color LED light bulb to the world.
“We’re delighted to be using Stripe, the best payment platform with world class user experience and customer support,” said Daniel May, CIO of LIFX. “We were up and running in just minutes, and are now able to accept payments from anyone in almost any currency.”
“Stripe’s mission is to grow Internet commerce by providing everything an online business needs to accept payments,” said John Collison, co-founder and president of Stripe. “We hope Stripe’s powerful set of tools and APIs helps Australian businesses scale globally.
“In the past, traditional merchant processing posed considerable barriers to entry for new companies – and substantial friction for existing ones.
Stripe’s fully-online payment service, and rapidly-growing global reach replace a complicated matrix of bank accounts, gateways and third-party software. Stripe handles the heavy lifting of payments — from credit-card storage to fraud detection — and lets companies get back to building.
Pricing for Stripe in Australia will be 1.75% + 30c for domestic transactions and 2.90% + 30c for international and American Express transactions.
Peter Bullimore, Founder & Chair of the UK Paranoia Network, is an international trainer and facilitator and is an expert on the topic of hearing voices by lived experience.
This August, he returns to Australia to facilitate a very unique one-day workshop exploring the role of trauma and fear in mental wellbeing, and understanding and working with voices.
Studies have found that between four and 10 per cent of people across the world hear voices. Between 70 and 90 cent of people who hear voices do so following traumatic events. These voices can be male, female, without gender, child, adult, human or non-human. People may hear one voice or many. Some people report hearing hundreds, although in almost all reported cases, one dominates above the others.
It is not so much the voices that are the problem, but the difficulties that some people have in coping with them. Whilst one in three people who hears voices becomes a psychiatric patient – two in three people cope well, don’t need psychiatric care and live and function well.
Voices often reflect important aspects of the hearer’s emotional state – emotions that are often unexpressed by the hearer. Hearing voices in itself is not related to the illness of schizophrenia. In population research, only 16% of the whole group of voice hearers are diagnosed with schizophrenia.*
Many voices can be unthreatening and even positive. It’s wrong to turn this into a shameful problem that people either feel they have to deny or to take medication to suppress.**
Peter Bullimore believes many people believe hearing voices is a normal part of life, not a mental illness. Using coping strategies can help manage voices without necessarily eliminating them.
David Facer from the Australian Mental Health Recovery Consultants, will be supporting Peter’s tour and the development of Hearing Voices workshops.
Together, Peter and David will assist participants to work through paranoia and help make sense of unusual beliefs.
For further information about the tour, or to speak to someone about hearing voices, contact MIFQ on 07 3358 4424.
Working Through Paranoia & Making Sense of Unusual Beliefs
7 August – Albert Waterways Community Centre, Cnr Hooker & Sunshine Blvd MERMAID WATERS
8 August – Venue to be confirmed TOOWOOMBA
11 August – Calliope Community Centre, 3 Don Cameron Dr, Calliope GLADSTONE
14 August – Merthyr Road Uniting Church, 52 Merthyr Road, New Farm BRISBANE
Workshops are a ticketed event and run 8:30am to 4:30pm, refreshments & lunch provided.
As the death toll in Gaza rises over 350, millions of protestors all over the world are taking to the streets to demonstrate their solidarity for the Palestinian people.
In Brisbane, thousands of people gathered at King George Square to protest the Israeli ground invasion of Gaza demanding the Israeli government to quite their offensive in Gaza, while urging the Australian government to discontinue their support for the Israeli carnage.
The march was organized by the Socialist Alternative of Brisbane and the Students for Palestine from UQ and QUT, whereas other organizations such as the Queensland Greens, The Socialist Alliance and a number of Faith and Cultural community organizations also endorsed the protest.
As the march moved down Queen Street, various demonstrators waved Palestinian flags and other banners with defaced Israeli flags, replacing the Star of David with swastikas.
When the crowd moved into Charlotte street, the air was gassed with non-toxic smoke bombs to ignite the emotions even more.
The protestors chanted slogans such as“Free free Gaza, down down Israel,” and “ Tony Abbot, you can’t hide, you are supporting genocide” .
An estimated two thousand people gathered to demonstrate their disgust for the Israeli onslaught. After a very vocal march around the streets of Brisbane, the demonstrations ended with the protestors chanting “In our thousands, in our millions, we are all Palestinians.” Even though the protest was a peaceful one, the event was targeted by counter-demonstrators who tried to sabotage the peaceful nature of the protest by heckling the gathering and tried to instigate a violent reaction, but the trouble makers were immediately ushered away by the organizers before any disturbance erupted. Meanwhile the facebook page which promoted the event was targeted by spammers who posted comments such as, ‘it does not matter how big that protest will be tomorrow, or how many people in the world will protest against Israel, Israel will finish the job there soon. You and your friends can say and scream as much as you want.’
During his speech, a Brisbane Aboriginal Sovereign Embassy spokesperson, Mr. Boe Spearim, inspired the people to keep fighting by citing the words of an aboriginal elder, “ As individuals we only dream. But once we come together, we make that dream a reality, ” he quoted.
Ms. Rutaba, a member of the students for Palestine and socialist alternative raised her voice to question the Tony Abbot government, “ Does Tony Abbot know the names of the 342 Palestinian men, women and children his government has backed to slaughter in Gaza?”
Mr. David Forde, a long time advocate for freedom in Gaza and an independent candidate for Stretton shared his disgust for the Abbot government’s numbness regarding this issue.
“There are only a handful of countries that support Israel’s oppressive occupation and expansionism – unfortunately, again one of them is our Australian government – and that includes both the government and opposition, with the exception of a few MPs and Senators,” Mr. Forde said.
“Yes a complete cease-fire must be supported to protect lives, but it must include a complete lifting of the illegal blockade, otherwise Palestinians will just keep dying – just more slowly,” he added.
To highlight the actions that people need to undertake, in order to pressurize the government to share the solidarity for the Palestinian people, he suggested, “Changing Australia’s position is a must. … Public pressure can do this. But this sort of political criticism in Australia is not only not tolerated, it is almost taboo.
“I ask you to undertake one simple step – do the one thing that politicians do not want you to do on this issue – that is engage with them – that is the one thing they don’t want you to do – because they don’t want this to be an issue for them. … At the end of the day, we vote them in; Same way, we can vote them out.”
He suggested that citizens contact their politicians directly using social media, letters and the telephone to make sure the level of concern is registered.
He also proposed ten questions people consider asking those politicians. Here are three:
“Do you support a peace setlement for al based upon international law and UN Security Council Resolutions and an end to the ilegal occupation?”
“Do you support Israel’s administrative detention of thousands of Palestinians, including hundreds of children, who are denied due legal process and often kept in-prisoned for years without charge?”
“What would you do it if was your home that was demolished, or your brother, mother, sister, son, daughter, father that was denied medical treatment or worse. What would you do?”
During his speech, Mr. Halim Rane, an associate professor for the school of humanities at Griffith university, said, “Israel has lost this war as far as the world public opinion is concerned.”
Phil Monsour, a singer and a songwriter, rephrased the lyrics of the song “we will rock you” by the Queens, into “We will boycott Israel”, to set the tone for the protest.
While the people of Gaza are facing the bloody consequences of Israel’s dramatic escalation of the 13-day conflict and Hamas’s intransigence in the face of mounting calls for a ceasefire. The Hamas leadership has come under increasing pressure from multiple international sources to accept an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. Recently the French and Italian foreign ministers flew to Cairo, where negotiations have started to back Egypt’s call for a prompt de-escalation in the conflict. The Arab League has also backed Egypt’s call for a quick ceasefire, even as Israeli troops crossed the border into Gaza.
Meanwhile the Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, a Hamas rival, had tried to negotiate with the representatives of Hamas and failed to achieve an agreement for truce. At Jordan’s request, the UN security council held an emergency meeting on Friday and afterwards an official announcement was made that the secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon, would be leaving for the Middle East to help mediate the conflict. When asked to comment about the efforts of the Arab League and the UN to extinguish the conflict in Gaza,
Mr. Leone Jordan, an Australian citizen and a Palestinian by blood, replied, “The Arab league and The UN are puppet organizations, the UN has been positioned there by America and other Western powers. The Arab League is another bunch of selfish sheiks who have their own interests in mind. Instead of demanding the Israeli government for a ceasefire, they are trying to negotiate with HAMAS representatives who are fighting with homemade rockets.”
“This is an asymmetric warfare between, Israelis backed by western military verses Palestinian fighters equipped with homemade rockets, in the besieged Gaza strip.
“The only reason these aristocrats are there, is to divert people’s attention to themselves while little children are being butchered. Kids who look like my children, my friends children, what if they were your children ? how would you react ? there’s no justification for this slaughter.
“Their efforts are a joke, a rhetoric, it’s finished. Their lies are being exposed. Don’t undermine the people’s intelligence, the people are smarter than that. Ban Ki Moon has no power, he’s just a puppet who continues the rhetoric, a puppet who says the same thing every year with no change.”
“Every two years we experience this kind of atrocities in Gaza, and funny enough, it always happens in the month of Ramadan. Why is that? The world is seeing through the rubbish of these politicians, people all over the world are protesting, and not because the mainstream media has done us any favors. It’s all because of social networking, people are seeing the inhuman acts that are committed against humanity.”
Ms. Rebecca Barrigos from the Socialist alternative of Brisbane supported Leone’s sentiment by stating, “This gathering is proof that the Palestinians who have resisted their repression for over 60 years do not stand alone. Western governments may give their unequivocal support to Israel but ordinary people who oppose oppression, who support justice, stand with Palestine and will continue to do so until Gaza is free.”
The Boundary Street Markets received a fascinating new addition today, with the delivery of a massive Motor Rail, to add a touch of rustic glamour to the markets.
The 10 ton Silver Bullet motor rail carriage was transported to West End on the back of a trailer, and then installed in place with the help of two 20 ton cranes.
The cranes hoisted the carriage off the trailer and, after the trailer drove away from underneath the carriage, it was firmly secured on the ground.
According to Mr. David Bostock, the manager of Boundary Street Markets, it will be an icon for the property and will be used as a seating area for the visitors of the Boundary street Market.
Mr. Fred Drake, the proprietor of ABSOE, discovered the motor rail carriage sitting in a neighbor’s property in the Brisbane valley.
Rumblings have reached the Westender that the tenant is getting the upper hand in the commercial and apartment market in 4101 at the moment.
Rob Honeycombe from Bees Nees is on record as saying that the number of apartments coming on line in the next couple of months are likely to see a bit of a sag in rental prices.
He writes, “We’ll stand by our comments that tenant demand is strong in Brisbane’s inner-city. … But there’s a limit to everything and there’s likely to be a noticeable blip in at least this one inner-city rental marketplace in 2014. Landlords would be well-served to keep a close eye on their own neighbourhoods and plan their lease expiries and renovations carefully.”
