Sometimes it seems like we learn nothing from our conversations. From 2012 when I addressed policymakers in international intervention in the UK, to this 2017 cover art for Kyle Grayson’s book on targeted killing and drones, the warnings have been clear from many well-informed people. Yet we just didn’t want to think too deeply about it. This May 2023 article by Gabriel Honrada in Asia Times triggered that sense of “again?” feeling…

This post is a little drip-feed post of excerpts from my Dad’s unfinished memoirs. I’ll keep adding to it off and on. He died in 2018. Dad (Ramanathan Gopalkrishnan) was only 8 years old when war came to Penang in Malaysia in what we now call the ‘Indo-Pacific’. His father, my grandad, was assumed dead after not returning home after the 1941 bombing & occupation of Penang by the Japanese.

I’m posting two drypoint prints I printed as part of a print-mentoring session with WA fellow Artist Monika Lukowska last week. It’s titled Conversations with Orc III, but in my mind I’m already calling it The Spirit of AUKUS,… when I entered into this imaginary conversation about the AUKUS agreement and the Indo-Pacific, Orc started to ‘act-out’ the battles of his past…