Sarah Jansen | Writer | Editor | Web Geek

He’s a classical musician with a talent for improvising. A concert violinist who decides his playlist moments before taking the stage. A baby-faced professional. An outgoing Finn.

Although he’s the current it-boy of the next generation on classical music’s world stage, Pekka Kuusisto doesn’t go in for all the rock star gimmicks his peers seem to resort to. There’s no designer punk hair style, fluorescent instruments, or psychedelic suits; just plain matte black two piece suits for Kuusisto, pianist Simon Crawford-Phillips, and the page turner du jour; standard haircuts and clean shaven chins; standard wood violin and glossy black grand piano.

In 1937 the Japanese invaded China and began to systematically exterminate the people they found as they moved across the country from Shanghai to Wuhan. They hadn’t actually declared war on China, claiming they were helping the country, which gave them more freedom to play outside the rules for things like the treatment of POWs and the admittance of the press.

This is the setting for Children of the Silk Road, a film centring around the true story of one journalist’s experience of the eastern beginning of World War II.

Desperate to get into the city of Nanjing, Japan’s latest conquest, and report on what’s really happening, George Hogg poses as a Red Cross delivery driver and makes it into Japanese controlled territory.

What follows is not what he expected, but that’s what happens when life takes you in hand and points you in a different direction.

The recent calls for Australia to legalise polygamy to accommodate the country’s Muslim community have sparked some interesting discussions in the media.

There have been a lot of statements about the issue of polygamy — a word that covers both multiple wives and multiple husbands — and how it relates to the “Australian way of life”. One camp says it threatens or is counter to it and therefore should not even be considered. The other camp says that it is rare for Australian Muslims anyway and that there are polygamous marriages here already so making it legal wouldn’t threaten anything.

No one is talking about what the Australian way of life actually is, and why it is feeling so threatened.