Rae Desmond Jones would have appreciated this…. The other day I created a Facebook ad to promote Rae’s posthumous collection of poems The End of the Line.  We have quite a few copies left and I thought a bit of promotion might help to sell a few collections of Rae’s poems. Meta and Facebook had other ideas. Shortly after the ad, which featured Rae’s poem ‘Australia’ started to run, I received a number of messages from random people relating to the poem, these messages went something along the lines of ‘Bullsh*t’ and ‘unAustralian f*ckhead’. Apparently some people disagreed with Rae’s poem.

Then this morning a received a notification from Facebook saying that the Rae Desmond Jones ad had been rejected as it was too political and didn’t apply with their “policy about social issues, elections or political policy”. I went back and read the poem – yes it is a political, but it is a poem and the ad is about buying a book of poetry. It is also not the first time that this poem has been posted to Facebook, but obviously something has changed and a poem like this is now classed as dangerous. I have appealed this decision but I am not holding my breath for a positive outcome. 

I see numerous sponsored posts in my feed using AI generated images to attack immigrants, Muslims and First Nations people, but a poem about Australia’s relationship to Britain and the USA goes against “community standards”.

As I said I am sure Rae would find such a situation funny and confirmation of just how stuffed we all are.

The best way I can think of to fight back against this censorship is to buy a copy of Rae’s last poetry collection The End of the Line. It is available from Rochford Cottage Bookshop for $10 plus postage and handling – https://rochford-pressbookshop.square.site/product/the-end-of-the-line-by-rae-desmond-jones/6

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