Imagine that. Imagine claiming a whole vast and fast continent was empty, naming it Terra Nullius. The land of nothing. Imagine thinking you could fill it up with people you had no use for, people who had stolen, who had committed crimes. Imagine emptying your prison ships squalling on the Thames into big boats and […]
In a cafe where I write, the staff are terrifically grumpy. One sometimes meets me with a finger propped under her chin, tipping her head: Is it almond milk? Soy? I say, It’s the honey that’s misleading you, by association, and she’ll say, mansplanatorily, “No, no… I don’t associate you with honey.” Today a large […]
Hi Callum! Good morning I’d like to ask your advice as I don’t know now what to do with my free trial. Can we suspend it? Can I apply it to a different training group? I attended two sessions at the riverside park with Chris. Was super looking forward to it and excited to commit […]
Alone in the house for the first time in days I feel a sadness descend and take me in its wings. I’m sad for Dad. It has come from pottering and tidying, I washed up a bowl and set it upside down on the board to drain, I folded a pair of his old pyjamas […]
I’m going into the difficult embrace of family life to say goodbye to my father. Our family relationships have been fraught with miscommunications, outbreaks of insanity, and violence. Now it’s all coming to an end and we will have to, I hope, focus on our common humanity. My mother says, you’ll find him much changed. […]
Good god, I just voted. By email in Queensland, which is currently in the grip of a miniature narcissist who’s funding his own higher-than-POTUS salary increase with cuts to essential services. It took me 45 minutes on the phone yesterday to organise and an hour today to complete the forms and scan and mail them […]
The aspects of Australianness I feel most dearly attached to, and which are also the aspects Germans, Americans, other people seem most intensely curious to hear reports of whenever I’m travel outside Australia, are these: 1. the land (the shape of the land, like an upside-down heart); the surf, the rock formations, the desert, the […]
I just cycled home through the spattering rain, with thunder rolling heavy overneath, and as I swept down the hill riding on my brakes I passed a cluster of dark-clad people raising their umbrellas, phones to their ears, released from their desks for the day and not happy. They were large but looked not so […]
If one Australian festival was to take over the world as the British/American Hallowe’en has this year, which one should it be? Cockroach races? Todd River Regatta, which is run on legs in a dry river bed by contestants wearing beer-can boats? The People’s Republic of Woodford, largest folk fest in the southern hemisphere? Billycart […]
Beautiful African woman, standing with her back to the street in a luscious canary-yellow dress. She is facing the vast windows of a display of swank cars, why? The windows rise away into the night above her head like an airport. Ah, I see. Beautiful African man, whom I didn’t see until he moved, in […]
The strange screeching of tropical birds spurling into midnight’s blue sky at 6 o’clock, as the night gathers like a dew, forms like a band, a marching band of strange and unaccountable, uncountable, nasty-beaked bird, weird big birds, glossy little birds, green birds and brown. Brisbanana. You are utterly the weirdest, my sweet suburban love.
Brazil has, how can I put this, the richest store of remaining rainforest in the universe. THE UNIVERSE. In the middle of this pristine and irreplaceable pharmacy they have built a giant stadium for football. FOR FOOTBALL. It has no roads leading to or away and during the World Cup it will be used four […]
A house nearby is small, wooden, and humble, a tiny workers’ cottage in the classic Queensland style. Only it’s been done up like an Ascot knot with a formal grey-and-dark-grey paint job, art-gallery landscaping (blades), and an unpleasant extension bigger and taller than the house that clamps onto its back side like some shuttered and […]
Fought the good fight, and won. The battle if not the war. We came home an hour ago to the sound of jackhammers ringing up and down our street. It was 10pm. I rang the police. They said, they can do nothing, I would have to ring the Council. So I got on my ugg […]
Bought The Saturday Paper, the one not owned by a misanthrope sadist. Carried it into my favourite weekend cafe and sat down. They were playing the Rolling Stones: bloke music. The first sentence that caught my eye was: “Trying to explain why fiction matters, novelist Ian McEwan put it simply. ‘Cruelty,’ he said, ‘is a […]
This morning carrying coffee I walked past the hostel where an old Aboriginal man, gold-chocolate skinned and with a round white beard, sometimes sits in a folding chair under the trees waking up slowly. He and I like each other and we often say g’day. “Might get some rain,” he said, and I said, “Feels […]
Most joyous demo/march I’ve ever been involved in. There was a sense of colourful exultation, a kind of rejoicing, a feeling of laughing at each others’ placards and of coming together to ridicule the ridiculous. So many intelligent, open facial expressions, so many cool handmade signs. Someone had made extra signs, proper ones on poles, […]
Could our fear of brown-skinned asylum seekers with unfamiliar cultural origins actually be self-hatred? Years ago it was embarrassing in Australia to confess to “the taint” of convict ancestors. Then it came to carry a cachet. It’s true we would undoubtedly respond with more compassion as a nation if boatloads of stricken Finns, Belgians and […]
Finally, bodysurfing. It must be a decade since I have surfed, maybe since before moving to South Australia where terror of sharks somewhat put me off. That feeling, you know that feeling? Carried by water, gasping for green. You invite the water to take you. The water picks you up and takes you. Rushing with […]