Essay Archives

WITH THE PASSING of thirty years since Queensland’s Fitzgerald Inquiry and its seminal report, an opportunity arises to sit...

By Gary Crooke

THEY WRITE MUSICALS about it in the US; swear by it in Canada; swear about it in Australia; and...

Proportionally, we are the most incarcerated people on the planet. We are not an innately criminal people. Our children...

By Ross Homel

LIKE MOST FORMS of cancer, violence and abuse are preventable. But why is preventing them so hard? They leave...

I GREW UP believing that I would be murdered by a stranger. I was eight years old when Sian...

HAVE YOU EVER thought about what it would be like to have a loved one in prison? Would you...

By Susan Dennison

I’M STANDING IN the shifting forest in the muted light of dusk. Above me, a tall tree with a...

By Karen Viggers

WHEN FACEBOOK TURNED ten in 2014, Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and nerdish face of the social network, announced that...

By Julianne Schultz

THE CAR JOURNEY from Canberra airport to the parliamentary triangle is a necessary trip for Federal politicians. One route...

ON THE SURFACE, the global digital rights landscape is a depressing and forbidding place. US technology giants have commodified...

By Scott Ludlam

EVERY ERA IS defined by its sustaining myths. Among ours is surely ‘disruption’. The book that seeded the mythology,...

By Mark Davis

WALK THROUGH THE doors of a suburban op shop and you’ll find the residue of household (de)composition that was...