Essay Archives

EVERY YEAR, IN first semester, my husband teaches a tertiary course called ‘Biological Adaptation to Climate Change’ to third-year...

By Ashley Hay

‘WHAT YOU NEED to understand is that automotive work is very monotonous.’I was in a restaurant in Port Melbourne...

By Gideon Haigh

VISITING SYDNEY FROM New York before Christmas, I dropped by the office of a client and former colleague. Her...

By Virginia Lloyd

BRISBANE, 15 JUNE, 2039: Chris shuffles into the homeless shelter. They’ve always been spartan places, but more so now...

By David Peetz

ANNIE WAS WORKING as a secretary when she turned sixty, a milestone she’d always regarded as her retirement age....

By Darryl Dymock

TWO DECADES AGO, my father, then in his mid-seventies, used to fly to the northern New South Wales town...

By Mandy Sayer

IT IS GETTING dark as we approach the Cameron Highlands, about two hundred kilometres north of and a three-hour...

‘I HAVE NEVER used a vacuum cleaner,’ my ardently intellectual mother says proudly. ‘That was my condition when I...

By Hayley Katzen

WHILE MANY ASPECTS of working life have changed in recent decades, the inequality of outcomes experienced by male and...

By Liz Temple

MANY MOONS AGO, before editing books was a glimmer at the end of my nib, I worked as an...

By Dmetri Kakmi

‘THERE WOULDN’T BE a day goes by that I don’t think about giving up.’ It’s a cold winter’s morning...

By Lucy Mayes

LAST WINTER I was lying in the red dirt in the middle of the Sandover Highway two hundred kilometres...