Amid the posturing and tumult shone three moments of clarity that highlighted the gulf between cynical efforts to divide Australians and the leadership needed to bind the nation together at a time of unprecedented uncertainty and challenge. Each revealed the potential to rediscover and reconnect with the ‘holding centre’ that has defined Australian politics...
Secrecy, a lack of accountability and lack of restraint breed incompetence and failure, creating a vicious cycle both for institutions and the public’s faith in them. And yet these are the hallmarks of how executive governance is now practised by populist leaders, including in the UK and Australia.
As someone with lived experience of a regime so consumed by its determination to cling to power, a regime unconcerned about and unmoored from principle or a raison d’être beyond its own survival, I've found the past three years chilling and shocking in equal measure.
Then, in late May, S suggested something new. Next time, might we consider the Uluru Statement from the Heart? Immediate enthusiasm – and, unusually on my part, some nerves at the prospect of giving voice to a text.
When I lived in Dubbo the riverbank was a place where the school you attended or what your house was like or whether your family could afford to run a car hardly mattered. For blackfellas and whitefellas it was a place free from authorities...
Although they do hold words with singular meanings, Aboriginal languages also encompass words that are practical, words that address overall understandings of states of being and circumstances, of events, moments or items.
The last glacial maximum was only 20,000 years ago and that was followed by sea-level rise many times the amount we fear now. Many cultures lived through that experience, integrating it into their spiritual understanding of the world, passed down from body to body
When I was taught history as a primary and secondary student, it was as though Australia sprang into being when James Cook sighted a beach in 1770. An easy date to remember with all those sevens, I had thought, supposing ‘history’ to be largely about the memorisation of facts.
Despite growing up in Western Australia, I’ve been infatuated with snow since childhood, beguiled by stories of frosted kingdoms accessible through wardrobes, of pearl-capped peaks and sleighbells and dragons, of the ever-present possibility of magic.
Inaction on climate change is not because we do not know what’s going on. It’s not because we’re waiting for someone to write just the right essay about why we should care. It’s not because we want to die in a fire.
It’s hard to find a way to justify falling asleep in the park, book splayed on my abdomen, as exercise – even within ten kilometres of my apartment. But the sun was just so warm on my thighs; it straddled heavy on me.
The image of the camel is consistently drawn from Australian archives (consistency, like visibility, is one of Calvino’s ‘six memos’ or values he deemed crucial to literature as it moved into our millennium).
