Memoir Archives

OUR FATHER, WHO survived the Killing Fields, would never let me travel to South-East Asia when I was a...

By Alice Pung

'GLAD YOU MADE it,′ said my friend. 'I cannot but believe,′ said I to myself, 'that when the history...

By Kate Holden

WE DIDN'T KNOW so much; we knew how to touch. We unpacked our boxes in the box on the...

By Luke Davies

ON THE DAY of my birth, Boxing Day, 1921, something seemed wrong in the small rented brick house in...

WE HAVE PUSHED our way through the strong heat of Adelaide's hottest summer since nineteen-o-something to get here, but...

By Tracy Crisp

"TAKE UP GOLF," they said. Both of them within the space of a week. The acupuncturist and the alternative...

By Michael Wilding

Selected for The Best Australian Essays 2011HER SUBJECT IS distraction. She's written a book about it, published by one...

By Helen Elliott

'In my music, I'm trying to play the truth of what I am. The reason it's difficult is because I'm...

By Paul Draper

IN MIDWINTER JULIA shuffled into my office and slowly lowered herself into the chair beside my desk. It was...

By Leah Kaminsky

WHEN MY SON told me he was going to Beijing to study Mandarin after graduating, he also said, with...

By Selina Li Duke

Selected for The Best Australian Essays 2011SCIENCE IS ONE of the few human constructs designed to test its own...

By Robyn Williams

AN OLD MAN is sitting by his fireside, candlelight illuminating a halo of wisps around his bald head. He...