Encircling the flames

I was seventeen. I didn’t own a passport. I’d never been on a plane. The extent of my ‘cultural exchange’ was one Toorak party where, reciting Hamlet’s first soliloquy, I tried to woo the private schoolgirls before they realised ‘this too too solid flesh’ belonged out near Dandenong.

Australia’s lost literary sector

As I’m writing this essay, at the start of 2026, nearly every arts, cultural and literary organisation in Australia is in some sort of trouble – whether at the hard-but-ticking-along-if-everything-stays-equal end of the scale or the other extreme: a not-sure-how-long-we-can-keep-going-like-this existential crisis.

The limits of authenticity

It was as though the genuine bid towards a more inclusive literary culture had led to the commodification of identity instead. It became clear that any broader interest in identity withered beyond the initial question of representation; I discovered I’d been naively unprepared for what adopting the term ‘Asian Australian writer’ meant.

Little gifts of flowers

It’s unclear whether Boyd, who would have been two years old when Wilde was convicted and imprisoned for gross indecency, similarly literalised his homoerotic fantasies. Contemporaneous reviews of Brenda Niall’s 1988 biography, Martin Boyd: A Life, commend Niall, in a way that reveals the soft prejudice of the times, for how she handled the subject of Boyd’s sexuality. Paraphrasing Boyd’s family friends – who referred to Boyd, endearingly, as Floppy – Niall writes that Boyd was probably ‘too fastidious for casual sex, and with too strict a sense of honour to exploit the innocent, he probably repressed and aestheticized his sexuality’. This conclusion is buttressed by the conspicuous absence of the only work in Boyd’s catalogue that presumably possessed an unambiguously homosexual point of view, of which we know little except that there were flowers.

In a way that strikes me, again, as typically Australian, Boyd is slightly behind the times with his fin de siècle attitude towards classicism and homo- sexuality. His novels are uniquely appealing to me for the narcissistic reason that they are perhaps the only Australian books I can imagine myself having written. It’s why I find the correspondence about The Shepherd of Admetus so appallingly fascinating. I’ve read countless gay novels, by gay authors, in an attempt to discover my own writing. The author to whom I feel closest, by virtue of nationality, style and subject, wrote one such novel, and for all anyone knows, it might have been rubbish.

The creative arts in a time of fragmentation

‘A time of fragmentation’ is a phrase that describes a period in which profoundly different world views jostle for dominance, and the destructive capacities of human beings threaten to do their worst. It isn’t just that public opinion is polarised. There’s a centrifugal quality to everyday life that makes it feel as if it’s being ripped apart.

A moment of wonder

When Elizabeth Blackburn became Australia’s first female Nobel Laureate in 2009, the media focused not on her research but on the ‘challenges’ she reportedly faced as a woman in science. Her journey was not dissimilar to mine – she had supportive parents and teachers as well as champions at work who helped her focus her passion – so there are clearly other factors at play here.

The lists

I want to hold her. She doesn’t know it yet, but her world is about to change. Yes, all the things happening at home are bad and it’s an open secret throughout town, but she doesn’t know how much further she has to fall.

Endless summer

In a perfect world, every season would be summer – a time of seemingly endless promise. At least, that’s how I remember the summers of my youth: freedom from the confines of school or university, with nothing but lengthy, sun-filled days of play and pleasure. As pleasing as the nostalgic image is, I know it isn’t true.

There’s something wrong

Almost twenty years ago, before I left my parents’ house – my home, my country, my continent – to adventure into a new world, I did the maths. If I visited my parents every week for the rest of their lives, I might be able to spend another year with them.

Let’s talk about tax, baby

If I were a global supervillain intent on shoring up my ill-gotten gains, where would I hide the piece of the puzzle that could cause my downfall? As any keen reader of Greek myth or Nancy Drew knows, the best place to conceal something is in plain sight. The word ‘tax’ is the ultimate anti-clickbait; nothing is less likely to get the Average Joel to the barricades than a three-week conference on ‘progressive taxation for an inclusive and just social organisation of care’.

Back to the future

What I find most interesting about the work that’s starting to crystallise on UBI and similar programs is not so much that people choose to continue working in addition to receiving a basic, survivable income – that always seemed obvious to me – but that in almost every study, one of the benefits that accrues is, quite literally, a future. 

Pay writers like politicians

When we talk about Australian books and writers today, we often find ourselves talking about money. Like patients with chronic illness, we’ve become adept at enumerating the symptoms of our malaise. We talk about broke writers and broke publishers and broke editors. Is anyone making any money? We talk about the cost of books and the cost of paper. We talk about writers’ incomes and the salaries of publishing staff. We talk about the cost of housing and university redundancies. There simply isn’t enough grant funding to go around. We talk about who can’t afford to write. We talk about the indie publishers selling out to multinationals because the margins are too tight. We talk about the market – the market for Australian literature that’s so small, even a prize-winning bestseller doesn’t bring financial security to its author. The market can’t be trusted with our national literature – unless what we want is self-published erotic fiction, which is apparently where the money lies. We talk about the obscenity of wealthy tech corporations shitting on copyright. If tech companies won’t pay writers, who else will?

Even when we’re not talking about money – when we’re talking about our hopes for a national literature, or whose stories should be told, when we’re talking about easy reading, or books that infantilise their readers, or how to safeguard freedom of expression, or the moral principles at stake in wholesale breach of copyright – our conversations are caveated and curtailed by the money question. At our most ambitious, we talk about how to pay writers a living wage.