No small change

As a 2022 industry survey showed, around 50 per cent of respondents – people who also worked in the literary sector – went to private school, compared with only 36.7 per cent of current Australian students. Considering private school numbers are now at an all-time high, the percentage for the total population would have been far lower when these graduates were entering the workforce. Put simply, these figures show the publishing industry is not representative of the Australian public. 

The tale of the innocents

All women’s domestic labour is finite and takes a heavy bodily toll. Breastfeeding requires calories, sleep and rest; fatigue and illness can set in, lives can end, and there are only so many hours in a day. The difference now is that such reproductive work is assumed and silenced in a different institution: the atomised single-family home.

The cost of living

IT’S DIFFICULT TO know how to honour stories about a site that remains
vacant, its future as unanswerable as the past we can’t reconcile. In community
meetings, well-meaning
locals asked that we celebrate both histories, as if
they are two different things, while the cost of environmental remediation
inhibits both government and the private sector from doing anything. And
the site remains silent, unable to articulate what happened or how to move on.

Noticing teeth

TEETH ARE ONE of the most visible markers of poverty: structural circumstances that are individually borne. In an essay for Aeon, US journalist Sarah Smarsh calls them ‘poor teeth’. She writes: ‘Often, bad teeth are blamed solely on the habits and choices of their owners, and for the poor therein lies an undue shaming.’ And: ‘Poor teeth…beget not just shame but more poorness: people with bad teeth have a harder time getting jobs and other opportunities.’ In the age of ‘whitened, straightened, veneered smiles’, the distance between ruined poor teeth and healthy, wealthy teeth is growing. 

Disturbing affections

PART I: POSSESSIVE RELATIONS  Acquisition. In the movie American Psycho, the main character, Patrick Bateman – a yuppie serial killer...

Operator, please

A 2024 website post from CHOICE confirms this trend: ‘In a survey of over 6,000 CHOICE supporters in May this year, 73% told us they had encountered sub-par service from a business in the preceding year, and 85% believed this assistance was getting worse.’ 

These numbers seem to indicate the growing distance that corporations are placing between themselves and their customers. If the invention of the call centre in the mid-twentieth century helped this phenomenon along, then the creation of AI chatbots has only accelerated the issue in an alarming way.

Gold standard

Not long after the 2018 Royal Commission into Misconduct in the Banking, Superannuation and Financial Services Industry, I attended a panel discussion that sought to consider its professional and ethical implications for bankers. Anna Bligh, CEO of the Australian Banking Association at the time, persistently used the #notallbankers hashtag, which was stretched beyond all rational use during the commission. Despite a #fewbadapples, she suggested, bank integrity was secure: Australians could sleep well at night knowing their money was safe. 

Until then, it had never occurred to me that my money – such as it is – might not be safe in the bank. These institutions go to some trouble to present themselves as symbols of safety, stability and trustworthiness. For example, there was great excitement when the Commonwealth Bank’s vault – still one of the largest in the world – was hauled to Sydney’s Martin Place in 1926 by the twenty-five horses required to transport it. It was a public spectacle that demanded our trust in banking, saying look at the hefty measures the bank takes to protect your money. Banks are now more likely to flaunt their investment in cybersecurity, scam prevention and online fraud, like the ANZ Falcon® technology that ‘works around the clock’ in a way that’s ‘personal to each and every one of our customers’. The message is the same: sure, we have big bucks, but we use them to keep your money safe.

How meme coins explain the world

THE MESSAGE POSTED on the $TRUMP website on 12 May 2025 reads like the opening gambit of an internet...

Uncanny virtue

I first heard Peter Singer speak at the University of Western Australia (UWA) in the summer of 2009. The subject was the ethics of what we eat, and the tone of the talk was open and generous. Some in the audience were hardcore animal-rights people, as one would expect at a Singer gig. But the philosopher’s message was that ethical eating is, in fact, a pretty complex matter, bearing not only on animal welfare but also on economic justice and the environmental impact of agriculture, and that what counted as ethical behaviour in one sphere was often difficult to reconcile with ethical behaviour in others. His advice was therefore to do what we could, advice I for one resolved to follow before hogging into the free wine and nibbles around the Beaux-Arts-style reflecting pool. 

Splitting the bill

A couple of years ago, after too many years too casually spent as a casual academic, I went to work at a law firm. It was in need of a writer, and, for a steady wage, I was willing to pretend to be one. For a time, the change felt daunting, and I eased that feeling by making a mental note of its differences with my old workplace. At the firm, everyone was smartly dressed and spit-polished; at my university, there were professors who padded the corridors with rumpled hair and bare feet. At the firm, everything was urgent; at university, nothing ever was. The firm’s tearoom was stocked with gleaming coffee machines, bowls of fresh fruit and individually packaged Tim Tams; the only things stocked in the faculty tearoom at my uni were cockroach baits and dead cockroaches. 

The ridiculous school 

Here are some things I now know: that the school’s grounds, beyond those imposing gates, are large enough that they could comfortably contain at least three of my high school’s own in their entirety – and they include six separate cricket pitches. That there are staff employed to patrol the streets of the neighbouring suburbs in the mid-afternoon, purely to ensure those blazers are not taken off in public. That there are swimming trunks (and that is the word they use for them) as part of the school uniform – in the school’s colours and with its logo on one leg. 

That the admission fee, each year, is equal to what I earn. (I am not, for the record, in any way involved in its payment.) 

And also that none of this matters, not in the context of my family’s lives. I am, of course and for want of a better word, the stepmother to my girlfriend’s children, which is to say that my role is always supportive and not agential. I’m not the protagonist and do not want to be. The problem is that neither can I be antagonistic, nor should I.

I never thought that I would be here. Never imagined I might find myself driving through those massive gates on the occasional stormy afternoon and idling in a queue of European cars as the older boy swings his cricket kit onto my backseat (though I still curse those of their drivers who insist on trying to turn right when they return to the main road). Receiving the school’s monthly magazine with its thick, soft pages in my letterbox. Stitching name tags onto uniform trunks, the existence of which I couldn’t even fathom until last year. It is unsettling, to say the very least. 

And I hate it.

Perfect match

Art and fashion have long been co-conspirators, collaborating commercially and creatively to mutual benefit since the early twentieth century. At first glance, the disciplines appear to be fundamentally opposed. Where fashion has traditionally been seen as fickle, transient and driven by popular culture trends, designed to make itself redundant with each new collection, art is understood to be more thoughtful, intellectual and elitist, in pursuit of longevity – the nobler pursuit, owing to its intellectual and philosophical origins. Fashion embraces reinvention to make itself relevant, responding to consumer demands and the commercial imperative, whereas art, born of an artist’s creativity, has historically been regarded as the higher form, one that does not necessarily depend upon financial gain, nor require money for its creation.

Of course, these are outmoded, romantic notions – absolutes. Art is a commodity like any other, bought and sold as an investment. Art and fashion are economic systems with a great deal in common: both exist because they can, not because they serve a practical purpose.