What’s the point of bookstores?

Arts and cultural workplaces often deliberately cultivate an allure of prestige and bourgeois elitism that protects them from scrutiny. Add to this the fact that publishing and bookshop employees are overwhelmingly white and educated with advanced degrees from prestigious universities (and those in executive or management roles even more so). This demographic is often better positioned economically to sacrifice income, work overtime or trade penalty rates in exchange for more desirable, intellectually stimulating labour.

Palestine 36

To finish with empire, we must first remember the truth of the violence that made it possible. This is what British academic Paul Gilroy believed, and that the loss of empire is the central social, political and cultural fact of British society today. But the more brutal realities of imperialism, the realities of violent death following occupation, emergency laws, judicial murder, the bloodshed accompanying deportation — horrors fundamental to the British state — are rarely captured by filmmakers for a large, multiplex audience.  

Tokyo driftless

I attempt to read a Murakami book, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. I have only read Norwegian Wood because people who are into Murakami tend to be annoying. The book is about an unemployed househusband to whom strange things happen. I stop reading it. Since moving to Japan with my husband for his job, I have mostly read Australian fiction and Dickens. The most celebrated Japanese novels available in English tend to be about alienated people with mental health issues.

Writing is social

Since the late 1990s, the internet has housed a new form of serialised writing. One that permits instant interaction with readers. Current well-known platforms for these kinds of works include Wattpad and Archive of Our Own. While these platforms are becoming more mainstream thanks to the traditional publication and adaptation of works from them (such as The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood and Alchemised by SenLinYu), there remains significant stigma surrounding the origin of these works. 

Nanu Gaamu / Google said

WRITING GIVES ME the power to transform the colonial settler narrative written for me (the racialised assumption and notion that ‘natives are unlovable and uncaring’). Writing reminds me why I shouldn’t fear my language too, in spite of the old colonial notion that ‘Islanders’ speaking their language are criminals or evil. Every Thursday at 7 pm, I sit at the dinner table with my cultural parents, ready to hear and analyse the sound theory of Kala Lagaw Ya.

Shutter click

Earlier this year, I endured the miserably ubiquitous experience of trying to install a software update on my phone and discovering that I didn’t have enough space.

The museum of the future

The Museum of the Future is not a futuristic museum – a museum as it might look in, say, the twenty-second century. It is a museum devoted to the idea of the future: to the future’s past, in other words. Its exhibits are evidence of a remarkable, and peculiarly human, ability: to speculate on what tomorrow might bring.

(re)Verbing the archive

When I think about the archive, my mind wanders to trees and birds and seeds and springs and grandmothers long before it gets to brick and mortar. All things hold and carry on memory and knowledge – an inheritance for the younger generations.

I write of trees and birds and seeds and springs and grandmothers at the State Library of New South Wales. A prose poem on the final day of a work trip where I present a paper as a trained librarian-­archivist. Too much caffeine and not enough sleep, but with a gnawing in my belly. There is an energy in this space that unsettles as much as it warms. The violence of invasion lives there under concrete and traffic, in the bones and sinew of the Land and her peoples. And so, I write. Of trees and birds and seeds and springs and grandmothers – of my place as descendant and future-­Ancestor who carries millennia of knowledge and culture and kinship. I am always writing about archives when I write this way. I cannot separate myself into contexts. The archive and ancestry are one and the same.

Portrait of the artist as an archive

I began to hate JM Coetzee during the month I spent in his archives. It was January 2015 and the archives were still relatively recently opened, acquired in 2012 by the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Other scholars who had visited were abuzz with enthusiasm.

Rising tides and archival inundation

In January 2022, in the receding wake of a record king tide, the buried remains of a Kaurareg woman were exposed in the dunes above Long Beach, on Muralag (Prince of Wales Island) in the Torres Strait. The huge tide – ten centimetres higher than when monitoring began in 2015 – eroded swathes of beach and sand.

Vanishing acts

I don’t know when my sense of smell vanished, exactly. It left without fanfare, sometime during the days of fatigue and snot and rattling 4 am coughs. But I clearly recall the first time I noticed it was gone.

My archive fever

I completed a succession of degrees in creative writing, growing increasingly obsessed with finding my way back into the archive of words my mother had left me. I was determined to continue the collaborative practice we once had, though one of us would have to take part from beyond the grave.