A consensus for care

Reframing the future of work

Featured in

  • Published 20170502
  • ISBN: 9781925498356
  • Extent: 264pp
  • Paperback (234 x 153mm), eBook

I USED PENCIL to write the due date for my baby in my diary. It was one of those pocket business diaries, with times recorded at hourly intervals. On the page for 5 April I wrote ‘baby!’ in semi-large letters across a few of the lines. The exclamation mark was a nod to the audacity of timetabling the arrival of a human being to the world. The hour would inevitably be wrong and probably the day too – how was it sane to use a pen?

The pages before that date were dense with appointments typical to a late-stage PhD student, nicely positioned to their designated times: ‘supervisor’; ‘submit book review’; ‘conference’; ‘seminar’; ‘teach’. All in ink, obviously. The pages crackled a bit from where the biro had pressed in hard. The pages after the ‘baby!’ entry were smooth and blank. I was living with my husband in a London council flat, seduced from my Australian home by the promise of a life in the knowledge-worker class. All my experience to date had taught me that ink in my diary meant work. Blank space meant not-work. The ink meant constraint. The blank space meant freedom.

Already a subscriber? Sign in here

If you are an educator or student wishing to access content for study purposes please contact us at griffithreview@griffith.edu.au

Share article

More from author

‘Imagine us as part of you’

EssayLIKE MOST VISITS to ‘the future’ of anything, the wonders of a trip to Australia’s most advanced digital hospital weren’t the things I had...

More from this edition

Economic illiterates

EssayTHE YEAR I was born, Paul Keating dropped Australia’s corporate tax rate by ten percentage points. As I started primary school, it dropped six...

Peasant dreaming

MemoirI’m currently doing a course on holistic farming near the southern New South Wales town of Braidwood. I had expected it to be full of ruddy-cheeked cattlemen in their forties and fifties; instead it is mostly people like me, tertiary-educated thirtysomethings who want to grow their own food to nourish their vocations. We are writers, a ceramicist and a filmmaker; a market gardener with a background in conservation; the manager of a local farmers’ market and her partner, who feeds his chooks on maggots from roadkill kangaroos.

Fossil Fuels

FictionTHE NIGHT BEFORE Jules went up to Townsville for his Nan’s eightieth, we cut each other’s hair. In all the time we’d been together,...

Stay up to date with the latest, news, articles and special offers from Griffith Review.