Featured in

- Published 20240806
- ISBN: 978-1-922212-98-6
- Extent: 216pp
- Paperback, ePUB, PDF


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

No secret passageway
Non-fictionIn 2001 I read an article in The Guardian newspaper about a man who fell from the sky, landing in a superstore car park not far from where I live in London. The article, by journalists Esther Addley and Rory McCarthy, detailed how the Metropolitan Police discovered the dead man’s identity through a combination of luck, Interpol and British-Pakistani community workers. Muhammad Ayaz had managed to slip through security at Bahrain airport, run across the tarmac and, according to witnesses on the plane, disappear beneath the wing of the British Airways Boeing 777. The article quotes a spokesman from the International Air Transport Association: a myth circulates that there is a ‘secret hatch from the wheel bay into the cargo bay, and then into the passenger cabin, as if it were a castle with a dungeon and a series of secret passageways’. No such passageway exists and Muhammad would have found himself trapped in the wheel bay with no oxygen, no heating and no air pressure as well as no way out. If he wasn’t crushed or burned by the retracting wheels, he may have frozen to death once the flight reached 30,000 feet, finally falling out hours later when the plane lowered its landing gear as it prepared to touch down at Heathrow.
More from this edition

Finding the right phenotype
Non-fictionAs a recently diagnosed transgender person, I was already part of a highly online, over-educated and underemployed cohort, routinely blamed for stifling free speech as well as both maintaining the gender binary and destroying it. The alt-right discourse was already aflame, decrying the social scourge of everyone wanting to be seen as a ‘special snowflake’ and the creeping ‘politics of victimhood’. Did I really need to inhabit a second suspect identity? Did I need another personal attribute I felt deeply ambivalent about to become a public part of my persona?

Conferral
Non-fictionBeneath my fantasy of a regular wage is the puerile hunch that if I stay in academia, I can regain some of the nervy possibility I held as an undergraduate student. It was at university that I first met people whose days were preoccupied with thinking, reading and writing, revelatory mostly because they were compensated for these activities with bourgeois trappings and validation. With hindsight, I can recognise that my straining so doggedly to become the kind of person who succeeded according to the university’s metrics mainly taught me what bell hooks says is the primary lesson of college – namely, ‘obedience to authority’.

the road of ghosts
FictionGraeme works with me almost every day of each school holidays. He conducts sessions that stretch from an hour into two. He teaches me how to shoot; he splinters my form down into nothing and then restructures it until it is exact. Fingertips: the ball slides through the air into the ring. He shuffles after each rebound, his returning pass precise. Graeme pours himself into me. He is patient. He is generous. He is firm, like a grandfather.