Bucket of water

When clients were brought to Australia, they were held in hotels or detention centres. Detainees were allowed to see external psychologists in visiting rooms in the detention centres. The rooms were stark and grey with bright, white lighting. I filled out an online application form to visit one of my clients. It asked me to list the items I wanted to bring with me, and how I intended to use each of them.

Old feelings, new appetites

Suddenly, my body was allowed to be big, weary, bed-bound and gorged. It was to eat readily, rest gladly, leak chaotically and swell without objection. For close to ten months, it was to be spared anorexia’s vicious rules. As I approached the end of my body’s heavy sabbatical, I felt nervous.

The knitting

The spores that caught and coupled. The filaments that grew, the hyphae that became the sum of our parts. All of it powered by water, powered by oxygen, powered by sugars, nutrients, deaths, resulting in bodies rotting in the ground. We spread out, touching the soft new roots of trees, entering them. Connecting them. A knitting. 

Blaming the pastries

Contemporary life constantly offers us the illusion of control – many of us can access whatever we want whenever we want it at the click of a button. In reality, though, we lack control over so many elements of our lives. Since it can be painful to think about that, we make ourselves forget.

From the new world

The first time I played Dvorak’s New World Symphony, I couldn’t believe the sheer power of inked shapes on paper. Breathing into the first note with eighty other musicians; the swelling fortississimo crescendos of pure angst; traversing stories inspired by communities borne from diaspora and unbelonging. Nothing I’d ever done had felt so real.  

Final five days

We sent Red off to school on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday – but we had to ask him to say farewell, to be ready for her absence, just in case. Every day. To bid your dying sister goodbye, each morning, and then go into the arms of your friends – who didn’t know.

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.

As a case in point, the last few years have revealed the shocking frailty of Australia’s literary sector. In Victoria, for example, in December last year, dozens of literary journals, training and development organisations, festivals and prizes were told they’d lost multi-year state government funding – not only making a significant number of literary organisations unsustainable (and potentially unsalvageable) but also risking the state’s reputation as home to Australia’s first UNESCO City of Literature (Naarm/Melbourne) and only Booktown (Clunes).

But literature has always been the sector’s poorly funded cousin. These may be hard times, but things have always been hard. In a sector accustomed to deprivation, deprioritisation and crisis, why does the current state of Australia’s literary sector feel so different?

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

Almost immediately after completing a draft of my novel, I become preoccupied with a letter housed in the National Library of Australia. The 1930s correspondence between the English and American publishers of an Australian novelist concerns their decision to reject that author’s most recent manuscript – so, of course, that’s where my thoughts fixate, yesterday’s triumph already faded to mocking echo

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.