Journal
Articles
The elephant in the basement
WHEN I STARTED at the museum, the place seemed normal enough. The previous exhibition had just wrapped up, so...
Lost eyes
My eyes are lost in the past. I am hiding in my past, your past, my great-grandfather’s past. Our lost...
Death of the ornithologist
The wind was shunting a heavy storm, with her binoculars she searched for him along the cliffs, he was still...
Genealogy: 2
1983 in the mountains of smoke haze & roads hacked through sandstone, your father declares after trekking alone for hours, he made...
Foxola
It isn’t small – a medium size female and no plaything. To reduce, make diminutive as panting with heat, potential of storms, build...
The space waste
I don’t want to kill everyone’s buzz (Lightyear), but perhaps it’s time to reconsider how much money we waste on space stuff? Given the state of things on Earth, how can we justify (largely performative) space science? As someone who spends a lot of time attempting to make people care about science, this may seem like a strange hill to die on, but I’ve been struggling to quantify how useful millions of dollars of expenditure is proving to the scientific advancement of…what, exactly?
Confessions from a bookstore
What those who work outside of publishing don’t factor in is that, ultimately, bookselling is a niche form of retail work. You are working in a bookshop. The curatorial process is certainly unique, but the basic business premise of a bookshop is that it’s a place of commerce.
Inside it, trying
Savage describes her ideal world as one ‘where the value of creativity was not assessed against the metrics of excellence, institutional legibility, or professional viability’ – where artists ‘did not feel compelled, out of the threat of poverty or social disgrace, to professionalise’.
Who listens to CDs?
When my partner, Jerry, and I moved in together nine years ago, he was dismayed to discover my CD collection. Its existence was no mean feat. Since leaving my family home in Adelaide, I had moved fourteen times, including three overseas stints. And yet, the CDs endured.
Cruising the stranger
Welcome to the emotionally complex world of Stranger by the Lake, the 2013 French film written and directed by Alain Guiraudie that makes strangers of everyone, including the most bewildering stranger of all: the stranger each of us harbours within ourselves.
Safe haven
Research shows that when children are taught their genealogy, they come to understand that they are part of a larger tapestry. This is a fact that gives them strength. But as queer people, we’re raised – for the most part – in heterosexual families. Without our parents, schools or televisions enlightening us, this absence can worsen the isolation many of us experience during our younger years.
Tough love
As a Canadian, I was accustomed to wandering into any bookstore to find the latest Julia Quinn, Charlaine Harris or Robert Jordan novels. Moving to Australia in 2005 was an enormous shock to the system. Not only was I unable to find the latest Julia Quinn novel, I couldn’t find any Julia Quinn novels. Australian bookstores offered a couple of Ursula K Le Guin novels and maybe a George RR Martin if I was lucky. To me, Australia was the land that genre fiction forgot.
