Journal
Articles
Dramatics
ANNIE DOESN’T RECOGNISE the old teacher at first glance, not consciously. She only registers a vague sense of disorientation...
Performance enhancement
IT’S A STINKING hot Saturday morning in December and I’m dressed as an elf at a rundown shopping mall...
Pass it on
It was part of my assignments that I had to collect stories from the elders and then illustrate them and so on. I could draw and paint, and I taught everybody how to paint. And now they’ve taken the limelight from me, the young ones! I was doing it on purpose to get others to come up and stand on their own two feet, to start doing this.
Escape rooms
Click here to listen to Editor Ashley Hay read her introduction ‘Escape Rooms’. THE RAINBOW LORIKEET – a fledgling, brilliant green with texta-colour highlights...
Character
Character matters in all facets of our lives, but seldom is it more consequential than in politics and political leadership. Even before the rise of Donald Trump, there was a widespread consensus in American politics that presidential character was just as important as intellect, organisational and policy capacity, media and presentational skills, and a vision for the nation’s future.
Connection
Amid the posturing and tumult shone three moments of clarity that highlighted the gulf between cynical efforts to divide Australians and the leadership needed to bind the nation together at a time of unprecedented uncertainty and challenge. Each revealed the potential to rediscover and reconnect with the ‘holding centre’ that has defined Australian politics...
Consequences
Secrecy, a lack of accountability and lack of restraint breed incompetence and failure, creating a vicious cycle both for institutions and the public’s faith in them. And yet these are the hallmarks of how executive governance is now practised by populist leaders, including in the UK and Australia.
Power, populism and principles
As someone with lived experience of a regime so consumed by its determination to cling to power, a regime unconcerned about and unmoored from principle or a raison d’être beyond its own survival, I've found the past three years chilling and shocking in equal measure.
Who are ‘we’?
Then, in late May, S suggested something new. Next time, might we consider the Uluru Statement from the Heart? Immediate enthusiasm – and, unusually on my part, some nerves at the prospect of giving voice to a text.
Welcome
FROM THE TIME Kurt Talker disappeared, presumed drowned, people began to claim him. They named his parents, his extended...
Unaccompanied minor
THE FIRST TIME I fly to Melbourne to see my father alone I am four years old, and I’m so little...
soap
Artist Walter Inglis Anderson escaped from the Mississippi State Insane Asylum on 1 April 1939 i. hold, he prayed, and wrenched the sheet...
