Journal
Articles
Last of the rational actors at the end of the unnatural world
Was it Douglas Mawson who compared Antarctica to Mars?... 'Outside, one might be a lone soul standing on Mars', or something very much like that. 'All is desolation and hard.'
Convergence
The holiday brochures talk about ‘the sound of silence’ in Antarctica. That it is an experience, elliptical and expansive. This has become a long-running joke at the base. Everyone knows that life here relies on making noise.
Hope sends a message
I am here to get the feel of the place; to understand why they are here, at the edge of the world, keeping hope alive. I need that hope and I think I am not alone in that sentiment. That is why I was sent, why I agreed to come, why this piece is being published – unless it has been suppressed. I am displaced as much as the people here; my family have not been to our homelands for generations.
Snowman
the hardest part about going to antarctica is coming back after two years to a six-year-old daughter who screams when you...
A Lullaby Made From Ice
The closest I’ve ever come to an iceberg is at the bottom of a dime bag. Me, a climate...
A badly researched history of the Australasian Antarctic Expedition
The Australasian Antarctic Expedition, headed by Douglas Mawson, explored the Antarctic coast between 1911 and 1914. After losing a sled...
Expedition to Blood Falls, Victoria Land
I used to catch fish in jam jars and hide in hedges. I slept in trees like a lemur and dreamt of...
Editor block styling demo
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‘The True Hero Stuff’
I grew up in a Queensland still so saturated with racist ideology that my own identity was hidden from me until as a teenager I started bringing home questions about our family’s tan skin and curly dark hair. Forty years later I was very well aware that non-First Nations writers usually mine a vast well of ignorance and stereotype when they attempt to bring Aboriginal characters or themes into their work.
fifteen ways to be erased
When my son was surrounded by dozens of students, being called a faggot after his ‘friend’ announced to the whole cohort that Saul identified as pansexual, the new guidance counsellor spoke at length about the school’s supportive culture for queer kids and avoided the F-word in case saying it would manifest a faggot before him. Like to see that guidance councillor de-escalate a fist at the point it regrades a face. Like to know the last time someone reduced him to a noun.
Beyond the frontier
Click here to listen to Editor Ashley Hay read her introduction ‘Beyond the frontier’. A LONG TIME ago, I spent a day on a...
Recognition
In the second of a series of intergenerational exchanges and reflections on the links to and legacies of the...
