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.

After leaving high school, my friends and I started tutoring the kids in the years below us and advertising our classes on Facebook. It was a cash job, quick but consistent, and we mucked around all holidays in the state library. In January, I was shortlisted for an interview with Yale-NUS.

Ten minutes before the Skype call, I looked up the college on Wikipedia. It had already admitted national athletes, professional actors and entrepreneurs. In the interview, I said I’d started a tutoring company, that my co-founders and I wanted to make tuition accessible to public school students, that building something new was incredibly rewarding. ‘Just like,’ I said, ‘how rewarding it will be to build the Yale-NUS community.’

To this day, I’m unnerved by how well I sold myself. But to the admissions team of a start-up college, selling was as natural, and as satisfying, as taking a shit.

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.

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

It’s unclear whether Boyd, who would have been two years old when Wilde was convicted and imprisoned for gross indecency, similarly literalised his homoerotic fantasies. Contemporaneous reviews of Brenda Niall’s 1988 biography, Martin Boyd: A Life, commend Niall, in a way that reveals the soft prejudice of the times, for how she handled the subject of Boyd’s sexuality. Paraphrasing Boyd’s family friends – who referred to Boyd, endearingly, as Floppy – Niall writes that Boyd was probably ‘too fastidious for casual sex, and with too strict a sense of honour to exploit the innocent, he probably repressed and aestheticized his sexuality’. This conclusion is buttressed by the conspicuous absence of the only work in Boyd’s catalogue that presumably possessed an unambiguously homosexual point of view, of which we know little except that there were flowers.

In a way that strikes me, again, as typically Australian, Boyd is slightly behind the times with his fin de siècle attitude towards classicism and homo- sexuality. His novels are uniquely appealing to me for the narcissistic reason that they are perhaps the only Australian books I can imagine myself having written. It’s why I find the correspondence about The Shepherd of Admetus so appallingly fascinating. I’ve read countless gay novels, by gay authors, in an attempt to discover my own writing. The author to whom I feel closest, by virtue of nationality, style and subject, wrote one such novel, and for all anyone knows, it might have been rubbish.

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.

The lists

I want to hold her. She doesn’t know it yet, but her world is about to change. Yes, all the things happening at home are bad and it’s an open secret throughout town, but she doesn’t know how much further she has to fall.

Endless summer

In a perfect world, every season would be summer – a time of seemingly endless promise. At least, that’s how I remember the summers of my youth: freedom from the confines of school or university, with nothing but lengthy, sun-filled days of play and pleasure. As pleasing as the nostalgic image is, I know it isn’t true.

There’s something wrong

Almost twenty years ago, before I left my parents’ house – my home, my country, my continent – to adventure into a new world, I did the maths. If I visited my parents every week for the rest of their lives, I might be able to spend another year with them.