Journal
Articles
Sitting with difficult things
AS A CHILD in the early 1970s I would sometimes overhear my parents discussing how much commercial television I should be...
Accords and antagonisms
Listen to Tony Wood, Grattan Institute, discuss ‘Accord and antagonisms’. THE PHYSICAL AND scientific evidence of human-induced climate change continues its depressing...
A long half-life
ON MY DESK there sits a well-thumbed copy of the 1976 Fox Report, the first report of the Ranger...
Trash fish, sand, sea snails
WHY ARE SOME resources sexy and others not? The monumental equipment that accompanies certain forms of major resource extraction...
Touching the future
As defined by Norbert Wiener, an American mathematician, cybernetics was ‘the scientific study of control and communication in the animal and the machine’, and also in society and in the individual. In particular, for Wiener and others, it was about the study of feedback mechanisms and circular causal systems, including in the newly proliferating space of computers.
State actions and libertarian lawsuits
IN SEPTEMBER 2020, for the first time in its seventy-five-year history, the annual meeting of the UN General Assembly...
Postnatural, post-wild, posthuman
RACHAEL: Do you like our owl? DECKARD: It’s artificial? RACHAEL: Of course it is. DECKARD: Must be expensive. RACHAEL: Very. Blade Runner (1982) THE COURSE...
Gifts across space and time
A speak/listen trade will always include things that have never been thought or said before as well as the word gifts I wish to give. When things like this appear in a trade, don’t worry – it doesn’t mean I am making things up or holding information back. I’m not ripping you off! It is a sign there is respect in the speak/listen relationship. It is proof the relationship is alive, growing, and we are learning together. This happens a lot when people meet to talk about culture and cultural things.
Tipping the seesaw
The drivers that have dominated Australia’s climate landscape for so long are now being overshadowed by the black sheep that is climate change. Every time variability attempts to govern the Australian climate like it used to, climate change steps in and takes total control.
A new year
The idea of taking care of place has a significant weight in the Torres Strait Islands. Our people have always upheld the responsibility of care required to maintain and understand the lands and waters where we live.
Atmospheric pressure
Often lauded as ‘the cleanest air in the world’, the composition of the air that arrives at Cape Grim from across the vast Southern Ocean is called the baseline signal. Like the resting heart rate of the planet, it has been rising as humans have added increasing stressors to the Earth system.
Leaving Coonabarabran
It was my first experience of a catastrophic bushfire and it was terrifying. I’ve never felt such visceral, primal fear. Go through it once, and you’ll always carry a knot of apprehension in your stomach when the weather feels as it did on those days.
