Journal
Articles
All our landscapes are broken
Land is surveyed, enclosed and assigned a value for an elite minority who can own it and leverage it as capital against debt. It can only have value through limitability and excludability, so the majority must be denied access to the land that most people on Earth still lived upon until just a century ago.
Community control
I arrived in Melbourne as great uncertainty, confusion and a sense of impending dread settled across the world. These were the moments before the first Australian lockdowns were announced, but whiffs of existentialism and nostalgia were already appearing around radical shifts in the look and feel of everyday life.
The impossible election
Weeks ago, unable to bear the strain, I withdrew from all American news, sticking my fingers in my ears and screaming like a six-year-old when Trump’s face popped up on my television. I reckoned that I had already done my part – a postal vote mailed to California in mid-September – and needed no additional agitation.
Samples of gifts and giving
Click here to listen to Editor Ashley Hay read her introduction ‘Samples of gifts and giving’. AT THE END of the first day...
When the heart speaks
I had in mind what Australia should be as I wrote the book, a gift to the peoples’ movement for legal, political and structural change in this country – the movement to establish a constitutionally enshrined First Nations Voice to Parliament, as proposed in the Uluru Statement from the Heart.
Inheritance
FIVE OR SIX days after the funeral, or perhaps a week, Rory finally ventures out. Her father’s dog, Harpo,...
Blue and black
MY MOTHER WAS a worrier. She speculated endlessly about whether her pie would be considered the best at bake...
Sonny
Click here to listen to Adam Thompson read ‘Sonny’. ON SOME WINTER mornings in Launceston, the fog doesn’t lift until midday. Today...
Invisible histories
IMAGINE YOURSELF A bird, huge, flying out of time through a smoky sky, back, back through millennia. Further than...
The pleasure cure
THE SOUND OF waves just behind me filled my ears. My bare feet on the hot sand made me...
Elemental summer:
A season of change
This is the first essay in a new series to be published online across the 2020-21 summer. Bearing witness...
Stone. Tongue.
i. Evening falls, and rooms grow dark, then light. Through the open window, a cricket starts up its whirring. Steam rises from the...
