Journal
Articles
Lost utopias
Reframing the thought
experiment
Click here to listen to Editor Ashley Hay read her introduction ‘Reframing the thought experiment’. IT WAS ONLY recently that I learnt about...
Exploding time past and time present
THE VERY IDEA of stepping back in time as a Badtjala woman is a utopian thought. Back in time...
Facing foundational wrongs
ROMAN QUAEDVLIEG STANDING tall in his smart black suit – medals glistening, insignia flashing – looked every bit the man-in-uniform from...
Life on JobKeeper
IN SEPTEMBER 2020, two months into Melbourne’s second lockdown, I was in my local park doing my allotted hour of...
The open-plan office
DR X TREMBLED with excitement. The hall was quiet, deserted, but behind every closed door she knew that there...
A short history of guns in America
The first firearm was the Chinese fire lance, a gunpowder-filled bamboo tube first depicted on a tenth-century silk banner from the Gansu Province in Western China. Early incarnations of the fire lance were used mainly for shock value in melees – the weapon little more than a glorified firework attached to a spear.
The day after the storm
AT FIRST, THE black clouds gathered as if in contemplation. Like a herd of dark thoughts, they quickly gave...
The memory clinic
THE PROCEDURE WOULD be painless, the white-smocked facilitator assured her. Lee sat almost catatonic as the translucent wires were...
Musique concrète
The original brutalism is the projection, in concrete, of strong social ideals. It’s also the architectural sedimentation of a given period: the hopeful ’50s up to the ’70s. But to me more personally, it’s a totally alien form of architecture: in my hometown, most of the buildings are small and made of wood. So raw concrete, sign me up! I was hooked very early on: I remember very fondly some of the brutalist buildings in Halifax, Nova Scotia, from my travels in Canada as a kid.
The hopeful edges of power
‘UTOPIAN’ AND ‘RADICAL’ are unlikely words to spring to mind in everyday debates about law and governance – but what...
Worlds of play
IMAGINE A PARK made out of candy, with bridges featuring water cannons that shoot water onto kayakers below. Imagine...
