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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.
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,...
