Journal
Articles
Gun
One must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn’t going to go off. It’s wrong...
Paradise lost
IT’S MAY, THE end of the wet season in Far North Queensland, and storm clouds brew ominously to the...
The sin room
When they left, carrying Will on a stretcher, I closed the shop for the day. My thoughts were all a swirl, and the most important was that Will would be all right, despite concussion and a broken jaw – and the source of the blood, a shallow flesh wound in his back. I saw it when an ambo pulled up Will’s black shirt tail and thought: that’s not road trauma. I know a knife wound when I see it.
Revisiting the Dark Man
ONE RECENT SATURDAY morning, I once again drove my children to the street in Brisbane’s west where I grew...
Bringing in the bystander
LIKE MOST FORMS of cancer, violence and abuse are preventable. But why is preventing them so hard? They leave...
Pirate mailbox
In Cincinnati, just south of the Hamilton County Zoo, on a south-east corner where Erkenbrecher Avenue intersects Vine Street,...
Courting injustice
ONE HUNDRED YEARS ago, colonial criminal law applied to Indigenous people in the bush was rough justice, if it...
‘This is how I will strangle you’
This story contains descriptions of violence and abuse. NATASA CHRISTIDOU’S EARLIEST memory is of her father Peter masturbating over her...
Lost for words
I GREW UP believing that I would be murdered by a stranger. I was eight years old when Sian...
On the record
A YEAR AGO, feeling hopeless about my work as a freelance writer, I began to look for other ways to...
Memorial park
DANIEL SAT ON the damp earth between two buttress roots of the massive fig tree. They rose up beside...
White justice, black suffering
Dad began this job in 1989 in the days of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. He was not the only black prison guard on staff – in fact, at one point, Rockhampton’s jail had the highest percentage of Indigenous employees in the state. And yet, there were even more Murris locked up. The first thing that shocked Dad was just how many were inside, and over the next two decades he would see many of his own relatives coming through the gates.
