Journal
Articles
Shadow life
I WAS LESS than five when I left Hungary for Australia, yet many of my formative experiences had already...
Belonging
WE’RE ALL PART of a family, and often more than one. Even without kids, I turn up on several family...
London calling
WHEN I TOOK my first job in advertising in 1994 – in my home town, Melbourne – the last thing I...
Sous le soleil exactement
…AND WE FOUND ourselves in the old Anjou capital, Angers, in the Pays de la Loire, adrift in the...
The town turns over: Audio edition
Listen to author Laura Elvery read aloud her short story 'The town turns over', a poignant exploration of ageing,...
Every paddock has its problem
I discovered too how when we were flooded in, isolated for days or weeks, I felt a kind of delighted wonder. Everyone on our side of the creek was ‘in it together’... An external force was responsible for our isolation and I felt accompanied, a solidarity with the locals I knew from firefighting and funerals.
One minute past midnight
We know, some of us, that confronting books are losing their power, flooded by an industry of trauma stories and books on mass casualty events and individual atrocity... Truth-telling and shock are one thing... But how do we make it clear that what we write of is a vast and interconnected world that also implicates all our readers as the cracks in its colonial mortar grow?
Travelling with Mary
It was the year of Australia’s Bicentenary when I first met Mary Durack. My memory is unclear, but I think it was at the Katherine Susannah Prichard house, the heart of Western Australia’s writing community. She would have been seventy-five – younger than I am now; a smallish woman with hair coloured coppery brown...
We are all deaf during the pandemic
For me, every day is an online conversation, with or without a pandemic. Sentences are broken. Loud noises interfere. There’s a lag as I try to decode what someone has said. I am permanently exhausted from the huge amount of processing my brain requires to function in the world.
Before the flood
The memory doctor. It’s a misnomer, because whatever I might be able to do, I can’t fix memory. No one can. Bones regrow, cuts heal, but memory – once lost – is usually gone for good… We are essentially born with all the neurons we will ever possess. Unlike other cells in the body, those in the brain do not replicate or reproduce.
A new normal in Italy?
There were forecasts that the collective experience of facing this plague would make people more aware of life’s essentials. Heeding the maxim ‘never waste a good crisis’, some have seen the pandemic as an opportunity to create a more just, equitable society.
Getting to the end
The correct term for the post-mortem examination is ‘necropsy’: to look at the dead. The more popular ‘autopsy’ implies looking at the self, although it’s usually translated to see for oneself. And it takes a certain kind of intestinal fortitude to undertake this work.
