Journal
Articles
All men choose the path they walk
THE WAILING THERE IS A deep wailing across this country. I heard it once when I was a child in...
Enduring change
PUBLIC INQUIRIES AND their subsequent reports suffer chequered histories in Australia. Some disappear with nary a trace, while others go...
Unmasking a culture of corruption
WITH THE PASSING of thirty years since Queensland’s Fitzgerald Inquiry and its seminal report, an opportunity arises to sit...
Looking at the big picture
THEY WRITE MUSICALS about it in the US; swear by it in Canada; swear about it in Australia; and...
Adjudged
William Spalyng, who, for selling putrid beef…was put upon the pillory, and the carcasses were burnt beneath. Arthur Griffiths, The...
As if children mattered…
Proportionally, we are the most incarcerated people on the planet. We are not an innately criminal people. Our children...
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,...
