Walking through the mou(r)n(ing of a)tain(ted life)

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A picture of a vacant theatre with red velvet chairs

My tiny green teacher

In June 2025, I was one of the many people emotionally wounded by a viral video clip of a little puppet named Tiny Chef (affectionately known as Cheffy) receiving some bad news. I hadn’t heard of this character and his playful children’s show, but the clip had a profound effect on me. It depicts a more potent vulnerability than many human skits achieve.

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Always was, always will be

In ConversationIf Aboriginal people are all dead, you don’t have to negotiate a treaty with us and you certainly don’t have to go around feeling guilty about stolen land and stolen wages and stolen children; the subjects of that injustice don’t exist anymore if you choose to believe that we’re dead or all assimilated, which isn’t the case. It’s a very practical kind of assimilation strategy.

The sentimentalist

In ConversationI’ve positioned myself as somebody who’s constantly going through the trash of yesteryear with my raccoon paws and saying, ‘Wasn’t it grand?’ I think it’s more that I’m drawn to things I misunderstood rather than things that are just old, and I’m also interested in diagnosing the culture through what we loved, what we made and what we despised. It’s becoming much more clear to me the older I get.

Time plays tricks

IntroductionTen years ago, the late, great cultural theorist Mark Fisher posited that our ‘montaging of earlier eras’ had reached such fever pitch that we no longer even noticed our submersion in a sea of bygones. And sitting alongside this purported cultural inertia are our increasingly divergent attitudes towards history – the far-right impulse to romanticise the past, the far-left desire to remedy its wrongs – and how they inflect our politics.