IntroductionAntarctica offers windows into many different worlds...

IntroductionClick here to listen to Editor Ashley Hay read her introduction ‘New vibrations’. IN THE FIRST months of 2020, the vibrations of the Earth changed. As monitored by a global network of seismologists, the average daily displacement of the surface of the planet –...

IntroductionClick here to listen to Editor Ashley Hay read her introduction ‘Create, destroy, reset’. WE’RE TERRAFORMING, MY son and me. We’ve done this in the real world before, tree by tree – but this time, it’s virtual, pixelated. Digging down and piling up, creating...

InterviewIN LATE 2020, Barbara Kingsolver published How to Fly (In Ten Thousand Easy Lessons), her first poetry collection in almost twenty years. Many of these poems operate as spare and elegant suggestions for navigating the various ruptures, changes, remakings...

IntroductionClick here to listen to Editor Ashley Hay read her introduction ‘Samples of gifts and giving’. AT THE END of the first day of spring, the clear sky is dotted with as many stars as the city’s faux dark lets through. The blue,...

IntroductionClick here to listen to Ashley Hay reading her introduction ‘This south and that north’. THERE IS A particular ebb and flow in crafting a co-­­edited collection, in the first vague collaborative maps of possible shapes, in the side-­by-­side work with individual writers,...

IntroductionListen to Editor Ashley Hay read her introduction ‘The time of our lives’. YEARS AGO, I read a book by Douwe Draaisma, a professor of history and psychology at the University of Groningen, called Why Life Speeds Up as You Get Older (CUP,...

IntroductionClick here to listen to Editor Ashley Hay read her introduction ‘Foresight, hindsight and the present day’. IN 2013, US-based Chinese visual artist Cai Guo-Qiang created the vast artwork Heritage for GOMA in Brisbane. This spectacular diorama features a waterhole more than a...

IntroductionClick here to listen to Editor Ashley Hay read ‘In the small hours: Stories from madrugada’. THIS MORNING, I was up at 5 am. The city sky was a layer of pewter rather than darkness, too sparsely starred, and every living thing was...

IntroductionTHE PERIMETER OF the New Gaol on Norfolk Island features imposing walls set with three archways, one high and two low. The setting sun throws long shadows onto vivid green grass and the light bleaches the view through the...

IntroductionTHERE IS SOMETHING seductive about aircraft vapour trails, those long streaks – ice, carbon dioxide, soot and metal – that slice the sky. I’ve often wondered what the first person who noticed one thought it was, or what they’d look...

EssayIMAGINE AN AIRPLANE flying north from Brisbane to Cairns. In just over two hours, it will cover nearly 1,400 kilometres of Australia’s eastern coastline and add 340 kilograms of carbon dioxide to each of its passengers’ personal carbon footprints. The...

IntroductionIN THE WINTER of 2018, the National Gallery of Victoria’s ground floor was given over to the MoMA at NGV exhibition, arranged across two suites of galleries in its iconic St Kilda Road site. The first run of rooms...

FictionIT WAS EVENING when Mia and her mother reached their building. Overhead, the perpetual pale overcast of the sulphur-seeded sky had flared through the terrible red of sunset and was now starting to dim. Annifrid flicked the car’s headlights...

ReportageSelected for The Best Australian Essays 2015   I THOUGHT BATAVIA was the story I was carrying on my trip to the Abrolhos in the first weeks of spring. You know the one – the Dutch East India Company ship that...

EssayEVERY YEAR, IN first semester, my husband teaches a tertiary course called ‘Biological Adaptation to Climate Change’ to third-year science students in Brisbane. Enrolments have roughly tripled in the time he’s been offering the program, and the students learn...

ReportageWHEN WE WERE moving from Sydney to Brisbane this year, people suggested different things I'd need to get used to: hot, sticky summers; the absence of city beaches; and the city's baseline fauna, which apparently ran to mighty flying...

Fiction'THIS IS HOW it was, when I saw you for the first time.'When Mackenzie Lachlan butted up against the side of Australia he was twenty-five, with nowhere in particular to go and no one in particular to be. Walking...

FictionIT WAS EARLY in the morning when she fell, and the sun coming in through the back door made a triangle on the kitchen floor. From where she lay, quite comfortably tucked on the thick green carpet between the...

MemoirTHEY WERE THERE for months, small shapes embedded in the mud at first, and then, as the mud was washed away, small shapes embedded in the grass. A few plastic toys; the shiny white squares of slide frames –...

IntroductionClick here to listen to Editor Ashley Hay read her introduction ‘Reframing the thought experiment’. IT WAS ONLY recently that I learnt about aphantasia, a condition in which people cannot conjure up or visualise mental imagery. A friend explained that if she asked...

IntroductionClick here to listen to Editor Ashley Hay read her introduction ‘Escape Rooms’. THE RAINBOW LORIKEET – a fledgling, brilliant green with texta-colour highlights – stumbled around like a person too long at a party. It tripped on the roots of the fig tree...

IntroductionClick here to listen to Editor Ashley Hay read her introduction ‘Prismatic perspectives’. IN 1816, DAVID Brewster, a Scottish mathematician and physicist, invented a new kind of optical device. A narrow tube, fragments of coloured glass gathered loosely at one end were rearranged as...

IntroductionClick here to listen to Editor Ashley Hay read her introduction ‘Beyond the frontier’. A LONG TIME ago, I spent a day on a replica of HMS Endeavour on Sydney Harbour. It was an uncanny experience. This ship, a reconstruction, seemed an almost inconceivably...