Reportage MARCH 2020. IN a darkened room in a Melbourne hospital, a slight, dark-haired woman sits at the bedside of a lone patient. Outside, COVID-19 webs its way silently through the city; inside, the patient rests back on the day...

Memoir ONE AFTERNOON IN late July 2003 I turned up at a café in Brunswick Street Fitzroy to have coffee with a man. I carried, for reasons still partly obscure to me, a small orange case – a child's reinforced...