Time travel

THE ABILITY TO travel through time in our minds, to inhabit re-created pasts and imagined futures, is arguably one of the defining characteristics of human civilisation. It is one of the great foundations of literature, an age-old tool of satirists, and is purpose-made for...

To a new Babylon

IN THE WESTERN tradition, faith and reason stand at opposing poles. My social-scientific training was deeply framed by this polarity. A recent experience, however, caused me to question both it and my own scientific outlook. This was a public engagement with a theologian, about...

World in motion

MANY IN THE social sciences have given up on trying to imagine the future. Between the options of conceiving of it in present day terms, plus the hyperbolic fantasy of much science fiction, perhaps their surrender is understandable. Yet it is important that we...

Accommodating new perspectives

TWO POWERFUL AND contradictory images come to mind when I’m asked to reflect on my experience of attending the United Nations Climate Change Summit in Paris. The first image (dated 12 December 2015) is of delegates leaping to their feet and cheering wildly as...

President Kennedy’s topper

IN JANUARY 1961, nobody on earth symbolised the future like John F Kennedy. At his inauguration the youthful president took to the microphone on a raised dais outside the Capitol Building and spoke of change and renewal, and of a ‘torch being passed’ to...

Future perfect

IN THE SOUL of Man under Socialism (1891), Oscar Wilde wrote, ‘A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing.’ Certainly it used to...

Living with complexity

BIOMEDICAL RESEARCHERS LIKE me probe the mechanistic basis of health and disease. In a long career working at the discovery end of the spectrum, I’ve been privileged to live through, and make some small contribution to, an extraordinary (and continuing) revolution in medical understanding...

Notes from an underground future

SINCE MY LATE teens, I’ve had a penchant for Russian literature. It started with Dostoevsky. It may have been because we were both clerks; Fyodor Dostoevsky’s ‘underground man’, that is – he’d been a clerk, too, a petty clerk in the Russian civil service. That...

City dreaming

White man got no dreaming Him go ’nother way White man him go different. Him got road belong himself.THESE WORDS, SPOKEN by an old Aboriginal man to the anthropologist WEH Stanner more than six decades ago, still resonate in the Australian imagination. There is...

The tale of two cities

IN JANUARY 2016 in the holiday atmosphere that envelops Melbourne – remember the Australian Open and Australia Day long weekend? – thoughts about the city’s future seem remote and unimportant. After all isn’t Melbourne ‘the world’s most liveable city’? What is there to discuss? Yet the...

A new mother tongue

AS OXFORD ECONOMIST Kate Raworth so rightly puts it, economics is the ‘mother tongue’ of public policy – and it is time to reimagine it for the twenty-first century. We need a new language for public policy and debate that brings together the many different...

Facing the zeitgeist

WITH ONE BOLD move King Henry VIII could solve many problems. He could meet his conscience. After divorcing his Catholic Queen, Catherine of Aragon, the newly Protestant Henry knew scholars such as Erasmus denounced monasteries as institutions no longer fitted for the modern world....

Triangulation

IRONBARKS, AS THEIR name suggests, are tough trees. Their outer covering is thick, rough and deeply furrowed. Dead bark is not shed but accumulates. As it dies, it is infused with kino, a dark red sap or gum. The kino ensures that the bark...

This essay is good for my KPIs*

LAST DECEMBER, I was planning to write an essay on the politics of the imagination for this magazine. But then I felt so worn out by worrying about how to urgently cut a lot of money from next year’s budget in my corner of...

Up in smoke

WE’RE TWELVE DAYS’ walk from the nearest road, on an island on the edge of the world. There’s no official bushwalking track, although at times there is a faint trail, a sign that for an hour or two we don’t have to battle the...

New power, new realities

TUCKED AWAY IN a jade valley in the mist-shrouded hinterland of northern New South Wales, the former cedar-logging village of Tyalgum seems an unlikely place for a revolution. The pace of life is unhurried, and when the electricity goes down, as it often does...

The final frontier

TELEVISION WAS MY babysitter. As a child growing up in the ’60s, I would race home from school, grab a plate of biscuits and a glass of milk, and spend the afternoon on the couch watching back-to-back American cartoons and sitcoms. Several decades later, I...

Revolution on wheels

‘We’re going to see more change in the next five to ten years than we’ve seen in the last fifty.’ Mary Barra, CEO General Motors   IT IS NO longer the stuff of science fiction. Self-driving cars will be on sale in just four years, and there is...

An empty house

The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned. Maya Angelou, All God’s Children Need Travelling Shoes   I AM ON the edge of sleep when a memory, weak and edgy as an...

Transforming the bush

THESE COWS ARE in no hurry. Each just meanders to the dairy, all rolling hindquarters, swishing tails and loping heads, the blue-black and tan Rorschach ink-blot patching of their hides vivid against the washed-out Australian summer light. They stop as they please along the...

Persephone’s picnic

THE OLD STONE quarry sits in the range high above Ilparpa Valley, on the south side of Alice Springs. Once there was a road leading up here, washed away now, leaving just a narrow track. At the top there’s a flattened turnaround where trucks...

Depending on the final yes

AL GORE, FORMER US vice president, Nobel laureate and chairman of the Climate Reality Project, has led the global discussion about climate change for many years. His multi award-winning film An Inconvenient Truth (2006) has been widely credited with changing the way world leaders...

The great unmapping project of 2016

In the time before the map – IBunjil & Birrung meet the seaIN THE TIME before the bay, before the ice began to slip away, the men and women and the children mapped the land with the soles of their feet, drawing and tracing tracks...

Season of hope

MR F WAS short and squat, well dressed, with the sort of small, dry hands you might expect of a bureaucrat. I was horrified to observe a tiny spot of tomato sauce on his striped tie. At least I hoped it was tomato sauce....

What happens next

IT 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 onto a higher beam as...

De-Nazification and Blake’s illustration to Purgatory canto 9 (lines 64-101)

Snow is falling white-outover the Schloss and its collectionsof the dead. A small marble hand glistens in its case and holdsa...broken staff of life? In a darkroom animals carved from mammoths’ tusks forty-thousand years ago,and downstairs, a piece of knotted blue jewelleryaches in its category, its...

The city algorithm

This image is a computer-generated projection of a standard 2040 global city of eight million citizens. It is based on an Amaz-Apple-Fox-Sony mainframe supporting a Google/Westfield App platform. The decision-making algorithm used to design the City is the result of aggregating the democratic behavioural records of old Government Hansards, minutes of...

The fires of change