Joker in the pack 

Status itself is a little like a riddle: a code to be cracked, a hand in which you can’t see all the cards. Unless you’re Batman, however, the stakes for solving riddles tend to be comfortingly low, whereas the pressures of deciphering status can occupy a far more consequential role in our lives (it’s all fun and games until somebody loses their cultural capital).

Into the void

The singular achievement of mass politics was allowing otherwise powerless individuals a greater say in how society was ruled. It gave ordinary people the kind of status that hitherto they could hardly imagine. Its withering away, therefore, has allowed those in society whose status has always been higher to assert their interests more fully. Business and the wealthy are no longer forced to make big compromises to accommodate the interests of those below them in the social pecking order. For example, trade and financial liberalisation policies have permitted many companies to shift production, and even some services, offshore to capitalise on lower labour costs, weakening unions’ bargaining power considerably. Many lower paid workers have been pushed into insecure, low-paid jobs with poor conditions, a transformation justified by political and economic elites as contributing to greater economic ‘efficiency’ and labour market ‘flexibility’. Owners thus pocket a greater share of the economic pie, while workers’ incomes often stagnate or even decline in real terms, causing wealth inequality to rise steeply…

Class acts

Under capitalism, perhaps the most conventional mode of asserting status is through the performance of wealth. In the early twentieth century, German sociologist Max Weber identified that Northern European societies had conflated an individual’s personal worth with their financial value. This represented the amalgam of two distinct theories: one moral, the other economic. The first was the Protestant idealisation of the work ethic – the idea that to work hard was to exhibit virtue. The second was what historian Eli Cook, author of The Pricing of Progress: Economic Indicators and the Capitalization of American Life, calls ‘the lessons of mainstream neoclassical economics, which suggested, through [the economist] John Bates Clark’s theory of marginal productivity, that everyone earns what they in fact produced’.

Dying of exposure

Publishing is a weird industry, a retail supply service where every day hundreds – thousands – of brand-new, untested products are launched, each one a little bit different to the last. The long-haul career trajectory of most writers is increasingly difficult to maintain with incomes nosediving, as evidenced by multiple surveys. The road is cluttered with novelists brought down by ‘bad track’, their new books rejected because of the poor sales of previous titles. But as readers we still need help to discover good books, to figure out what to read next. As book pages, magazines and newspapers shrink or disappear altogether, it’s no longer clear what impact book reviewers can have on a career. The endorsement of someone whose work – critical or otherwise – you admire remains important to many writers.

The Gordon cult

From a modern perspective Gordon makes an odd choice for a national poet, since he wrote only rarely about the country that embraced him. He set many of his popular verses in England and studded the others with the classical references familiar to an English gentleman. Yet before the passage of the 1931 Statute of Westminster – or, more exactly, until similar laws passed through the Australian Parliament in 1942 – Britain retained the legal right to determine foreign relations for the Australian Commonwealth. Accordingly, prior, during and for some time after the Great War, respectable Australian nationalism generally manifested as Empire patriotism.

Birthmarks

There’s no denying the pride and glory that comes with being born Aboriginal and knowing it, along with knowing the history of my culture. Yet with this comes a weight, attached by invisible rope tied by the hands of colonial settlers. Aboriginal people live with the death and damage our ancestors have experienced since 1788, while trying to outweigh it with the strength we inherit from the 2,000 generations that came before us. 
Cultural integrity is one of many facets of Aboriginal identity, and a testament to our reclamation of social governance led by our own communities. Aboriginal people recognise the power and impact lore and values have on the body and mind, and the life elements between, and this fuels our fire to design structures that allow our knowledge and history to be at the forefront of the services our people receive. Certainly, this powered my need to be working within the community, to acknowledge and understand the strength we find in the face of difficulty and push it into the valleys of my physical form as an Aboriginal creative.

Healthcare is other people

‘I see a lot of junior doctors suspend what I think of as their natural self during training,’ Bravery tells me – the self that is patient-centred and came to the profession because they wanted to help people. ‘They think that once they get far enough along the training pathway then their natural self will just come rushing back. But often it doesn’t.’ With this observation, Bravery identifies what is known in the broader education context as the ‘hidden curriculum’, the unwritten and untaught – and generally negative – behaviours that we see in those around us and learn to emulate to assimilate and excel. In the medical context this usually means a retreat from patient-centredness, a harried and sometimes imperious air, and a concern for money and distinction. Medical students are told about patient-centred care… We labour over weekly theoretical case studies during our pre-clinical (that is, classroom) years to the constant refrain from tutors to think of the patient’s experience and social circumstances.

Drowning in a puddle

The thought of being accepted is terrifying when you’re so used to not being accepted. You expect the worst because the worst is what you’ve become accustomed to. The people in that meet-up group will become your closest friends for the next year. You’ll come to understand that they worry about the same silly little things you do. But those silly little things aren’t so silly and they’re not so little. We just designate them as such because that’s how we’ve been taught by some of the people around us – who expect us to behave in the exact same way they do. But life just doesn’t work like that. Different experiences create different strengths and weaknesses in all of us.

Conferral

Beneath my fantasy of a regular wage is the puerile hunch that if I stay in academia, I can regain some of the nervy possibility I held as an undergraduate student. It was at university that I first met people whose days were preoccupied with thinking, reading and writing, revelatory mostly because they were compensated for these activities with bourgeois trappings and validation. With hindsight, I can recognise that my straining so doggedly to become the kind of person who succeeded according to the university’s metrics mainly taught me what bell hooks says is the primary lesson of college – namely, ‘obedience to authority’.

Finding the right phenotype

I paused to consider the possible benefits of a diagnosis. If I was autistic, my disinclination towards hugging, eye contact and small talk would stop being seen as a sign of my underlying coldness and instead be considered a legitimate accessibility need. I imagined a whole new world where the federal Disability Discrimination Act (1992) would be my shield, protecting me from the scourge of ‘camera-on’ Teams meetings. Could I insist on my own four-walled office at work, and get out of the cacophony of the modern open-plan office too? Maybe my new condition could even explain away my patchy work record and reluctance to accept underwhelming authority figures. 
But I already had a label. One that, like autism, regularly stirred up moral panic around wokeness and social contagion. As a recently diagnosed transgender person, I was already part of a highly online, over-educated and underemployed cohort, routinely blamed for stifling free speech as well as both maintaining the gender binary and destroying it. The alt-right discourse was already aflame, decrying the social scourge of everyone wanting to be seen as a ‘special snowflake’ and the creeping ‘politics of victimhood’. Did I really need to inhabit a second suspect identity?

When adults are at risk

One significant subset of our modern adult-safeguarding environment is elder abuse, which we know is a significant and under-reported problem. In 2021 the Australian Institute of Family Studies released the results from the first-ever broad survey of elder-abuse prevalence in Australia. This showed that 14.8 per cent of adults aged sixty-five and over had suffered abuse in the previous twelve months. Importantly, only a little more than one third of people who experienced abuse sought help.

Uninsurable nation 

AS I DRIVE into the small Victorian riverside town of Rochester, a banner tied to a metal fence greets me on the main road. The banner is white and the text is written in heavy black lettering, like a desperate plea for help: Can’t...

The inspirations of radical nostalgia

There is nothing natural or inevitable about the ‘decline’ of history and the broader arts and humanities, any more than there is the destruction of nature. Neither are passive or natural processes; both occur as a consequence of deliberate decision-making made in accordance with ideological preferences, usually supporting the material objectives of the vested interests that systematically corrupt our democracy and society.
Redeeming universities and other public institutions requires sustained political effort. The decline of academic history can be reversed through ending the ideological sway of neoliberal managerialism in universities, the allocation of reasonable levels of resourcing, and the provision of job security and professional autonomy to sufficient numbers of historians, plus time and space to learn for their students. Loss of historical consciousness, unlike extinction, need not be forever. With air returned to their lungs once more, the disciplines preoccupied with human purpose and meaning, fostering habits of critical thinking, are amenable to full resuscitation.

Radioactive fallout

The quake lasted six minutes – the office floor jolted convulsively; metal shelves rattled, files fell with a cacophony of thuds, and the structure of the building seemed to be squeaking. And then it stopped. My office building hadn’t collapsed. Neither had our apartment; my husband and son weren’t hurt.
But it wasn’t the end. The Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant had lost power, which was required to cool both the reactors and spent fuel rods. The government was braced for the worst: massive explosions or core meltdowns. A nuclear emergency was declared at 7.03 pm.

The great divide

In the ’80s, and maybe the early ’90s, fashion was a political statement just like art was…and real art wasn’t about selling out or succeeding in a mainstream context; it was the opposite. The whole idea was that you didn’t want to conform. Anyone who was trying to make money off your art or helping you make money was corrupt or compromised. The last thing you did as an artist or a writer in the ’80s was self-publicise – it was so naff, it wasn’t done. Street cred was what mattered. And I’ve been watching, with social media and the internet, this 180-degree shift over the last few decades.

Put your house in order

For me, collage is about relationships. I’d written the poem using Cicero’s first speech but sensed there should be something more. And I was just so in love with the Latin text on the left-hand side of the book that I wanted to do something with that. I spent some time going through my book collection, stumbled upon Australian Housing in the Seventies and made the connection.

New shoes

This is where I work: the kind of sneaker store that stocks shoes with the names of famous American rappers or athletes. The kind of sneaker store with plywood everywhere and hip-hop and young staff who look like customers except for their fluoro lanyards. 
Tomorrow a famous American basketballer will drop his new line of shoes. 
At our morning catch-up, Corrine reads out a list of names. It’s the staff who have pre-paid for the shoes. I am on the list, and Jules and Ruby are too. Corrine reminds us that this is a ‘privilege’ for staff.

High life

We’ve just finished one of the longest and hardest shifts of the year, and we are too tired to leave the building. It’s Christmas Eve, a 35-degree night, and we survived three dinner seatings while being two people down. We also all worked a double, and our staff meal was the butt ends of bread choked down with blood-temperature water while polishing cutlery. Every single person we served was tired, stressed, sick of spending money and not looking forward to seeing their in-laws. They also all wanted dressing on the side, no garlic and everything gluten free, but to also have multiple serves of the pasta of the day.

Animal control 

She’d seen her mother a couple of times since the lockdown ended, but it was still a shock. Margaret had lost some vital density that seemed ethereal, although it was obviously about her body – the protruding cheekbones, eyes sunk too deep in her head and hair a wispy cap across her scalp. Only her hands looked the same – her piano-playing hands resting neatly in her lap, long-fingered and surprisingly preserved. The rest of her was ghostly, and there was a blink when she looked at her daughter and the lights didn’t go on. SJ felt a momentary sinkhole: not that, not yet.

The Juansons

In the morning, she walks over to the Johnsons’ place and knocks on the door. Nothing. She calls the police, but once the officer on the phone understands that Norma is not the boy’s kin, he brushes her off. She makes coffee and goes into the living room and turns on CNN. A banner across the top of the screen reads: INSTANT E-DEPORTATIONS ACROSS US. 

Lifedorm

The fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh decades filled me with bitterness. I felt like the big oak tree in the centre of our play garden, stuck in the same place forever. Except even the oak tree’s life was more interesting because when it was small Parent 3 had told us to be careful not to step on it, and now it was this huge thing with ugly tree wrinkles and scars in the trunk from the branches we cut off to build a raft one summer, but I’d hardly grown at all.

the road of ghosts

Graeme works with me almost every day of each school holidays. He conducts sessions that stretch from an hour into two. He teaches me how to shoot; he splinters my form down into nothing and then restructures it until it is exact. Fingertips: the ball slides through the air into the ring. He shuffles after each rebound, his returning pass precise. Graeme pours himself into me. He is patient. He is generous. He is firm, like a grandfather.

Aca-lyte

Che Guevara is white and wearing a shirt  with his face on it, mansplaining Derrida or Adorno a hat like your grandfather used to wear though at least the man knew something about the great war [2]. This Che hasn’t worked out how to borrow a book from...

how to launch a poem

i) recall democracy is pretty numbers & orange clusters, strategically bold and critically wet, intemperate type-c photographs; ii) advance stagger: inkjet-laboured nested griefs & hybrid animals, radio waves & gaze-detail, yellow tableaux & charlie foxtrot figments, clusterfucks;  iii) shoot east shoot west, strike a pose, teem...

The National Institute of Standards and Technology

I disappoint myself each day that I remember my work password I take it that seriously that I base my key on the National Institute of Standards and Technology system:  • make them long  • make them random  • make them unique • don’t go to Z’ha’dum • if you go to Z’ha’dum you...

Habitat

It was early. I recognised

my fate in the bathroom mirror. 

Behind which he slept deep 

into the morning…