Mr Speaker! Mr Speaker!
I’m thinking of running at the federal election next year. Not for the Senate because that’s rubbish, but the House of Reps. It’d be a difficult campaign because I’d have to come clean and admit to the electorate that I wasn’t interested in representing anyone or voting on anything. Nor would I be involved with formulating policy or ‘keeping the bastards honest’ or whatever politicians these days campaign on. My ambition is purely and simply to become Speaker. Having watched former backbencher Andrew Wallace sitting in the chair for the last two weeks, I am convinced that I could do […]
Growing Up
In 2011, I was cast in a production of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, the late American composer Stephen Sondheim’s 1987 musical. Sweeney Todd, about a murderous barber who slits the throats of his clients and his lovelorn landlord, Mrs Lovett, who bakes the bodies into pies and sells them, is one of the best and likely most popular of all Sondheim’s tricky, wondrous creations. I remember that, in our first run-through of the show as a team, our director asked us to speak all the lines, including the songs. It’s certainly an appropriate way of approaching […]
Editorial: Summer 2021
In the beginning was, by some accounts, the word. A profoundly unknowable moment, but if things ever did in fact ‘begin’, maybe a word is as good a place as any. But in what language, and with what meaning? In Christian gospel that moment of creation is refined further to a pinpoint in which ‘the word’ was both godly, and god; a flash of divinity from which the sentences of all existence might form and take flight, simultaneously creating our world and investing it with meaning. Regardless of belief, there is something compelling about the notion of an originating word. […]
A Problematic Convergence: Permaculture and the Far-Right
What happens when the green left and the conservative right find themselves as strange bedfellows in their attempt to rattle the halls of democracy? Is it just a means to a shared end, does it run deeper than just this moment, and where have we seen this merger before? Much has been made recently of the association between the far-right as it infiltrates some of the more conservative responses to the current pandemic, and new-age ideas that revolve around lifestyle choices, spiritual thinking, and health and well-being. As Carl Cederström, author of Desperately Seeking Self-Improvement: A Year Inside the Optimization […]
Essays
Capital
The biggest difference between Australian Aboriginal people and non-Aboriginal people is their relation to capital. The land, the spirit and the economy were, and are, one entity for Aboriginal people. She is called Mother Earth. We believe that we come from Mother Earth and will return there and so our relationship with each other and all matter on the Earth is that we are related through the reality that we have and will keep sharing our atoms with all generations of plants, animals and earth.
Fiction
The Man Who Loved The Persimmon Tree
I first saw him in the port of Chongqing, in a navy-blue overcoat, hurrying on the wharf towards the Yangtze River ferry. He held a valise in one hand and clutched a book to his chest with the other. I stood by the rails on the upper deck and watched until he vanished in the melee of passengers crossing the gangway.
Memoir
Eye Contact
Outside my kitchen window, beyond the chicken-wire fence, two ravens hopped about under a lightning-struck eucalyptus tree, circling one another with blackened twigs jutting out of their beaks like they were children playing at swords. In Norse mythology, Odin, king of the gods, would send a pair of ravens to Earth, their names Huginn (thought) and Muninn (memory), here to spy on us humans and report back.
Poetry
Water
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