I have opened the door and stepped into the beginnings of my old age, into the house of my youth. Surrounded by the smell of wood, not damp, musty perhaps, and the scent of my mother. Avon Unforgettable, floral, carnations with undertones of moss. The scent that witnessed me sneaking through her snap-shut, gold-latch handbag, caught me searching in the darkness of her wardrobe, searching for private things, searching for her lipstick. Memories of my mother’s slim ankles in stiletto shoes and her auburn-bourbon-red hair lay, hidden like Easter eggs, awaiting the joy of discovery. She is here within the… [Read more]
At Night I Marry the Bed
Just don’t do it: the cornerstone of the Mormon religion. When I was thirteen, I was visiting my friend from church. She had an eleven-year-old brother. While I was visiting, his parents caught him rubbing his crotch up and down the pantry door. He had obviously just discovered how amazing it felt. My friend and I watched as her brother was taken into the living room and sat down for a talk. We listened through the closed door. It was all so funny to us. What was he doing that for? He could have simply been told that it was… [Read more]
Contempt and Suppression
There’s a cyclone tracking south through Queensland while an intense low is battering south east Australia. At the same time, there’s a leadership spill going on in Westminster and the US is reacting to the jailing of President Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen. These stories are filling a very busy line-up on morning television. But on the newsstands in Sydney, the front page of The Telegraph has thrown all that aside with a bold headline claiming the media is missing an even bigger story. The paper is right. Just go online and type in the magic combination of words, and there… [Read more]
Egg Rolls and Eggnog: Chinese Food in Christmas Movies
There’s a scene in the classic (albeit overrated) holiday film A Christmas Story (1983) where the neighbours’ bloodhounds demolish Ralphie’s turkey dinner. The final scene has Ralphie, his parents and brother seated in the local Chop Suey Palace serenaded by heavily-accented waiters. Not as common as Christmas movie staples like single moms losing the spirit of the season, or Santa Claus feeling unappreciated, nonetheless, but a recurring festive inclusion is Chinese food: that, on occasions, sweet treats and English-style roasted meats are sidelined in favor of dumplings and stir fries. While watching too many hours of Christmas films for a… [Read more]
My Brother the Ark
When Rory burst into our lives, he was an angry pink and already knew how to complain. I should have smothered him right there, taken a pillow from behind Mum’s matted wet hair, saving us all. And I would have, had she ever left his side. Instead I was forced to endure him, to direct my hatred instead toward the blowflies buzzing inside the window ledge, while she repeated over and over, ‘Isn’t he the most beautiful thing you have ever seen?’ How I made my mother so incomplete that she would need a second child, I would never understand…. [Read more]
What I’m Reading
Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia by Anita Heiss (editor), Black Inc 2018. I picked this book up because I was researching a psychological thriller, to be set in central NSW in a region with a substantial Indigenous population. After agonising about authenticity, appropriation and the possibility of causing hurt and harm, I decided to include an Indigenous woman as a key character in my story. As a Melbourne-based psychiatrist, I hadn’t worked closely with the Indigenous community, with the exception of a research project twenty years ago which took me to Townsville and Palm Island, and an occasional patient or… [Read more]
Watching Love Actually (Again)
It’s the purpose of Christmas, in my opinion, to poke a thermometer into the thick of our lives and stare. Each year during the holidays we’re asked to be at our most vulnerable, to look about our person with wide, wobbling eyes and ask ‘who loves me?’. Santa Claus, Michael Bublé and flammable pudding are all the hand that waves about to distract us from the pain of this exposure. It begins in sentiment, a rogue display of chocolate shaped like a family of reindeer or a viral ad about the friendship between a bear and a rabbit scored with… [Read more]
Peevish Paddy and Sir Neddy: Patrick White’s Nobel Prize
Forty five years ago as the King of Sweden was handing the Nobel Prize for Literature to Sidney Nolan in Stockholm in the early European afternoon of December 10, 1973, Patrick White was dining with Stephen Murray-Smith at the annual Overland dinner in Melbourne. The Prize had been a long time coming. White’s claque had been lobbying since the late 1960s. His advocate on the Committee, Artur Lundkvist, got him onto the shortlist in 1969 but Samuel Beckett prevailed. David Marr quotes a translation of a 1969 review where Lundkvist considers that White had given Australia something of a language of its own. For Australia… [Read more]
About A Dog
He sees me through the tall window and comes over, pressing against it. I slip to the floor and lean in, too. But the glass between us holds and it is cold. I cannot touch him. He was solid once, and warm. I wake. It is 27 days since I had him killed. I was 26 years old when a dog entered my life, 38 when he left, which means that for most of the 15 years I then lived in Australia, he was there. Time split—the hours carrying me away from when I had him, and deeper toward not… [Read more]
What He Should Be Reading: Grattan’s 2018 PM Reading List
The summer break is one of the few times of the year that we switch off our screens for long enough to lower the height of that pile of shame beside the bedside table. There is still a magic to books, which provide enough space for a nuanced view of a topic, without reducing it to mere talking points. But reading a book takes time, and Prime Ministers have even less time than others. To make best use of a rare opportunity, Grattan Institute recommends each year a summer reading list for the Prime Minister. Summer reading shouldn’t just be… [Read more]
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