For most of my life I have lived in large old country houses, where I collected and restored furniture and effects obtained at deceased-estate clearing sales. I have always liked order but am more flexible on filth. As a child, God stood over our Methodist household threatening violence to children who were careless or wasteful. Adults paid me to impose order on pantries, spare rooms and overflowing sheds because, à la Marie Kondo, it sparked joy in me, and it was useful. It rarely involved throwing things out. Over the last few decades, privileged, westerner consumers have changed their patterns… [Read more]
What I’m Reading
When you drive through the Tarkine wilderness, as my partner and I did this January, you encounter numerous highway signs noting that the Tasmanian devil remains endangered. What, precisely, the authorities intend you to do with this information never becomes clear. Slow down, perhaps? Certainly, we saw far more devils dead on the road than we ever glimpsed alive, which suggests that lower speeds might make some difference. Then again, the signs don’t mandate any particular limit, nor suggest anything else that individual motorists might do. In any case, they lose whatever moral force they might have possessed as soon… [Read more]
Meerkats and pubic lice: when Valentines turn to revenge
Of all the moonlit, chocolate-dipped-strawberries, rose-petals-on-the-linen ways to observe Valentine’s Day, the celebration that most piques my interest are the happenings at the El Paso Zoo in Texas. In a seasonal marketing gimmick to outshine all others, the zoo is giving the cheated on, the abandoned, the bitter, twisted and vaguely vengeful among us the opportunity for a V-Day purge. If you message the zoo with the name of your ex, they’ll name a cockroach after the bastard and feed it to a meerkat. As the meerkat destroys the insect incarnation of your erstwhile lover, a kind of crunching catharsis… [Read more]
What I’m Reading
Deep Time Dreaming, Billy Griffiths Archaeologists work with toothbrushes and sieves. They sit on folding stools in the bottom of very neat holes they have dug, shoulders hunched and peering at a fragment of something or other between their fingertips. They wear khaki and no-one cares what they think. Ancient Australia has no material record—and therefore no archaeology—because Aboriginal people moved lightweight over the land and didn’t build anything. And even if they did leave traces, and they were found, the material would be of no more than academic interest to a handful of obsessives. There. Have I covered the canards?… [Read more]
What I’m Reading
Biophilia in biblio The summer after I finished high school, I turned my part-time job at the second-hand bike shop into a full-time one. Long hours aside, it was a good job. We were paid hourly, so the wage was decent. My boss was a fairly traditional Calabrian man who believed that his female employees’ role was to service the phones and checkout, clean the store, and make cups of coffee for customers while they waited to have their inner tubes replaced. As a female person, I wasn’t permitted to sell bikes or fix them. Course I recognised the sexism… [Read more]
Tempus fidgets
Reviewers like to say that this or that work of art is ‘demanding’, but unless they’ve watched Christian Marclay’s The Clock, they don’t know what they’re talking about. The Clock makes demands beyond any art I’ve ever come across: it demands the viewer be awake all night; it demands unwavering attention, hour after hour; it imposes hunger, thirst, exhaustion, an uncomfortably full bladder. Twenty-four hours of movie with no beginning and no end, The Clock is a strange sort of masterpiece. To see it, I’ve got out of a perfectly good bed at six a.m., three a.m. and 12.18 a.m…. [Read more]
Ill-Met By Gaslight
Thinking back to early 2018, ‘gaslighting’ meant little to me. It was the term de jour in online arguments; a word I saw thrown around on social media when people got into disagreements. I figured ‘gaslighting’ meant when people disagreed with what you’re saying, or when they tried to minimise your experience. The true extent of gaslighting, its impact on my own lived experience, became clear to me one day in late June, when I discovered my former partner’s extensive lies and deception; the foundation of my recent years was coming undone. It felt as if my world was crumbling,… [Read more]
What I’m Reading
Brokenness can be an inheritance. I think about inheritances often now, with the weight of a two-year-old in my lap. I often read In the Night Kitchen with my son at dusk, partly in the hope that he might learn to read earlier than I did, but I am also drawn to the complexity in Maurice Sendak’s comic book for children. While the book seems to be about a toddler’s dream-like mission to source milk for breakfast, the adventure takes a darker turn when uniformed men wearing toothbrush moustaches force the young protagonist into an oven. Sendak was raised in… [Read more]
A Humble Petition to Commissioner Hayne
The terms of reference for the current Banking Royal Commission are to investigate malpractices in financial institutions. The institutions under investigation are the Banks and the Superannuation Funds. Neither functions without a battery of other institutions: accountants, actuaries, auditors, rating agencies, lawyers, lobbyists and Business Schools. Furthermore, all those of auxiliaries are directly engaged in Stock Exchanges, Foreign Exchange and Futures markets. Many are global enterprises. In particular, the banks are locked into foreign banks for fund-raising. An interrogation of malpractices by banks and retail super funds is not even half-way towards unraveling how these institutions operate if their supporting… [Read more]
Nauru, Manus: They Have Suffered Enough
Over the past year I have watched my fellow doctors find their voice, notably sparked by Dr Sara Townend, an unsung hero who managed to get all of her professional colleges and the AMA to finally crank up the pressure on the politicians in Canberra. This resulted in a shift in public attitudes, and the Kids Off Nauru campaign has resulted in nearly all of the children on Nauru leaving the small island that had been their world for the past five years. A victory for decency certainly, and seeing motions being passed in the senate to try and change… [Read more]
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