Fraser Anning, a Senator in Australia’s federal parliament and a member of the Katter Australia Party (KAP), gave his first speech in the Upper House on Tuesday night. In it he called for what amounted to a return to the policy of White Australia, an approach to immigration that discriminates on the basis of race. He also praised the authoritarian and racist Bjelke-Petersen Government, a government that has been exposed as corrupt through a Royal Commission, and whose legacy has been rejected on an ongoing basis in nearly every election since their demise. The speech articulated such profound racism that… [Read more]
What I’m (Always) Reading
In the second year of my Arts degree at the University of Queensland, I took a critical theory course from which I remember only two details (I did not do well). The first is the lecturer gesturing towards an image of a glaring, turtlenecked Foucault and describing the philosopher as being present ‘in all his sartorial glory’. The second is a piece of wisdom delivered by my tutor, a perpetually beleaguered wild-bearded PhD candidate who, at the time, seemed sagaciously ageless but, looking back, was probably 24. Responding to a student who had asked what he liked to read, the… [Read more]
Lives in Halves: A Homage to Vidiadhar Naipaul
Thursday 11 October in my son’s flat in Ealing Broadway: the 10 pm BBC 1 News finally confirmed what for many years we had been waiting for: the Nobel laureate in literature (the hundredth as it turns out) was V.S. Naipaul. The news item was brief, a sentence at best, perhaps two, as matters far more important or at any rate much more immediate took up much of the news time. My eyes went moist and I said to my wife, ‘It is such a relief, I have lived with his works for so long.’ In a sense Naipaul is… [Read more]
Dry Run
I still remember the first time I ever saw a red-capped robin. It was in the mid-90s, and the bird was in the garden of my parents’ holiday house about 45 minutes inland from the New South Wales Far South Coast town of Bermagui. It should not have been there. Red-capped robins are inland birds: among Australia’s ‘red’ robins in the genus Petroica they fill the semi-arid niche, taking over in the inland zones from their more coastal, tree-loving cousins the scarlet robins and flame robins. On a trip to the Mallee in the north of Victoria four years ago… [Read more]
What I’m Reading
When I was a child, I would read the comic strips in the paper as a daily ritual. The subtleties of Cathy, Hagar the Horrible and Wizard of Id were perhaps lost on my tiny self, but I was thrilled by the meticulous minutiae of these characters’ actions—three or four small squares telling a little story, a snippet of a life, their movements represented so precisely. I devoured Peanuts and Far Side books at my cousin’s house, but at some point I stopped reading comics. They were for kids or men or nerds who liked superheroes—they weren’t really for me…. [Read more]
Shitposting the Pain Away (Or All the Cars I Have Owned)
1. The Reliant Regal Supervan III was a three-wheeled car manufactured by the Reliant Motor Company between 1953 and 1973. Its successor, the Reliant Robin, is a three-wheeled car that went on to become the second most popular fiberglass car in history until its production ceased in 2002. 2. In 2003, the billionaire Elon Musk co-founded the electric car company Tesla Motors. The company began production on an all-electric car that, unlike its counterparts, could successfully travel long distances. The Roadster was released in 2008 and can travel more than 320 kilometres on one charge. 3. The three-wheeled… [Read more]
Farming the Future
Don’t call me a farmer. The term farmer is tied up with all sorts of myth, entitlement and guilt. Thousands of words of poetry, song, prose, and countless McLeod’s Daughters box sets have been produced chronicling the heroic struggle to tame the bush and carve a living from the land. Years of selective breeding, careful husbandry of bloodlines to get the right progeny. The Tax Office call me a farmer, but I have never liked them. I maintain a good relationship with them because I hear they can be real bastards, not as bad a banks though. My mates call… [Read more]
What I’m Reading
I’ve been reading a lot of nonfiction about smells. Or smell perception, to be exact. How people experience smells, through their bodies, socially or emotionally, is the focus of some fascinating nonfiction. Nonfiction offers a unique opportunity to tell vivid stories that weave together a scientific understanding of smells, scents, odours, fragrances and aromas with unexpected insights into everyday life. Stories about smells are not just scratch and sniff books—although these are not without their olfactory charm. Rather, nonfiction that explores the ephemeral and often powerful experiences of smell can help to re-imagine our relationship to the world, and each… [Read more]
The Death Knock
The death knock. It has no friends. It draws shudders from journalists crotchety or fresh-faced alike. This need to hear from the freshly stricken—is it a human desire to comprehend the incomprehensible, or a salacious hunger for vicarious rawness after violent and untimely deaths? There is rarely a drawing of straws—if you’re the breaking news reporter when tragedy strikes, it’s in your lap. Once, you would have reached for pen and notebook and headed for the door. Today? You open Facebook. Don’t have a name? You might strike it lucky with an ‘RIP’ left on a news report by a well-meaning friend…. [Read more]
‘The ongoing disgrace that is Manus and Nauru shames us all’
Today the Queensland Coroner delivered his damning findings on the death of Hamid Khazaei (pictured). He found his death to be preventable and that it was the result of compounding errors in healthcare provided in off-shore detention. This news came as absolutely no surprise to me. When I worked on Nauru in 2017 I frequently experienced the delays, hold ups and obstructions caused by the Australian Border Force when trying to get critically-ill patients off the island. ABF officials were in meetings, unavailable, dismissive or downright unbelieving of the medical information being presented to them. This was two years after… [Read more]
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