A few weeks ago I bought an autographed 1960 paperback edition of Myra Morris’ The Wind on the Water, which was originally published in 1937. When I unwrapped the parcel a small cream Christmas card fell out. I immediately noticed this handwritten inscription on the back: Dear Eleanor, I’ve had this for a couple of weeks to send you. You’ve been so kind and so sweet and the rotten luck is that you discover me at a time when everything is glum and screwy. However—’tout passé’. Have a lovely Christmas all of you. Myra Reading this card gave… [Read more]
Hyper-Partisan, Violent and Opportunistic: This Is 2018, but It Doesn’t Have to Be
In Melbourne on Saturday night a young woman lost her life after being stabbed during an altercation at a teenage party. The next day in Oakland, California, a man took out a knife on the train and stabbed two sisters, killing one. Laa Chol, 19, and Nia Wilson, 18, did have one thing in common, aside from being teens with their whole lives ahead of them: the colour of their skin. Two dead women an ocean apart, but their deaths, these horrific tragedies, are linked by the times that we live in. This is 2018. Ugly, hyper-partisan, violent and opportunistic…. [Read more]
For the Love of Libraries
When US business site Forbes ran an article about libraries, they probably weren’t expecting it to be contentious. Obviously, they didn’t know library Twitter very well. Now they do. The article was taken down by Forbes two days after publication following an outpouring of Twitter rage from librarians and library lovers. Lesson: if you want to start a Twitter pile on, trash libraries. In the piece, Panos Mourdoukoutas, an economist and academic from Long Island University, suggests that public libraries ought to be replaced by Amazon stores, as this would save tax dollars. Mourdoukoutas says libraries were valuable to communities… [Read more]
What I’m Reading
I read every night before I sleep, so there is always a small pile of books and comics on my bedside table. I have made a selection of these, which follows, omitting certain things that I am just not so fussed over, and will probably abandon before long. As well as those which will potentially do further harm to any already-tenuous allusions I may have to literary coolness or sophistication. The Secret History of Wonder Woman/Jill Lepore I’ve enjoyed this immensely. Not necessarily for Lepore’s writing so much as her attention to detail. Like many of the early superheroes,… [Read more]
We Need to Talk About Tom Ballard
It was the chilly mid afternoon of 9 June 2018, the internet chugging along with its usual lazy chaos, when stand up comedian JooYung Roberts posted a statement on Facebook that began: Today… marks four years since Tom Ballard, host of the ABC television show Tonightly, indecently assaulted me. The public post went on to detail what had occurred, and the way this had affected Roberts over the proceeding four years. It ended with a call for the importance and rewards of truth prevailing, the need for justice, and a hashtag: #MeToo. Later the same day, Tom Ballard posted a… [Read more]
A Lot to Learn From, and a Lot to Despair Of, in These United States
It’s the Fourth of July, and here in Brooklyn, New York, it’s 31 degrees. On the street I can hear the ice cream truck, and without needing to look, I know that there’s kids chasing their shadows in the fountains of cool water that jet up from the pavement in the park across the street. It’s hot, it’s a holiday: the kids are there. I know they are because the sound of soft serve on wheels ringing in my ears reminds me of home. It reminds me of long hot Brisbane summers filled with nothing but bubbling tar on the… [Read more]
My Highlighter is 100% Brighter Than the Sun
I want to live inside a reality television makeover set with good lighting and a trio of style experts who promise to fix me. I want someone to really see me, to interpret and diffuse my essence into a natural makeup look, a flattering haircut, and outfits that are conventionally fashionable with a unique personal twist. I want my face shape to determine my future successes, my good features standing out like city lights on a horizon, calling out to people, making them want to aspire to be like me, too. I want to get really good at using highlighter…. [Read more]
Not Drinking to My Health
After several weeks boozing up a storm in Vietnam, I set myself a Herculean task: I wouldn’t touch a drop in India, my next destination, for a full three months. This was somewhat out of character. With me, drinking has always been part of the package, as integral, I thought, to my personality—or at least the personality I wished to project—as my writing or sparkling wit. That my sentences grew longer and more tortuous with each beer, and my sparkling wit duller with each glass of sparkling, was never something I really thought about. It wasn’t that I needed a… [Read more]
What I’m Reading
Did you ever have to do that thing at school, in biology, where you went down to some previously overlooked dribble of water just beyond out-of-bounds to scoop up a sample of pond into tiny glass beacons whose contents soon revealed themselves to be complex, alive and varied, often pathogenic (Faecal coliform *snicker*)? I raise this memory because it offers a good, overwrought metaphor for what a scoop of my reading brain would give up these days, vestibule that it is for the various interconnected ponds of reading that I must wade into for my writing, my book editing, my… [Read more]
Cringing Toward a New Australianism
‘I’m from Tasmania, which is an island on the periphery of Australia, and Australia is an island on the periphery of the world.’ The author Richard Flanagan is in Beijing talking to a room full of Australians. Roughly one hundred of them, mostly white, have crowded in to The Bookworm, a bookshop familiar to anyone in Beijing’s small English-language literary scene. Near the front is an enthusiastic Chinese fan, but the rest are members of Beijing’s Australian expat community. They know where Tasmania is, and they know, keenly, that Australia is at the edge of everything else. Australians in Beijing… [Read more]
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