We need to pay our artists, and for the most part we do, but there is a blind spot when it comes to radio. I was contacted by an ABC radio books show to see if I would review a new novel on air. After inquiry it was clear that this work would be unpaid. When I expressed that this was problematic, one of the show’s hosts explained that she agreed it was not ideal but that there was nothing she could do: ABC funding has been cut, and the ABC has a policy of not paying anyone who comes… [Read more]

There is a conversation I do not know how to have, a conversation about what happens if we are heading for disaster. It is not a theoretical question for me. I have two daughters. The older has just turned 13, the younger is nine. On current projections we will pass the point at which it is possible to hold warming to 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels before the younger has finished school. By the time she is at university the coral reefs will be gone. By the time they are in their early thirties we will be committed to two… [Read more]

Peter Steele once wrote: I do not apologise for mingling one kind of preoccupation with another, since I am myself quickly bored with any writing which does not attempt something of the sort. With that in mind, I’m going to practice a variation of what Steele called ‘mixed farming’—speaking of the world in general by speaking of poetry in particular, and vice versa—because, for me, poetry has always been my way into (and more importantly out of) the extreme sport that is life. In other words, consider this more a confession than a lecture: a personal, political, poetical confession. Like… [Read more]

It’s so hot—could you please reduce the heat from the fire a little? I would do it myself, but I see you are good with the logs and the twigs. I believe that a person’s soul is revealed in their hands. Do you agree? I think so when I see your hands touching the bark, rolling it so that the logs collapse just right, as though you know the grooves of each piece and how they should fit together. Look at your hands, pulling out that log now as it spits glowing coals, flipping it onto the sand. What a lovely way to spend a night in the… [Read more]

Like some sort of seasonal infection, the Man Cave signs and car-branded stubbie holders have popped up on store shelves again, promoting a brand of hyper-masculinity that hasn’t changed since the Hawke government. When I wrote [this piece] last year about how strange Father’s Day advertising felt as a non-binary Dad, I thought the gap was between my gender and the assumptions made of me as a Dad. But as I see the same slogans pop up all over again, it feels like the problem lies in the way we talk about fatherhood. Father’s Day has always been built on… [Read more]

The city of Melbourne was sweltering under a damp, oppressive forty-six degrees centigrade, the sweat-enveloped citizens cocooned in air-conditioned rooms, escaping to others when the air-con in their offices failed. The streets were mostly empty of pedestrians; even the homeless were indoors, hiding in the shopping centres which were showing unexpected mercy and letting them stay. Drivers stared out at a white-hot world from their climate-controlled cars. The ‘whoomph’ could be heard in every corner of the city—in the forest of grey stone they called the central business district it blew out windows letting in the heat, and popped eardrums, protecting those victims from the sound of screaming, even their own…. [Read more]