I was asked by a white woman poet friend yesterday to account for my role in the @verityla Stuart Cooke mess. My role was this: I tried for weeks through private emails to the editor to get them to see the piece was problematic. I did everything I could to raise the alarm, within.

Aboriginal poetics have always existed. Or, at least, they fulfil every sense of always that we have access to: yaburuhma, the kind of eternal that spirals out a constant across time and space; forever, the kind of promise we make to spread between every time. Since the land, since the land made us shape, since the land gave us voice, since we had learned enough to inscribe it back, since we took up tools tossed here by the uninvited. We sing it back as it is sung back to us in every bird song, every branch ache, every wave heave…. [Read more]

Jaws was the big movie in the cinemas the summer we moved next to the Thompsons, who had a swimming pool, a real one, in-ground, kidney shaped, pellucid chlorine blue, with a crazy-paving all around, not one of those Clark Rubber above-ground jobs, surrounded by insta-decking which were just as good, but fooled nobody (Trigger Warning: bourgeois content throughout). The Thompsons’ house was Spanish Mission style, a vast stucco and terra-cotta hooptile shell out of the 30s, which gave their backyard an even more raffish appearance, a touch of LA, though I’m getting that only in retrospect. For ten year… [Read more]

Western governments across the world are standing up to Israeli plans to annex the West Bank, but Australia’s voice is conspicuously silent. Indeed, Australia has played a prominent role in the region since H.V. ‘Doc’ Evatt, former Attorney General and President of the United Nations General Assembly worked to secure the Partition Plan of November 1947 that ultimately led to the establishment of the State of Israel. Since then, Australia, like many Western allies has withheld its criticism of Israel, speaking out only occasionally relating to matters of peace, security and democracy. Yet as the July 1st deadline approaches for… [Read more]

Black deaths in custody are once again in the political spotlight, both in America, due to the unjust killing of George Floyd alongside many others, and in Australia, due to the recent inquest into the death of David Dungay. These Black men died a world apart, united by the same final words, ‘I can’t breathe’. Tragedies of this nature are by no means new, but the worldwide protests prove that more people are starting to listen. It’s taken centuries for that to happen, and we should spend some time thinking about how and why that is the case. There has… [Read more]

The pandemic is a portal, Arundhati Roy wrote in early March, ‘a gateway between one world and the next’. We are yet to enter that next world, nor can we clearly see its shape from here. For now we are filled with one numbing certainty: the sad sense that the world we left behind as the coronavirus took hold is closed to us now, much as we might hanker for it, much as daily life is still formed around our memory of what it really ought to be. What a thing it is to live through a moment of such… [Read more]

So here we are again. Shuffling around in the same old dance, performing the steps we all know so well. The Government cuts the ABC’s funding yet again, blandly asserting that times are tough and we all need to live within our means. The public, who love and trust the ABC more than any other media outlet because they see it as their own, express their anger, sadness and fear. And then, thirty seconds later, this moment of clarity and outrage dissipates as we all fall over each other to argue about which particular bit of the ABC should be… [Read more]

I grew up alongside a river. The river runs unbroken, from the hills to the sea, and passes the street I lived on as a child. At first I was only permitted to see the river from the foot of the street, but as I grew older I was able to follow the path that runs along the banks, provided I didn’t stray too far, stay too long, go further than the bridge. The river became a place I could be alone, separate from family and home, somewhere I could begin to imagine a future beyond the suburbs. The cold… [Read more]

The pavement outside my house in London is scattered with rubber bands. I tilt my head to give myself a better view and notice that they’ve been strewn everywhere, up and down the street. I step on bands twisted into ghoulish faces as I begin my run to the small patch of scrubby forest near our house, crushing a rubber number 80 on the way back down the hill towards home. My boyfriend explains, looking up from his computer from our makeshift working-from-home setup (two desks squeezed into a bedroom), that the postie unloops the rubber bands from her stacks… [Read more]