Years ago, I went on a bus trip from Melbourne to Noosa with my grandma. I was 19, it was a diabolical nightmare, and while at 89-years-old she’s had the good fortune to forget every single detail—and even gaslights me each time I mention it as though this is the fanciful delusion I’d choose—I still occasionally wake in a cold sweat remembering the details. Apropos of nothing somewhere near Port Macquarie, my grandma turned to me and said, ‘We’re not a very affectionate people, the Rosewarnes, are we?’ Not the only zinger from the trip that I remember two decades… [Read more]

Government members applauded in the right places during last night’s Budget.  They chorused ‘hear, hear’ and nodded approvingly as the millions and the billions began to add up. But the enthusiasm was distinctly restrained. It sounded like the beginning of the end, not Josh Frydenberg’s ‘next stage’ of a master plan begun nearly six years ago by the vanquished Tony Abbott. Up the back of the House of Representatives chamber, Abbott attended to his paperwork. The ghost of elections past.  Down the end, Julie Bishop looked on quietly.  There was a sepulchral air about Peter Dutton, seated a short distance… [Read more]

I’ve been paying attention to dusk a lot this past summer. Noting the gradual darkening of the sky from blue to pink to black; tilting an ear to the crescendo and diminuendo of birds calling to each-other as they settle in to roost. Watching as trees turn from three-dimensional, textural things to stage-prop silhouettes. I’ve been looking for sugar-gliders. There’s a population of them in a large bushland park in suburban north-east Melbourne; there are doubtless other populations of them around town, too. They emerge from their hollows in the twilight, tiny possums with improbably long and bushy tails and… [Read more]

It is not yet three years since the last federal election on July 2, 2016.  Since that fateful day, when the Turnbull coalition government’s majority was reduced from thirty to just one, all eight state and territory governments have faced the electorate. New South Wales completed the cycle last Saturday. Of the eight elections, governments were re-elected in five (ACT, Qld, Tas, Vic and NSW) and defeated in three (NT, WA and SA).  It’s a handy reminder that governments usually win. Since 2000, governments have been re-elected at 31 of the 48 elections held in all jurisdictions. That’s a success… [Read more]

Mr B had always lived there. Long before we arrived to make a home on the Bega River, he had built his own. His was a simple affair; a busy temple to blue that drew an annual parade of female admirers. You see, Mr B is a satin bower bird, that most industrious and enterprising of creatures. A year ago, a firestorm devastated Tathra, a small town on the south coast of New South Wales. Our house survived, but the forest understory on our block did not. We wandered over our blackened land in a daze, and wondered what happened… [Read more]

There’s been a little bit of navel gazing around what led to Australia’s recent export of extremism and racial hatred to New Zealand. Remarkably, some for good. First and foremost, a healthy, young white bloke from Grafton, wealthy enough to travel around the world for years, supported by a loving, united family and with good job prospects, just threw more shade on Peter Dutton’s border protection mantras than anyone could in a lifetime. Even Senator Handful-of-Votes struggled to pull off his ‘migrants are to blame’ segue or to elicit much sympathy for getting egged. David Koch lost his stack with… [Read more]

The day after an Australian terrorist claimed the lives of fifty Muslim worshippers at their mosques in Christchurch, I attended a vigil in central Melbourne. I wanted to mourn alongside other people, in particular other members of racialised minorities. The bloodshed may have taken place in New Zealand, but this was an Australian hate-crime that we had long anticipated. And those of us who were reviled as ‘invaders’ in the killer’s manifesto remain in the cross-hairs of the far-right. Although I do not wear hijab on a routine basis, I have sought to make my religious identity more visible since… [Read more]

Under a black felt hat my sweet-faced niece stood to one side of the climate strike and quietly took in the surging crowd bristling with placards. A little older than the school strikers, at their age Lucy had also missed school because of climate. Her primary school burned to the ground in the Black Saturday fires whose 10th anniversary we observed last month. She lost her home, neighbours, her dog—everything but one teddybear she called Derrida. On the cusp of adolescence the underpinning of Lucy’s emotional infrastructure was blasted to smithereens. My little niece has since valiantly navigated the rocky… [Read more]