It’s fascinating to observe the issues which spark national and global outrage. In Australia recently there have been all-consuming crises over an allegedly racist tabloid cartoon of Serena Williams, needles in strawberries, political interference in the ABC and advertising on the Sydney Opera House, to name a few. Globally, the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh as US Supreme Court Justice, despite credible sexual assault allegations and dishonest testimony, has been seized on as confirmation of white male privilege, of the sexist and racist nature of society and the polity. These are all important issues, no doubt, but the rage is being… [Read more]

A year ago, mere days into the #MeToo era, I wrote about my fears that it would likely only ever be a movement of tragic confessionals and not one of revolution or lasting change. Flash forward nearly a year to the day, and Christine Blasey Ford would tell her story of sexual assault to the Senate Judicial Committee. Ford shared her pain and we watched on and wondered whether it would be harrowing enough to thwart the heir getting his crown. It wasn’t and it was never going to be. The parallels with the 1991 Clarence Thomas hearings are obvious,… [Read more]

Writing memoir is a daunting task. Since the release of my debut book, No Country Woman, a memoir of growing up as a migrant in Australia, I have been asked numerous times what the process was like, and how I have balanced the many competing pressures when writing from personal experience. It’s assumed that writing memoir can be fraught because, inevitably, exploring our own experiences will mean incorporating those of others that intersect with our lives, and doing justice to each person represented in your work can be challenging. The questions I have been asked about writing my book have… [Read more]

Fashion can be weird, but for a few decades in the middle of the 19th century it went completely nuts. All the cool kids wanted consumption—a disease that liquidises your lungs and drowns you in blood, or else causes your organs to fail. They painted their faces white, rouged their cheeks and penciled on veins to mimic the hectic flush of a constant low-grade temperature. They tightened their corsets until their chests hollowed out and their shoulders stuck out like a skinny bird’s wings. And according to microbiologist-turned-historian Carolyn Day who details the surreal trend in her book Consumptive Chic, even doctors said… [Read more]

Two years ago, the US presidential election was closing in on us. Like many, I thought Hillary Clinton would win. I wrote a long tweet thread at the time (captured in full here) which you can read in your own time (please do!), but the thing that was motivating me was from what you could describe as a ‘sustainability perspective’. There’s little that’s settled in the analysis of sustainability, but one of the things that ought to be is to be able to spot when something is unsustainable because the means of keeping it going are being systematically depleted. And… [Read more]

We may never know beyond a reasonable doubt what occurred between Dr Christine Blasey Ford and Judge Brett Kavanaugh on that night in 1982—the night he is accused of sexually assaulting Dr Ford. We may never know the truth about the numerous other allegations of aggressive sexual behaviour made against Kavanaugh since Dr Ford came forward. We will probably never bother to find out. But, from what we’ve witnessed in this week’s US senate hearings, we do know beyond a doubt that our cultural and political distrust of women is as fierce and fact-resistant as ever. Dr Ford delivered testimony… [Read more]

On 4 August, Sky News broadcast an interview between compere Adam Giles and former leader of the United Patriots Front, Blair Cottrell. Giles asked Cottrell whether he saw ‘a correlation between the way Australia is going and where it should go in regards to some of the arguments Donald Trump is putting out there’ about Islam and immigration. During the interview, Sky News tweeted ‘@blaircottrell89; A lot of Western countries lack the national pride that is necessary to galvanise the minds of the masses and to protect the people of this country against foreign ideologies’. Cottrell has a fondness for… [Read more]

When the announcement was made that Michelle Guthrie had been sacked as Managing Director of the ABC, there was a distinct air of ‘hey ho the wicked witch is dead’ from many ABC staff. That was foolish. There is a big problem still in the building, and it threatens the longer-term future of the ABC. In a nutshell—how likely is it that any future managing director will be able to do a good job if the Chairman, Justin Milne, continues to try and engage in hands-on management? Particularly when that management includes strategic background briefing and leaking against his own… [Read more]

The Bendego meteorite sits defiantly on a pedestal against a backdrop of the charred remains of the National Museum of Brazil. The world’s largest meteorite first survived a fiery entry through the Earth’s atmosphere and is now one of the few remaining items standing after a blaze that gutted the Rio institution. Losing Brazil’s national museum is on the same scale as losing the Metropolitan Museum in New York or the British Museum in London. It was the largest natural-history museum in Latin America, holding over twenty million collection items. You only had to see the footage of the inferno… [Read more]