In My Defence The shelf was empty. Alarmed, I checked atop drawers and desks; the kitchen bench; the arms of chairs in the living room; in backpacks and cupboards. Nothing. I sifted dirt in the backyard, climbed the lemon tree to scan the horizon, pawed through the dimness behind the couch. The books had gone.    I crept to the back shed. It was the last place they might expect me to look. Inside, I witnessed the final stages of a mutiny, a scene from Jacques-Louis David’s The Tennis Court Oath. From the disparate territories of my house, dozens of […]

Our prized 1943 edition of the Funk & Wagnalls New Standard Dictionary of the English Language—a book about the size and weight of a car battery—does not contain the term ‘photocopier’. The almost as cumbersome World Book Dictionary of 1973, however, provides definitions of both photocopier and ‘Xerox’, the corporation that in the intervening three decades developed the first office copying machines. Also included is a virtual advertisement masquerading as an example of usage: Microfilm takes weeks and is costly. Positive photostat takes time. What about Xerox? It is easy to imagine an 18-year-old today being totally flummoxed by that […]

My phone. The answer is that I’m reading my phone. I suddenly come to, the way I’d wake up at the wheel on a lonely country road, back in the days before Stop Revive Survive. Shit, was I just asleep? And now it’s Shit, am I reading my phone again? Didn’t I just swear off this about one minute ago? On the phone, starving polar bears are attacking human beings on remote Russian islands, the total biomass of insects is plunging, a million fish are dead, floating on a stretch of hypoxic water near Menindee. My Twitter echo chamber is […]

1. That mound of New Yorkers dating back to the Mesozoic Era. I know it, you know it. 2. The interminable paragraphs before the recipe. Life is too short for me to share your fermentation journey. Just give me the ingredients already. 3. Erotic Christmas fiction. Really, Kindle? Recommended for me? This long we’ve been together and still you don’t know me? 4. Photos of your bullet journal. I was here for your teeny-tipped felt pens but I am uninterested in your hydration levels. 5. The credits. I know. But there’s a line for the toilets and a babysitter to […]

This summer I’ve been captured by three stories in particular. All have been caught up with the landscapes I reside in—particularly how memory seeps into my surrounds, bleeding and blending the lines between the literary and the literal. Books about landscape associate the external with the internal world, back and forth, one reinforcing the other. I can look out from the verandah to see the refractions of these tales, the memories I have created in the land, and the history of the country in which I live. The first of these tales is Robert Macfarlane’s The Wild Places. The book […]

A colleague and I step outside into the sun, clutching our keep cups, and head over to our spot which overlooks the University of Sydney’s oval. We sit facing the grounds, and on the far side I can make out the blurry figure of a man reclining on a bench, disappearing occasionally behind a cloud of vape smoke. Grant and I chat over our coffees in the shade, debriefing on our day’s progress so far. He asks what I’m working on next, and I mention I am about to commence writing this piece. However, I am struggling to settle on […]

Upon being asked to contribute to this series, I gave some solemn thought to what I was going to write about. I’ve become a serial abandoner of novels, so I could’ve written about one of the many unfinished books that I occasionally lie about having read all the way through. I could even actually have read one all the way through. In fact I did, in a sense. I committed. I recently finished Sally Rooney’s Normal People, regarding which there’s plenty to say. But I feel like I cheated with that one, because I listened to it as an audiobook—this […]

There’s a stack of recent-reads on the bookshelf in my bedroom. It’s tall and unsteady and I have to be careful not to knock it over when on summer nights I open the window. Over the next couple of weeks, these books will be distributed to other shelves in other rooms or to friends with an urgent nod—you must read this. My small suburban home has bookshelves in every room, this is my childhood dream come true: a house full of books. My parents were Sicilian migrants, they worked long hours in factories to pay the mortgage and put food […]

When you drive through the Tarkine wilderness, as my partner and I did this January, you encounter numerous highway signs noting that the Tasmanian devil remains endangered. What, precisely, the authorities intend you to do with this information never becomes clear. Slow down, perhaps? Certainly, we saw far more devils dead on the road than we ever glimpsed alive, which suggests that lower speeds might make some difference. Then again, the signs don’t mandate any particular limit, nor suggest anything else that individual motorists might do. In any case, they lose whatever moral force they might have possessed as soon […]

Deep Time Dreaming, Billy Griffiths Archaeologists work with toothbrushes and sieves. They sit on folding stools in the bottom of very neat holes they have dug, shoulders hunched and peering at a fragment of something or other between their fingertips. They wear khaki and no-one cares what they think. Ancient Australia has no material record—and therefore no archaeology—because Aboriginal people moved lightweight over the land and didn’t build anything. And even if they did leave traces, and they were found, the material would be of no more than academic interest to a handful of obsessives. There. Have I covered the canards? […]

Biophilia in biblio The summer after I finished high school, I turned my part-time job at the second-hand bike shop into a full-time one. Long hours aside, it was a good job. We were paid hourly, so the wage was decent. My boss was a fairly traditional Calabrian man who believed that his female employees’ role was to service the phones and checkout, clean the store, and make cups of coffee for customers while they waited to have their inner tubes replaced. As a female person, I wasn’t permitted to sell bikes or fix them. Course I recognised the sexism […]

Brokenness can be an inheritance. I think about inheritances often now, with the weight of a two-year-old in my lap. I often read In the Night Kitchen with my son at dusk, partly in the hope that he might learn to read earlier than I did, but I am also drawn to the complexity in Maurice Sendak’s comic book for children. While the book seems to be about a toddler’s dream-like mission to source milk for breakfast, the adventure takes a darker turn when uniformed men wearing toothbrush moustaches force the young protagonist into an oven. Sendak was raised in […]