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 […]

In 2017 when the same-sex marriage debate came about, it turned very nasty very quickly. I had been slowly making my way through an old list of ‘50 Books to Read Before You Die’, and while more often than not they were excellent reads (Jane Eyre never seemed to want to end but by the time it did I didn’t want it to), the content was almost consistently bleak and exhausting. Escaping one cruel world just to dive straight into yet another cruel world just wasn’t working for me anymore. So I turned to YA. It felt nice to leave […]

I often feel shy, even embarrassed, when asked what I am reading. Books can indicate our likes, our passions; they can reveal what catches our eye when browsing, or what we seek out when no-one is watching us.   Granted, sometimes what we are reading says nothing about us beyond that we will force ourselves through anything if it is a gift from a beloved aunt, or that we mistakenly assumed Fifty Shades of Grey was a book about black and white photography. Nevertheless, the question of what one is reading can be—or at least feel—immensely personal. How do I tell you […]

I recently saw Eric Abetz, and it made me unhappy. He was standing on the street in a patch of Hobart light, bathing in the weak wash of the southern sun, a smile on his face, and this scene—the banality of his contentment juxtaposed with the pallid horror of his existence—wrought in me a deep, gnawing displeasure. I was supposed to be finding lunch, but I could no longer concentrate on what I wanted to eat. He looked so happy there in the pale light, this man who has opposed decriminalising homosexuality, who has linked abortion with breast cancer on […]

Ten years old. Innocent. I pick up the saxophone and puff out a playful tune. Twenty years old. A high-achieving student. I’m mid-way through my classical music training at university. I play the same phrase again and again, aiming for the same goal as all the others: (unattainable) perfection. The balance between study, practice, work, and life is grueling. The competition is crushing. The support networks are absent. Elitism is ingrained. We don’t make it easy on each other. We don’t make it easy on ourselves. An accident puts an abrupt end to my burgeoning performance career, years too soon. […]

Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia by Anita Heiss (editor), Black Inc 2018. I picked this book up because I was researching a psychological thriller, to be set in central NSW in a region with a substantial Indigenous population. After agonising about authenticity, appropriation and the possibility of causing hurt and harm, I decided to include an Indigenous woman as a key character in my story. As a Melbourne-based psychiatrist, I hadn’t worked closely with the Indigenous community, with the exception of a research project twenty years ago which took me to Townsville and Palm Island, and an occasional patient or […]

The Present At the Byron Writers festival in August I was on author panels with Trent Dalton (Boy Swallows Universe), Jarrah Dundler (Hey Brother) and Elise Valmorbida (The Madonna Of The Mountains). I read their books for professional reasons, figuring that if I were going to be on a panel where the discussion would centre on their books then it was only fair that I read them. I enjoyed all three books very much, but had a particular soft spot for Elise’s book which is set in northern Italy through the Fascist period and the war. It’s a part of […]

Dead Girls by Alice Bolin Is it okay to hate a book, if only because you didn’t write it first? Alice Bolin’s Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession slaps with the brand of critical analysis and self-deprecating memoir I’ve been writing and not writing for the past year. That’s not to say that humanity only has room for one book about pop culture’s penchant for commodifying women’s bodies, hot and cold. It’s just that Bolin’s collection is so sorely true, so sharp and current, why shouldn’t I just give up? In the book’s opening quartet of essays, the […]

Each year, I record the books I read in the back of my diary. When a friend asks for reading recommendations for, say, a kayaking holiday in Vancouver, I just photograph the page and offer the numbers specific to that person’s taste and to a kayaking holiday in Vancouver: 2, 4, 17, 26 etc. No other words needed. This year I’ve recommended West by Carys Davies a lot. Also Robbie Arnott’s Flames, Jane Rawson’s From the Wreck, and Madame Zero by Sarah Hall. I get heaps of book recommendations from people on Twitter. A person I’ve never met says: ‘You […]