For most of my life I have lived in large old country houses, where I collected and restored furniture and effects obtained at deceased-estate clearing sales. I have always liked order but am more flexible on filth. As a child, God stood over our Methodist household threatening violence to children who were careless or wasteful. Adults paid me to impose order on pantries, spare rooms and overflowing sheds because, à la Marie Kondo, it sparked joy in me, and it was useful. It rarely involved throwing things out. Over the last few decades, privileged, westerner consumers have changed their patterns […]

Of all the moonlit, chocolate-dipped-strawberries, rose-petals-on-the-linen ways to observe Valentine’s Day, the celebration that most piques my interest are the happenings at the El Paso Zoo in Texas. In a seasonal marketing gimmick to outshine all others, the zoo is giving the cheated on, the abandoned, the bitter, twisted and vaguely vengeful among us the opportunity for a V-Day purge. If you message the zoo with the name of your ex, they’ll name a cockroach after the bastard and feed it to a meerkat. As the meerkat destroys the insect incarnation of your erstwhile lover, a kind of crunching catharsis […]

Reviewers like to say that this or that work of art is ‘demanding’, but unless they’ve watched Christian Marclay’s The Clock, they don’t know what they’re talking about. The Clock makes demands beyond any art I’ve ever come across: it demands the viewer be awake all night; it demands unwavering attention, hour after hour; it imposes hunger, thirst, exhaustion, an uncomfortably full bladder. Twenty-four hours of movie with no beginning and no end, The Clock is a strange sort of masterpiece. To see it, I’ve got out of a perfectly good bed at six a.m., three a.m. and 12.18 a.m. […]

Thinking back to early 2018, ‘gaslighting’ meant little to me. It was the term de jour in online arguments; a word I saw thrown around on social media when people got into disagreements. I figured ‘gaslighting’ meant when people disagreed with what you’re saying, or when they tried to minimise your experience. The true extent of gaslighting, its impact on my own lived experience, became clear to me one day in late June, when I discovered my former partner’s extensive lies and deception; the foundation of my recent years was coming undone. It felt as if my world was crumbling, […]

The terms of reference for the current Banking Royal Commission are to investigate malpractices in financial institutions. The institutions under investigation are the Banks and the Superannuation Funds. Neither functions without a battery of other institutions: accountants, actuaries, auditors, rating agencies, lawyers, lobbyists and Business Schools. Furthermore, all those of auxiliaries are directly engaged in Stock Exchanges, Foreign Exchange and Futures markets. Many are global enterprises. In particular, the banks are locked into foreign banks for fund-raising. An interrogation of malpractices by banks and retail super funds is not even half-way towards unraveling how these institutions operate if their supporting […]

Over the past year I have watched my fellow doctors find their voice, notably sparked by Dr Sara Townend, an unsung hero who managed to get all of her professional colleges and the AMA to finally crank up the pressure on the politicians in Canberra. This resulted in a shift in public attitudes, and the Kids Off Nauru campaign has resulted in nearly all of the children on Nauru leaving the small island that had been their world for the past five years. A victory for decency certainly, and seeing motions being passed in the senate to try and change […]