Some records become indelibly associated in our minds with a particular time or place or moment, even if we haven’t listened to them for years. For me Darren Hanlon’s Little Chills will always be the sound of moving to Melbourne, when I lived for a year in the middle of Fitzroy and spent every dollar I could spare in Polyester Records; similarly Clap Your Hands Say Yeah’s self-titled album is the sound of moving out of that Fitzroy house and getting the hell away from its dodgy landlord: relief and freedom and joy. Some records, though, have no such concrete […]

Rather than speak about the work of the Financial Services Royal Commission, I want to say something about what seems to be the place Royal Commissions are now being given in our democracy and what that may say about the structures of government.

Americans have massacres down to a fine art now. Round the clock coverage with brutal back to back eyewitness testimonies. Rapid-fire branding of perpetrators with throwaway insults like ‘coward’. Hollow promises made by local authorities that they absolutely positively won’t let this atrocity change us. Ask anyone who’s felt anxious in the middle of a packed cinema, been in the vicinity of a backfiring car, or—in my case this afternoon —within earshot of a dropped chess set on a tiled bar floor, everybody in America is already well and truly changed. For writers, it’s hard to find new ways to […]

Try to slow those pin-balling thoughts down, while shovelling cereal down your throat. Read the news and depress yourself early. Feel guilty about not ringing your mum back. Google every single thought. Today your left armpit is sore. It’s cancer. It’s the end of the world. It’s 7 a.m. Thoughts and anxieties move under your skin like tiny electric currents. It’s like when you were a child lying on the trampoline and rubbing your arms along the black fabric making your arm hair stand on its end. Ripples of static, waiting to burst through your fingertips at any moment.   […]

I’m pretty consistent about not consuming pop culture that I consider politically dodgy. Despite a cover photo of a very mystical-looking John Travolta—captioned with a promised revelation about how he’s raising his son from the dead—I resisted buying this week’s National Enquirer. Equally, I don’t watch reality television because I think, to put it mildly, it maligns all participants. For the same reason I give commercial breakfast TV the widest of berths. That, and it’s largely trash. My righteousness however, completely falls apart when it comes to stories about random objects inserted into vaginas; about medical professionals painstakingly explaining why […]

This vast numbness. Staring out the window of my office. Seeing nothing. Thinking nothing. Trying to resist pouring wine so early in the day, which has become my habit over the months of hard writing. Drinking and crying—especially towards the end. By then, the build-up was intolerable. Sometimes my husband would find a glass tainted deep red as he stacked the dishwasher in the late afternoon. He’d frown: ‘Have you been drinking?’ ‘No,’ I’d say, although this is clearly untrue. In response he didn’t say anything. There was no point. The situation was too fragile and he knew that. On […]

I’m sitting at a communal table in an inner-Melbourne cafe; from the back of the laptop opposite, a row of cryptic-looking cartoon characters—all heads, no bodies—are grimacing and mugging at me with odd-shaped mouths. A woman at the next table says ‘winter is coming’ and her companions laugh, because they are in on the joke. Out on the street, a child waiting for a tram is rendered a mere stick figure under his/her oversized, fluffy head-dress: yellow with big black eyes and rosy cheeks, instantly recognisable as Pikachu the Pokemon. And I wonder: what does it all mean, this ocean […]