Ten Australians were killed on 11 September 2001 when two hijacked Boeing 767 aircraft were flown into the Twin Towers in lower Manhattan and a third plane, a Boeing 757, crashed into the western side of the Pentagon in Washington, DC. Osama bin Laden and the al-Qaeda group he led took sole responsibility for the attacks immediately thereafter. Since then, Australia has maintained a continuous military presence in Afghanistan and then in Iraq, countries that soon became the scapegoats for attacks claimed by bin Laden’s affiliation of non-state actors. Of the 19 hijackers who died alongside their victims on 9/11, […]

What does the use of royal commissions tell us about how our existing governmental structures are working? The immediate answer may be that it shows that those structures—legislative, executive or judicial—are not working as they should. If they were, why would we want or need so many royal commissions? But to answer the question at any deeper level requires some unpacking of the issues. To do that, I need to begin with some basic and obvious observations. First, the legislative and the executive branches of government make all sorts of inquiries and gather all sorts of information without appointing a […]

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Whoo-hoo.
Whoo-hoo.
It is strong but with soft acoustic edges, a voice with the breath of a creature grown in high tree hollows.

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There has been a particular rhetoric in parliament over the past months. Each time a man (or a Liberal Party woman, which is to say a proxy for the patriarchy) has stood in front of cameras to weep, he has delivered a wink and a nod to others like him, through crocodile tears, as to the true nature of the story. Not that a young woman’s life has been irrevocably changed by a man’s actions, but that a poor, silly fella is being taken to task in front of his mates. Look, he seems to say, you know how blokes […]

It seemed I might be washed away. It was mid December, three weeks before rioters stormed the Capitol Building in Washington, DC. I was driving through the Northern Rivers region, just south of the Queensland border, and listening to podcasts by Pete Evans, Australia’s most prominent proponent of QAnon conspiracy theories.

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I’ve been shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards, one of the largest book prize for authors in Australia; the ceremony is on 10 December, and I don’t want to go. You only need to attend one award ceremony to know why they’re best avoided.