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I am a migrant on stolen land—this I cannot escape, this I don’t want resolved. To understand my family’s move to safety as the displacement of others is a lifelong project. I am not in the market for fantasies of innocence, I studied history. Giving up the idea that I am on the margins though—that’s hard.

I joined the public service in the mid 1960s. The purpose of this essay is to review and reflect upon the changes that have taken place since in the way we are governed, and to hazard some thoughts about whether the way we are governed now is fit to meet the challenges we face. The story that emerges is one of governments wrestling with the relationship between government and the public service, especially the relationships between ministers and their department heads, the services to be provided to ministers to enable them to discharge their ministerial functions, and the relationships between […]

Dang, sorry. This is only available to a Meanjin subscriber. But we can fix that. It’s just $100 for a print subscription, $5 for a monthly digital subscription, and $50 for an annual digital subscription. DIGITAL PRINT

In her 2015 Sydney Review of Books article ‘What the essayist spills’, Maria Tumarkin draws a clear distinction between ‘confessor’ and ‘essayist’. The first is a writer who spills everything for an audience primed to receive and ‘learn’ from it. The latter sees their material as an entry to wider discussions; ‘smashing the bottom from underneath the author’s experiences’ and steering…

Every now and then, perhaps every few weeks, I end up asking how you feel about time. It baffles you, this strange question—it baffles me too. Perhaps that’s why I keep asking you—maybe it’s not that I’m searching for an answer that I cannot find, it’s that I don’t want to be alone in my confusion. It feels as if the past decade, but particularly this year, time has receded in a tide, never to break back on land. I don’t know where I’ve been.

In the six years I’ve been writing about domestic abuse, I’ve lost count of the horror stories victim-survivors have told me about police. I’ve also sat with many who say a cop saved their life. Maybe that’s why I can’t get this quote out of my head. It’s from an anonymous senior sergeant in rural Victoria, who was surveyed for an academic study on policing attitudes: ‘Family violence is … a love or hate thing,’ they said, ‘[police officers] are either fine to do it or they hate it. Because it’s a grey area and it’s not that fun like […]

Beyond this desk there’s an unbroken chain of words reaching back 80 years. It’s something to sit with; a study in persistence, perhaps in the insistent necessity of written ideas…

I didn’t invent the White Australia Policy. White people invented it. And they invented it to distinguish themselves from Aboriginals, Africans, Asians, Arabs and Pasifikas. And they didn’t invent it to distinguish themselves in the negative; only in the positive, with greater rights to the stolen land on which they gathered than the rest of us.

The history of the future is written in its past, aka our present, just as the history of the past is written in its future. So the sin of presentism definitely applies to this wee essay. But I can start with some things that are known knowns (thanks to Donald Rumsfeld for such clarity). It’s 30 years since I last published in Meanjin, and more than 50 since my father did (Miller, 1967). So nothing Oedipal there. His contribution was part of a critical celebration of the magazine’s first quarter-century. Occurring just after his return to Australia, it was a […]

Rosemary Kayess broke her neck when she was 20, causing her to become a quadriplegic, able to move her head but unable to eat and drink unassisted. Now, at 57, she is associate director of the Disability Innovation Institute, chairperson of the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and lectures in international law at the University of New South Wales. With other panellists she appeared on a recent edition of Q&A on ABC TV discussing loneliness. The chair, Hamish MacDonald, asked her how she felt when she heard discussions through this pandemic about critical care triaging systems. […]

In 2020 Australia’s airports are empty and run on skeleton crews; aircraft are parked on tarmacs across the country, the border is shut to all but returning Australians and well-connected millionaires. We’re about to experience life in a low-migration scenario—lower demand, lower housing prices, lower growth, lower congestion—at least until the pandemic ends.