My first book was yellow. On its cover was a bumblebee and the words ‘All the best things in the world begin with a b.’ I look at the words, and the words make sense, and suddenly the book springs into story. All these years later I can open that book’s hard yellow covers and I am six years old, alone at night, and making a discovery that will mean I am never alone again. There is a boy, there is a butterfly, thand there is a bumblebee. They all begin with a b, they are all found in the […]

The announcement of a grant of half a billion dollars to the Australian War Memorial for a massive program of extensions has reignited the long-smouldering controversy about frontier conflict. Despite criticism reaching back many years the memorial has steadfastly refused to admit Aboriginal warriors into the shrine, which director Brendan Nelson calls the soul of the nation. His excuse is that the relevant legislation prohibits such an innovation. This has always been a debatable assertion and rather misses the point. If Dr Nelson wanted to embrace frontier conflict he could ask for a minor amendment to the legislation, which could be […]

‘There was a lot of talk in the office about annihilation,’ shouted Gretchen above the overexcited din of a basketball game, filmed in a college town in the American Midwest and beamed into the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The Warriors had just opened up a 14-point lead as she recounted her experiences of a recent accidental air raid warning in Hawaii that had presaged nuclear attack from Pyongyang. How had she reacted during the few minutes when nuclear destruction brought by an in-bound North Korean missile had seemed possible, I asked? ‘I texted my family to tell them I […]

The public housing residents of Waterloo, New South Wales, draw on two incidents to describe their relationship with their landlord. The first is the use of the phrase ‘I am excited’ opening a letter announcing the demolition of their homes. The second is the decision to buy Homebrand sausages, Homebrand white bread and Homebrand tomato sauce for a barbecue ‘consulting’ public housing residents about this demolition. Sometimes the incidental things are the most revelatory. The government’s choices around this decision—the decision to announce it to residents at the same time as to the general public, the use of the phrase […]

Rewriting the mythology of Western civilisation Scepticism is as much the result of knowledge, as knowledge is of scepticism. To be content with what we at present know, is, for the most part, to shut our ears against conviction; since, from the very gradual character of our education, we must continually forget, and emancipate ourselves from, knowledge previously acquired; we must set aside old notions and embrace fresh ones; and, as we learn, we must be daily unlearning something which it has cost us no small labour and anxiety to acquire. —Theodore Alois Buckley’s introduction to Alexander Pope’s translation of […]

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Confronting. Controversial. Unrelenting. Edgy. When The Lebs, the second and most recent novel by Michael Mohammed Ahmad, was published a year ago it was amid a flurry of these adjectives from (mostly) white reviewers and interviewers. One descriptor that did not fly so readily from their keyboards, however, was ‘coming of age’. In film and literature, a coming-of-age story is one in which the protagonist makes the transition from adolescence to early adulthood, much as Ahmad’s Bani Adam does by the end of the novel. Just why The Lebs didn’t seem to fit this bill is embedded in the pages […]

I think about Eurydice Dixon when I walk home at night. I think about her rape and murder and the conversation that emerged in the wake of it, both good and bad. ‘Unfortunately, evil acts like this do occur …’ In a press conference given by Victoria Police, this oblique platitude was the only reference to the crime. The rest of the discourse was full of the impotent pragmatism that dwells on victim’s choices—women were told to ‘take responsibility for their personal security’, exercise ‘situational awareness’ and crucially, if they had a mobile phone, be sure to ‘carry it’. Like […]

I am a good Chinese girl. To many, I will always be a good Chinese girl. Girl, because society can’t help but infantilise women. Chinese—not Malaysian Chinese, because Malaysia is just a nearby holiday destination. Not Australian, because I don’t have the right skin colour to be ‘Australian’. And good, because I am part of the model minority. Originating in America in the 1960s, the phrase ‘model minority’ was first used to describe Asian Americans during the ascension of the civil rights movement there. At that time, both phrase and myth were weaponised against the African American population in an […]

Of the few Indigenous Australian languages still spoken as a first language, Warlpiri is one of the most alive. My people have an earthy, often self-deprecating sense of humour. Their profound linguistic awareness leads them to invent hilarious jokes about their constant mispronunciation of English, and other Aboriginal languages, as well as the mispronunciation of Warlpiri by tin-eared English-speakers.

On 31 October 2017 the Australian Government officially closed down the Manus Island immigration detention centre in Lombrum and ordered PNG authorities to evict the incarcerated refugees. The detainees refused to move to another prison camp and demanded freedom. A 23-day siege began with water, food, electricity and other services discontinued or shut off. The following dialogue between Behrouz Boochani and Omid Tofighian through Whatsapp voice/text messaging communicates the anticipation and various acts of resistance leading up to the closure and the articles written and translated with urgency during that period.   17 October 2017 Behrouz: They’re going to close […]

At first glance there is not much that connects street artist Banksy, American author Thomas Pynchon, American photographer Vivian Maier and authors J.D. Salinger and Elena Ferrante. But in their own distinct ways each of these individuals are or were escape artists. They either made a deliberate attempt to avoid publicity and the limelight or simply were not interested in being interviewed or even seen in public. Fame did not interest them. But society is continually interested in them. In 2016, when Ferrante’s true identity was ‘unmasked’ by Italian journalist Claudio Gatti, a justified furore subsequently arose around the deliberate attempts […]