Literature is a reflection of the culture that spawns it. As a queer teenager growing up in Sydney’s outer western suburbs, my access to literature was limited to the books we had at home—airport novels—and the small collection at my high school library, mostly classics. So far as I knew, old white men wrote books; Ruth Park, Ursula Le Guin, Virginia Andrews and Danielle Steele were the exceptions. When I held up the mirror of literature, I did not see myself in it. The library had no YA section so I occasionally shoplifted Sweet Valley High books from Target. I […]

My dog’s ears are all over the place. They flop over his head in a haphazard semaphore. It’s hard to imagine how they could serve any practical purpose. My dog’s ears are a dog’s breakfast. Yet sometimes, at unexpected moments, they prick up and turn in rare symmetry towards something: something unknown and unknowable to me, beyond my ken.

Progress is never permanent, will always be threatened, must be redoubled, restated and reimagined if it is to survive. —Zadie Smith When I was 18, my 30-something boss took us out for ‘team drinks’. If you’ve ever worked in a city office block, you’ve probably been out for team drinks: it’s where someone whips out the company credit card and you do shots on a Thursday night and vomit in a Myer cubicle while someone you only know from work holds your hair back. In my experience. On this particular night we grabbed a booth in the dark corner of […]

‘We’re doing the VCE this year.’ Around this time of year you quite often hear parents say that. (You might be saying it yourself.) For those outside the magic circle, I should explain that the VCE is the Victorian Certificate of Education, Victoria’s name for the senior secondary certificate of education awarded to Australian students who have completed high school. The SSCE is called the Higher School Certificate (HSC) in NSW, the QCE in Queensland, and so on. Except in the more enlightened ACT, the award of this certificate is heavily dependent on one final, external exam at the end […]

O God of Earth and Altar O God of earth and altar, bow down and hear our cry, our earthly rulers falter, our people drift and die; the walls of gold entomb us, the swords of scorn divide, take not thy thunder from us, but take away our pride. —G.K. Chesterton The words have a startlingly modern ring to them, and some might find it surprising to stumble across them in the English Hymnal. But for the hymnal, first published in 1906, modernity was the point. This was the Anglican Church renewing itself at the start of the twentieth century—today […]

Being a kid in 1960s Clayton, a suburb on Melbourne’s outskirts, was to be a kid in a time and a place that was carefree and conventional. Backyard cricket, homemade lemonade, terry-towelling everything. Dee Sadikay was this kid. Clayton-bred and conventionally carefree. But Dee was also a kid burdened by a secret. Dee had seen a plane shaped like a 20c piece. No tail, no noise, no pilot. On 6 April 1966 Dee was at Clayton South Primary School, two kilometres down the road from Westall Primary and Westall Secondary. It was recess when Dee spotted a disc in the […]

No-one does identity politics quite like resentful white men—all the while bemoaning it. In a blaze of teeth-whitening Milo Yiannopoulos arrived on our shores late last year. With more swing than Tarzan and undoubtedly more leopard print, he beat his depilatoried chest pleading for riots. His provocations were so predictable that a refresher on his insults is already required. He dismissed Aboriginal art as laughably ‘crap’ and coming from ‘inferior’ people who failed to invent the wheel. (Yiannopoulis omitted to mention that the aerodynamic lift of the boomerang’s airfoil shape together with the gyroscopic precession associated with its rapid spin make […]

One man’s downfall, #MeToo, and the rising up   When I was ten years old a man at least six times that number pulled me against him and pressed his hot, wet lips against mine. It was New Year’s Eve, a rare night on which us kids were allowed to join the revelry of the grown-ups downstairs, and the clock had just tipped us into 1992. Around me adults swirled, jovial and drunk, as I had seen them become so many times before while peering down at our living room from between the shadowed rungs of our upstairs bannister. Between […]

For the first few years after its invention, the laser was described as ‘a solution in search of a problem’. Now lasers are everywhere. They’re used to scan barcodes, remove tumours and analyse chemical compounds. But initially no-one was quite sure what to do with this new technology. We have the opposite problem today. We’re facing down a wall of radical inventions and innovations that we can easily imagine will transform our world. Take autonomous cars—the most public and obvious change that is now just years, perhaps months away. Autonomous vehicles are already being used across our transport networks. Driverless […]

The street was lined by violet. The beautiful monotone corridor emerged at around the same time each year, lingered for a few days then disappeared. The jacaranda trees remained prominent, but robbed of the ephemeral purple blanket spread across the footpath, the street returned to its usual status as a pleasant rather than breathtaking vista. A stroll down the purple corridor offered evidence of man-made, as well as natural, beauty. The dwellings on the street held a certain quality. Many were run-down, some had taken on a shanty-like appearance, while others had been well maintained—but none seriously challenged the harmony […]

When she says, ‘we run this motha, girls’, Beyoncé may be onto something. The Young-Girl is everywhere in popular culture: there are the nostalgia-draped girls of Stranger Things, Riverdale and Twin Peaks; the pop-punk stylings of the Broad City girls; Lena Dunham’s Girls; the Gilmore duo; the never-ending parade of international bestselling books with one titular aspect in common; the virginity-obsessed Jane the Virgin and her more anxious British counterpart Tracey from Chewing Gum. Yet we can’t claim actual flesh-and-blood girls are any more likely to run the world because of this apparent ubiquity. This is not to say that the […]

Late in 2017, just weeks after successfully negotiating the return of Albert’s copyright to the Namatjira family, helping to set up the Namatjira Trust and bringing Big hART’s eight-year Namatjira Project to a conclusion, producer Sophia Marinos and I found ourselves in tears as we penned an obituary for our dear friend Kumantjai L Namatjira,* who had been so instrumental to the campaign. It began with these words: It is with great sadness that we share the passing of Kumantjai L Namatjira Lankin. Born in 1951 in the lovely country of Raggatt’s Well near Glen Helen in the West MacDonnell Ranges, […]