I am not allowed a knife, but the National Treasure’s son is. He has a red-handled Swiss Army one that incorporates a can opener, a bottle opener, two saw blades and a detachable pair of tweezers. He shows it to me in his back yard, levering the primary blade out of the handle with his thumbnail. ‘I killed a bird with it last week,’ he tells me.

I consider myself somebody who watches a lot of reality television. Married at First Sight was once my chosen poison, and it is exactly as it sounds: a juicy social ‘experiment’ where, according to objective compatibility standards, two individuals are coupled, only to meet for the first time at the altar.

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How can I tell you where it began? The episodes. The doctor always asks that. ‘Did you take drugs? Did somebody slip you something?’ No. It began with water … a long time ago. With a whisper calling me to gaze deep into it, and then a lifetime of following through. To harness and evade it. To yield without faltering. To fall and rise with its rhythm. To transform, evacuate and fill. To flush and gather. To hold and to keep still without raising the temperature, the pH level, the salinity. To source all nourishment from its constant movement and my […]

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

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

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1. 1988. It is five years after the Ash Wednesday bushfires, which devastated many parts of Victoria, including the coastline of the Eastern Otways. It is also Australia’s Bicentennial year. A man in his early twenties sits on the step of a small fibro bungalow in the Aireys Inlet riverflat, in the thick shade of two towering old macrocarpa pines. Catching the light at his feet is a loamy brocade of russet pine needles, stretching across the yard to the sunroom of his house, one of the few buildings in the town to survive the fires.  In this yard there […]

Click here to access a Spotify playlist of Sevdah music compiled by the author   What I remember most is how yellow his skin was. He looked bilious to me, sickly. The wrinkles on his forehead were sharper because of the yellowish hue, and the way he sat in his wheelchair, hiding his amputated leg with a jacket, he seemed like he needed to get back to bed, not go on a holiday to Bosnia and Herzegovina. Like a typical wog family, we were all at the airport. My parents, my uncles and aunts, my cousins and their children—there were […]

I have always thought of myself as a good person, but I recently began to suspect that I have been kidding myself. What’s more, I began to believe that my failure to be a good person is inseparable from me being a writer—an activity that has taken on the character of something diabolical. I should clarify that I am in the habit of second-guessing myself, of being self-critical. Generally speaking, scepticism rather than faith, self-doubt rather than self-confidence, have served me well. I think of these characteristics—undoubtedly with an obnoxious measure of self-regard—as the foundation for learning, thinking, self-reinvention, and […]