As my 20-year working life at the University of Melbourne was coming to its natural end by teaching for the last time an introductory subject on modern poetry during the first half of 2018, Andrea and I were planning to spend the following four months travelling in the far north of Australia, first crossing the Great Sandy Desert on the Tanami Track up from Alice Springs to revisit a community in that desert where we had lived for most of the past two years, and then crossing and recrossing the area of Western Australia known as the Kimberley, a craggy region of spinifex, boab trees and laterite still sparsely populated and still unforgiving to the unprepared.

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When he left the country, her father’s bones remained. He packed them in a wooden box decoupaged with butterflies. Brian from Ballarat—nature photographer, only friend left in Australia—was happy to give that secret box a home. Over time, he took the bones from their butterflied hiding place and displayed those private things on his mantelpiece with cabinets of dead moths and blurry photos of the sea. The butterflies peeled from the empty bonebox. Dust took to the cracks in its wood. It stopped being a memory and started being an object, so Brian put it in the garage with his […]

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From a young age, names preoccupied me. As a child I didn’t like my name and I would often daydream about changing it. Na’ama (in Hebrew, נעמה) was too heavy for me.

The dank editorial offices of the Bulletin in Sydney’s lower George Street in the 1950s were a daunting place for a raw teenager from the remote south-western Sydney suburb of Revesby. I found myself there in response to an advertisement for a copyholder to the proofreader, and landed the job. Overawed at first by the Dickensian ambience of the offices, I enjoyed a lift in spirits when introduced to the associate editor, Cecil Mann. A grey-haired, balding, bespectacled man in his sixties, seated at a massive oak desk, he looked up from subediting with a steel nib dipped in red ink […]

It all started with a question I should never have asked. ‘So, do you have sexual fantasies?’ I was thinking about how we’d both been reading Nancy Friday’s My Secret Garden, popular once again now in the post–AIDS-is-going-to-kill-us-all nineties, and how liberating it was to share fantasies that were once thought to be taboo. ‘Sure I do,’ Paul says. ‘When you masturbate?’ I ask. I’m 19—and curious. ‘Yeeeah.’ I can tell he’s wondering where this is going. ‘Doing it with two girls, a threesome?’ Paul stops to look at me and traces his long fingers, soft and olive, along my […]