The image of Australia is of a man in an open-necked shirt solemnly enjoying an ice cream. His kiddy is beside him. —Donald Horne. Have we done with the man in the open-necked shirt solemnly enjoying his ice cream? It would appear not. For a long time he was there in the flesh, as real as you or me.

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Narratives can haunt. What haunts our memories is more than images and words, but the actual world of experience behind them. —Arthur Kleinman I am looking at a film of an old man sitting in an armchair being interviewed by a disembodied male voice with an Australian accent. The old man is in his seventies and has receding white hair. He has an unmistakeably Semitic nose and his name is Szymon, which the viewer cannot miss since the interviewer keeps falling over the pronunciation. Szymon was my father and the video is the recording of an interview for a documentary that, […]

I like to see life with its teeth out. —Janet Frame My mother kept the baby teeth of her four children, my two sisters, my brother and me, in four small glass jars. She called the teeth ‘milky denticles’ and she had them tucked behind the large Turkish džezva, a long-necked coffee pot made of brass. This pot, together with small demitasse coffee cups, was a centrepiece of the vitrine, a glass cabinet in the living room on the top floor of our house. The teeth jars sat there from the mid 1970s until early June 1992 when a mortar […]

Trauma is a strange bedfellow. In its company you binge on adrenaline and will anyone to have a go. Don’t push in front of me. Don’t mess with me. Go on, mess with me.

Content warning: sexual assault A response to Shannon Burns on childhood sexual assault In the late 1980s, around the age of 11, I hit puberty with the force of an 80-tonne road train. I became the third-tallest child in my primary school and grew exquisitely painful adult-sized breasts whose entire surface was livid purple scar tissue. When I started high school, at 11 going on 12, I looked old enough to be allowed to buy cigarettes at the milk bar down the street for the year-ten boys who were old enough (the smoking age was then 16) but didn’t look […]