It could not have been more ugly. A grey Remembrance Parks no-brand urn. To cater for/cancel out all tastes. Trying so hard not to be what it so clearly was. Modern death is all about discretion. Your name and d.o.d. were printed underneath.

‘If I don’t fall down and die it’s safe to eat it.’ Vera Deacon, 91 and impeccably dressed in a floral blouse and slim black skirt, tucks into the cake she has baked for our afternoon tea. It’s a carrot cake, made with pineapple, spices, brown sugar and walnuts. ‘I feel a bit better about it when it’s got things like carrot in it.’ Vera has cleared us a small space, rearranging the books, maps, letters and annotated newspaper articles on her dining table, in the still-working-class suburb of Stockton. On the walls hang framed historical maps of Newcastle, ranging from the […]

The bills were mounting up when an email slid quietly into my inbox: a mutual friend had given my name to a publisher. Was I interested in ghostwriting a memoir? The book’s subject was a community arts worker. The name rang a bell. At the time I was writing my first novel while scraping by as a freelance journo and a research assistant. My credit card was maxed out. A concentrated chunk of work, with a decent pay cheque, held practical appeal. The catch (or so I thought) was that I’d have just 11 weeks to write the memoir while working […]

Donald Trump has disrupted the world in so many ways that it is understandable his impact on the literary arts has been overshadowed. And fair enough too given that his actions have taken the world closer to nuclear war than at any time since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. An impact he has undoubtedly had, though, as his rise to the American presidency prompted Tony Schwartz, the ghostwriter of Trump’s 1987 memoir The Art of the Deal, to step forward and reveal just how much art was required to make Trump look like a consummate deal-maker. An experienced journalist before […]

Content warning: deals with suicide and depression.   If you drive down what was once ‘the old coast road’ that winds through the unravelling neo-suburbia of Cockburn, shadowed by McMansions and signs offering community and garage space, then on past the hold-outs of Hamilton Hill’s light-industrial district, and you glide to a stop at the traffic lights beside the old car wash that signals the entry point to South Fremantle, you’d have driven a rough reversal of the route C.Y. O’Connor took on 10 March 1902 when he rode his horse into the Indian Ocean and committed suicide by shooting himself […]

To have committed every crime but that of being a father. —Emil Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born   In the very early hours of an otherwise unmemorable day in autumn 2007, I decided that I would never have children. I’d recently committed to studying a seemingly unlimited supply of material—first-person accounts (or testimony), history, philosophy, fiction and poetry—focused on the Holocaust, as research for an ill-fated PhD thesis. Reading and thinking about that material, day and night, left me struggling to sleep. I didn’t have nightmares; instead, I’d stop breathing, or imagine that I’d stopped breathing, at the moment […]

Everything I’m about to tell you is the truth. Or at least a version of very real lies I have told myself. All I remember is the rain. It’s grey. I’m hunched over in my car, illuminated by my iPhone screen, furiously googling. It’s only 4 pm but it feels like nighttime. Melbourne winters can do that. ‘I’ve been meaning to tell you,’ I mutter in Mandarin, repeating after my Google Translate. I had been practising for weeks. My Mandarin, the first language I learnt, is forever trapped at a grade two level. Fine for important tasks like ordering food […]

For me, inspiration is everywhere, including in the ordinary. I don’t have a muse. I’m not sure if I quite believe they exist. The drive to write, for me, is not a mysterious existential urge. Inspiration is literally everywhere. It was in my preschool playground in suburban Sydney; in my parents’ migration to Australia in 1976; in the 2011 Tottenham riots, which spread like wildfire through the working-class suburbs of England; in the liner notes on the back of the records in my father’s collection; in a Test match played 60 years ago by the West Indian cricket team; in […]

Dad took home a whole lot of Mum’s clothes when we emptied out her room at the rest home. In his downstairs bedroom, where the curtains are always drawn, sagging cardigans hang alongside trackpants and a few musty salwar kameez. The sarees are presumably still at the bottom of the dresser in his bedroom upstairs, but it’s hard to know for sure. We try to avoid going into the house. Dad, 94, worries we’ll steal their things. The wonder of mum’s sarees used to unfold on Sunday mornings, when she draped one of the impossibly long pieces of cloth from […]

Sabiha’s story had come out of her and been carried to me; now, after I had lived in it jealously myself for a while, I would carry it to others, and in the end would let it go and be done with it, like all the other stories I have carried. —Alex Miller, Lovesong   2010 I’ve just devoured Alex Miller’s book Lovesong. Even more than the love affair between John and Sabiha, I’m haunted by the narrator Ken’s dilemma—the question of whether he should follow his impulse to write a book about the couple’s extraordinary story. John tells Ken […]

In the European spring of 2015 I was on tour in Paris with an Australian dance company. Three nights before our première at the Théâtre National de Chaillot, we were invited to a cocktail reception at the ninth-floor penthouse atop the Australian Embassy, residence of our ambassador to France. His name was Stephen Brady. He had a photograph of Tony Abbott on his wall, but he was gay, and early in his assignment that had been an issue for him—his partner Peter had had to stay in the car when they’d greeted then prime minister Abbott at the airport. We arrived […]

‘What a fucking waste of time.’ The marine who said this was talking to me, to the desert around us, to himself. There had been a flurry of activity when the helicopter arrived, in a howl of dust and kerosene. The ambulance had rumbled by, the driver’s face tight as they drove the casualty to the main entrance of the hospital, and then some muted shouts as the broken man was wheeled inside the faded green tent. We had hung around at the smoking area, not wanting to be the first people to go back inside, but not wanting to […]