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 […]

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.

On Sunday afternoon I go to a queer speed-dating event in Newtown. The event organisers have teamed with a rescue group, and the proceeds are going towards rehoming stray or neglected pets. I picture huggable puppies with shiny coats and swishing tails but, when I arrive, there are only two rescue dogs in the courtyard: an unaffectionate husky and a brindle bitsa with a scab on his head. The scab breaks and bleeds. I can’t stop looking. As I move from table to table at the sound of the bell, clutching my square of pink paper, I smile at strangers […]

1. The club is down an alley in the top end of city. It looks like an office building or a hotel. There is a doorman in the foyer and a pale-green velvet couch. A clothing rack filled with designer coats. I am wearing an ankle-length blond fur. My auntie kisses me hello, she comments on the fur in a tone that could equally be admonishment or admiration. My sister, when she first saw the coat, asked if it was made out of guinea pigs. The women at the club are all blonde or blow-dried brunette with fine auburn highlights. […]

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 […]

Despite the shoddy disco ball, the mysterious ‘plum wine’ and the melodramatic video clips, I am of the mind that karaoke is good for the soul. My friends and I arrive at Echo Point close to midnight, stumble down the steep staircase, overhear the howling from the other rooms and defiantly think, that won’t be us. Usually, choosing a playlist is easy, and we sing along without much reference to the (often dodgy) lyrics on the screen. But this time it’s different: we struggle to select songs to sing, and there are mumbled pauses in place of previously well-known refrains. […]