May 2020 The email notification startles me. It is from Virgin Airlines. Get ready to fly soon. When I click into the notification, Virgin—an airline that has entered voluntary administration—tells me that my direct flight to Tasmania has been changed to three separate flights spread over eight hours. I will be flying from Brisbane to Sydney, then from Sydney to Melbourne, then, after quite a wait, from Melbourne to Hobart. The problem is I thought I had cancelled the flight. We are still in lockdown. Borders are closed, travel is restricted to within 50 kilometres. After a long and complicated call to […]

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I’m here: Everest, Camp II, plus about 40 metres. At my feet, a crampon gripped the ice in perfect 12-point French-technique position; exemplary style except for the fact that it lacked an attached foot. Crampon failure can be lethal, but on this slope, not much steeper than a black ski run, it rated only nuisance value. I sighed, and slumped to the snow for the awkward asana and cold-fingered fumbling required to reattach it. It took a few seconds for what I saw to register: a dawning disaster. The sole of my right boot had delaminated. It flapped off the […]

I was seven and had just finished swimming practice at Sutherland Shire Leisure Centre. There I stood in the shower rooms—brown, nervous at the sight of so much white flesh, and very embarrassed. Mum and I were looking for an empty shower stall when I saw her: a broad-shouldered Anglo woman, naked, tall and strong, with pale skin that had scorched an angry red from the steam. At first she seemed relaxed, easy. Then she looked at me and froze. Her lips pursed and her nostrils flared. She looked at Mum. ‘He shouldn’t be here. He’s making us uncomfortable with […]

I’ve worked as a teacher of English as a foreign and second language for many years and know how to teach the difference between the word ‘house’ and the word ‘home’. I teach that the former is a structure made from concrete or bricks, mortar or wood, while home is a conceptual idea of place and belonging.

My GP thought I might be pregnant but said that my hormone level was too low for my dates. At the ultrasound I told the sonographer I was seven weeks pregnant.

‘You can’t be,’ she said, using her head to point at the screen. There was a black-and-white pattern, a snowstorm, and somewhere to the side a black hole. ‘It’s just a gestational sac; there’s no heartbeat.’

I’ve been thinking about bisexuality. Identity, visibility, queerness, truth. I’ve been thinking about these things as I read and talk, as I work and watch and sleep. It’s an attempt to come home to myself, to call back the parts I have been lonely without. On a visit to Melbourne for a festival, I experience anew the small thrill of thankfulness and determination that for me comes with being seen as queer; with being seen. I’m surprised to find my favourite thing about the fortnight I spend there is that in Melbourne I am new to everyone I meet. I am […]

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In 1962 the Dutch manufacturing company Philips first developed the audio cassette in Belgium. Twenty years before this in neighbouring Germany, the Nazis had secretly developed a portable audio recorder that allowed sound to be recorded and played. They called it the Magnetophon. From 1975 to 1990 a very uncivil war raged in Lebanon. Groups fought one another, then fought alongside one another, then fought one another again. At times militias conducted joint operations in one town while exchanging fire in another, like the Royal Rumble spectacle of wrestling where multiple opponents fought one another in the ring. Though wrestling had […]

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Parking is easy when I go to the Morning Owl Café because it’s in the middle of an industrial area. As I walk to the café from my car, I see an overgrown grassy strip between two warehouses. There is nothing in the fenced-off space and it can’t be accessed.

When I was a ten-year-old I started going to The Sun Theatre in Yarraville all the time. It was a big old art deco building that had fallen into disrepair in the previous decades, but around 1997 it was resurrected as a film society. It had an enormous 1000-seat auditorium, one screen, and barely anyone ever went. The film society only showed films on the weekends, mostly black-and-white stuff. Films such as Rififi (Jules Dassin, 1955) and The Asphalt Jungle (John Huston, 1950). I saw Le Cercle Rouge (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1970) and soaked it up like a cinematic sponge.