The space for broad-based discourse is shrinking. In its place, we have siloed online communities.

What’s a literary journal for?

Change is slow. And Australia is even slower. This is a central crisis of the colonised nation-state.

As a nation, we are quite selective in what we remember and what we forget.

Whitlam, for his faults, refused to yield on progressive ideals. Instead of celebrating what he achieved, we treat it as a cautionary tale.

More than fifty years ago, Gough Whitlam used heroic advocacy to change Australian society. We must follow his example.

The word ‘woke’ is tiresome. More though, it’s a cliché that terminates our ability to debate. In Australian civic discourse, and internationally, the word is used to demarcate lines of battle. In 2025, Australian politicians are hoping it can turn a motley coalition of voters into the government’s base. Woke emerged as a concept in US Black culture in the 1920s to signal people who were aware of how the system trapped them in disadvantage. Later, progressives borrowed (stole?) the label to celebrate that awareness more broadly, with regard to varied subjects like human rights for minorities, women, workers and […]

Writing a piece on the energy in the Trump administration is like trying to write fiction in the apocalypse: you can’t create anything more insane than the real world. Every time I write about something batshit they are up to, they end up doing something even wilder. It’s like trying to catch bullets in your bare hands. Every day, every hour, every minute they do weirder shit—and, no doubt, that between when I finish this and when it is published, it will have gotten even worse.