The end of a jetty is a nowhere place; no longer on land but not quite at sea. With a glance in the right direction, even time vanishes. Is that a ship on the horizon? White sails catching the winds. Matthew Flinders on deck, scanning distant land. There’s a whiff of smoke blending with the aroma of salty air. Looking back towards the shore, shadowy figures cook fish in coals, while children search rock pools for mussels. Imagination runs wild in nowhere places.

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Last Days of the Anthropocene Last summer started early in Australia. In November a heatwave struck northern Queensland, pushing temperatures to record heights in many places. In Cairns the temperature reached 42.6 degrees, more than five degrees higher than the previous record for November. Over 12 days fire crews attended more than 1200 fires, including devastating blazes in rainforest areas that had always been regarded as natural firebreaks. In parts of Queensland, fire conditions were designated catastrophic, the first time the rating—which was only created in 2009—had been used in the state. November’s record temperatures in Queensland were only the […]

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Our lives are made up of different arcs—love, family, politics, geography, time and dislocation among them. One of the arcs that has exercised me most is my wondering about post-colonising Australia and its myths and mythmaking propensities, also about my family’s. Although my childhood was spent mostly in Melbourne, it was punctuated by our frequent pilgrimages to the promised land (aka South Australia) and inflected by the awareness that Melbourne was exile to my South Australian mother—feelings I do not share. She often reminded us of our ‘free settler’ heritage, and of our roots in the colonial era, no more […]

Behrouz Boochani’s prize-winning book No Friend but the Mountains is a genre-breaking metanarrative produced under extraordinary circumstances. The response to it has been deep and will likely last. But I find that the attention that the Kurdish writer pays to the natural world is all too often subsumed under other layers.

A word is a small mystery and ‘All written work’, Jane Hirshfield tells us, ‘retains some trace, however faint of [the] initial sanctity of the Word.’ Celebration of this sanctity or, as Hopkins has it, the inscape of a word, is a hallmark of lyrical poetry and one of the things that draws me to the reading and writing of poetry. In a world dominated by abbreviated communication, by purpose-driven language and weasel words, poetry remains a domain where language’s rich tradition can be feted. I have been exploring language and how it is transformed into the art we call […]

From under a hessian sack a calm, clever face looks through the bars with an air of rumpled bemusement. This shapeless shambles of long, thick hair and leathery skin seems to have accepted her place in the world, even while not quite understanding why she’s in it. Wearing her hessian headscarf, she sits in a Buddha pose, her long powerful arms folded in front of her, and watches the bizarre world of humanity pass her by. The interior monologue of Mollie the orangutan is separated from us by a hundred years and the not inconsiderable language barrier between human and […]