Essays

Perhaps the existential risk Creative Australia faces is its own pusillanimous lack of faith ...

What is a revolution, exactly? Where and how does it begin, and, perhaps more importantly, how does it end? ...

We need different ways of doing things. They don’t have to be new: we have tens of thousands of years of human knowledge to draw on when it comes to thriving on this continent ...

There’s a reason why historians and researchers are running against time to preserve the diverse narratives of Chinese history in Australia ...

Since the 1990s we still haven’t legally learnt to live with our physical environment ...

In humans and animals, abortion is a survival technique ...

These people don’t know what art is, so they will never truly be able to kill it. Not in the way they think, anyway ...

There are certain things I grew up knowing so intimately that I never recall having learned them. One of the deepest of these, the oldest, is the idea that to express too much emotion, to be too much, is ...

Disgust comes from the Latin word distaste, meaning to dislike or disrelish. In her book That’s Disgusting: Unravelling the Mysteries of Repulsion (W.W. Norton, 2012), Rachel Herz describes physical disgust as ‘a scientific amalgamation of terror management and the avoidance ...

I am in a constant state of disappointment. I am disappointed in myself for not completing this task or that. I am disappointed in my children, for similar reasons. I am disappointed in old friends for their fading politics. Mostly ...

It is a hot Saturday afternoon during Sydney’s Mardi Gras when I talk to Wendi Carroll over Zoom. The veteran personal trainer and fitness instructor has just taught a barre class in a sequinned rainbow singlet and matching cat ears ...

A Coalition senator was in the middle of a debate about foreign policy when he let a fundamental truth drop. ‘Cognitive science indicates a thing called the illusory truth effect—that if you say it often enough, people will start to ...

It was not Anthony Albanese’s beach house we resented, but the intergenerational inequity his government is unwilling to address. ‘As a prime minister, I earn a good income. I understand that I’ve been fortunate. But I also understand what it’s ...

There is always an appetite. It is now the gambling corporations that seek to mould everyone in their own image. They might yet be reined in ...

I’m looking idly at a bright patch on the ground when I see it. A moving image of the sun and sky and clouds, cast down on the rough concrete floor. I’ve read about the phenomenon of a pinhole projection ...