Memoir

As the inaugural director of Heide Park and Art Gallery, I knew Sunday and John Reed along with many of the artists who are now collectively called the Heide Circle. Sunday and John had lived at Heide for almost fifty ...

On the last day of a week’s holiday in Berlin, I took the U-Bahn to Hackescher Markt, a shopping neighbourhood in Mitte, the soulless commercial centre of the otherwise culturally verdurous city. In the tourism literature, Hackescher Markt is a kooky ...

She might have said she couldn’t go. Might never have clambered into that car. What shoes was she wearing. There must have been a radio. Cigarettes. Bacardi. Joints. The smell of hair gel. Night wide open. Somebody driving them into ...

Maybe I’ll start playing the saxophone again. I’m on the way to the markets this morning—I am sweating in the shade. I left years ago. It’s my first full turn of the seasons on wulna and gulumoerrgin since. I am ...

Now that I’ve crossed the biblical finish line (three score and ten), I thought it timely to share a brief overview of my life with my family and friends. For my family, my history is your history. For my friends, ...

One of my earliest memories is in the kitchen at our house in West End. I am standing on a little stool making pesto with Mum. Plucking basil leaves from their stalks with great care and munching on toddler-sized fistfuls of pine ...

Nana Myra would sometimes pick up little shiny tektites off the ground on the Nullarbor, and this is one of the first memories I have about beautiful Nana Myra. She could find small pieces of black space that fell through ...

Note: this essay discusses Aboriginal people who are deceased I can’t remember when I became aware the late Allan Aldenhoven was an Aboriginal man, descended by his mother from the Garrwa people of the Northern Territory’s Gulf country. On the ...

Late in 2021, I attended a conference in Tarntanya (Adelaide) organised by a collective of thinkers called Reset Arts and Culture. I listened particularly closely to a panel about labour and the arts that was chaired by Vitalstatistix director Emma ...

The water is the temperature of blood. Under a white-hot sky the swimming hole at Dalhousie Springs is fringed with thick reeds and creamy-flowered, paper-barked Melaleucas. Long-billed corellas on drooping branches watch me float. Slightly saline, a whiff of sulphur ...

breunloch                 dangerous sinking bog that may be bright green and grassy Gaelic brochan                    miry soft ground (literally ‘porridge’) Gaelic carr          ...

You rock up to the emergency department of your local hospital with a jagged piece of bone protruding from your leg. Despite seeing the inside of your body on the outside, the medics who made an oath to do no ...

Inspiration I: Diaphragm flattens When I reflect on my childhood as a dancer, I think about holding my breath. I’d finish a routine with my palms outstretched to an imagined audience and look down to see my forearms, red with ...

I pulled up the tomato plants before they had finished fruiting. The sickly haze of the megafire had lifted only days earlier and now, able to spend time removing weeds and rot for the first time in weeks, I felt ...

‘There’s just one kind of folks. Folks.’ —Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird 1986 The midwives are horrified when they see the size of my head on my way out of the birth canal. I am born with a bright ...