Memoir

I collect Marys as reminders that I am part of a gender that perseveres in all kinds of circumstances ...

So, who is a Palestinian? A Palestinian is a person who says, I’m Palestinian. Khalas ...

Performing for kids is one of the things Jewelz does for a living—another is working as a death doula ...

It’s winter 2016 and your year began with severe illness, an abusive relationship, moving interstate, and now deep depression in your cold new Melbourne sharehouse ...

‘The signature to a life requires the search for a method.’ —Adrienne Rich, 2011 After my second book came out, I was asked to do a lecture on ‘Writing as Method’. I wasn’t sure what the term meant but I ...

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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 ...