Memoir

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 ...

In 2008 I was invited to travel to the United Nations in New York as part of a delegation of law students from South Australia. I remember getting a phone call from the organiser of the UN trip, and after he ...

Resisting the commodification of our lives can take many forms, and one that feels right to me is beekeeping. I first became interested in beekeeping when a friend I was living with had a hive that he would gently tend ...

We were just starting on our prawn crackers. There was John, a student friend, Ian, now my husband and then boyfriend, and me. ‘That film made me feel so cold,’ Ian said. ‘It’s meant to,’ I replied, with a laugh ...

How do we relate to the body? Recover a sense of dignity and ownership of our body? Acknowledgement: Tony Birch’s question from the Red Room Emerging Writers’ Festival workshop recently made my insides cringe. A week later, this idea emerged ...

It was around 4 pm on Tuesday 12 July 2022. I’d been standing by the window for a while now, looking at the dusk slowly stretch itself on the city ahead, gathering courage to look down. Minutes passed, but my gaze remained ...

In a small coastal town where I know almost no-one, in a hipsterish café that is becoming all too familiar, I am eavesdropping on two women at a neighbouring outdoor table. Their conversation has drifted from kayaking to the pangs ...

In June 2022, after almost 12 years as a judge of the County Court of Victoria, I retired from that position. COVID hastened my departure as the administration of justice became mired in a blur of protocols, RAT tests, WebEx ...

Out on my daily walk, I recently had a thought visiting me that human beings are ants who have to keep moving around and doing things or else they get rusty and die, which reminds me of a poem I ...