We need new voices and unconventional narratives to guard against rigidity. Plots that are distinct and lucid and sometimes boiling hot.

Lying still, Skilton imagines little robotic Pac-Men chomping through the inflamed tissue along her spine. Their mouths, almost half the size of their heads, are gobbling up everything that hurts, swallowing the big glob of shadow she remembers from her X-rays. It’s like they jumped from one of the machines they’ve put in all the pubs and landed in her back, devouring her pulpy tissue like they do ghosts.

Three nights’ accommodation at the Coburg Motor Inn and the prospect of being fast tracked through the system might sound good at a glance. Three nights in a motel may be a treat, but that’s where the support ends – where are people supposed to go next? As for being fast tracked up the public housing list, it would mean displacing people who’ve been waiting on that list already, often for years.

Our lack of debate on drugs is both concerning and a great mystery. After working in the harm-reduction field for over a decade, it seems counterproductive to pigeonhole or view this group through a two-dimensional lens. So often, when drugs are discussed in the public sphere, people who use them are divided off from those who don’t. Following on from this, they are seen as either having ‘given up’ and ‘gotten clean’, or kidding themselves about how much control they have.

With 200 or so people in the auditorium and, after being told that 1 in 4 girls and 1 in 6 boys had experienced sexual abuse as a child, we were asked, as way of demonstrating the fact, to raise a hand if it had happened to us. As hands slowly rose around me, I was in a dilemma.

As I worked my way into the heart of these stories, I realised just how experimental each is: occupying spaces rather than walking linear lines; shifting about the central theme of rumination; full of mood and sensorial responses. These stories dig around in the interior state, mining (to keep with the analogy) the terrain that must be explored when outer forces collide with the individual. A person in a place – as simple and complex as that may be – is always filled with important but normal stuff: the big and the small, the soft and the brutal. These stories are not so much about what happens to us as about what we go through when something does.

Since Pulp Fiction hit the big screen in 1994 it’s been public knowledge that a drug overdose can be reversed. Dramatic as it was, Tarantino captured the abrupt rise of Mia (played by Uma Thurman) from her unconsciousness state, wonderfully. With the needle having been driven through the woman’s chest bone she takes one massive breath as if coming to the top of a body of water.

In Nepal my friend Cliff is trying to keep the wind away. A tiny disease has taken his face. Nothing that won’t repair, he assures me, that a month on the farm won’t fix. But it hurts to be alive. This makes me want to scribe something long-winded and a little brutal to the diplomatic corps.

If the job of fiction is, as many suggest, to flesh out place and cement it socially, physically and culturally in time, then, despite the variety of voice and subject matter, The Best Australian Stories 2011 succeeds with Southern Cross stars.

I quarrelled with myself when I heard a decade ago that Mr Jeff Kennett was starting up an initiative for depression. How could someone who’d closed hospitals and schools in such an unthinking swath in the 1990s – an act that undoubtably sent many into a maudlin state – now come forward as a crusader for depression?

This year marks 50 years of drug prohibition. 50 years since the United Nations adopted the first international treaty to prohibit certain drugs. And, in the spirit of cordiality and a large amount of tongue and cheek, there are those who would like to send their thanks.

I’ve asked some daft questions over the years, naive, childish questions, luckily some of them when I was a child. Recently, however, I was with a friend when his daughter (aged 11) asked him why there were wars in the world. I was fascinated, not only because I had asked this exact question myself at that age, but because it became apparent just how difficult it was for him to satisfy her with an answer.

Last year a friend invited me to what I thought was going to be a lecture by the outspoken feminist Professor Sheila Jeffreys titled: ‘Prostitution in St. Kilda, How The Law Has Failed Sex Workers.’

When I read The Ecstasy Of Owen Muir at the age of 14 what stood out was the opulence, vanity and hypocrisy of the Catholic Church. How, I wondered, had it become so much bigger than its boots? And how had Catholicism become such a schmick business, such a powerful entity, such a gross version (in my mind at least) of the doctrine of Christ?

Equator Wayne Ashton Freemantle Press By the time I got it together to choose a book from Overland’s list to review, I was saying: Send me over whatever you’ve got. Novels, I’ll read novels. When two arrived and I read the first two pages of each, I reluctantly chose the tome, a doorstopper as Phillip […]

We might be forgiven for thinking US and NATO allies are interested in keeping opium cultivation down. However, as Afghan farmers start sowing their next poppy crop, we’d be fools not to recognise how comprehensively embedded the heroin trade is – not only in the war in Afghanistan, but in the funding of terrorism in […]

MWF session: A year for Australian writing This session had it all, from heckling to backslapping, from scholarly commentary to dogged insistence. It was what you could call a well-rounded experience. Funnily, looking back, the topic, based on the publication of the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature and The Cambridge History of Australian Literature, […]

What I can say is, after all my whining, all my shunning and head-in-hands dismay, something’s caught my eye, snared my attention, caused me to contemplate – even with some degree of intrigue – the Federal Election. It’s not just the winning and losing – although that holds its own nail-biting attributions – it’s what’s […]

When a friend told me that two of her children had been homebirthed and she was thinking of having her third in a hospital, it was the answer that a friend of hers gave which made me sit up and take note. ‘What makes you think going to hospital will make the birth any easier?’ […]

Come Inside GL Osborne Freemantle Press Come Inside is a beautifully written, evocative novel told from many perspectives and over a long expanse of time. Despite the possibility of the rather slim volume becoming heavied by such a vast and varying platform, it remains light and unburdened in tone. The reader, or at least this […]

When Freud said he could only ever be expected to return someone to the normal state of unhappiness, no-one, it seems, was paying much attention. I know the average person doesn’t read Freud, but whether preferring to avoid this sort of news or be in outright denial, people these days – often at considerable expense […]

A few days after a woman struggled, Houdini style, to free herself from the back seat of her car, which had been driven by her ex-husband off the end of a jetty in Mordialloc, I happened to be running a group for survivors of domestic violence. All eight of us were impressed and glad to […]

I spend 22 hours a week in one of the busiest needle exchanges in the world. Apart from the obvious statistical data informing me of this, there are two reasons why I know it to be true. Firstly, the existence of a loophole in the laws in Australia allowing us to distribute needles to the […]