This landscape is not a manifestation of a triumphal struggle over droughts, floods, hardships and Blacks. Rather, it is a refraction of swirling patterns of memory, memorialisation; suppression, repression and revelation; constantly ravelling and unravelling, endlessly struggling to erase or incorporate the Other and soothe the settler pillow.

This month, Rail Tram and Bus Union members in NSW gifted the public free train travel as part of their industrial action against the tightarse Tory State Government. In so doing they showed us that maybe public transport should be free. We already pay for it.

In that moment the audience and Emerald are each abolitionists, and in that moment at the Blacktown drive-in where I witnessed Nope, everyone in that carpark, however briefly, behind their tinted car windows, desired the absence of police, for the police to fuck right off, and in the infinite violent possibilities invoked by Peele, we all wanted to see the police, the dutiful henchmen of capital that they are, gone for good.

The slow cancellation of the future is finally itself undergoing cancellation, disappearing from view. This formerly all-pervasive cultural mood has been robbed of its soporific power by the recent intrusion of queasy possibility, the reminder that, as the old song says, anything could happen and it could be right now.

My friend Trev invited me to count lyre birds with his local community, between Gunai/Kurnai Country and Boonwurrung Country. 'We listen to their songs, and make a map of them.'

The rhetoric of the Universities Accords mirrors the Prices and Income Accords of the 1980s. Then, a deal was forged, theoretically swapping reduced industrial militancy for social services like medicare. The parallel is a red flag, as the accords have long been considered a key turning point in Australia towards neoliberalism.

We wake by still water to what sounds like a large pearl dropped from a great height, it breaks the surface tension with a resonant nasal tock more than a splash. A lake is an inland expanse of standing water. This one is nine hundred and sixty-three metres above sea level.

Palestine student activists are being reprimanded for refusing to take on the coloniser’s truth at a time of supposed decolonising of academia. That is the situation we expect them to navigate without demanding accountability or critical scrutiny.

When we can truly choose, Orr tells us, that is when we know have returned to ourselves. And that’s the beauty of this novel. Though we see the ways a traumatic event can spiral out into the dense fabric of our lives, we also glimpse ways that spiral can resolve in time.

It’s not difficult to grasp the horrific conclusions that might be—and repeatedly have been drawn—from the populationist argument. If the masses truly threaten the well-being of the planet by their existence, would, say, the emergence of a new and deadly pandemic be such a problem? The more morally squeamish of the populationist crowd might not like to follow that train of thought to its ultimate destination but plenty of others will.

I’m biking and I’m biking and this could be anywhere: Audrey Hepburn’s Rome on a mint-bodied Bianchi, or mid-80s Minneapolis on a hot pink BMX, or the Capetown M48 on a drop-bar Momsen. I’m pedalling and I’m pedalling, working my legs to the limits and when I finally catch the truck, I carabiner on, kur-klunk!

I’m not saying wage theft cases are a waste of time—they aren’t. I don’t know what kind of payout I’ll receive, but something’s better than nothing. In a few cases I’ve heard of, back payments for marking have come to as much as ten thousand dollars. And the avalanche of wage theft cases have shone a spotlight on the abusive employment practices that have the become standard practice at universities.

Coined by Julia Serano in her book Whipping Girl, ‘transmisogyny’ describes how trans women experience a heightened and more aggressive version of misogyny. This leads to trans women facing extreme levels of sexualisation, much heavier policing of our femininity and presentation, and greater silencing of our voices.

As a global pandemic joins a long list of catastrophes that have simply become a fact of ordinary life, it seems more urgent than ever to revisit and reimagine the fictions governing the accident. Conditions of debilitation, and the bodies that suffer them, deserve nothing less.

Early internet culture, its openness and penchant for performativity—found on the French Minitel, Tumblr, and even the Buffy chatroom—is innately queer. It is important for us to call on this past, to understand its performative nature, and to reckon with its unrealised potential.

The answer to the demonisation of drugs, which has caused incalculable harm and so far deprived us of a more complete understanding of their risks and benefits, is not evangelism. Rather, the revival of interest in the kinds of compounds extolled in How to Change Your Mind presents us with a unique opportunity to reevaluate our relationship with them wholesale, good and bad.