Infrared Nancy Huston Text Now, I am a fan of Nancy Huston, and I want to get that straight off the bat before I get into a discussion of her most recent novel, Infrared. She’s had a successful career prior to its publication, and was nominated for an Orange Prize for her book Fault Lines, […]

I recently saw a sign indicating that Sydney Buses is soon going to do a trial where the M10 bus service has wireless internet on board for six months. This was a simultaneous ‘yay!’ and ‘ohhh’ moment for me. The former because it’s a great idea we should be getting into, and the second because, […]

I made my first foray to the Oxford Art Factory this week to see a gig by Jenny Lewis’ new band, Jenny and Johnny, who were quite decent. They were supported by a band I’d never heard of called the Laurels, so, in preparation, my companions and I looked them up online to learn a […]

I loathe plastic water bottles. I detest them, I really do. I think they’re ridiculous, wasteful, overpriced and faintly offensive. They’re faintly unhealthy, and insulting. I prefer them to the endless consumption of bottled soft drinks, but I still consider them more pointless. And, in the words of my eighty-five-year-old great aunt, they’re a little […]

Why vs Why: Nuclear Power Prof Barry Brook & Prof Ian Lowe Pantera Press It isn’t easy to review a book that consist of two different people arguing each side of an argument. In this case, it’s about whether Australia should pursue nuclear power, but my objections would serve for any book that worked in […]

I recently went out for lunch and ran into this sign: Which I think is about the best thing in the history of time. It is a breakdown of the ingredients in each of the restaurant’s dishes, indicating which contain dairy, fish, nuts, and so on. Unfortunately I’d already eaten lunch, or I would have […]

Here on Earth Tim Flannery Text Flannery’s new book Here On Earth reads like a cross between Bill Bryson and Jared Diamond, which is reassuring given it has the title of a Leelee Sobieski film. It also sort of makes sense; both of these authors have read and commented on the book, and Diamond is […]

Into the woods Anna Krien Black Inc. Anna Krien’s book begins with violence, travels through corruption and pain, and ends with a vague, vain sort of hope. With a structure like that, you might expect that it’s about a catastrophic event, some natural or human-created event that has crushed communities and people, and is now […]

A friend of mine, let’s call her K, has a son who just turned fourteen. She’s fairly committed to the idea of raising him as a relatively decent human being and, being a fairly active person online, she recently asked her blog for help finding books and DVDs and the like on how to be […]

Natasha Lester has three children and lives in Western Australia. This is good news for me, otherwise I would want to be her. Her first novel won the 2008 TAG Hungerford award, she’s written for Overland, indigo and Wet Ink, and she just won a Publisher Fellowship from Allen & Unwin. Her first novel, What […]

Forty percent of all Australian water is used by agricultural irrigation in the Murray Darling Basin. At least that’s my estimate, based on some widely available and often quoted figures*. So 40% of all of our water is used in an industry that employs 3% of the workforce. This could almost be fair, I suppose, […]

If our recent political debacle lends itself to analysis beyond Australia’s political choices being pretty dire, it may as well be two pet theories of mine. The first is pretty simple and goes like this: it isn’t enough to diss the other guy. You have to have policies, principles, and, above all, a plan for […]

Earlier I was doing reading for a subject for my Masters. It was about the various forms of environmentalism as they had existed in the past, and in the then-present (1996). Among the last things in the given reading was a table of environmental ideas divided up by how wacky they were considered to be. […]

So last month the girlfriend and I went to see Christopher Hitchens talk about his new book of memoirs. I’m not really into memoir so probably missed out on some of what he said, however, did get one real gem out of the evening. Among other things, he and school friends – and later, other […]

I had thought with the election of the Rudd government in 2007, and the abandonment of the frankly shameful Pacific Solution, Australia had moved on from its most disgusting phase of xenophobia. Unfortunately, the last three years, and more specifically the last six months, have proven me wrong. And with Julia Gillard, a prime minister […]

Screw Light Bulbs Donna Green & Liz Minchin UWA Publishing Screw Light Bulbs was written when its authors got to the point of having written or read one too many articles suggesting that the best thing individuals could do towards fighting climate change was change their light bulbs. Recognising that this was at best a […]

I first heard of freegans in Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel 40 Days of Rain. In the novel, they’re primarily people who live on the streets, both before and after a major climatic event that destroys much of the infrastructure in Washington DC. The main character, Frank, half joins their ranks when he loses his home; […]

I have this thing. Possibly it’s an issue, possibly it just demonstrates I’m fairly sane. It’s this: I feel strongly that all stories should have conclusions. That shouldn’t be up for debate, right? But seriously folks, I’ve read way too many books lately in which this really basic element of storytelling does not occur. Picture […]

Today I finished reading KJ Parker’s 2008 novel The Company. And, as usual when I finish one of her novels, I wondered why the hell I had. It’s not that they’re bad novels (although I felt this one was somewhat inferior to her other books), it’s that they are relentlessly depressing. I’ve never read novels […]

So I finally got around to reading Jared Diamond’s 2005 book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Clearly I’m way behind the times, but the book is eight hundred pages long. Anyway, the central thesis of the book is that environmental factors, and the way people respond to them, can play a major […]

I worry a lot lately about water. It’s a categorical fact that Australia is the driest inhabited continent on the planet. It’s well known. We have a lot of droughts, and we have a lot of long droughts. We’re affected by the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), and we’re affected by the lesser known Interdecadal […]

My name is Georgia, and I am a vegetarian. I know that in writing that, I have already turned a significant proportion of my audience. The omnivores among you are rolling their eyes, skimming by, and looking for something else to read that will hopefully be less moralising and self-righteous. The vegetarians among you are […]

I’ve been reading a lot of non-fiction lately, looking for some kind of consensus about what kind of future we’re facing, and exactly what sort of thing we should be doing in order to deal with that. Sadly, while there is general consensus that the environment and human society are in sad shape, there’s not […]