A week after Tom left, Gus was yawning through a morning piss when the patter on the roof intensified to a rattle. Before he could shake the last few dribbles into the toilet bowl, the rattle swelled into a roar.

At the end of a year in which a global pandemic devoured the future, I found myself re-reading Fisher’s work and nodding gravely along. It made me recognise why I retreated to the ashen, rococo wasteland of Fallout 4, a world where things have gone quite bad. Given all that’s happened in recent months, I had found a perverse comfort in it.

Camp’s triumph is that the people who developed it did so to make fun of a society that shunned them and now that society seems more camp than ever. The world seems to take itself a little less seriously than before. This is not always a good thing, but then neither is camp.

Watching the premiere of the SBS miniseries First Contact was a strange experience for me. The first few minutes my focus shifted between the program and my own thoughts, because I had a strong sense that I’d already watched a show like this.

Unclench your fists, please. Relax. The title has nothing to do with women, but everything to do with provocation. It’s a title that I’m sure has raised your eyebrows. Unfortunately, if you are expecting a sexist diatribe, you will be disappointed. The title is a rather playful representation of a trend toward gratuitous provocation in […]

Earlier this week I watched Jennifer Byrne present a program on fantasy. As a reader and writer of fantasy (among other things), I found the panel discussion a bit shallow and (surprisingly, given it was on the ABC) fully embracing the market categorisation of fantasy rather than a decent discussion of just what might comprise […]

To most people who have studied the humanities, the benefits of such an education are self-evident. I could list all the joys of ethics, rhetoric, aesthetic analysis and critical thinking; the specific thinkers that introduce these concepts like Plato, Aristotle, Burke, Nietzsche, Wollstonecraft, Marx, Freud, Simone de Beauvoir, Russell or Arendt, among many others. I […]

Another year, another bloody Australia Day. Like most people who reside in Australia, I was happy for the public holiday. And along with most members of what Gerard Henderson labels ‘ the intelligentsia’ (who are you, Henderson, Trotsky?) I rolled my eyes at the waving and wearing of that imperial vestige we call ‘ the […]

If you believe the hysterics of Dick Smith and indeed the Prime Minister, there are just too many people in this country, or there will be too many people in this country. One of the points of difference between Gillard’s Prime Ministership and Rudd’s was their beliefs about the size of Australia’s population. In opposition […]

Whatever happened to queer activism? Where once it was aggressively and staunchly for human rights, consciousness-raising and real social reform, it seems now to be dominated by a drive towards the inoffensive and the inconsequential. The contrast of the Stonewall activists (in the most combative sense of the term) – ‘low class’ drag queens, hustlers […]

I am not politically correct. I make the funny with friends about their sexualities, their lifestyles, their cultural stereotypes. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with calling my gay friends ‘poofs’ or ‘faggots’ (this may of course be easier for me to do considering I am one of those pesky gays), making my Indian friends […]

Talk of banning the burqa is twisting some civil rights knickers again. This time in South Australia. What I find interesting is that people (on all sides of this debate) seem to think legislating against something that makes large groups of society uncomfortable is outrageously novel. But it happens all the time. By law, I […]

That line from David Marr’s article in the SMH this morning struck poignantly home, following a brief discussion about Rudd with a colleague. This colleague used to work for the Goss Government, all those years ago, and had many interactions with Rudd back then – and always dreaded those interactions. Rudd would demand things, and […]

POMO OZ: Fear and Loathing Downunder Niall Lucy Freemantle Press Ah, postmodernism. The word makes us shudder, or cheer or jeer or laugh or roll our eyes. The multiplicity of reactions it engenders surely reflects the multiplicity of meanings it has accumulated. Reading Niall Lucy’s POMO OZ: Fear and Loathing Downunder, one is by turns […]