If the pandemic has taught us anything, it is that a vast majority of people who do the essential work of keeping things ticking along are largely invisible—save for national emergencies, when all of a sudden cleaners and supermarket workers are wheeled out in front of us to ‘tell us what it’s like’. The idea that these same people have larger lives and stories though, is still something that Australia’s literary world struggles to grasp.

In Victorian times, the pauper funeral signalled abject poverty and low morality and in order to avoid this stigma, many working-class people made great sacrifices to pay regular and relatively significant amounts to burial clubs. What lingers today is the common misconception that overspending on funerals has a direct correlation to dignity.

It’s fair to say that with ever increasing divorce rates (the median duration of marriage in Australia is only 10 years) and louder and louder laments about cheating spouses, the concept of just ‘opening the relationship up’, while challenging, is an idea not without its merits. So much so that even Hollywood got in on […]

It would be an understatement to say that whole new worlds have opened up to me as a result of parenthood, but nothing brought this home more than discovering the toy section of a department store. You would think as a mother of a toddler, or perhaps even, as general citizen of the capitalist consumption […]