As extreme weather becomes the norm Bolivia’s first indigenous president, Evo Morales, believes that to fight climate change we need to recover the values of indigenous people. Indigenous Australian writer Alexis Wright says something similar in her essay ‘Deep Weather’ in the latest issue of Meanjin. Noting the devastation of the 2009 Victorian bushfires, the […]

The excerpted Clive Hamilton essay on climate denialism at the ABC has now generated nearly 800 comments over at Drum, as well as spawning a reply from climate skeptics. You can now read Hamilton’s original essay from Overland 200 in full online. This might be a good time to mention that, until the end of […]

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, […]

At 0900 hours the enemy combatant was identified squatting, camouflaged, in the undergrowth. The target was photographed and captured without incident. He is believed to be a scout from the coming invasion party. Perhaps that’s not quite how the first cane toad was reported near Noonbah Station, southwest of Longreach in Queensland last week, but […]

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 […]

The drive from Mpartnwe/Alice Springs to Tennant Creek is a good reminder of what it means to be living in the Territory. It’s long, pretty much straight, littered with blown-out tires and beautiful landscapes and you pass through some roadside stops that highlight the good, the bad and the absurd of the NT. This past […]

Mark Bahnisch is the person (or at least one of them) behind Larvatus Prodeo, the biggest and most lively Left-leaning blog in Australia. Here he contributes a guest post on Australia’s years of magical thinking. Politics, under the sign of postmodernity, increasingly resembles an ethereal realm, floating free of any grounding. It’s become almost trite […]