The new cartographers—Indigenous, grassroots, academic, etc.—are building new cartographic worldviews, methods and projects to talk back to the colonial cartographies that helped to structure the worldviews, laws and governance systems of settler-colonial societies like Australia.

In January 2021, one day after thousands of Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol, I underwent a craniotomy far from home in Loveland, Colorado to remove a low-grade tumour from the front left of my brain. In 2016 the World Health Organization stopped calling such tumours ‘benign’ as, when it comes to the brain, anything where it should not be cannot be classed as benign.

For years I have been writing a book of essays in my head. I used to keep a written list of their titles on my desk, but otherwise made no other notes: The Happiness of Bees, The Name of the Machine Is Money, Why Socks Lie, Sentences Spoken By Grass, Dead Matches On A Stove […]