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.

At the old Heathcote Mental Reception Home, Martu artist Curtis Taylor installs his art. He has erected a bow shelter in the middle of the main room and spread sand and pieces of broken crab on the polished floorboards. Behind a locked door in a white room, he has piled bark on a metal hospital bed. In the flickering light, it looks like piled clothing or shed skin. This place is also known as Goolugatup, and Kooyagoordup.

In January, I asked Stella Young, editor of Ramp Up, to define disability. I was facing drastic surgery, which would result in me wearing a stoma bag for at least three months. I wasn’t sure if wearing a stoma bag would make me a person with a disability.

It seems somehow amiss to ponder the mystery of how music may move and motivate us to action when so much of the planet and its people are in unimaginable crisis. Yet I will share this anecdote, as I am sure it is somehow linked to an ongoing process of thinking and acting that can […]

There are lots of reasons why people choose to have kids, but for many women in Tanzania, the word ‘choice’ may not be the most appropriate one. No one is arguing that the birthrate here isn’t high. The Daily News, one of Tanzania’s newspapers, recently listed the country as having one of the 10 youngest […]

When Freud said he could only ever be expected to return someone to the normal state of unhappiness, no-one, it seems, was paying much attention. I know the average person doesn’t read Freud, but whether preferring to avoid this sort of news or be in outright denial, people these days – often at considerable expense […]

I spend 22 hours a week in one of the busiest needle exchanges in the world. Apart from the obvious statistical data informing me of this, there are two reasons why I know it to be true. Firstly, the existence of a loophole in the laws in Australia allowing us to distribute needles to the […]