One of the less enjoyable things about growing older is that books blow your mind less regularly. Books that explode the possibilities of the novel are rare; when they do appear, however, it is with more lasting power. For the last six years I’ve been grabbing lapels and insisting that Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria was the Great Australian Novel. With The Swan Book, she’s done something new, again.

The other day I was talking to a teaching colleague about a troublesome student we’d both taught. He’s in Year 10 and notorious for his absenteeism and, when in class, his disruptive behaviour and refusal to do any work. She informed me that his parents had just been fined because of his truancy. When this […]

Income quarantining has become part of life for welfare recipients in the NT. Originally it was part of the Federal Intervention, rolled out by Howard and his pet bulldog Mal Brough in 2007. Its aim was to prevent welfare money being spent on alcohol and cigarettes, rather than food, and on preventing ‘humbugging’ (demands for […]