In the spring of 2019, my dad’s most recent partner called as I was heading out my front door. They’d been dating on and off throughout the year and we’d met once, about a month prior. I couldn’t recall having saved her phone number, but sure enough there was her first name with ‘Dad’s Partner’ in the Company field. Primed for disappointment, I slung my bag over one shoulder, cradled my mobile in the other and answered with a curt ‘what’s happening?’ as I pulled the door shut. She asked how I was, then shifted quickly from the incident to her wishes for his remains, the funeral home, the ceremony.

Mum and Dad reckoned I was always a waterbaby. As soon as we stopped the car at the beach, I’d take off, a trail of clothes left in my wake, headed straight into the water. I didn’t notice the difference of the cooler waters down here until I was an adult. The water was always a refresher, a relief from baking hot sun and dusty throats. We would swim everywhere—Johanna, Kilcunda, Wonthaggi, Ninety Mile Beach, Mallacoota, Gunnamatta, Koonya.

I wander down the wide corridor of the crunchy fire trail. Both sides of the track are lined with scaly black matchsticks sweeping up to the sky. It has been six months since I was last here and almost a year since the fires of the New South Wales Black Summer. The change is dramatic in this time. The matchsticks are now coated with a fuzzy layer of vibrant green epidermic growth, and fresh grassy whiskers punch out from the burnt forest floor.

I fancied becoming essential might involve fanfare, regalia and pay rises. Instead we were made invisible, essential only by implication and association. On the 2nd of April 2020 the prime minister announced that child care services were ‘critical,’ and would thus be made universally free, so that essential workers – those in healthcare, emergency services, and ‘everyone who has a job in this economy’– could continue going to work.

Approaching a house at night, it is possible to tell, from a distance, if the television is on. Even if the program is inaudible, the night walker, passing by, can discern beneath the sounds of wind and foliage, of cooling roof iron and cars ticking in their mechanical sleep, a kind of hum—a high and eerie keening, a dog whistle set to the human ear. The ghost in the television is electricity, pulsing at high frequency, causing the metal parts of the appliance to vibrate minutely, shaking its tiny ferrite bones.

The pandemic further exposed a core logic of the capitalist state: what it giveth, it can taketh away. The changing rate of JobSeeker was an extreme case: shortly after doubling it—and thereby raising above the poverty line for the first time in decades—the Coalition cut it once more, with an insulting bonus of $50 a fortnight. But this logic predates the pandemic and extends beyond income support: it’s central to the operation of capitalist government, and intensified by our neoliberal model.

There are books that, without you even knowing it, have shaped who you are as a thinker. I was reminded of as much on re-reading Humphrey McQueen’s A New Britannia: An argument concerning the social origins of Australian radicalism and nationalism. First published in 1970, my well-thumbed third edition from 1986 had been picked up at a second-hand store to replace an earlier fourth edition published in 2004 and now yellowing on some long-lost acquaintance’s bookshelf.

When my father, Laurie, retired from his job as a high school science and IT teacher, he’d been a teacher for about thirty-five years. He was, I think, a good teacher. ‘I wasn’t super teacher,’ he told me, ‘I wasn’t Eddy Woo, but my students did well and sometimes they bought me a beer years later, I was an ok teacher.’ I liked the fact that he was a schoolteacher, liked that he chose to work at a public school down the road, because his values were my values.

When, in late 2020, I first heard mention of a forthcoming novel called Detransition, Baby, I felt a jolt of alarm. A book with ‘detransition’ in the title? Surely this would be a TERF diatribe, companion to Abigail Shrier’s 2020 ‘social contagion’ screed Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters. Based on the title […]

I want to begin by acknowledging the enduring loss experienced by those whose family members, loved ones and workmates died in Australia’s worst industrial accident. I started on the West Gate Bridge well after the collapse, and I often wondered if only those there on the day could fully comprehend the human dimensions of its tragedy.

For years, nobody called me by my name. In Brisbane, I was jen; in Melbourne people called me ana. It was a neat split, my name folded into a recognisable shape, the unnecessary syllables and foreign letters turned in against themselves and shushed. It is a recent thing to have claimed the full breadth of myself.

The story goes that a writer, and wannabe singer, dancer and actor (who screamed like Screamin’ Jay Hawkins and pivoted like James Brown), and a real actor and wannabe director (you might know her from such TV shows as Prisoner, The Flying Doctors, and the cult film Little Miss Wonder), met at the Black Playwright’s conference in 1989 in Canberra.

The first thing Ranald Allan and his friends heard, after they passed through customs at Sydney airport, was John Forbes’ booming deadpan, reciting the poem: ‘Up, Up, Home & Away’. Allan, together with Linn Cameron, Landon Watts and Jenny Redford, had just returned from a holiday in Bali.

At a certain point in the new political era of this century (and millennium), the peculiarly political branding of hope became inextricably bound up with the concept of work. Not only in the US, but also in Australia. After all, hope seemed to lead away from both a racially segregated America and the jingoism that characterised the Howard era, towards a more inclusive idea focused upon relentless productivity and individualised pursuit.

My mother calls her arrival in Australia ‘the years of hell’. In one story, she worked at the dry cleaners for a thousand unbroken days. By happy accident, she never left. Thanks to Bob Hawke’s tearful tribute, she stumbled into citizenship after 1989, the winner of a grisly scratchcard along with some forty thousand other Chinese. To this day, she votes Labor.

As my plane soars over the Northern Territory, I imagine the ocean has turned into desert, its skin inscribed with song cycles. Ribbed earth stretches into ochre dunes like the bottom of the sea, the hills puckering with naked-looking, coppery scars. Darker blooms jut fractally into the dry, tessellating scales and the sandy plains are dotted with poppyseed vegetation.