Whether through place names, physical monuments or memorial events, the way a country celebrates its heritage sends strong political messages about its identity, as well as those of its inhabitants. It doesn’t take much to realise the symbolic power of historical monuments: some of the most powerful images of the last century show victorious crowds toppling statues of authoritarian leaders after an oppressive regime has collapsed; those doing the dismantling are fully aware that such monuments represent more than the individual depicted.

This sounds cheesy, and in a way it is. And sometimes it doesn’t work. A lifetime in a racist society is hardly undone by one conversation at a door, no matter how convincing. But it is drastically more effective than dismissing or lecturing. If I were to hazard a guess at how the left can win over right-wing voters – and, for that matter, Labor voters who need more than a simple alignment of policy positions with personal concerns – it would be in the articulation of a broad, transformative vision for changing society. This is otherwise known as a politics.

In 1995, comedian Denis Leary recorded a track called ‘Asshole’, a song about an all-American guy who likes ‘football and porno and books about war’. It concludes with a monologue: I’m gonna get myself a 1967 Cadillac Eldorado convertible Hot pink, with whale skin hubcaps

The tabloids revert to tired tropes: Stacey’s ‘heartbroken family’ had been unaware she was supporting herself by stripping; she was a ‘party girl’ whose friends had warned her against working at the club, described by News Corp as ‘a seedy underground den where drug use was rife’. In Daily Mail Australia, Antoinette Aparo, the sister of Salvatore, the club’s owner, insinuated Stacey’s own culpability: ‘I know strip clubs and I know the type of girls who work there.’

Social relationships are breaking down. According to an OmniPoll survey from July 2018, the number of close friends Australians have has declined from an average of 6.4 in 2005 to only 3.9 today. In other words, the rate at which relationships break down no longer keeps up with the rate at which they form. In turn, more and more Australians are becoming ghosts in their own communities.

The philosopher Judith Butler argues that gender is produced through performance: ‘Gender identity is the stylized repetition of acts through time.’ As an adolescent girl growing up in the 60s and 70s, I understood that performing the domestic work my mother did, including her craft work, would shape me into the kind of woman I didn’t want to become. I did not want to be my mother. I did not want my life to be controlled by a husband, and to be limited by and to the domestic.

I was in no way prepared for pregnancy – had not even considered the idea that pregnancy is something to prepare for. I had not thought about what Maggie Nelson labels ‘the capaciousness of pregnancy. The way a baby literally makes space where there wasn’t space before ... the rearrangement of internal organs, the upward squeezing of the lungs.’ I imagined such things almost painlessly. After all, my mother had done it; my grandmothers had done it. How hard could it be?

On 22 February 1944, Levi was deported to Auschwitz, where he would survive until the Soviet liberation of the Camp on 27 January 1945. A warm and humble man, he resented any suggestion that his experience was somehow paradigmatic, or that he held some greater clarity than other survivors. Yet Levi’s post-war writings remain fundamental reading, especially his 1947 Auschwitz memoir If This Is a Man. Through his own story, that work still now conveys with an empathetic yet clinical eye the historical, social and economic prerogatives that define the Holocaust as a modern genocide.

‘Just like super-typhoons, rising seas and heatwaves, border build-up and militarisation are by-products of climate change,’ Miller writes. We should not overlook the brutal and racist policies of the current Trump administration as a defining factor in the increased securitisation of the border. But the military’s worldview puts migrants under the category of ‘threat multiplier’, and replaces the shared dangers of climate change with the external danger of forced displacement.

As a writer, I find opportunities to tell my story. Us artistic mob share our stories to audiences through poetry, art, music, theatre and dance; through this, we celebrate who we are and honour those who have come before us. One space (there are many) where we consistently struggle to feel heard or tell our story is in the health system.

The anarchy of the market is writ large in the housing sector throughout Spain. In the years before the GFC, the country experienced a housing-construction boom fuelled by the same debt-ridden loans that had thrown the country into crisis. There are now around 8.4 million empty houses in the country, and the coast is dotted with ghost towns made up of apartment blocks that have never been lived in. Meanwhile, around 3 million people in Spain are sleeping rough.

To understand Australian concepts of enjoyment’, Donald Horne wrote in The Lucky Country, ‘one must understand that in Australia there is a battle between puritanism and a kind of paganism.’ Puritanical leisure, Horne felt, was the product of numerous religious sensibilities, yet ‘ordinary’ Australians – who Horne saw as white, middle-class suburbanites – tended to embrace an opposing view of their recreation: a worship of nature and the body for their own sake.

Talking to other women, we all seem to cycle through this: switch it on, swipe, start a bunch of awkward conversations, go on a bunch of terrible dates, get frustrated and tired, delete the bloody thing, before downloading it again a few weeks, maybe a few months, later. In a moment of weakness, we say, but it’s not that, or not exactly.

Chinese-Australians continue to be marginalised and othered in dominant culture and discourse, assumed by many to be more recent arrivals than anyone who happens to have white skin and an undetectable accent. This prejudice persists through the same tired stereotypes and colonial fears of the Yellow Peril. We are blamed for everything from driving up house prices to threatening national security.

While thinking about this huge subject of silencing, the muting of voices, and bullying tactics used to oppress, humiliate, manipulate, create fear and exclude, I thought about how to tell this story about censorship in another way – by visualising an extreme situation where the world was stopped from telling stories. Let’s say we lived in a story-less world where our rich literary traditions no longer existed, and have been excised from memory.

Kashmir is a tourist retreat in an occupied land. Every year, as the monsoon rolls across India, bringing with it both soaring temperatures and pounding rain, the county’s elite escape to the overwhelming beauty of the Kashmir Valley. These two realities – Kashmir as a haven for holidaymakers and a warzone for locals – remain remarkably separate, so much so that when one invades the other the effect can jar, like a jolt of absolute reality.