When Muriel Spark met Shirley Hazzard, in the early 1960s, both were rising stars at The New Yorker. Spark, a Scot, was a newcomer to New York. In her early forties, Spark was a decade older than Hazzard, yet they bonded and wrote to each other regularly. Despite being two of the best stylists in English of their era, they often wrote like teenage besties.

While it may be sensible in our climate-threatened world to regard cars as unrestrainable pests choking and exhausting the planet, cars are routinely celebrated in popular cinema as portals for escaping drab reality, their sleek bright surfaces offer a glistening promise of transcendence. Yet Titane conveys a passion for automobiles surging beyond mere commodity fetishism, and an acute hostility toward people.

I don’t make the doors. I just fix them. People always think there’s a special trick to it, some training I’ve done. When they ask, I smile but don’t give too much away. Part of the job is being mysterious. Clients expect it. You’ve got a door doing weird shit, you don’t call a repairman expecting him to be normal.

What a writing life is that, one might wonder, having to publish one’s own work by oneself, in the case of Pessoa, or consigning one’s own work to obscurity, in the case of Dickinson? But that is exactly what migration—mental, spiritual and creative—is all about.

as in not an event but the unspooling as in not working from definitions a new state to declaim “ok, this is normal now”, but conscious of hollowing, the dark souls of sense data a wasp’s nest growing in the walls

It had been two weeks to the day since we were seated in the Theatrette listening to the Director General explain how our Department would be overhauled. To keep our attention focused on the details of the new management structure, rather than furtively trying to locate ourselves in it, she announced at the beginning that when we returned to our desks we would each find an envelope with details about our future positions.

You are now sailing Spaceship Earth. Some of us are preserved in the geological record, the heat of lightning collapsing grains of sand into skeletal tubes.

BMI is an antiquated, inadequate, and potentially racist measure of health. Which is why I was rather surprised last week when I got a text from a friend and fellow parent – who also happens to be a clinical psychologist – asking me if my daughter was okay. She was concerned because apparently our eighth graders had been made to calculate and report on their own BMI in class.

M.J. Moriarty of Redfern found his wife dead in the kitchen with her throat cut. A married woman named O’Connor died suddenly at Armidale. The coroner refused to give a death certificate until the contents of the stomach had been analysed.

It’s been one year since the Attorneys-General failed to raise the age. Since then, the ACT has announced its intentions to go at it alone and change the laws to keep ten-year-olds out of prison. The question now, is will other states and territories show the same political courage and take the action that so many Australians, doctors, lawyers and families are calling for and raise the age to at least fourteen?

Australian households are directly responsible for 20 per cent of Australia’s carbon emissions. Yet the persistent focus on individual responsibility to reduce our carbon footprint ignores the fact that most Australians have little to no control over the biggest contributor to household emissions – the energy efficiency of their homes.

If I wrote a letter to my Country, how would it read? Dear Bundjalung Jugun, Or Dear Yuwinj Dhari? Will she forgive you and me for discrepancies of the anthropocene lately? Because it took too many ancestors before you and I to arrive.

Clocks should be as fragile as time itself, yet as glorious and colourful as the times you enshrine in your heart, sear into your skin, those minutes and hours that linger in your eyes, even after the light has fled. Clocks should be vivid, as vibrant as the memories that power blood through your shrinking veins.

The Murugappan family has become the face of many coinciding causes: the plight of all asylum seekers around the world; the struggles faced by Tamils in Sri Lanka who experience cultural, emotional, and physical violence in their homeland (largely perpetrated by the Sri Lankan government); the human, humanitarian, and financial cost of Australia’s immigration policy.

We, members of the Disability Justice Network of Australia, want to express our anger, sorrow, and solidarity with the Palestinian people. As both Indigenous and non-Indigenous disabled people living in so-called Australia, we recognise and understand the violent and disabling nature of settler-colonialism, an ongoing structure that relies on the othering, dehumanisation, and disposal of our bodies and lives.

Ultimately, governments offering Hollywood subsidies are usually bidding for ‘place branding’, effectively a form of product placement. The economic and artistic health of the local screen industry and its workers is either an afterthought or deliberately subordinated in pursuit of national prestige and downstream tourism revenue.