Those gifts were other writers, thinkers, concepts, moments. Jameson served as an expansive mediator, setting up texts that promised to be an encounter between a moment or text and a diverse set of thinkers. One would learn plenty along the way in the encounter, certainly, but, as time went on, what was there to return was his style itself.

‘Making a movie is casting a spell,’ said Kenneth Anger about his lifelong profession, his unique and spectacular talent, his very own dark magic. That certainly describes how I was lured into his realm. There was a time in my life where I would watch Anger’s seven-minute film Rabbit’s Moon basically on repeat, infatuated by its blue-tinted images of a sprightly harlequin dancing around a clearing and calling silently to the moon. It was poetry.

As sabre-rattling escalates and increasingly hysterical claims of foreign influence are used as pretexts for military build-up – in Australia and elsewhere – John le Carré's novels will not stay in the last century. They will remain as prescient and timely as ever, and only become more essential to our understanding of how secret power is wielded against the forces seeking a more just world.

Robert Fisk understood that war was not a natural state of affairs and would prompt his readers to challenge official narratives and to ignore the Hollywood myth of ‘... victory and defeat, heroism and cowardice ... War is primarily about the total failure of the human spirit.’ His respect and empathy for the victims of war made him fervent and indignant, and caused him to side with them.

Ania Walwicz taught us that art is central to being human. She recognised that to be an artist is also to be a teacher. She wanted to create a community and a movement, and when it suited, that community was also her court.

For the past fifteen years I’ve been more engaged with the violence of capitalism than ever, and I realised that David Graeber was part of the company of people I think of as being my own personal squad of invisibly-present comrades. Graeber was living, now, doing the work, thinking about it, talking about it, writing about the things I was thinking.

'My dream and that of hundreds of thousands or millions of others may come true: a socialist world with a human face, an ecological heart, an egalitarian body.'

I will remember him as a small figure standing behind a shop counter, surrounded by piles of books and receipts, discussing Lance Sharkey and the internal history of the Communist Party with a browser who patently isn’t going to buy anything at all.

Vale Kuracca, Aunty Kerry Reed-Gilbert, as you fly high and safe on the journey back to your Dreaming. Under your wings is the strength of us as Black writers.

In 2011, Egypt was a country that offered hope to people across the region, and across the world people were inspired. Millions took to the streets, at considerable risk, and for too many, at considerable cost. In just two and a half years, the fight for democracy was reversed, if not entirely defeated.

Murray leaves a legacy of strong writing which, like much Australian literature, is tainted by indefensible principles and politics.

I’m devastated about Agnès Varda’s death, not only because the world has lost a great light but because she was still making art, and we’ve lost what she still had left to give us.

When I first met Andrew, in the mid-1990s, he had already won the Vogel award for Praise and had written a play, Bait. Working alongside David Berthold, Bait was the result of Andrew’s time as a resident writer at the Queensland Theatre Company. As fate would have it, the company passed on producing it. Andrew’s time at the company was also over, and so that may well have been it for Andrew’s involvement in the theatre.

In 1974, when Lanzmann had started filming his 350 hours of interviews, Holocaust cinema was the domain of European filmmakers such as Liliana Cavani, Louis Malle, Lina Wetmuller and Joseph Losey, pondering amnesia, conformism, class, and deep Freudian studies of the effects of totalitarianism on the psyche.

Grease-black, the Californian sea lion moves through the pool like a slick of oil pushed by a strong current. Propelled by rear flippers in a momentous leap, a halo of water spins from its glossy head, and, as the awkward mound flops down, a large splash rises to an elated chorus of laughter. A cool bead hits my arm. The smell in the air is cold fish mixed with the scent left in a room after a dog has been bathed.

I first read this poem, which prefaces Ursula Le Guin’s classic fantasy story A Wizard of Earthsea, when I was twelve years old. As with all her writing it has stayed with me for my whole life, gaining depth, translucency and wisdom. And now, after hearing of her death, I’m reading it again, with a new dimension of sorrow and joy. It helps and it doesn’t help. Her flight remains vivid, but now the sky is empty.