The definition of homelessness itself is more complex than most of us would realise. This point was passionately articulated to an audience attending a forum on homelessness at the Wheeler Centre in Melbourne in early 2013, when a former homeless man who advocates for people in the predicament he endured for many years explained the difference between being provided with shelter rather than a home: ‘I want to close my own door of a night. The door to my home, not someone else’s.’

The symptoms of bipolar mania include an inability to stop talking, irritability, a great optimism, a huge output of work, severe problems with impulse control and hypersexual – um – proclivities. Does this sound like a disability? Or does it just sound like a lot of people you know?

20 February 1987–20 June 2013 I first met Ahmad Ali Jafari in the Villawood detention centre in mid 2012 whilst conducting art lessons with the Refugee Art Project. Though he had no experience of making art Ahmad was a willing and enthusiastic participant in our class. He was a short, compact man with a slightly rounded belly who had an air of tidiness about him.

Some months ago, Overland published an essay in which (as a scholar of Buddhist non-violent resistance) I detailed the now 120 self-immolations of Tibetan monks, nuns and lay-people, a number not including the case of an Englishman, a young man whom I knew and who was also an ordained monk in the same Tibetan Buddhist tradition as the majority of his Tibetan cohorts.

I travelled to Turkey in late June to attend Global Power Shift, hosted by 350.org. It was about a month after the start of a nation-wide protest movement sparked by the proposed demolition of Gezi Park in Istanbul and I was intrigued to see what was going on. I went in with no idea about Turkish politics and little understanding of the movement. But through talking to activists and seeing it in action, I learnt a lot.

Nothing strains ones faith in humanity as much as attempting to catch a glimpse of the Mona Lisa in the Louvre: it’s barely visible behind the mass of people, crowding forward, a veritable phalanx of phones and ipads clicking and flashing, bodies pressing together like an ancient Roman testudo. (Banning phones and cameras would immeasurably improve the museum experience.)

In the final months, when we knew time was ebbing, our mother frequently acknowledged to David, Cleeve and me that few lives were as interesting and few as fortunate as hers had been. It was a life with a remarkable, almost ungraspable span and perhaps appropriately, a narrative more evocative of fiction than truth.

All media is social media. That’s the first point I think needs emphasised. We have had this term ‘media’ since the mid-twentieth century, and the term ‘medium’, in the sense of ‘an intervening or intermediate agency or substance’, since the sixteenth century.

When I first visited London, in the summer of 1991, I was struck by the unfamiliar spectacle of boarded-up shops, and of shops that had been hollowed out and were now occupied by temporary stalls selling imported clothing or knick-knacks.

When I was a kid, I’d watch my Dad eat salami. He’d skin it like a banana and eat the whole thing for afternoon tea. I’d watch him eat steak. He’d always get the biggest, with hot mustard and all the fat left on. I’d watch him drink gravy straight out of the plate.

Nine months ago my mum asked me to buy an axe and chop her head off. I joked with her. Told her it would be a messy way to go. She was lying in a palliative care ward, dying of cancer. Chopping her head off might have been messy, but at least it would have been quick.

Last year a friend invited me to what I thought was going to be a lecture by the outspoken feminist Professor Sheila Jeffreys titled: ‘Prostitution in St. Kilda, How The Law Has Failed Sex Workers.’