Foresight, hindsight and the present day

Click here to listen to Editor Ashley Hay read her introduction ‘Foresight, hindsight and the present day’. IN 2013, US-based Chinese visual artist Cai Guo-Qiang created the vast artwork Heritage for GOMA in Brisbane. This spectacular diorama features a waterhole more than a thousand square metres in size,...

Active citizens, constructive answers

IN THE DAYS after Labor’s unexpected defeat at the May 2019 federal election, a social media storm raged. ‘What the hell is wrong with Queensland?’ was a common starting point ahead of calls for the state to be excised from the rest of Australia....

Remembering who you report to

EARLY IN MY career as a Queensland public servant, I attended a workshop with the renowned Professor Patrick Weller, where he interrogated me about to whom I was accountable as a public servant. I jumped right in, saying that I was accountable to my...

Towards a reconception of power

IT WOULD BE disconcerting to wake up one day and discover that everything we thought was real in the world we live in was simply a fantasy constructed out of some flimsy, mismatched old metaphors. Though most of us can go through life without...

Negotiating the grey zone

WHILE SUCCESSIVE AUSTRALIAN governments spent the past decade focused on their budget deficits, another deficit quietly opened: one of public trust in government itself. A wealth of evidence shows Australians have become increasingly disillusioned with their political class. Growing suspicions that people in government serve...

Co-operation, mutualisation, innovation

THE MURMURED ANTIPHONY of counsels assisting, witnesses and the commissioner that fills the bulk of any public hearing is supposed to be dry. Hearings are methodical and patient, on the scale of hours and days, with revelations building slowly, quietly. The Royal Commission into...

‘Imagine us as part of you’

LIKE MOST VISITS to ‘the future’ of anything, the wonders of a trip to Australia’s most advanced digital hospital weren’t the things I had expected. The Fiona Stanley Hospital is the biggest public works project commissioned by the state of Western Australia since the...

Truth, lies and diplomacy

IN 1604, SIR Henry Wotten – an English diplomat travelling through Augsburg – composed an epigram for the guest book of the house in which he was staying. Legatus est vir bonus peregre missus ad mentiendum rei publicae causa, he wrote. ‘An ambassador is...

Hail Hydra

‘DO YOU TRUST me?’ An earnest question. ‘I do.’ An earnest answer. And then that ancient, global gesture of earnest intimacy: a handshake. For many, this is the moment from the Avengers: Endgame movie: Captain America and Iron Man putting aside their conflict for the common good....

Archival secrets and hidden histories

IN DECEMBER 2005, Gough Whitlam was at the National Archives of Australia in Canberra speaking on the occasion of the third and final release of Cabinet records of the Whitlam government. It was hot, mid-summer, and Whitlam was just a few months short of...

A great experiment

IT’S EASY TO get lost in the disruption: our obsession with technology and how to regulate it; minimise our dependence; manage our kids’ screen time. On a personal and societal level, we find ourselves squaring a circle – ever more reliant on our devices and...

Democracy and the corruption question

I’M RUNNING ON a beach near Cairns, spending a rare holiday moment trying to regain some of the fitness I’ve lost to far too much international travel. Next week it’s to Hong Kong to speak at a symposium hosted by the Independent Commission Against...

Signing up to the social contract

AMONG THE MOST lovely and quirky of the books I own is a hardback compendium called The Book of Human Emotions: An Encyclopedia of Feeling from Anger to Wanderlust (Profile Books) by British cultural historian Tiffany Watt Smith. Published in 2015, the work offers...

Less than 20/20 vision

EVEN A PERFECT metaphor runs its course. For decades, 2020 has offered a convenient label for conferences and strategic plans alike – perfect sight about the way forward, a convenient end date for planning. In the 1990s, Craig Emerson, later a senior minister but then...

On being sane in insane places

I’VE BEEN THINKING about how my body inhabits place and how it changes – fluctuating between comfort and pain – depending on the state of my illness. While reading Chris Kraus in bed, I’m caught by an obscure reference to a study where people who are...

Where the voices aren’t

IN 2018, THE University of Oxford ran an essay competition that asked, ‘Are Men (Still) Beasts?’ Students were prompted to respond to an early twentieth-century essay, ‘Aren’t Men Beasts’, by feminist author Rebecca West. They were also asked, in the context of #MeToo, whether...

Weaponising privilege

ON 12 NOVEMBER 1986, physician Alex Wodak and his staff fixed a note to the door of their building near to St Vincent’s Hospital in Darlinghurst, Sydney: ‘If you would like a clean needle and syringe, free, press this buzzer.’ Providing needles and syringes to...

Let the river flow

THE TWO MEN stand knee-deep in river water the colour of pickled cucumbers. ‘My name is Dick Arnold and I’m here with Rob McBride for this really sad bloody shot here…’ Dick, closer to the camera than Rob, wears a grey camouflage-pattern cap with sunglasses perched...

Order, not chaos

IT WAS A muffled cheer. On 19 October 2017, it rose from behind a stiff oak door in New Zealand’s Parliament Buildings and drifted down narrow corridors decorated with stern-faced portraits of historical bearers of office. In a televised speech made at the Executive...

The burning question

THE WESTFIELD KOTARA in Newcastle is a carbon copy of shopping centres around the world, with its jumble of concrete car parks and sterile shopfronts. Three hours north of Sydney, Newcastle was Australia’s second settlement after Sydney Cove. Early convicts spoke of its brutality;...

Working through the problems

WE WORK TOGETHER as co-directors of the Indigenous Settler Relations Collaboration, a research unit at the University of Melbourne. In this context, our working relationship requires a high level of trust, but as an Indigenous person (Sana is a Torres Strait Islander) and a...

The compound

A TROPICAL SUMMER. 2006: A Monday. Wendy, the story: the compound, the day, her telling me in Mackay her dream of going to England one day, her smile, her confidence. She will enact her dream. Up the winding road into the highlands from Mackay...

Surrounded

IN TERMS OF the event, the make or type of bikes surely doesn’t matter now, but it weirdly did then, so the issue seems to warrant emphasis in the process of looking back. The dragsters and stingrays, the one or two mid-sized racing bikes...

Best laid plans

THE KIDS IN Eleanor Hardy’s class are all still talking about the fight. They shouldn’t be – she heard the new deputy impose a strongly worded ban on the topic at assembly yesterday afternoon – but they are six and seven, so probably think a fight...

The things we’ll leave behind

THERE’S A LIGHT blearing hazy through the glass behind her brother’s head, the red-blue red-blue of a police car or ambulance. A fire truck. The siren whirs, sings, sets off the great, lumbering sheep dog at her father’s feet, barking at the door until...

Bashar al-Assad

I asked her to draw her home for me Ben Quilty   Using the old cryptographs Heba, at the age of six, has managed it in minutes only,   eloquent and minimal, starting from above – the helicopter gunship,   its larger and its smaller rotor seen as simple crosses. The aircraft is a box,   basic with a...

Iris

I was told experience mattered. This is a lie, at least when it comes to light. I’ve drunk decades of it and still I cannot describe the taste. Let’s say the study is drenched in lemonade. I have lived here for most of a year, writing or more often not-writing....

Expert judgment on markers

Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves a powerful culture. What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger. The danger is in a particular location the center of danger is here of a particular size and shape, and below...

Conversation

He held the light for me   I saw the door there was no   Spot – outside and inside. It was my first day   In the new house. Dad, I called out   Pointing to our little mirror   Quietly, he patted me and said let your light so shine

Ministry of Truth 20/20